(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 73, No. 1, Pesach 2018)
There are two well-known stereotypes of Jewish women – the first deserves to be valued above rubies, because she works her fingers to the bone supporting her husband.i Up before dawn, she toils till late in the night, planting vineyards with her hands, going to distant shops to buy food for the family and raw material to spin, weave and turn into clothes to sell. She is not afraid of the snow for her family because she dresses them in scarlet. Why scarlet, not blue or green? Because of a mistake in the original translation. In Ugaritic the word, translated as ‘scarlet’, is a special form of the number TWO meaning the children are covered in double layers of clothing.ii And what about her husband whom she supports from her earnings? Well, he praises her efforts and spends his days sitting at the gate chatting to the elders of the community.
The second portrays the woman who, when her young son boasts that he has been given a part in the school play as the Jewish husband instructs him to tell that teacher he wants a speaking part!
However such stereotypes ignore the many other women who labour to make the world a better place for their family and for society. South African society has problems aplenty – racism, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, gender abuse, and environment. These other women are quiet heroes, who seeing a need, decided with quiet determination to do something about it, often against considerable opposition and frequently at their own expense.
Warning: this article has a guaranteed feriebel potential because for every one selected, space has prevented the mention of another dozen of equal worth.
PAM HERR
“When I started my own business it was there for the greater good of Cape Town”.
Working in Johannesburg for the Chamber of Commerce during the apartheid years, Pam Herr organised workshops for business men, including workshop on chapters in an importer’s manual she edited. The Johannesburg whites-only technikon asked permission to run a course based on the book. She refused.
“They all had a go at me and I said ‘You can do what you like but unless the technikon is going to be an open society, it is no deal.’ It took an Act of Parliament to enable the technikon to include non-white students. That was all because I said this is a stupid system and you are not going to get me to move.”
In 1981 Pam wanted to know what Soweto was like: “And if I wanted to do this then so would a whole lot of others so I organised a permit from the West Rand Bantu Administration Board for ‘Pam Herr and 60 business men’. My boss thought I was nuts.”
Pam designed township tours to introduce white businessmen to black businessmen while enabling them to see the apartheid realities hidden from view. When she moved to Cape Town and the Chamber of Industries, she wanted to do the same thing (“I was new to Cape Town. I wanted to see the Cape Flats. I wanted to know about other people and what they were doing.”)
Her boss refused and when she persisted, he called in the army:
“We went off through the townships with sixty of Cape Town’s elite in this bus followed by a casspir. But if that was the only way I could get these white people into the township, then that was how I would have to do it. It was all business oriented. On the way they would see how people lived. I thought this was G-d working through me. He has got to change these people so this is what I had to do. All of a sudden they would stop talking and just start looking around them. The tour guide and I would look at each other and smile.
The tours were monthly – the army only came once. The casspir got stuck in the sand and those three-piece pinstriped businessmen had to get out of the bus to push it.
Later, Pam opened her own business, organising talks and tours and joined the CT Chamber of Commerce. Every month she would take businessmen on a 60-seater bus tour with a banner saying ‘Journey to the Cape Flats World of Business’. At each stop they would be told to pick a shop related to them and talk to the shopkeepers. She would tell the shopkeeper, “We are not going to improve your business or his unless the two of you talk.” People would say that their lives were never the same after one of her trips.
When executives from a clothing chain went on their tour, they asked to see what the shacks looked like. Pam refused.
“I said we can walk around but I am not showing you inside but they asked an old man if they could look inside his shack. I just gasped.
‘Yes’ said the old man, ‘but the baby is asleep. It is only one room’.
In and out they went, and they were dumbstruck. I said: ‘Ask him where the nearest toilet is. Ask him where the bus stop is. Ask him how many people live in this shack, and what time do they leave for work in the morning. Have members of your staff ever arrived for work late? Now are you surprised? You have got to start a housing policy, so that you can get decent houses for your staff. Now you can see for yourselves. They stood around me, knee deep in the sand and looked down at their shoes.”
Prior to 1994, Pam went to see Tony Yengeni and offered to run workshops for the ANC to enable the business community and the ANC to get to know one another. At her ANC Western Cape Forums a panel of speakers including the likes of Trevor Manuel, Pallo Jordan and Joe Slovo would discuss different topics and take questions followed by cocktails where they could make contacts. She started popular monthly breakfasts for white business people at the Yellow Door jazz club in Gugulethu and would include local people looking for business or employment opportunities.
When her husband died, she could no longer manage the business on her own and moved into a retirement village. There she discovered another form of discrimination – exploited workers. The gardeners were about to be retrenched. She called in a friend, a trade unionist, and paid their joining fees:
“Then the gardeners were members of the union. The carers and others joined up too. We were too late to save the cleaning staff and the catering staff – they had already retrenched and outsourced them, but the others received letters of appointment, their pay was doubled and they received bonuses after ten years.”
For a break she took a room in a seaside hotel for seniors: “I met the staff – I have never met a bunch of people who worked so hard. They never got a break. They just worked. I asked how much they earned. That was not OK.”
So Pam invited the trade unionist and his wife to be her guests for Saturday lunch. They came, chatted with the waitress, and were equally appalled. The upshot was that she helped the staff fill in the union forms, paid their joining fees, and after a bitter fight with the recalcitrant manager, the staff got letters of appointment, their salaries were tripled, they were given a lunch hour and lunch.
Since then the trade unionist has been unionising the retirement villages with similar results and Pam Herr has paid all the joining fees. She says that what is not right must be put right, that she is doing what G-d wants her to do and that it is for the greater good of society.
HELEN LIEBERMAN
“I could have looked at those townships and run away for life. But I couldn’t accept my country was like that. I had to try and do something to help. The biggest gift you can give people is the feeling of self-worth and the capacity to look after themselves.”
As a young speech therapist at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1963, Helen Lieberman was upset when she found the baby she had been treating had been sent home prematurely. She waited in her car until she saw the nurse leave after her shift and asked her to get in her car. “You don’t understand the trouble you and I are getting into”, the nurse told Helen as they drove to Langa.
“It was just horrific. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; I thought I was looking into what was hell. There was squalor, poverty and fear. It was so overwhelming and terrible. I couldn’t imagine this existed in my own country and knew I could not live and watch it happening, without trying to help. At least now I can face myself having tried to do something about it.”
Helen took the baby back to the hospital and returned to Langa the next day. She saw many needs but realised that helping individuals would not be enough; centres were needed where people could learn skills and improve their situations themselves. And so this amazing modest woman went on to change the lives of hundreds of thousands.
She taught them to sew and make clothes and black cloth dolls. One woman asked her if she had noticed the state of the children – Helen mobilised the community to build the first pre-school. Another wanted a school – she knew twenty women who could teach with her as the principal. For the next five years, Helen came to the makeshift school every Saturday and worked with them. Then she became aware of the plight of the elderly and arranged with the community to bring them together and give them soup – this developed into Senior Clubs.
The police became suspicious of this white woman walking around Langa without a permit. Was she an informer or engaged in subversive activities? Helen was often arrested. When the community spotted the police car, they would rush her out of the back door into another shack or hide her in the bushes. Helen remembers sitting in police vans, cuddling a little baby. The Jewish Board of Deputies at that time regarded her as a trouble maker.
By the 1970s, with her guidance, the community had started taking orphaned children into their homes. Peer support groups, care centres, food gardens and programmes for the blind, the disabled and the youth had been set up. In the 1980s informal schools had been started in several townships and their work began to spread, to Mossel Bay, George, Cradock and Johannesburg.
In 1989, Helen assembled 3000 people in the Langa Stadium. There she suggested that they establish an official NGO to improve the lives in their community and, in 1992, Ikamva Labantu – “The Future of the Nation” – was born.i Today, it is one of the largest NGOs in South Africa – 140 principals and practitioners enrol in early childhood development training yearly, 2000 seniors attend nineteen clubs, 1321 pre-schoolers receive deworming treatment and 150 at-risk children benefit from academic support programmes. There are multipurpose service centres for children, youth, and adults to empower the most vulnerable populations, the disabled, the blind and elderly, day-care for pre-schoolers, economic empowerment initiative for seniors and business initiatives for working adults.ii It employs social workers, occupational therapists, community fieldworkers, nurses and teams of volunteers and raises vast sums of money all over the world to help disadvantaged people in South Africa.iii Says Helen,
“Had I known what it would grow into, I would never have started it! It is now a monster, it consumes everybody’s lives. I could not have done it without the input and the caring of so many ordinary, decent human beings. For this is very much a community run and owned organisation. That has been the common thread which has run right through the whole idea. You can’t do this without the support of community leaders and the local people. They have bought into this and they want to volunteer their time and services. We don’t own the projects, they own them. Charity is the worst thing; you destroy people because you don’t give them the ability to be self-sufficient. My biggest achievement is when I hear people say they don’t need our organisation anymore.”
An extraordinary woman, Helen Lieberman is still actively involved in the organisation she founded: “I wake up in the morning and I want to be there.”
MARLENE SILBERT
“We need to learn to live together to promote respect, empathy, social cohesion, reconciliation and social activism”.
When Marlene Silbert retired as Education Director of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre (CTHC),i she agreed to serve on the committee of the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative along with the writer of this article. She has had a life-long commitment to human rights activism including serving as a safe house for ANC activists on the run from the police during the apartheid era.
“It all started after a meeting early in 2011 with Chris Chivers, the Canon Chancellor of the Blackburn Cathedral, UK.i He had heard of a human rights and diversity training programme I had developed at the CTHC called, ‘Learning to Live Together – We can make a difference’.ii He asked me to introduce a similar programme in the schools in Blackburn, a divided city with little contact between the religious groups.”
Canon Chivers offered to raise funds to cover the costs of flights and accommodation to twin learners from Cape Town with their peers in Blackburn and Liverpool to teach the British youth that it was possible for people of different backgrounds to relate to each other. Marlene agreed and developed a two-year programme for learners from different religions, faiths, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds from five schools in diverse geographic locations. Each principal selected a teacher and three pupils who had demonstrated distinct leadership potential. The pupils also had to commit to introducing extra-mural clubs and societies within their school, and to twin with other schools. During the second year of the programme the pupils go to Gugulethu one afternoon a week and, in partnership with the Amy Biehl Foundation, tutor disadvantaged young learners in maths and numeracy or language and literacy.
“Within our new South Africa we are beginning to live closer together and our lives have become interwoven, both nationally and internationally, yet we still seem to be driven apart. We constantly encounter people whose religions, cultures, ideas and ideals are unlike ours. Religion, in particular, continues to have a. powerful presence because of its impact on our identity, and this can be divisive and create an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’”
The programme, now named the Marlene Silbert Youth Interfaith Intercultural Programme, was designed to create an opportunity for the learners to engage in meaningful dialogue with peers from different backgrounds, to sensitise them to their own prejudices and instil an appreciation of the value of diversity while breaking down the racism, stereotypes and prejudice that exists. It has exceeded all expectations. The pupils had bonded warmly, and come to realise how much they had in common. They remark that it had been an incredible and enriching life-changing experience as they had learnt so much – not only about themselves, but about each other. During the July holidays the learners were flown to England for a wonderful week, twinning with 15 U.K. learners who were also selected from diverse backgrounds who then returned to Cape Town with them for a further Cape Town experience with local funding raised by Marlene.i After three years Blackburn stopped the funding but by this time the programme had developed a life of its own. More and more schools wanted to join as they could see the difference it had made in the lives of their learners.
“I believe that we need to speak and to listen, sharing views, even when they differ from our own. We need to make space for the beliefs of the other. We need to respect the dignity of those who are not like us. We need to be open to changing our perspectives, to understand and be understood across the boundaries of difference. We need to learn to live and work together in our complex and dependent society.”
By now about 300 learners have participated in the course and the effect on the schools and the participants has been remarkable. Marlene did not realise that she would be busier in retirement than she was at the CTHC. From the initial three children from five schools, the courses now consist of 38 learners from nine schools. She cannot keep up with the demand and has had to take on fellow co-ordinators.
ROLENE MILLER
Don’t make me out to be a hero. I just realised that there were no services for abused women in the underprivileged areas. It was most often the songs of the heart that connected us and helped us create the beautiful MOSAIC that we envisioned.
Rolene Miller, a social worker, remedial teacher and Lifeline counsellor, was working at Ikamva Labantu with her friend Helen Lieberman when she began connecting with women from disadvantaged communities. Many, she realised, were abused and desperately needed help. They did not know where to go or who could assist them. They needed to be empowered and educated about abuse and domestic violence so that they would know their rights, and how to access them.
“As a white Jewish woman I realised that I wanted to repay the privileges that I had experienced under the apartheid system. I saw gender abuse as a crisis. I wanted to work with women who suffered from abuse and who had no recourse to free services to help them. There were no organisations that focused on abuse. It bothered me that women in our disadvantaged communities had to pay other organisations for services on a sliding scale. It seemed unjust that abused women had to pay for amenities so vital to their health and welfare. I felt that something should be freely provided for them.”
Having identified this need, Rolene decided to do something about it. As she had the tools and skills to make a difference, she used her own funds to start training grassroots community women, giving them tools to connect with and help abused women. In 1993, she registered MOSAIC Training Services and Healing Centrei and set about counselling, running workshops and educating about gender based violence. As she wanted to reach people within their own communities, she visited hospitals, clinics, schools, churches and community meetings to provide relevant information. She and psychologist Tammy Shaffer then compiled a course and in 1994 started training 28 women from targeted areas in social work skills. They developed a unique methodology of connectedness and empowerment and to date Mosaic is a forerunner in its field.
Four years later the Department of Social Development gave her a grant.
“I was ecstatic because we had nothing before. When I started training the second group of community workers we were bankrupt. We were always two months away from bankruptcy. As much as I was an insider as a woman, I was also an outsider as I couldn’t speak Xhosa and my Afrikaans was poor. I didn’t know their culture or the abuse they suffered as a result. Yet, the women who I trained seemed to transcend our differences and we connected on levels that words cannot express.”
These community workers shared with their abused clients similar backgrounds, stories and languages and with the training Rolene provided they mastered the social work skills and trained, healed, supported and helped abused women to change their lives for the better.
In 1999, Mosaic became the first organisation in the Western Cape to start working with domestic violence complaints directly at the courts. A major problem at court was that there was no one who could speak Xhosa to the women seeking Protection Orders. The technicalities and jargon of the Protection Orders were in English which the abused women did not understand. So Mosaic’s community workers translated the paper work for them and helped to write their affidavits.
It was not long before fourteen magistrates in the Western Cape and two in Gauteng asked them to set up Mosaic Court Support Desks in their courts. Mosaic also runs courses for the clerks of the court.
“I believe that Mosaic is a story of growth and personal achievements, of survival against great odds. It’s about miracles and the lessons that we learnt from them. It’s about our huge love and trust in G-d. It’s about us healing ourselves before we can heal others. Mostly, it’s about the excitement and wonder of Women Power! Change will only come about when women who have had enough abuse will want to change and make a difference! Only then will abuse stop and will Mosaic’s mission be achieved.”
Mosaic’s community workers have taken the skills Rolene has provided to abused women in 33 communities. Today Mosaic has seventy members of staff, 42 have qualified as dedicated court workers and many thousands of women who were abused by gender, by apartheid, by patriarchy and by culture have been empowered. All because one dedicated women realised that there were no organisations to help abused woman and decided to do something about it.
KERRY HOFFMAN
Something needs to be done for the homeless. We must be there for each other. I take pride in what I am doing for these people and I’m passionate about making things a little better for them.
One day in 2014, Kerry Hoffman was greeted with such a warm smile from a homeless person on the street that she felt an immediate connection and decided to reach out in return. One cold winter day, she and her mother cooked three pots of soup, made many sandwiches and went off to the entrance of Cape Town’s Government Avenue, a popular gathering place.
Kerry parked her car on the pavement, put on some jazz music, opened the trunk, and waited. It was not long before the first curious street person came by. The news spread and soon 150 polystyrene cups of soup and umpteen sandwiches had vanished with warm thanks and grateful appreciation from the hungry homeless, nearly 1000 of who sleep rough on the streets of Cape Town and the City Bowl.
Kerry was moved by the need, as well as by the degree of friendliness, kindness and co-operation she found among the street people. These were people who had lost everything – jobs, homes, self-worth and dignity. This led to a vision that such gestures could bring about positive change in an increasingly negative space, and an acknowledgement, quoting Rabbi Isadore Twersky, that indigents remain dignified individuals with their own needs and drives, their own sensibilities and rights, strengths and weaknesses.i
Kerry committed herself to do something to restore their dignity. Tzedaka means justice – Judaism does not consider it is just that some people are rich, and others poor, that some people have plenty while others go hungry.
Kerry’s friends began joining her, and brought their children along and by June 2014, Kerry had formed Souper Troopers.ii Soon her deliveries of soup and sandwiches had become regular keenly anticipated monthly events and services always run together with people on the street – a core group of loyal volunteers – in the Souper Troopers ethos of Dignity, Love, and Respect. These Souper Troopers events provide homeless people some dignity and attention and an opportunity to socialise in an environment of mutual respect.
In early 2017, Kerry was joined by Caryn Gootkin. They registered Souper Troopers as an NPO and are in the process of registering it as a PBO as well,iii with the aim of restoring dignity to the homeless and marginalised and reintegrating them into society. At one time they operated out of the Service Dining Roomsiv before moving to the Carpenter’s Shop.v
From hot soup on a cold day Souper Troopers, with the help of friends, volunteers and corporates has expanded into monthly ‘socials’. More than 500 attend each event, where they enjoy food, music, entertainment and games – even celebrating their birthday parties. They help in the kitchen, cut each other’s hair and clean up afterwards. Before Cape Town developed a water problem, mobile showers were an additional treat.
Corporates have come on board with donations of fruit and essential toiletries and many community members drop off clothing for distribution and a pop up shop. They run a customised Salesforce CRM database containing more than one thousand people’s names and which profiles and tracks each person’s development.
They are fund raising for a permanent central and easy to access human hub that will help to reintegrate them into society, with a Souper Café, a Souper Market, a Souper Salon and a Souper Style outlet to generate income for both the project and the currently unemployed troops and they will partner with corporates looking for staff and put the Troops in touch with the necessary social and administrative services.
“I started this for myself. I shared whatever I had and three and a half years down the line, the guys on the street have become like family. I am delighted to see how Soupertroopers has grown from three pots of soup into an organisation designed to restore dignity and self-worth.”
Kerry believes that it is up to her generation to continue the legacy of previous women who were trailblazers in providing assistance to the disadvantaged. She sees nothing unusual in what she has done: “We all have a story. It is up to each one of us as human beings to help each other. We can create meaningful change through small acts of kindness. Together we are the change.”
Once again, it takes just one woman, who sees a need and who chooses to step in to make a positive change in people’s lives. The price of these women is definitely above rubies.
In November 2014, Gina Flash launched the Mensch Network as a platform to support Jewish social change-makers working in non-profits and social enterprises across the country in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It facilitates a network of approximately 100 Jewish social change-makers, mostly women and including Helen Lieberman, Rolene Miller and Kerry Hoffman.
Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and long-serving member of its editorial board, is Deputy Director of the Cape Council, SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She has written, co-written and edited numerous books on local Jewish and Cape Town history.
