(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025)
As the adage has it, “many hands make light work”, and that is true of many things. It is not always so, however, when it comes to writing community histories, where it can all too easily be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth! But a new history of the Pretoria Jewish community recently brought out under the auspices of the SAJBD Pretoria Council has shown that even with multiple people on board, it is possible to come up with something of the very highest quality.
In 1987, more than a decade of research by a dedicated team of community members came to fruition with the appearance of The story of the Pretoria Jewish Community up to 1930, the first full history of Pretoria Jewry in its formative decades. A little short of four decades later, that story has been picked up upon and brought up to the present day, this time on a far more ambitious and comprehensive scale. Jacaranda Jews – Voices from Pretoria 1865-2025, some five years in production, was brought out earlier this year. It is an impressive achievement, monumental even, and can be ranked among those at the very forefront of the many community histories that South African Jewry has produced over the generations.
For the team tasked with researching, writing and producing the book (whose title, of course, derives from the purple-blossomed jacaranda trees for which Pretoria is famous), the project was very much a labour of love, and it shows. One sees it throughout in the meticulous attention to detail, in the extensive efforts that were made to source images to accompany the relevant text, in the unstintingly high production standards – aesthetically speaking, the final product is a true gem, superbly laid out and beautifully illustrated – and in how much consultation was involved in bringing on board so wide and diverse a range of contributors. The amount of in-depth research that has gone into it all is also very apparent. I can attest at first hand to how much effort went into delving into the records to get even small details just right since I was frequently consulted on various topics. In addition to the Pretoria community’s own comprehensive and excellently organised historical archives (Juan-Paul Burke, a regular past contributor to this journal and also listed among the books contributors having done a fine job in that regard), the SAJBD’s archives were also an important resource. An especially useful source of information for the more modern period was the Pretoria Jewish Chronicle, first published in 1970. Here, special mention can be made of long-serving PJC editor Diane Wolfson, who in her role as executive secretary of the Pretoria Council SAJBD provided exceptional administrative support, including in contacting families and overseeing subscriptions for the family stories.
It is rather striking that no single author, or even several authors, are credited with writing up the text of this book. Instead, the inside cover provides a comprehensive list of all noteworthy participants – over seventy names in all – including the members of the History Book & Editorial Committee themselves, many more individual contributors, research team members and the donors whose generous support ultimately made the fulfilment of the project possible. The closest one gets to actual authors being identified – a coherent, narrative history doesn’t miraculously emerge all by itself, after all – is in current SAJBD Pretoria Council chairman Gary Nowosenetz acknowledging in the Preface that “the compilation of information was undertaken by Carol Baron and Yvonne Eskell Klagsbrun”.
The book is thus presented as a team effort, or more accurately in Nowosenetz’ words, a “community effort”. How considerable and achievement this is should not be underplayed, given how difficult it is to come up with a community history that is sufficiently inclusive and broadly acceptable to all. By way of illustration, this reviewer was once involved in helping write up, and eventually finalise, a history of the Jews of South West Africa/Namibia, a process drawn out over nearly a quarter of a century that over time necessitated multiple authors, was beset by internal controversies over content and direction and in all was a textbook instance of how not to write the history of a community. Especially, dare I say it, a Jewish one!
One thing that JJ and the Namibia Jewry book do have in common is that both are divided into two main sections, one devoted to the history of the community as a whole interwoven with that of the country in general and the other to individual family histories and reminiscences. In the latter case, the approach was to feature every single Jew who had ever lived in the country, an ambitious undertaking but doable as even at its height the Namibian Jewish community never much exceeded 600 or so. Charlotte Wiener’s 2016 book The Jewish Country Communities of Limpopo/Northern Transvaal also adopts an all-inclusive approach, so that practically no-one is left out. In Pretoria’s case, where the community was some seven times larger in its hey-day than that of Namibia’s, that was never a realistic option, so instead individual families – 66 in all, with an appropriate donation being made to the project for the privilege – contributed their stories. There will inevitably be many with Pretoria roots who will be disappointed that their own families do not feature anywhere, but that is par for the course when it comes to more broad-ranging histories of this nature. What is remarkable is how large a proportion of the community, from its formative years to the present day, does feature in some way.
As the title indicates, a strong focus of Jacaranda Jewry is to provide a platform for Pretorians past and present to share their memories of community life while also telling their own personal and professional stories and those of their families. In the first section, these accounts are nevertheless carefully interwoven with the history of the community as a whole, always as reflected and impacted upon by events taking place in the greater society. It is a story of new beginnings followed by steady growth, vibrancy and impressive achievement and eventually by the onset of gradual but continual decline, at least in terms of bare numbers. Realistically speaking Pretoria Jewry, like most if not all remaining centres of Jewish life in South Africa, is today in its twilight years, and this book is therefore a much-needed vehicle for properly recording its story while there is still time. Writes Nowosenetz in his preface, “with the ageing population of the Pretoria Jewish community steadily declining, preserving the community’s living memory became a priority”.
The narrative picks up from where the previous history of Pretoria Jewry left off, at the start of the 1930s. The formative years of the community, beginning with the arrival of the first trickle of permanent Jewish residents from the late 1860s onwards, is nevertheless well summarised in a preliminary chapter, enhanced by many attractive and interesting illustrations, including of important original documents from the Pretoria SAJBD archives. To digress a little here, it is striking to note the extent to which those early Jewish pioneers, despite being no more than a small handful, achieved prominence and success in a range of different fields. Aside from the illustrious Sammy Marks, who did more than probably anyone else to build up the economy of the then Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, they included State Prosecutor and Volksraad member M. de Vries, Chief Constable of the city J R Levy, Pretoria News founder Leo Weinthal, Justice of the Peace (among many more public offices held) D M Kisch and Town Councillor and Taxing Master I J Lithauer. Most of these early residents were of Dutch, English or German origin, Marks – one of the first to come out from Lithuania, well before the large influx of other Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – being an exception in that regard. Marks himself lived a little outside Pretoria – his Zwartkoppies residence is now the very popular Sammy Marks House museum – but he contributed generously to both Jewish and general causes in the city and was ultimately buried in the Pretoria Jewish cemetery. If I may indulge myself a little here, I can mention that one of the graves alongside his grand, specially demarcated tomb is that of my own great-great grandfather Chaim Taback, who died around the same time.
The story proper commences on rather a solemn note, since the 1930s was a time when South Africa was experiencing an unprecedented upsurge of antisemitism. It all inevitably played out in Pretoria as well, for a time at least souring to an extent the generally respectful and friendly relations that had previously existed between the Jewish community and the rest of the population. It is recounted how this affected Jews on the ground, particularly those living in poorer, working-class areas, and also how the local Jewish, reinforced at times by supporters from Johannesburg, fought back, on one occasion even violently breaking up a pro-Nazi demonstration. It is nevertheless interesting that the only Jew to serve as mayor of Pretoria, Ivan Solomon, was appointed to that position at the height of this antisemitic wave, in the mid-1930s.
Parallel to what was happening in the wider society, Jewish communal life continued to flourish throughout these difficult years, as well as in the ensuing several decades. The book recounts how the community were able to sustain existing communal institutions while regularly establishing new ones, whether in the religious, Zionist, welfare, youth, cultural, educational, sporting or other fields. There is a strong focus on the part Pretoria Jewry played in World War II and how a high proportion of its young members served, and in a good few cases died, in the fight to defeat Nazism. How the Holocaust impacted on the community, at the time and in how it was memorialised in subsequent years, is recorded, as are the survivors who went on to make their home in the city. This is followed up by recording how a goodly proportion of Pretorians went on to serve as volunteers in the Israeli War of Independence and their experiences in that regard. Since there is a military base in Pretoria, many Jewish national servicemen from around the country became involved with the community for a time when compulsory national service was introduced.
From the post-war years, the unfolding story of the community is told against the backdrop of the struggle against Apartheid culminating in the eventual ushering in of multi-racial democracy in 1994 and the attrition that Pretoria Jewry suffered from emigration during those uncertain times. Pretoria was the scene of a number of high-profile political trials during the apartheid era, with the venue for one of them (the 1956-1961 Treason Trial) famously being the Old Synagogue in Paul Kruger Street, although by then it had been sold by the community and was owned by the State. How this impacted on the local Jewish community and which of its members were involved in those events forms part of the narrative and is one of a good many aspects of Jacaranda Jewry that make it of interest to a broader readership beyond the confines of the Jewish community.
Kudos, then, to Pretoria Jewry for producing this landmark piece of Jewish Africana. It is a fitting way indeed to chronicle and record for posterity the saga of one of South African Jewry’s most significant communities over the decades, a community whose story has yet to play out.
* (David Saks, editor Jewish Affairs)
