(Author: Veronica Belling, Vol. 64, #1, Pesach 2009)
A tragic by-product of the Civil War that broke out in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 were the numerous pogroms that occurred. It has been estimated that as many as 160 000 Jews died in the Ukraine in the years 1919-1921. During this period the Ukraine was occupied at different times by various shades of Ukrainian nationalists, anarchist peasant bands, and by the Red and White armies. All the armies concerned were responsible for pogroms.1
Two archival collections in the Jewish Studies Archives at the University of Cape Town are connected to these pogroms. One, which is housed at Oranjia, the Cape Town Jewish Orphanage, relates to the Ochberg Orphan emigration scheme.2 The second is the collection of Sholem Schwartzbard, who assassinated the Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Simon Petlyura, in Paris in 1926 and who died in Cape Town in 1938 [See Schmidt, M, ‘A Makhnovist in Africa: Sholem Schwartzbard’, Jewish Affairs, Vol. 59, No.4, 2004 – Ed.]. This collection was assembled by Hilda Purwitsky.3 Both Isaac Ochberg and Sholem Schwartzbard were born in the Ukraine. Both displayed great courage and possessed a keen sense of justice and self sacrifice. Coincidentally, both died in their fifties within three months of one another.
Isaac Ochberg, the older of the two, was born in 1878 in the town of Uman. Although he personally never experienced a pogrom, the Jews in Uman lived in constant fear of attack. In 1895 Isaac, then only 17, joined his father Aaron in Cape Town, where he had immigrated in 1893. Here, despite initial hardships, he soon demonstrated the entrepreneurial skill and daring which eventually made him one of the richest men in South Africa. His entrepreneurial enterprises included property speculation, building projects, salvaging shipwrecks, and scrap metal dealings. He also played a very active role in communal affairs, becoming South African Jewry’s leading philanthropist and serving as an Executive member of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. Yet Ochberg never forget his roots in the Ukraine, and his early struggles made him empathise with the disadvantaged and particularly with children.4
In 1921, the majority of the Jewish community in South Africa was made up of immigrants from Eastern Europe, predominantly from Lithuania and White Russia. Between 1880 and 1911 the community grew from approximately 4 000 Jews of mainly English and German origin to 46 926 Jews of predominantly Eastern European origin.5 Whilst fundraising for pogrom victims was customary, the idea of actually bringing Ukrainian Jewish children to South Africa was quite revolutionary. Ochberg, the President of Oranjia from 1916, was the moving force behind the scheme. It was his report to the committee in 1920 about an estimated 300 000 Jewish children left destitute as a result of war and pogroms, that led the Cape Jewish Orphanage to agree to bring some of them to South Africa. Ochberg obtained the support of the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in London, who agreed to bring the orphans from the Ukraine to London, if the Cape Jewish Orphanage would provide transport from England to South Africa. A team of canvassers led by Ochberg himself traveled the length and breadth of South Africa appealing for financial support and for offers of adoption. Permission to bring the children to South Africa, was obtained from the Minister of the Interior, Patrick Duncan, and the Prime Minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts was persuaded “to act on a pound for pound principal in connection with the Pogrom Orphan Fund.” It was also agreed that Ochberg himself would make the journey to the Ukraine to collect the children.6[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Sholem Schwartzbard in the French millitary duringWorld War I Support for the scheme, however, was not unequivocal. The economic recession which followed in the wake of World War I had led to an increase in anti-alien agitation, which made many fear that the arrival of large numbers of Jewish orphans would only result in an increase of antisemitism.7 Others opposed the scheme on the grounds that the children would lose their Judaism in South Africa.8 It was also felt that with the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was the appropriate place to transfer refugee Jewish children. 9 On 18 March 1921 Ochberg, at his own expense, set sail for London. Here he was given permission to enter Russia under the aegis of the great humanitarian, Dr Frijdtof Nansen. On 18 May, he set sail for Warsaw. He then spent the months of June and July travelling by truck or by wagon, from one village to the other, picking up destitute children. These were deposited at special depots in the cities of Minsk, Pinsk, Vladivostok, Stanislavov, Brest-Litovsk and Warsaw, where he had people waiting to care for them. He then had to face the agonising prospect of choosing amongst them. According to the stipulations of the South African government, the children had to be in good health and had to display some degree of intelligence. Ochberg also would not break up a family. If one of the children did not fit the criteria, he would leave all of them.10 Ochberg originally brought 233 orphans to Warsaw. 37 of them, however, ran away and others took ill, so that eventually only 167 were taken to London.11 The archives contain the original emigration papers of the children issued in Warsaw, and their travel papers together with their passport photos. The emigration papers contain the children’s names, their towns of origin, where and in what condition they were found, and information as to the fate of their families. The most common cause of the death of the parents, if they survived the pogroms, was typhus and starvation. Some fathers were recorded as having been killed in the 1914-1918 war. Occasionally the father had already emigrated and had died in America or Argentina. (I found one case where the parents were found eating grass and potato peels, having no means to earn a living, whilst the children were starving). The majority of the children ranged between 5 and 12 years of age, although there were also a few as old as nineteen. The horrors of the children’s experiences can only be hinted at in the emigration papers. Hirsch Stillerman, whose whole family was murdered by bandits, reported that they demanded that he thrust out the eyes of his nine-yearold sister. When he refused, the bandits severed his left hand and murdered his sister in front of him.12 From Warsaw, Ochberg took the children to Danzig, where he had chartered a boat to take them to London. There the children were placed in temporary shelter and clothed and taken care of by Jewish institutions. On 2 September, they set sail on the Edinburgh Castle for South Africa. The reminiscences of the orphans tell of their trepidation on being taken to Africa. Rumours abounded that they would be thrown into the sea, sold into slavery, or that they would be eaten by lions on arrival. It was only their faith in “Daddy Ochberg,” as they called him, and to whom they became extremely attached, that gave them courage. Whilst Ochberg and his wife, who had met him in London, travelled First Class, double bunks were fitted for the children in Steerage. The orphans further recall that Ochberg spent all his time with them. He delighted in surprising them with small treats such as biscuits or chocolate hidden under their pillows.13 In the words of Becky Greenberg: “Isaac was a honey, he was like a father to us. There was no difference from one child to another, every child was a darling, everyone was lovely and everyone he patted. He was just wonderful.”14 In Cape Town harbour they were greeted by a tumultuous cheering crowd. Just over half of the children were accommodated at Oranjia in Cape Town, while 78 were dispatched by rail to the orphanage in Johannesburg. Twenty of the children brought to Cape Town were adopted. In 1922 Ochberg returned to the Ukraine as a representative of two Jewish relief organisations, on whose behalf he distributed food, clothing and medical supplies. The story of the Ochberg orphans has turned out to be one of the great success stories of South African Jewry. There can be no doubt that bringing the children to South Africa, not only saved their lives but gave them opportunities that they would never have had, had they been left in the Ukraine, or even taken to Palestine. In the words of Fanny Lockitch, “He really snatched us from the jaws of death you can say, because if we hadn’t died then of famine and disease, we would have perished twenty years later in the gas chambers.” Whilst the Ochberg archive is a living archive, which is still frequently consulted today by the offspring of the orphans, the Schwartzbard collection represents an event which has been buried in history. This collection is truly unique as the only other collection about Schwartzbard is to be found today at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Although considerably smaller than the Yivo collection, it documents a little known episode in Schwartzbard’s life, and provides a very personal glimpse into the soul of a man who was prepared to risk his own life to avenge the wrongs perpetrated against the Jewish people. Sholem Schwartzbard was born in 1886 in Balta in the Ukraine, an area which was also the site of terrible pogroms. Schwartzbard lived through the pogroms of 1905 and was active in organising Jewish self-defence units. In 1906, he was forced to flee Russia because of his revolutionary activity. He ultimately settled in Paris, where he worked as a watchmaker. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Schwartzbard joined the French army as a volunteer and was awarded a Croix de Guerre. With the outbreak of the civil unrest in 1919, he went to join the Red Army in their fight against the counterrevolutionary White Russians. Thus Schwartzbard actually witnessed the horrors of these barbaric pogroms, and particularly the pogrom at Proskurov, where in the space of three hours 2000 unresisting Jewish people were massacred in cold blood.15 Fifteen of Schwartzbard’s own relatives were killed in these pogroms. When he returned to Paris, he could not erase these scenes from his mind. Six years later, when he became aware that Simon Petlyura, the Ukrainian leader, was living in exile in Paris, he planned his assassination. He first identified him from a Ukrainian postage stamp that appeared in the Larousse encyclopaedia. Later, he saw his picture in a Ukrainian journal that was being published in Paris. On 26 May 1926, Schwartzbard waited outside the restaurant on the Rue Racine where Petlyura regularly took his lunch. There he waylaid him and shot and killed him in broad daylight, thereafter waiting for the police to arrest him. When questioned as to why he had acted the way he did, his answer was simple: “I am a Jew!” The incident caused a worldwide sensation. At the ensuing trial in November 1927, Schwartzbard was acquitted thanks to the brilliant defence of his lawyer, Henri Torres, and also to the support of world opinion and of eminent personalities such as Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Albert Einstein and Leon Blum. In fact, the tables were turned and Petlyura and his armies were condemned. Schwartzbard was acclaimed a hero. After his acquittal, Schwartzbard devoted himself to Jewish cultural work. In 1929, he was employed by the Yivo, the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, to initiate a branch in Paris. In 1933-1934 he went on a lecture tour of the United States and was given a hero’s reception. Schwartzbard first arrived in Johannesburg in September 1937 on a mission on behalf of the Yivo, to publicise the recently published Universal Encyclopaedia in Yiddish, the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, three volumes of which had already appeared. In 1937, when the very existence of the Jewish people was being threatened by the rise of Hitler’s regime in Germany, the publication of an encyclopaedia in Yiddish was an act of cultural defiance. The publicity leaflets characterise it as “The symbol of a nation’s will to live.” At a time when ten million Yiddish speakers existed, another seventeen volumes were envisaged. At the beginning of February 1938, Schwartzbard came to Cape Town. There he met Hilda Purwitsky, a teacher and journalist, who were on the Cape Town committee of the Yiddish Encyclopaedia, and who was assigned to act as his secretary. A very unusual woman, Hilda and Schwartzbard were in many ways kindred spirits, fearless adventurers who were prepared to risk all for their high ideals. They formed a close friendship. Barely three weeks later, on 3 March, Schwartzbard died suddenly of a heart attack at Hilda’s cottage in Camps Bay. It was Hilda who assembled this documentary collection after his death, and it is in fact as much a testimony to her own life as to Schwartzbard’s. Born in Lithuania, Hilda Purwitsky was just a year old when she arrived in South Africa with her parents in 1902. Her father was a blacksmith, according to Hilda, the only Jewish blacksmith in Cape Town. Despite her poor immigrant background, Hilda managed to train as a teacher, subsequently obtaining a matric and a degree from the University of Cape Town. Hilda’s teaching career is intrinsically bound up with the education of the Eastern European immigrant children, who arrived in South Africa unable to speak English and unversed in Western manners. Together with her great friend and well known Cape Town educationalist, Rosa van Gelderen, they ran the Central Girls’ School, the successor to the Hebrew Government School, where Rosa was the principal. It was at the Central Girls’ School that Ochberg’s orphans were educated. Hilda also organised evening classes to teach English to the parents of immigrant children.16 Schwartzbard visited the school and spoke to a gathering of 200 children. Schwartzbard’s mission to enlist subscriptions to the Yiddish Encyclopaedia in South Africa was not an easy task. Although the first and second generation Eastern European immigrants in South Africa spoke Yiddish, they were not necessarily literate in it. Hilda herself, although she spoke fluently, could not read or write in Yiddish letters, and all her Yiddish writings in the archive are in English transliteration. In Johannesburg, where the Jewish population was larger, Schwartzbard had fared better. Ironically it was Schwartzbard’s sudden death which subsequently enlisted the support of Cape Town Jewry for the encyclopaedia. One of the most important contributions of this collection is the very personal glimpse it provides into the nature of Sholem Schwartzbard. In Hilda’s words, “He was a child who bore greatness as a mantle round his strong shoulders – he was a great man with the heart and soul of a child.” Words she uses again and again are: charming, simple, childlike, spontaneous, impulsive, fiery, charismatic. She calls him the happiest person that she has ever known. He loved nature, he was fascinated by the heavens, and his heart was full of sympathy for all suffering humanity. He had an intimate knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology and of Biblical and Talmudic legends. Yet his speech was seldom coherent and he could not well express the poetic thought of his mind.17 He was also aware of his own shortcomings and was quite prepared to make fun of himself. A description of his visit to the Kruger National Park highlights his childlike impetuous nature. On encountering a group of lions at the side of the road, “Our hero, Sholem did not think long, jumped out of the car and wanted to greet them. With difficulty we managed to drag him back into the car.”18 Hilda was clearly infatuated by Schwartzbard. She describes him as, “a blue eyed, stocky man of small stature with a brilliant smile… a big lion-like head, with thick golden hair…” Schwartzbard was already the author of a book of poetry in Yiddish, Troymen un virklekhkeyt (Dreams and Reality, 1920). In Cape Town he wrote a number of new poems dedicated to Hilda, which he romantically inscribed on postcards and posted to her: “Liebste mayne! Du ost mich geretet fin umglik – Fon zweifel ostu mikh bafreiet. Mit liebe mit fred und hoffnung Ostu mikh bakleyt und baneiet… Du ost mir gihelt meine vunden Di tifste leiden und schmertz…” (My Darling! You have saved me from sadness You have freed me from doubt. With love with joy and hope You have clothed and renewed me You have healed my wounds The deepest suffering and smart…) Other new writings by Schwartzbard in the collection include a poem dedicated to the Cape of Good Hope, Tsum Kap fun guter hofenung, a charming Indian legend, Di Legende fun hartsn (The Legend of the Heart), and an essay about the joys of wine, entitled, Vayntroybn un vayn…, (Grapes and wine…). Hilda’s description of their last evening together is haunting: We met him at 6.30 in town, and took him in our car to our bungalow by the sea. Sholem was very jolly and in the best of humours. We all laughed and joked over dinner, and as we know no French he taught us to say, A la votre sante! It was one of the happiest evenings imaginable. After dinner we went outside. It was a calm and warm evening. The sea was peaceful, the sky was bright with stars. Sholem admired the scenery, the big rocks (felsen), and looked at the stars. He pointed out Orion and the Pleiades and the Milky Way, and said he would never forget the strange beauty on this night. When he got back to Paris and saw the constellations reversed he would remember their loveliness in this Southern sky, and the glory of the summer night. He said that he was very, very happy.19 Schwartzbard was buried at Woltemade Jewish cemetery in Maitland in Cape Town on 4 March 1938. Thousands of people attended his funeral, which was the largest funeral that Cape Town Jewry had ever known. A death mask was made by the well known South African artist, Lippy Lipshitz, and a special album in his memory was published, in Yiddish and English, by the Sholem Schwartzbard Memorial Committee in Johannesburg. Hilda’s main purpose in assembling this collection was to provide herself with documentation to write a book about Schwartzbard, a project with which she persisted even into her eighties. In 1939, she travelled to Paris to meet his widow, Anna. Together with Dr. Joseph Bernfeld, the secretary of the Yivo office in Paris, she helped Anna to sort the hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings that Sholem had accumulated. Thus the greater part of the collection consists of press clippings of tributes and articles about Schwartzbard and Hilda’s outline for a biography. In 1933 and 1934 Schwartzbard himself had published two books of memoirs in Yiddish, In krig mit zikh aleyn (At war with myself), and Inem loyf fun yorn (As the years go by) from which Hilda translated lengthy excerpts. Immediately after his death Hilda conceived of the idea of having his remains transferred to Jerusalem. After his acquittal in 1927 he had actually expressed the desire to settle permanently in Palestine, but in 1928 he had been refused admission by the British authorities.20 However, Hilda could not elicit support for this idea in South Africa at that time. Thirty years later, on 7 December 1967, Schwartzbard’s remains were finally re-interred at Kfar Avichayil, a cemetery for Israel’s heroes of World War I and II, near Natanya in Israel. He was eulogised by Rachel Yanait, the widow of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second President, and by Menachem Begin. Schwartzbard’s death mask was donated to the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel. These two collections relating to the Ochberg orphans and to Sholem Schwartzbard, highlight the interconnectivity of Eastern Europe’s Jewish Diaspora. Events in the Ukraine echo not only in the large Jewish centres of Paris, London and the United States, but also in South Africa. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a large Jewish immigrant community in South Africa which rallied to the aid of their coreligionists and which was a potential market for the newly published Algemeyne Entsiklopedye. Thus, primary sources for the experiences of the victims of the Ukrainian pogroms, 1919-1921, have found their way to a land remote from the centres of Eastern European Jewish life. Veronica Belling, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, has been Jewish Studies Librarian at University of Cape Town Libraries since 1980. She holds an M.A. from UCT for her dissertation on the history of Yiddish theatre in South Africa (published in book form in 2008), and an Advanced Certificate in Yiddish from the Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer program under the auspices of the Yivo Center for Jewish Research and Columbia University. She is also the author of Bibliography of South African Jewry (Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, in association with U.C.T. Libraries, 1997). 
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