(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 78, #3, Spring-Summer 2023)
The year is 1948. In our small town of Roodepoort a powerful weather event is about to be unleashed. My mother, elder brother and I see ominous signs in the sky one November afternoon. Our father is at his business on the other side of town, unaware of what is happening. A deathly silence settles over the birds, and even the bees in the beehive along the grapevine seem to be quiet. We run inside and close the windows. A slow clatter of hailstones begins on the corrugated iron roof of our house. Little white rocks of ice gather speed, bouncing off the roof then crushing the blooming nasturtiums and chrysanthemums in the garden as we watch through the dining room windows. Apricot trees and greengage plum trees sway in the front garden with ghostlike movements while the not-yet ripened fruits pelt down. We run into the kitchen where a huge monstrous black cloud covers the window. We turn and hurry away from the awful, fearful sight, back into the dining room. I shut the interleading door, and we hear a tremendous crash of what we later discovered to have been collapsing wood, brick, metal and glass. The roof had caved in behind that door. The storm rages on with maniacal sounds of wind and thunder accompanied by lightning.
And then suddenly it stops. We feel weak and shaken. Is anything left of the outside world, we wonder? Destruction and chaos greet us when we open the front door. Broken lamp posts, uprooted trees, loose telephone wires, ripped-off branches lie silent and exhausted before us. Ambulance and fire engine sirens can be heard swelling up in the distance.
Out of this major disruption in the life of our family came an unexpected new chapter for us all.
Cousins who lived in the small country town of Volksrust heard about the disaster that struck our town, and phoned to invite us to live with them until our house again became habitable. Our parents accepted the invitation for my brother and I, while they remained in Roodepoort to supervise necessary repairs to our home.
So who were the cousins? Many years before in Lithuania two brothers, my mother’s cousins, lived in a town called Gorzd that bordered Germany. It was situated in western Lithuania on the left bank of the Minija River, fifteen kilometres from Memel. The Jews of Gorzd were therefore open to the influence of the German culture. The two cousins traveled to South Africa in the 1920s in search of opportunities that would enrich their lives. As life in Europe became increasingly antisemitic more people traveled to the USA and to South Africa. In June of 1941 during World War II, which was the darkest of times, most Jewish men in Gorzd were shot, followed a few months later by the women and children. Destruction of a Jewish community. Nothing was left for the cousins to return to should they have so wished.
My mother’s family lived in Riteve, which was also situated in western Lithuania, on the road to Memel. They connected with the cousins’ family in Gorzd. The Jews of Riteve studied Torah and were well known for being scholars who were faithful to the Jewish traditions. At the beginning of the 20th Century Riteve became the first shtetl to have electric lights. Thus the people no longer needed to depend on candles by which they studied Torah. Nevertheless many people left in search of opportunities to improve their lives, taking their knowledge of Jewish customs and traditions with them. In 1929 my mother together with others from Lithuania traveled to South Africa.
Tragically almost 95 per cent of Lithuanian Jewry was killed during the Holocaust, including those in Riteve, which was but a small part of the total destruction of Jews in that country. Again – the destruction, the annihilation of a Jewish community and again there was nothing for those who settled in South Africa or elsewhere to go back to.
And so it is incumbent upon us to remember and honor all those who died when their communities were destroyed. Our finest tribute to them is to continue traditions they gave us, and to always remember to maintain and strengthen our Jewish life.
Just as the families were close in Lithuania, upon traveling to a new country they maintained their connections, and although they settled in different parts of South Africa they continued to be in contact through the years. It was as though the invisible thread of connection that had held them together in Lithuania still held fast in their new country. They shared an understanding of one another because they originated from the same culture. They carried with them the traditions that they gave to us, traditions that strengthened our Jewish lives even in childhood. This is what we discovered as children while living with our newly found family after the tornado. We attended shul on Friday nights, and welcomed Shabbat with the same songs and prayers we already knew from our own home that our parents brought with them from their homes. We heard the same prayers that were read from the prayer book that we recognized, these being prayers recited years before in Lithuania. How comforted and secure we felt in the familiarity of this loving home environment.
Our visits became yearly events that occurred during Chanuka times when again we looked forward to the traditions of lighting the coloured candles in the menorah, to singing the same songs, and to saying the same prayers as we did in our own home in Roodepoort, and as our parents had done in their homes in Europe. Further connections to both the past and the present.
When we grew older, we the children in both families each followed our separate dreams. We were no longer children, as we established careers and built our own families – some of us remaining in South Africa, others settling in different countries – Israel, England, Australia, USA and Canada. As our parents had done, those of us who moved took with us our customs and traditions that had been instilled in us during our growing years by our parents whose origins were in Europe.
Out of the destruction caused by a powerful weather event, family connections were re-established, together with joyful sharing of our traditions.
Out of the destruction of Jewish communities through the evils of war, came the realization of the importance of maintaining and strengthening our Jewish life, connecting with our Jewish past, and the importance of thereby going forward into the future.
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Zita Nurok, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former elementary school teacher who grew up in South Africa. In 2019, she retired after 48 years of teaching, nine of which were at the then Jewish Government School in Doornfontein.
