(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 68, No. 1, Pesach 2013)
It is not every day that Cape Town’s Cape Jewish Chronicle receives an e-mail from overseas asking for something that had appeared in one of its distant back issues. The item requested in this particular case, by Jeffrey Schur in New York, was a group photo from an article in the August 1989 issue.1 One of the 24 tiny faces depicted sitting at a dinner in 1948 to celebrate the restoration of the Jewish Hospital in Budapest was that of Jeffrey’s aunt, Clare Schur. The only other photo he had of her was in her 1946 passport.
As the Chronicle could not help, they asked me. I tracked down the original article and the life of a remarkable person was revealed.
In July 1989, the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies received a letter from New York from the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee, a worldwide relief organisation active in more than 70 countries. Unlike Jeffrey’s 2013 e-mail, this letter, sent in April, had taken three months to arrive. The Joint Distribution Committee of (the American) Funds for Jewish War Sufferers – known as the JDC or simply as the ‘Joint’, was established in 1914 to help Jews effected by the First World War; through a network of social and community assistance programmes, it grew to become the largest non-political organisation dedicated to helping Jews in distress all over the world.2
Why had the Joint written to the Cape Board? During the closing down of its Geneva office earlier that year, jewellery belonging to Clare Schur, who had supposedly died twenty years earlier, had been discovered in a safe. Could the Board trace her heirs?
The Board did more. Through the Communal Register they found Clare, alive and well and living in Sea Point. Chronicle Editor Irma Chait went to visit her and a fascinating story emerged.3
Clara Rachel Schur was born in O’Kiep, Namaqualand, on 12 February 19104. It was an adventurous enterprising family. Her grandfather, Moses Schur, was one of the first Jewish shopkeepers in Namaqualand, a sparsely populated semi-desert area, bitterly cold in winter, boiling hot in summer, but rich in copper, with O’Kiep the headquarters of the Cape Copper Company. It was said that the first time Moses Schur appeared he was on foot with a pack on his back, the next time the pack was on a donkey, the third time he had a cart with two horses and on the fourth occasion opened a shop in the little village (now a ghost town5) of Bowesdorp, bringing out his sons Joseph, Woolf, and Harry from Chaviadan, Lithuania, to manage various stores throughout the district.6
Joseph, Clare’s father, travelled around Namaqualand buying skins. During the South African War, he was fined £500 for trading with the Boers in Bowesdorp. (He said he would have been a fool not to do so; the Boers paid him, whereas the British only promised him compensation7). His father then opened a hotel in Bowesdorp, which Joseph ran with his wife, Jenny, who came from Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania. It had nine bedrooms, two sitting rooms, a dining room, two kitchens, stabling for 36 horses, a bar and a private bar.8 Jenny would manage Joseph’s shop in nearby Nababeep when he went off on trips into the country to buy skins to sell to the Cape Town wholesaler JW Jagger & Co.
When she finished school, Clare moved to Cape Town staying with her brother, Lionel, in Plumstead, finding work in the office of the African Market Agency at Cape Town’s Early Morning Market. Later, she moved to Johannesburg to work at Century Radio & Tube Company, 22 Plein Street.
Clare had a strong social conscience, following the rise of Hitler with concern and his impact on the Jews with horror. She applied for a job with the United South African Jewish War Appeal9 in Johannesburg. This fundraising organisation had been established in 1941 by the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and the SA Zionist Federation. It operated under the auspices of the Board and worked through the Joint. The SA Jewish War Appeal collected money from the Jewish community and sent large sums to transport refugees from the Balkans to Palestine, to assist Jewish refugees in Switzerland, Greece and Spain, to Jewish communities in Algiers, Tunis and Casablanca, to the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Palestine which sent parcels to Jews who had escaped into Russia and for relief in Palestine itself. Money was also sent to the Teheran child refugees, and while allowed, to Stockholm , to provide food parcels to prisoners in Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau.10 After the war, it sent money and parcels of food, clothing and medicine through the Joint to the refugees released from the concentration and extermination camps, and who were then living behind barbed wire in displaced persons (DP) camps. A Scandinavian shipping line transported clothing free, and took 20 000 garments, 3000 pairs of shoes and 1000 blankets to the Polish port of Gdynia.11 To Hungary, South African Jews sent 1645 packages of jam, marmalade and raisins and to Italy, 4000 cases of food, 10 000 articles of clothing and 1000 pairs of shoes.
When the War ended, Clare volunteered to work with the Joint instead of doing so long distance from South Africa and began her new job at its European headquarters in Paris on 21 October, 1946.12 The move for Clare from O’Kiep to Paris represented quite a culture shock, but she was to go much further.13
The Joint’s work went beyond merely transferring funds, jam and shoes to local Jewish relief organisations. It tried to restore self-sustainable Jewish life within those communities. Before the war, it helped Jews to emigrate from Europe and, when that was no longer possible, it sent funds, food parcels and medicines to communities and then into the ghettos, opening shelters and soup kitchens and subsidizing hospitals, child care centres, educational and cultural programmes, even in the Warsaw Ghetto.
With the war’s end, the needs had multiplied. By late 1945, there were 75 000 homeless penniless under-nourished Jewish Holocaust survivors crowded into hastily set up and inadequately provided DP camps throughout Germany, Austria, and Italy, often under the control of the American Army whose General Patton lacked sympathy and understanding and had placed the survivors alongside hostile non-Jewish Polish and German refugees.
The Joint then took over the care of the Jews who were placed in separate camps, where it distributed emergency aid and tried to restore to the traumatized remnant of once flourishing families and communities a sense of community and normalcy. They set up schools for children who had lost their childhood, provided clinics and hospitals with new medical facilities for the ill and injured and established synagogues with Torah scrolls and ritual articles, food for holy days, cultural activities and books.
In Paris Clare, capable and efficient, threw herself heart and soul into this work. By 1947, the Joint was supporting 380 medical facilities across the continent, and 137 000 Jewish children were receiving some form of JDC aid.14 The Joint by then had developed a field organisation that covered Europe and later North Africa and had opened offices in all East European countries, except in the USSR.
At first, Clare enjoyed the experience of working in such a cosmopolitan culture-rich city but she wanted to do more than office work. The plight of the survivors in the camp touched her deeply and she wished to be more hands-on in her involvement. She thus applied for a transfer from Paris and was sent to Prague as secretary to Israel Jacobson, director of the Czechoslovakian Division. Her administrative skills, dedication and passion for the work proved invaluable.
In the years 1945–1952, the Joint spent $342 million on Holocaust victims.15 It had moved to a more proactive operational strategy with survivors who had remained or returned to their towns and villages, providing funding for the elderly and disabled, strengthening communal institutions and supporting cultural activities, including subsidizing Jewish theatres, books, and newspapers. The Joint sheltered Jewish orphans, supported state children’s homes and Jewish schools (with an enrolment of 20 000 pupils at the end of 1946) and encouraged religious activity.16
More controversially, the Joint was also financing legal – and illegal – Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. The Jews wished to escape from the blood-soaked fields of Europe where they were not wanted. They wanted to leave the antisemitic populace and to go to Palestine, where they could live among their own people. The Joint started to move from emergency relief to long-term rehabilitation, and much of that involved helping the exodus to Palestine, soon to be the Jewish state of Israel. The aid included food, clothing, transportation, money for railroad tickets, and maintenance in transit camp. Of the $30 million expended, $10–$12 million went to help Jews go to Palestine. This was problematic because Palestine was administered by Britain who, disregarding previous promises, was severely restricting the immigration of Europe’s Jewish refugees and blockading the ports. The Joint quietly helped finance the clandestine immigration conducted by the Bricha and Aliyah Bet.17[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Clare started to travel widely. Within three years her passport, issued in Pretoria on 16 September 1946 to enable her to take up her job in Paris, was full. When Israel Jacobson was promoted to be the Joint’s Hungarian Director in 1947, he arranged for her to be transferred with him to run his Budapest office. Clare was issued with a fresh passport in Hungary on 12 May 1949. Adolf Eichmann had turned his attention to Hungary in 1944 and within a year his fanatical enthusiasm for exterminating Jews had reduced its Jewish population from 600 000 to 100 000. In 1946, an estimated 120 000 Jews in Hungary depended on the Joint for food and other basic needs.18 From then until 1952, the JDC allocated $52 million for clothing, education, social welfare and food in Hungary (including jam, marmalade and raisins from South Africa). Some of the money was transferred in the form of bulk goods. Large quantities of coffee, bought in Brazil for dollars, were sold in Hungary for horints – at a huge profit. It was estimated that every cup of coffee made in Hungary was provided by the Joint.19 $18 million went on cash relief and canteens, $9.5 million on relief in kind, $3 million on the aged, $5 million on child care and $5 million on religious and cultural life and education. Only $645 000 was expended on emigration as Hungary would not allow its Jews to leave; a mere 2800 had grudgingly been allowed to emigrate by 1953. In 1949, the Joint assisted 198 436 Jews to move to Israel and 19 404 to America.20 Vocational training and hachsharot (agricultural training) centres were established for this purpose. Some indication of the reach of the Joint’s work and the responsibility given to Clare can be shown in her second passport, which Jeffrey possesses, which contains dozens of European and Israeli stamps, showing that she must have travelled extensively inside Europe on business for the organisation. It is a pity that we cannot know what she was doing in those countries. She went to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and Switzerland, and she was also in and out of Paris – not bad for someone originally from Namaqualand.21 The Joint did not work in a vacuum and conditions in Hungary started to change. In June 1948, the Communists took over, this after even widespread election fraud had failed to hand them a parliamentary majority, and their leader, Mátyás Rákosi, assumed practically unlimited power. Opposition parties were declared illegal, and their leaders arrested or forced into exile. Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had opposed Nazism, Hungarian Fascism and communism, was arrested on charges of treason, conspiracy, and offences against the laws of the newly formed communist government. Rákosi’s main rival, László Rajk, minister of foreign affairs at the time, was arrested, accused of spying for Western imperialist powers and executed. Unfortunately for the Joint, their main offices were in America and it was to America that they reported and from whom they received most of their funds. The Joint kept the Government of the United States informed about its own operations and the conditions of the Jews in various lands.22 The Soviets, convinced of the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, suspected any international Jewish organisation of being a centre for espionage and assumed that the Joint was the front for an international spy ring. In Hungary, their letters were opened and their telephone calls monitored. In 1949, Israel Jacobson visited the head office in America. When he returned to his post in Hungary, he was arrested as he crossed the border and taken to the prison where Cardinal Mindszenty was being held. The Communist government was looking for additional information to make the charges against Mindszenty stick. Jacobson was threatened with lynching and not allowed to wash, shower or move about. He was held under these conditions for twelve days before being released, charged with espionage and expelled.23 After five weeks in prison undergoing torture and beatings with a rubber truncheon, Cardinal Mindszenty confessed to working with Americans against the State of Hungary. He also “confessed” amongst other things, to plotting to steal Hungary’s crown jewels and to bring about a Third World War that America was to win and to personally assume power in Hungary. Shortly before his arrest, he had written a note stating that he had not been involved in any conspiracy, and that any confession he might make would be the result of duress. After a show trial which generated worldwide condemnation, including a United Nations resolution, he was given a life sentence for treason in 1949.24 Pope Pius XI excommunicated everyone involved in the trial.25 Although the Joint was not directly implicated – possibly because it was spending more money in Hungary than anywhere else besides Israel – it was scared to lose its foothold in Hungary and persuaded Jacobson to keep quiet about his experiences. With the Communist takeover, it was very difficult for Jews to get permission to emigrate and the Joint was desperate to be allowed to stay in the country to continue helping the Jewish remnant. Jacobson’s silence therefore seemed a small price to pay. Charles Jordan, who had represented the Joint in Hungary until May 1951 reported to their Paris office that the Hungarian government had neither “concern nor responsibility for the indigent Jews owing to the fact that they belong to the former bourgeoisies who have no claims on a People’s State”. For the same reasons, most of those people were “ineligible for social benefits… And yet, oddly enough … they and they alone of all the satellite countries at least let us help some of their people… they permit it to be known that money from ‘American Imperialists’ is permitted in to help their nationals.”26 Jordan paid a heavier price than Jacobson. On a visit to Prague in August 1967, by which time he was the JDC’s executive vice-chairman, he was abducted and murdered. In 1949, the Joint was expelled from Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria, in 1950 from Czechoslovakia, and in 1953 from Hungary. Many local Jewish figures who had worked with the JDC were arrested. The Joint had been accused of espionage, sabotage, illegal currency transactions, speculation, and smuggling under the guise of charitable activity during the 1953 show trial of Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, and 13 other Communists, 11 of them Jews, accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy.27 The trial was the result of a split within the Communist leadership, and was part of a Stalin-inspired purge both of ‘disloyal’ elements in the Communist parties, and of Jews from the leadership of Communist parties. (After torture the victims confessed to all crimes – eleven were executed and three sentenced to life imprisonment.28) Also in 1953, during the Doctor’s Plot in the USSR the Soviet press described the Joint as an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organisation set up by the American Intelligence Service which conducted broad-scale espionage, terroristic and other subversive activities and upon whose instructions the “doctor-saboteurs” allegedly acted.29 When Israel Jacobson was arrested, he was succeeded as Clare’s boss by Aaron Berkowitz, Jacobson’s second in command. Clare became his secretary. Looking for information about his aunt, Jeffrey contacted Sherry Hyman, Director: Archives and Records of the JDC New York in 2001, who spoke to Berkowitz.30 Although semi-paralysed from a stroke in 1999 and having trouble speaking, he made every effort to overcome these difficulties so as to tell Clare’s story. “All the Americans at that time in Budapest were under suspicion and were in danger of being arrested,” he told Sherry. Aaron received confirmation from a Budapest government minister that Clare and all people associated with the Joint were being followed. The JDC executives then worked out an evacuation plan which they did not reveal to the rest of the staff. Clare was sent to Paris – against her will – and Aaron drove her to the airport, miserable and furious with him.31 For Clare had by then fallen in love with a Hungarian Jew, Stephan, and they had become engaged. Before she left, Stephan gave her his prized gold watch and gold chain and asked her to keep them for him, promising to join her soon. It was not until Aaron saw her later in Paris that he was able to reveal the reason for her transfer. He further told Sherry that Clare had been “truly appreciated in her Hungary post.” Rákosi now attempted to impose totalitarian rule on Hungary. The secret police persecuted all “class enemies” and “enemies of the people”. An estimated 2000 people were executed, over 100 000 imprisoned and 44 000 ended up in forced-labour camps. Among the victims was Stephan. He was caught trying to cross the border on his way to join Clare and imprisoned. Aaron Berkowitz continued working with Clare at the Paris office of the Joint in Paris for another three years. Clare kept hoping that Stephan would manage to get out and messages from him arrived periodically through the Joint. By 1955, the resettlements were pretty much completed. Clare decided to return to South Africa even though she disliked its politics. She had given up hope that Stephan would be able to join her. She settled in Cape Town, where her brother lived, The next year, the Hungarian Revolution erupted. Students demonstrated in Budapest for reform and greater political freedom. In response Soviet tanks moved in and opened fire on protesters. The popular anger this aroused resulted in Imre Nagy and supporters taking control of the Hungarian Working People’s Party and starting a new government. Cardinal József Mindszenty and other political prisoners were released. Stephan managed to escape to Vienna, from where the Joint helped Hungarian Jews after the suppression of the 1956 uprising. He reached America and contacted Clare. She tried to join him but this was during the McCarthy era, the ‘Red Scare’ and the blacklisting of Communists. Because Clare had “worked in communist countries”, she was denied an American visa. She turned to the Joint which has documents dating from February 1957 referring to her wish to join a fiancé (a Hungarian refugee or parolee) in the U.S. Sherry Hyman reported that “The parole and refugee regulations apparently prevented this at the time. Progress on attaining a reunion – either in the U.S. or South Africa – is not to be found in our files.”32 Stephan applied to join her in South Africa, but the latter regime was also strongly anti-Communist. Because Stephan was from Hungary, a Communist country, he was not allowed a visa either. Clare was devastated. She never married. What happened to Stephan’s jewellery safely stored in the Geneva offices of the Joint for forty years remains a mystery. Jeff Schur recalled her as appearing to be devoid of emotion although he remembered her spontaneously bursting into tears when she noticed someone on the Sea Point beach front with a concentration camp number tattooed on the arm. “She never really explained the reason to me, a child of ten or eleven, but she did give me Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book, The Scourge of the Swastika, when I was 13, which I didn’t really appreciate until after I left South Africa and began very slowly accumulating our family history.”33 Jeff wrote that his aunt had devoted her life to helping other people, starting from her human rights sympathies from the time she left school to taking action during and after World War Two. This continued until she died. She had also worked for Colin Eglin, who represented Sea Point in the South African Parliament and became the leader of the Progressive Party. I phoned Colin Eglin. He recalled Clare as one of a number of dedicated old ladies who worked as volunteers stuffing envelopes in the Progressive Party offices. He doubted if any photographs had been taken. A few days later, he phoned back. He had spoken to Errol Anstey, a Democratic Alliance City Councillor, who remembered attending Clare’s funeral in 1993. Errol remembered, “I gave her lifts home from party meetings. I would organise township tours and she was one of the few people who would join them.” 34 He searched and voilà! He unearthed two coloured photos of Clare in the tour group. Jeff was delighted. At last he had a photo of his father’s sister. Clare and his parents had been members of the Communist Party. His father had worked for Frank, Bernadt and Joffe who had defended Mandela with Bram Fisher and they had helped Adv. Harry Snitcher, a member of the SACP Central Committee, in his unsuccessful 1943 and 1948 attempts to be elected as a Member of Parliament. When the National Party came to power, life for them became difficult because of visits from the Bureau of State Security. Jeff left South Africa in 1969. Without any reason given, the Government even denied him a visa to return after his father died. He did not return until after Mandela was elected President, when he brought his daughter and two tiny grandchildren back to Cape Town for closure. But at least he now has his aunt’s photo and the story of a remarkable woman has been restored to memory. A few days later, I attended a consecration at the Jewish Cemetery in Cape Town. Cutting through the cemetery on the way to the ceremony having visited my parents’ grave, I came up short because there, facing me, different from the other glossy stones, was a simple small rough hewn stone marking Clare Schur’s grave. Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history. 
NOTES
