(Author: David A Sher, Vol. 70, No. 1, Pesach 2015)   The passing in Johannesburg of the renowned philanthropist Samuel Michael (Sam) Sher on 9 December 2013/6 Teveth 5774 elicited much sorrow amongst his friends, family, associates and beneficiaries. “Sam has departed. South Africa has

(Author: Gabriel A. Sivan, Vol. 70, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2015)   Standard works on Jewish history have fostered the impression that the first Jews to arrive in North America were refugees from Pernambuco (Recife), a short-lived Dutch colony in Brazil subsequently recaptured by the

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 71, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2016)   In 1892 my great-grandfather Reb Yehuda Leib Schrire (1851-1912), a shochet, bodek (ritual slaughtering inspector) and cantor who had sung in many East European towns, left Neustadt, Lithuania, for Johannesburg to take up a

(Author: Stuart Buxbaum, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016) Doctor Hartwig Buxbaum (right) and his brother, Gustav, late 1930s Preamble Hartwig Buxbaum, a German-born Jewish doctor who immigrated to South Africa in the 1930s, was my late uncle. While I never knew him, he was

(Author: Hazel Jungbacke, Vol. 75, #2, Summer 2020)   The title of this article is taken from the obituary of Feodora Clouts (1899-1996) by Willie Katz. It well sums up the impact and energy of this remarkable woman, a redoubtable Jewish communal worker, Zionist activist