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Interviews with Pioneers – The Work of the South African Jewish Sociological and Historical Society

Author: Published on: Published in: Jewish History – South Africa

(Author: Naomi Musiker, Vol. 69, No. 1, Pesach 2014)

 

The first attempt to establish a record of the South African Jewish community dates back to 28 April 1927, when the SA Jewish Historical Society was founded. Its chief objects were ‘the securing of reliable and statistical data about Jews in all parts of South Africa and Rhodesia.’ Much of the credit for the founding of the Society is due to Chief Rabbi Dr J L Landau, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation (and later of the Federation of Synagogues) and Professor of Hebrew at the University of the Witwatersrand. Chief Rabbi Landau served as President of the Society, with Mr. I M Goodman as Vice President and Registrar. Under Goodman’s direction, much valuable information was gathered in reply to hundreds of questionnaires sent to all parts of the country. A committee was set up to compile a Jewish Yearbook and Communal Directory which would also include a South African Jewish “Who’s Who”. The volume, edited by Morris De Saxe and I.M. Goodman and sponsored by the SA Jewish Historical Society and the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), made its appearance in 1929. It was officially entitled ‘The South African Jewish Year Book: Directory of Jewish Organisations and Who’s Who in South African Jewry 1929, 5689-90’. The Directory remains an invaluable source of information. The Communal Directory (Who’s Who section) was the first comprehensive effort to compile biographical information on prominent personalities of the Jewish community and is greatly treasured by modern day researchers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The South African Jewish Sociological and Historical Society – Reports and Interviews

In 1947, fresh efforts were made to preserve the original records of the South African Jewish community. In February 1947 the SAJBD Executive Council approved the Constitution of the SA Jewish Sociological and Historical Society (SAJSHS)1. The initial steps for the formation of the Society had been taken jointly by the Communal Relations and Public Relations Committees of the Board.

The objects of the Society were defined as follows:

  • The promotion and organization of research into and study of the history and contemporary life of the Jews of South Africa.
  • The establishment and maintenance of a Jewish Library, Archives and Museum.
  • The classification and indexing of Jewish historical and sociological material in the archives of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.
  • The publication of a comprehensive history of the Jews of South Africa, pamphlets, monographs and other publications.
  • The organization of lectures and discussions of Jewish sociological and historical interest and holding of conferences at which papers would be read.

At the inaugural meeting of the Society on 26 March 1947, Chief Rabbi Professor Louis Rabinowitz was elected Chairman, Dr H. Sonnabend, Vice-Chairman and Max Geffen, Treasurer. Samuel A Rochlin was appointed as Archivist and Vera Perlstein as Secretary.

The Society proposed the following methods for the promotion and organization of research:

  • Some 40 proposed themes for research were submitted by Rochlin to a meeting of the Executive Committee held on 9 February, 1948.
  • The Society sponsored a ‘Prize Monograph Competition’ to encourage research and study in the fields of South Africa Jewish history and sociology. Two prizes of £20 and £10 respectively were offered.
  • The Society initiated a Seminar conducted by the Chairman, Chief Rabbi Rabinowitz to carry out research and study for publication. The first theme of the Seminar was “The Jews and the Boer War”.
  • In order to preserve ‘living’ historical material, the Society undertook to conduct interviews with Jewish pioneers in various parts of South Africa. Full written records of these interviews were kept in the Society’s Archives.
  • Public lectures were given under the Society’s auspices and it was intended to publish a selection of them.

Interviews with Jewish Pioneers

From 1947 onwards, Samuel Rochlin assisted in the interviewing of a number of Jewish pioneers, both in Johannesburg and in Durban, which he visited in November 1947 in company with Dr Sonnabend for the purpose of forming a branch of the Society there. The Society was planning a systematic scheme of work for 1949-1950, including the sponsorship of research by M. Brown on ‘The Jew in South African Agriculture’. By the end of 1948, members of the Society had interviewed fourteen Jewish pioneers from Johannesburg, Durban, Kimberley and Port Elizabeth; a further seventeen were interviewed during 1949.

After the appointment of Dora Sowden as Organising Secretary in 1951, the Society was greatly facilitated in its pioneers’ interviews. Sowden, film and music critic of the Rand Daily Mail and Secretary of the South African PEN Centre, was superbly qualified for the task. She interviewed some 22 pioneers during 1952, and also conducted interviews jointly with Rochlin.

More names were continually being added to the list of people to be interviewed and Mrs H Kehr and Dr H Abt were asked to list and interview members of the smaller communities encountered in their visits to country areas. In March1951, for example, Abt noted interesting facts during a lecture tour to Upington and Kimberley, particularly regarding inscriptions in the Jewish cemeteries in Kimberley. In December 1953, he presented a report on the Grahamstown cemetery.

In November 1952, Sowden presented a memorandum on the Jewish Archives of the SAJSHS in which she outlined the work done on interviews as follows:

Actually the job takes more time than anyone is aware of, and (though I say it myself) demands the efforts of someone whom people know and trust….The basis of the collection, before I began to work for it about 18 months ago, was the Library of the Board [of Deputies] – made up of press cuttings and other material of historical and sociological interest. There is a staff here which cuts papers and files material, but our archivist, Mr. S A Rochlin, also makes cuttings which may be of immediate use to us as information, or as a guide to sources of material-just as a check.

An additional source of archivistic material comes from personal interviews with old pioneers. This is a slow and arduous task, if it is to be properly carried out (my own job being part-time, I have managed only about 35 interviews in 18 months) and [have] to be as accurate as possible in noting down the information. Usually it leads to gifts of old material from the old folk who are interviewed or from relatives or friends.

By the end of 1953, the Organising Secretary was finding the task of interviewing, carrying on correspondence and collecting material greatly handicapped by limited time and assistance. Sowden recommended that the work should be better allocated so as not to fall so heavily on one person. She tendered her resignation in March 1954, but continued to write for Jewish Affairsuntil her departure for Israel in 1966.

Sowden was succeeded as Secretary by Mrs H Dreiman, who held the post until the end of 1955. After her departure, the main focus of the Society was on the production of the volume entitled The Jews in South Africa: a History, which was edited by Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz and appeared in 1955. In the preface to the book, the editors acknowledge their debt to the continuous co-operation and material assistance received from the SAJBD, and to the ‘wealth of historical material assembled in the archives of the Board of Deputies’ which was freely drawn upon by the writers.

As mentioned earlier, one of the aims of the Society was to investigate the role of Jews in the Boer armed forces during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. The compilation of this information was undertaken by Chief Rabbi Rabinowitz during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It involved corresponding with, and where possible interviewing, both Jewish and non-Jewish veterans of the war. Important work in this field was also done by Eric Rosenthal and Rochlin. The results of this investigation were embodied in scholarly addresses delivered by Rabbi Rabinowitz to public meetings under the auspices of the SAJSHS. Examples of lectures were “Herman Judelowitz: the ‘Russian Rebel’ of the Boer War”, delivered 17 June 1948,2 and ‘Jews in the Boer War’, delivered at the Parkview-Greenside Communal Hall, Johannesburg on 27 May 1949. The lectures aroused great public interest and encouraged other war veterans to come forward with further information which would otherwise have been lost; many of the original participants were already deceased at this period.

The research by Rabbi Rabinowitz and the Society formed the basis of the scholarly book which appeared in January 2010 under the title Boerejode: Jews in the Boer Armed Forces 1899-1902 by David Saks, editor of this journal. Saks discovered many new facts concerning the ‘Boerjode’, which he was able to add to the existing body of information first unearthed by Rabbi Rabinowitz and the members of the SA Jewish Sociological and Historical Society.

Articles in Jewish Affairs

Through the work of the Society, many interesting and vitally important interviews appeared in Jewish Affairs the journal of the SAJBD. Those featuring reminiscences of pioneers included ‘Through the Eyes of a Litvak, 1893: Johannesburg Jewry’s first years: a contemporary report’ by M D Hersch.3 These articles were translated from the letters of Johannesburg pioneer Meyer Dovid Hersch and originally appeared in the 1895 and 1896 issues of Hatzefirah,a Hebrew journal edited by Nahum Sokolow and published in Warsaw.4

Another example was the ‘Memoirs of a Rand pioneer’ by Siegfried Raphaely,5 a well-known personality and former President of the SAJBD. About ten years before his death in 1953, he commenced writing his memoirs but completed only a small part, recording the history of his family and their early years in South Africa from 1884 to the commencement of the Anglo-Boer War.

Sowden and Rochlin provided many of the biographical articles for Jewish Affairs, based on personal interviews. Sowden’s contributions included ‘The Jewish Pioneer of Krugersdorp’, a tribute to Abner Cohen.6 ‘The First Jewish House in Johannesburg’, an account of the Johannesburg pioneer, Wolf Miller7; ‘The End of an Episode: Hannan Hiersch-Yiddish Actor (1873-1953)’8and ‘The Late Harry Morris, Q.C. –Son of a Pioneer Family’.9

By 1958, the SAJSHS had ceased to function. In the SAJBD Report to Congress of 1958, the sections on the Library of Information and on the Museum contain a passing reference to the fact that many items of Jewish Africana remained buried in the stored cases of the Board’s archives and in the cupboards of the SAJSHS at the Board’s premises. Further information on the fate of the Society’s collected archives is presented in the reports of SAJBD Librarian, Fanny Stein, for May 1969 and November 1970. She mentions the unpacking, sorting and cataloguing of a great deal of library material. Among other items, the 1970 report states that the cupboards containing material collected by the SAJSHS had been sorted and tidied and a start had been made with the cataloguing of these items.

It is clear, therefore, that after the demise of the Society, its holdings were incorporated into the Library of Information, the Archives and the Museum of the Board. The interviews with Jewish pioneers, which formed a vital, separate part of the archival collections, were catalogued, but, with a few exceptions, never published. This biographical section was augmented through the succeeding years by appropriate press cuttings of interviews and obituaries and also by family memoirs donated by descendants of the original pioneers. Many commemorative volumes, such as those issued on the fiftieth and seventieth anniversary of Johannesburg, contain valuable biographies of the founders of the city, which form a valuable source of additional information. The most original and valuable section, however, continues to be the interviews carried out by the SAJSHS, and progress is being made towards ensuring their eventual publication under the auspices of the SAJBD.10

 

Naomi Musiker, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its Editorial Board, has contributed numerous biographical articles for the Dictionary of South African Biography and the Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa and, as an indexer, has worked for some of South Africa’s leading publishers. She has held the position of archivist at the SAJBD since 1991.

 

NOTES

  1. South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Executive Council Minutes February 1947.
  2. This article was reprinted in Jewish Affairs June 1948, pp28-31.
  3. Jewish Affairs, 11 November 1956, pp 4-9, and Jewish Affairs, 11 December 1956, pp23-29.
  4. The complete letters of Meyer Dovid Hersch together with other biographical information were incorporated into a monograph entitled ’Meyer Dovid Hersch (1888-1933), Rand Pioneer and Historian of Jewish Life in Early Johannesburg’ edited and published by JoshuaI. Levy, 2005.
  5. Jewish Affairs 9(4) 1954: 18-22 and 9(5), 1954: 20-24.
  6. Jewish Affairs Sept 1953.
  7. Jewish Affairs October 1953, pp 23-4.
  8. Jewish Affairs Feb 1954, pp32-4.
  9. Jewish Affairs, Nov 1954, pp29-30.
  10. The following is a list of the pioneers interviewed by the Society: Moses Aaron, Fritz Baumann Adler, Alexander family, Frederick Henry Ansell, Mrs Simma Asher (formerly Binion, nee Hertz), Samuel Baranov, Charles Baneshik, Herbert Baumann, Barnet Capcan, Zvi Harris Capcan, Abner Cohen, Edward Cohen, Samuel Epstein, Sidney Samuel Fisch, Augusta Fisch (nee Rothbert), Maurice Freeman, Fanny Esther Goldblatt, Paul Goodman, Benjamin Grolman, I.H. Guinsberg, David Hayden, Israel, Hayman, Benzion Hersch, Hannan Hiersch, Isadore, Heymann, Aaron (Harry) Hilson, Lewis Philip Hirsch, Felix C Hollander, A Z Idelson, Harry Itzkowitz, B.I Joffe, Salli Kahn, Israel Kuper, Moses Mayer Landsman, Sophie Leviseur, Rose Levison (nee Shepherd), Jacob Leviton, Harry Levy, Louis Flavian Lezard, Herman Lichtenstein, Harry Lipinski, Harry Lourie, Ernest Lowenherz, Joubert Marks, Jane Mendelsohn, A L Meyer, Wolf Miller, Isaac Mofson, Hyman Morris, Henry Harris Morris, Effie Nathanson (nee Joffe), Jacob Morris Polevnick, Clara Raphaely (later Schuler), Sara Rosenthall (nee Green), Myer Rubin, Toni Saphra (nee Plaut), Aaron Sarenkin, Schlosberg family, Maurice Schwartz, Sam Silverman, Wolf Sulsky, Philip Wartski, Max Weinbrenn, Jacob Werner, Leo Yatt, Harry Mortimer Zeffertt.

 

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