From Hot Cross Buns to Crossword Puzzles: The SA Jewish Board of Deputies as an information resource

 

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024)

 

 

Most people associate  the South African Jewish Board of Deputies  with tackling antisemitism and taking on the Government when its irrational pro-Hamas and pro-Palestine platform interferes with the Constitutional  right of the Jewish community to its own opinions and beliefs. That includes their right to be Zionist.

However the Board does far more than that. At its inception, just over 120 years ago, it had two main functions – to safeguard the civil rights of the Jewish community and prevent discrimination and to contribute to the enhancement of Jewish communal life. In 1974 Gus Saron, its Secretary-General (as the SAJBD director was then called), wondered whether the Board’s work grew haphazardly in response to emergency needs and sudden challenges, or whether it followed some underlying pattern. He concluded that both elements were present. The Board undertook some tasks because these became urgent, others because there was no one else to do it.

More recently the Board’s work was defined as having six main areas: Antisemitism (monitoring antisemitism in the media and society and taking appropriate action); Cultural (enriching and maintaining Jewish life through cultural and educational programmes, including Yom Hashoah commemoration, exhibitions and academic seminars); Holocaust (keeping abreast of Holocaust based claims and litigation and making this information available to and assisting Holocausts survivors and heirs in the community); Information Resource (providing an information resource on Jewish life and history, locally and internationally); Interfaith (building bridges with other faith communities) and Political (networking with government at every level in order to maintain open lines of communication between government and SA Jewry.)

I shall not be discussing the Board’s work in all those roles, only as an information resource to show the far ranging and far reaching work it does as the representative of the Jewish community, and hence the body people can and do turn to for information and assistance when they do not want to use Wikipedia. 

Having worked at the Board for  over twenty years, I can confirm how varied were the requests we received and how stimulating and interesting the work was. I received a wide range of phone calls and letters, sometimes most arbitrary. Here are some  from non-Jews:

• Quick. I am doing a cross word puzzle. Can you  give me  a six-letter word for an ancient Hebrew coin, second letter G? (Answer agorot)

• Where can our church buy a Jewish ram’s-horn? We are having trouble with the Council over building regulations and we believe the problem will go away if  we  blow a  horn on the four corners of the property. (Name of shop given, but they never phoned back to say if it worked.)

• Where can we buy the shawl Jesus wore to use in an Easter pageant? We want a cheap one. (Name of shop given.)

• We are a Johannesburg Call centre. We want 20 Hebrew speakers. (Referred to Staff Wise)

• You must stop shops from putting halaal labels on food. I refuse to pay extra for these labels  and the money goes to Hamas.  You Jews must put kosher labels on food instead so that we Bible-believing Christians have a choice and can support you. (Explained that halaal and kosher labels make sound business sense as these enabled religious people with food restrictions to purchase them safely. Consumers are not charged extra. I am outraged at halaal stickers on hot cross buns. These are for Christians not Muslims to eat. (Similar response given.)

• Can you answer the following questions about the Hebrew religion? Unfortunately my granddaughter was given Jewish [sic] to research in her class. (Certainly, ask your granddaughter to phone me and I shall do so with pleasure. Her reply: Oh she is far too busy with her ballet. I repeat that I am happy to assist her granddaughter but the project is for her to research. Phone slammed down.)

• A shop in Woodstock is selling earrings with swastikas. (Explained  they are a Hindu good luck symbol and not necessarily antisemitic.)

• My new neighbours must be Muslim antisemites as they have placed a tile with a swastika on their gate post. (Told her it is a good luck sign and suggested she welcome her new Hindu neighbours with a cake.)

• A snooty and barely disguised antisemitic professor from Rand Afrikaans University phoned to report that in his research on adoptions he had discovered that the Jewish  community had been breaking the law. They had brought in and had adopted foreign children even though it was not legal to do so at the time. He was chastened to be told that it was with the permission of Prime Minister Jan Smuts and the Minister of the Interior Patrick Duncan that these children, orphaned in pogroms in the Ukraine, had been brought  to South Africa in 1921 by Isaac Ochberg.

• While he was in hospital temporarily sightless, with his ATM card with him all the time, someone gained access to a man’s bank account and withdrew everything. A bank clerk, noticing that the funds had not been used for a long time, probably presumed him dead. The bank refused to accept responsibility. (Contacted the late Brian Joss, who ran a complaints column in the local community newspaper and who arranged for the bank to return his pension and other money. The non-Jewish man then wrote a will leaving his money to the Board as we were the only ones who had helped him. He has no relatives and when he visited Israel, people were very nice to him.)

• Art student wanted to find out if we had any hand coloured photos in oval frames of Jews from the 1920-1930s. (Referred to the Kaplan Centre.)

• Congolese Civic Association chairman reported that a 15 year-old Congolese child who had been appointed class monitor  at Salt River high school was threatened by the class because only South Africans not foreigners, should be given positions, The principal did nothing. The class  attacked her and she landed up in hospital. I contacted the Argus newspaper, which put it  on the front page. As we wrote, without a response, to the principal, a lawyer on the Board agreed to take on the case.

• Two weeks later the chairman returned, with pictures on his cell phone of an 18-month old Congolese toddler attacked with a knife when she wandered away from a birthday party. The man was caught but the police released him as he claimed to be drunk.(Again the Argus placed the story on the front page.)

• A German man phoned to report the impossible behaviour of his Jewish neighbour. He had not wanted to complain because he was German. I told him that in the same way there were good Germans and bad Germans, there were good Jews and bad Jews. Her behaviour as reported was impossible and it would not be regarded as antisemitic if he complained.

• Could I find a rabbi to participate in  a military parade in honour of the Cape Corps’ victory in the battle of Square Hill (which opened up the road to Jerusalem for the Allies, enabling General Allenby to enter the city)? During the First World War the Cape Corps made up of Coloured soldiers were allowed to shoot Turks, regarded as non-Whites, but were not allowed to shoot Germans, regarded as white! They had decided to invite a rabbi because of the Jerusalem connection. This was arranged.

• For eleven years, every time Cape Town elected a new Mayor, I would write asking that the Oswald Pirow Boulevard be renamed. He was the first person in South Africa to use tear gas on people in a 1929 tax collecting raid on a workers’ compounds at 3:30 a.m. accompanied by 700 policemen armed with machine-guns, bayonets and tear gas – 8000 were arrested. My major objection however was that the city should not be honouring a man who had met with Hitler and Goering, who promoted a Nazi state in South Africa that would restrict Jewish immigration and admission to professions, and who started the New Order movement based on Nazi principles. Finally, in December 2011 on the 44^th  anniversary of the world’s first successful heart transplant, Pirow’s name came down and Dr Christiaan Barnard’s name went up.

• As a result of this, I was invited to serve on the City Council’s Panel of Experts to select names to replace 90 Gugulethu streets previously labelled NY – which might have stood for Native Yard – and a number. This followed a nine-month  public consultation process in which the residents were asked to choose names for their streets. The panel of twelve consisted of  two white people, both Jews – Keith Gottschalk and myself.  Ninety streets got new names. Four streets honoured white people – three were women, three were Jews! One was Ray Alexander, one was cartoonist Zapiro and  to my surprise, the third was Ruth Hayman. I had to google her to find out who she was. I was surprised that the people of Gugulethu  were honouring a Johannesburg-based Jewish woman of whose existence I had been ignorant. She was an attorney who through the Black Sash had offered free legal advice and represented anti-apartheid activists. She moved to London after having been  served with a banning order and placed under house arrest. This, according to Sydney Kentridge,  was “inexplicable save on the assumption that it was a punishment for her professional work.” This sent out a clear message to attorneys; the Transvaal Law Society refused to come to her aid.  

• A professor  from Lindau (Bodensee) Germany wanted information for a book he was writing about Jewish Round Table members. (Contacted Round Table and put advert on a Johannesburg Jewish internet site and sent responses to him.)

• An elderly man came to see me. His Jewish father ran a hotel in the country where his mother had worked as a maid. He grew up in a Coloured township. In the Gitlin Library he found the Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities published by the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth which contained a photo of his father and his daughters. Now that apartheid was over, he wanted to meet his half siblings. (Looking at the photocopy, there was indeed a close resemblance to his father. I phoned the daughters. One put the phone down on me, the other burst into tears and said her father was a lovely man. I said I was sure he was, but these things happened. She agreed to discuss it with her son who would be visiting shortly from Australia. Some months later this man returned, bringing a gift of honey from his hives. He wept with happiness as he told me of the warm meeting he had with his half-sister and her son.)

• Someone writing a play with a character called Hymie Rabinowitz wanted to listen to a  Jew who spoke Afrikaans with a Yiddish accent.(Could not help.)

• A prisoner in a jail phoned to say he “has embraced the Jewish religion, and wanted a Siddur and someone who can serve as his guru”  (Informed him that the Board did not deal with religious issues.). Another prisoner, a paedophile, was refused a bursary to study primary school teaching.

• A student making a TV documentary on religious attitudes to HIV-Aids wanted to include an interview with a religious Jew. (Contacted the UOS and gave her their suggestions.)

• A High Commissioner phoned. They had bought a large antique table  for their embassy and found written underneath in chalk R Bar David  and indecipherable Hebrew lettering. Who wrote it and how old was the table? (Contacted a Bar David who came from Rhodes Island and could not help. Told Commissioner about  the large Cape Town furniture factory, DH Isaacs, that employed many East European carpenters. Faxed them photostats from the  1901 Cape Times illustrating their furniture.)

Jewish people also phoned in with queries or complaints.

• The  kosher food on a plane from Zambia consisted of four apples, two bananas and soft grapes. (Referred to UOS)

•  Letter from an 80-year-old Canadian planning to visit South Africa for the first time since his newly widowed German Jewish father had shipped him as a small child to an unknown uncle in England. His father who had run a hotel in Sea Point, had remarried. On their divorce, the non-Jewish ex-wife had moved to Johannesburg with their daughter and remarried. Could we trace the unknown half-sister so that he could meet her, the purpose of his visit? I arranged for the Board’s Charisse Zeifert to place an advertisement in the Johannesburg community newspapers and an Afrikaans reader, an amateur genealogist decided to take this on as an exercise. She scoured divorce and marriage records and managed to trace the daughter who knew nothing about her father. An emotional reunion was held attended by the genealogist. 

• A lawyer phoned. They were administering the estate of a widowed childless German Jewish refugee who had left money to relatives somewhere in Europe. Europe is a large place. I contacted the nephew but he had never heard of these relatives of his aunt by marriage. It was not fair, he said, he should have got the money. After all he took his elderly aunt shopping, not these unknown people.  I contacted a genealogist in Israel. After eighteen months (and many calls from the lawyers) and considerable detective work, she managed to trace these relatives, who thought at first it was a scam. They had only met once many years before.

• Could I find out if his adopted cousin was really Jewish? X had been adopted in Rhodesia through Rabbi Papo of Salisbury. I contacted Naomi Musiker at the Beyachad archives who found the 7 March 1946 minutes of the Council for Refugee Settlement in Africa outside the Union set up by the Board of Deputies during World War 2. X’s mother had been deported to Siberia in 1940, to Persia in 1942 and then to Tengeru, Tanganyika, where she had married a former yeshiva bocher and died of malaria plus complications from a premature childbirth in 1944. X’s stepfather was unable to care for him in the camp and he had been placed in the home of foster parents who wanted to adopt him. X was in tears when I gave him these documents. At last, he had an identity. As for the camp in Tengeru, all that is left is a cemetery with 150 graves, some with headstones containing Magenei David. American volunteers were shown it and arranged for their shul to raise money to repair the cemetery.

• Those were happy stories. This is a sad one. The request was whether I knew an Ethiopian Jew. They were filming Red Seas Spies: The True story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort. It was safer to film in Cape Town than in the Sudan? (I did. Tamrat Tizita worked at the Aquila Game Reserve and would visit the Gitlin Library when he was in Cape Town and had invited a friend and me there on a game drive. He was tall, good looking and spoke English and Hebrew. He also helped the CSO when important Israelis were in town. The film company was delighted with him. Tamrat was also delighted. “That is my story! I am filming my story!” he told me happily. Then the company phoned to say his costume was ready, but he had not turned up for a fitting. He had been killed driving over a mountain pass in a thick mist near Aquila. I went to his sad funeral attended by the film crew and the Aquila workers. Later a very heavy box was delivered to me, containing all the small change he had been putting aside – I sent it to the Zionist Council. I thought that would have been what Tamrat would have wanted.

• Visiting the war cemetery in  Rhodes Island,  Isaac Habib had noticed Jewish war graves and would say kaddish there on his annual visit to take tours. That year he noticed that the  tombstones of these Jewish airmen, and no others, had been vandalised. Through the Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s league, I was put in touch with the War Graves Commission who repaired these graves.

• A woman in a nearby seaside town phoned to complain that people from the nearby post office were trying to influence her thoughts by sending messages through the television and the electric wires in the walls. I phoned her Cape Town rabbi suspecting schizophrenia, who contacted a family member to have her admitted for treatment.

• A man had found  his parent’s ketubah on the internet and now wanted their Bulawayo marriage certificate (put him in touch with Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, CEO African Jewish Congress.)

There were also interfaith queries. Could I find someone to talk to a catering school on kashrut; to assist with an international pilgrimage to Cape Town; to find rabbis to make a prayer for the Cape Times 150^th anniversary, for people killed on the railway, for rain in a drought, for policemen killed in the line of duty, for child abuse, even for a canal opened at the harbour waterfront. In that case waters from the seven seas were obtained (!) mixed together and each religious dignitary in turn poured some water into the canal with an appropriate blessing. When Cape Town’s new soccer stadium was opened for the World Cup Soccer in 2010, the religious leaders were invited to offer up prayers for success on its newly laid turf. Unfortunately, their combined prayers were not powerful enough to allow the South African team to get past the first round.

From hot cross buns to crossword puzzles, from marriages to adoptions to graves, from battles to bank cards, turning ignorance to knowledge and learning about the bizarre uses of talleisim and shofrot, all this is part of the unsung daily work of the Jewish Board of Deputies.

As for antisemitism, we need to be alert. The Board shares statistics with international organisations. Surprisingly, antisemitism levels in South Africa, even since October 7^th, are far lower than those in other countries such as Australia, America, the UK and the EU. It is not appreciated how much our community benefits from the work of the Board, not only in tackling antisemitism, but in the ramification of its other functions. Every interfaith activity exposing the wider public to Jews other than those seen on TV, and every query from a non-community member, courteously responded to, helps to diminish antisemitic attitudes.

 

• Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its editorial board, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.