Soweto’s Morris Isaacson School and the man who made it possible

Morris Isaac Isaacson, the founder of Soweto’s Morris Isaacson High School, was born in or near Kovno (now Kaunas) in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, in about 1879.1

The village in which they lived was probably Pakalne, north-east of Kovno. Isaacson’s adopted son, Jeffrey, later remembered that his father named every house in which they lived ‘Pakalne’.

In about 1895, a family crisis meant that Morris, still in his teens, was sent on his own to South Africa. The previous year, the Russian government introduced a state monopoly on the sale of alcohol, extending it to Lithuania in 1897. So complete was the ban on private sale of alcohol that by 1914 the Russian state earned one third of its revenue from the sale of vodka. Isaacson’s father was an inn-keeper. Faced with the destruction of the family’s income as a result of the monopoly, it was decided to send young Morris to earn a living to South Africa, where there were already two relatives. Morris travelled by train from Memel (now Kleipeda) on the Baltic Sea to the port city of Bremen in Germany on the North Sea. Following conflicts with unscrupulous travel ‘agents’, in which Morris helped to organise one of his first protests, he and other young immigrants were sent to London, and from there to Cape Town, registered as ‘miners’.

Lithuanian Jews, known as ‘Litvaks’, formed the great majority of Jewish immigrants to South Africa. When they arrived at Cape Town they generally did not understand any of the languages spoken in Southern Africa. As was usual among the Jews of Eastern Europe, Morris Isaacson’s first language – the language of his family and his local community – was Yiddish, a spoken and written language used only by Jews, derived grammatically and linguistically mainly from German, but including Hebrew words, and written in Hebrew script.

All Jewish boys in Lithuania over that period studied the Jewish holy books, the Talmud and the Torah, in preparation for religious graduation into manhood at age 13. Morris Isaacson shared this religious graduation into manhood through the learning of Hebrew, then still universal among Jews of the Pale.2 His first name, as with very many other Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to South Africa, was almost certainly adopted on his arrival in the country.

After living for a short while in Cape Town, Morris arrived in Johannesburg, within ten years of the beginning of the city. The discovery of gold on the Rand in 1886 led to an extraordinarily rapid development of the gold-mining industry, with Johannesburg soon the fastest-growing economic centre in Africa. It was soon a sprawling, urban giant, within the mainly rural South African Republic (ZAR), then ruled exclusively by the minority of white, mainly Afrikaans-speaking citizens.

Following a period as an itinerant trader, or hawker (‘smous’), Isaacson became a shop assistant in Brakpan, afterwards working in many different occupations ranging from in a mineral factory to selling insurance. He later established himself in business.

In 1899, war broke between the British Empire and the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Isaacson moved back to Cape Town, staying there until after the conclusion of the war in May 1902. One of the few remaining documents from his possessions is his passport from the SAR, issued to him in 1899, giving him permission to travel to Cape Town.

The defeat of the Boer republics and their incorporation in 1910 into the new Union of South Africa together with the former British colonies of the Cape and Natal, led to expanded opportunities for economic development, though under very harsh conditions for workers, white as well as black. In 1910 Isaacson, now back in Johannesburg, joined the new South African Labour Party, a party of white workers and their supporters. For more than ten stormy years, he took a leading part in labour politics in Johannesburg. He knew little of the theory of socialism, but his friends said he was “a born Socialist” and he acted and spoke as one. He took a prominent part in a very fierce strike of white mine-workers in 1913, called by the Transvaal Federation of Trades, to which nearly all the unions then in existence – so far only of white workers – were affiliated. At least twenty people were killed in clashes with troops in the strike.

In 1914, Isaacson was elected a member of the National Executive of the Labour Party, and was a candidate in elections for the Johannesburg Town Council. However, an armed rebellion after the outbreak of World War I by Afrikaans-speakers hostile to the British Empire led to the elections being cancelled.

The national executive of the Labour Party opposed the war, in accordance with a decision of the Second International – an organisation of working class political organisations in many countries, mainly in Europe. Known as “M.I.I.”, Isaacson was one of a small group of Labour Party members who formed the War on War League, later to emerge in 1915 as the International Socialist League. He presided at one of its stormy mass meetings, held at the Gaiety Theatre in Johannesburg. Among his colleagues in the formation of the ISL – which had a Yiddish-speaking branch in Johannesburg – were the founders of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1921, including SP Bunting, David Ivon Jones, WH Andrews and Frank Glass. However, Isaacson did not join them in this further political step, which allied the CPSA to the revolutionary Bolshevik state in what became the Soviet Union a year later.

As a member of the Labour Party’s Administrative Council, Isaacson took a prominent part in the Rand Rebellion of 1922, in which there was armed conflict by strikers and their supporters with the state, led by the Prime Minister, General Jan Smuts. The primary issue in this general strike, which developed into armed revolt, related to the wages, conditions and status of white mineworkers in the gold mines. It was crushed by military force, with between 230 and 250 deaths and led to the execution by hanging of four of the ringleaders (three of whom went to the gallows singing “The Red Flag”). After the crushing of the revolt, Isaacson hid for a time with his friend Gabriel Weinstock, a Yiddish-speaking Labour Party MP and member of the national committee of the ISL, in Sweetwaters, a small village in Natal.

In 1924, together with Weinstock, Morris Kentridge (also a Labour Party MP) and B Jenkins, Isaacson established the Labour weekly Forward. This became the official journal of the Labour Party, which in 1924 entered into an electoral Pact with the National Party under General JBM Hertzog against the Smuts government. This led to the participation of the Labour Party in a short-lived coalition government based of a programme of job reservation for white workers. It was a turning point in South Africa’s political history. Sharp divisions arose between members of the ISL, focused on the issue of the “white labour” policy of the Labour Party. The CPSA later became the first South African political party to open itself to non-racial membership and a non-racial political programme.

By this time, Isaacson was increasingly turning away from South African politics. His attention went mainly to the needs of orphaned Jewish children in the former Russian empire whose parents had been killed in pogroms, wars and civil wars, and to his own personal life. This was the beginning of his exertions on behalf of children and young people which, in association with the Jewish tradition of faith in education, finally found secular expression in the founding of Morris Isaacson High School.

At the beginning of World War I, Isaacson had been one of the chief advocates for the formation of a Jewish War Relief Fund. By the end of the war, he was one the most prominent and active leaders of Johannesburg Jews: President of the Jewish Guild, Treasurer of the Jewish War Memorial fund, and Treasurer and Vice-president of the Jewish Relief and Reconstruction Fund. In 1921 he became a member of an advisory board that drafted a new constitution for the South African Jewish Orphanage in Johannesburg, and became a member of its committee. In 1924 he became its chairman.

On 24 March 1924, Isaacson married Mavis Myers, whom he had met through his work for the orphanage, where she was the matron. He was about 46, she was 24. He had played a crucial part in bringing 88 Jewish orphans from Eastern Europe to the orphanage. In an illuminated citation for their wedding, the central executive committee of the Fund paid tribute to his “great and noble work.” After the “pogrom period in the Ukraine” had created “hundreds of thousands of pogrom orphans,” it stated, “you placed yourself at the head of the Save the Orphans Campaign and since then you have worked wholeheartedly on behalf of these destitute orphans of ours…. Indeed you have been like a father to them”.

Mavis Myers, whose mother Rosie was then head of the Jewish orphanage, took charge of the 88 orphans when they arrived in South Africa. The orphans were by then housed at the Arcadia Jewish Orphanage in Parktown. She soon became “Mummy Myers” to them, while “M.I.I.” became “Pappa Isaacson”. As their wedding citation stated, “Miss Mavis Meyers has as Matron been a true friend to them, giving them a mother’s care and love.”In the years before their marriage, Isaacson had played a leading role in raising money for the purchase of a large house in Kensington belonging to the mining magnate, Sir Lionel Phillips. This became the premises for the Jewish orphanage, formally opened in 1923 by Prime Minister Smuts. At Morris’s suggestion it was named ‘Arcadia’, from an ancient Greek myth about an ideal land of happiness and peace.

After the orphanage was securely established, Morris and Mavis left Johannesburg in 1926 to establish the Warmbaths Hotel at Warmbaths (now Bela-Bela, or “boiling-boiling” in Tswana) in Limpopo province. For twenty years this was a principal home of their married life, and the main source of their earnings, which after their deaths helped to fund the education and care of generations of children. The couple had no children of their own. In 1933, however, they adopted Mavis’s nephew Jeffrey, then almost one year old. Until decades after their deaths, Jeffrey Isaacson never knew he was not in fact the birth child of Mavis and Morris, and that his beloved uncle Kevin Myers (who owned a hotel in Durban) was in fact his birth father.

Mavis and Morris provided their son with the best education in South Africa that money could buy. Jeffrey attended boarding schools in Johannesburg and Natal, spending holidays with his parents at Warmbaths, in Johannesburg and at the coast.

In this period of safety and educational development for Jeffrey, the Holocaust resulted in the wholesale murder of almost all Jews in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Of approximately 208 000 to 210 000 Jews living in Lithuania at the time of the German invasion in June 1941, which took place simultaneously with the invasion of the Soviet Union, an estimated 195 000 and perhaps even more were murdered before the end of the war, most of them in the six months between June and December 1941.

The Holocaust in Lithuania was one of the first, large-scale implementations of the Nazi “Final Solution”. Lithuanian fascist organisations and individuals began murdering Jews from the very first days of the occupation, without even waiting for the German Einsatzgruppen (Action Groups). As early as 25 June 1941, just days after the German invasion, a photographer with the German army, Wilhelm Gunsillius, took photographs of the systematic murder of Jews in Kovno by Lithuanian civilians. A Lithuanian observer recalled later how at the Lietukis Garage in the city centre, “a group of well dressed, spruce intelligent looking people held iron bars which they used to viciously beat another group of similarly well dressed, spruce, intelligent people”.3

That was the end of Morris Isaacson’s birth family in Lithuania. Letters stopped coming. Only after the war did he learn of their fate.

South Africa provided the Isaacsons with safety. Morris and Mavis had close family friends in South Africa, and were loved and respected. In addition to running the Warmbaths Hotel and a nearby farm, from 1936 Morris worked as manager of the Commodore Hotel in Berea, Johannesburg, while from 1939 Mavis worked full time in the Almoner’s department in Johannesburg General Hospital, to assess whether patients had to pay or got free treatment.

Jeffrey Isaacson has written that his parents continued with their charity work after leaving the Arcadia Orphanage. He continues, “When I finished school in 1947, my father sold his hotel, and for eight months we travelled. We returned to Johannesburg and I went to study at Wits from 1949 to 1953.

“My mother was diagnosed with cancer immediately after our return to South Africa and died the day I enrolled at Wits. In a strange coincidence, my father attended my graduation in 1954, and died a week later.

“In my mother’s memory he built the first nursery school in Soweto, called the Mavis Isaacson Hall. At the time there was nothing similar in an area of dreadful black poverty, with a population of 150 000.

“My father also left most of his estate in a charity educational trust fund. We had a committee which assessed the students’ ability to study, and my wife Myrna worked with the various bequests, within the premises of the South African Institute of Race Relations. This committee was still active when we immigrated to Israel in 1963.

“In his memory we also built the Morris Isaacson High School.

“I last visited the school in 1996, where I got an extremely emotional reception from the students”.

The initiative for establishment of the school rested with Morris Isaacson.

Derrick Kobe, principal of the very impoverished Mohloding Secondary School in Jabavu, had approached several businessmen in the early 1950s to ask them for help. Morris Isaacson donated six classrooms and a laboratory, with the school being renamed Morris Isaacson High School in 1961. The first group of students matriculated in 1963.

Probably the most important existing collection of documents relating to Morris Isaacson and the Isaacson educational bequests can be found in the archive of the late Richard Feldman (1897-1968), deposited at the University of the Witwatersrand. Born, like Isaacson, in Lithuania, though substantially younger than him, Feldman was also a leading member of the Labour Party, serving as secretary of its Organizing Committee and as an elected councillor on the Transvaal Provincial Council between 1943 and 1954. A biographical note states that for several years he was an “executor of the Morris Isaacson Education Fund, which grants bursaries to deserving African students. This fund had its origin in the Peretz School for Africans, which Feldman established earlier and which was incorporated into the Isaacson Fund.”

The Feldman papers indicate that the former Ngakane Primary School was renamed the Isaacson Primary School in 1953, prior to the death of MII. The papers include MI Isaacson’s last will and testament, of which Feldman was an executor, dated 31 December 1952.

A note concerning Richard Feldman’s extensive papers reads: “Re the estate of M.I. Isaacson, appeals for financial help, setting up of a non-European Trades School in Johannesburg, shares, setting up of a bursary fund for Africans, Entokozweno School, Mavis Isaacson Play Centre, Jan Hofmeyr School, South African Council for English Education. Other correspondents include T. Huddleston, J. Isaacson, W. Nicol, F. J. van Wyk.”

“J. Isaacson” is Jeffrey Isaacson. “T. Huddleston” is Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, rector of the Community of the Resurrection mission station in Sophiatown, rector of St Peter’s School, Rosettenville, and a founder and later president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London. “W. Nicol” is William Nicol, the Administrator of the Transvaal from 1948 to 1958. “F.J. van Wyk” is Fred van Wyk, director of the SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR).

A further note in the Feldman archive states: “On student bursaries, feeding of African school children. Report of the Isaacson Foundation Bursary Fund, 1962 Apr., signed Annemarie Wolpe, administrative secretary, 16 pages/Report of the Isaacson Foundation Education Fund: a brief survey of its formation and work by Richard Feldman, 1967, July 9, 8 pages”.

Annemarie Wolpe, the administrative secretary of the Isaacson Bursary Fund, was the wife of Harold Wolpe, a leading member of the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe. Wolpe was arrested at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia in the police raid of 11 July 1963, together with Arthur Goldreich, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba and other leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe. With Goldreich, Abdhullah Jassat and Moosa Moolla, he escaped, from police detention and from South Africa the following month. Nicholas Wolpe, son of Annemarie and Harold, is now director of the Liliesleaf Heritage Trust in Rivonia, Johannesburg.

Jeffrey Isaacson helped to supervise the funding and building of Morris Isaacson High School, and took part in the opening the school in 1961. Before leaving for Israel in 1963 with his wife Myrna and their first two children, he was also chairman of the Union of Southern African Artists, which promoted the musical King Kong (1959), with music by Todd Matshikiza and starring Miriam Makeba.

The Isaacson Foundation Bursary Fund, the second largest of the funds administered by the SAIRR, is still very much in operation. According to the Institute’s audited financial statements, the fund had assets worth R4 876 653 at the end of 2010. As far as the CEO of the Institute, John Kane-Berman, can make out, the original bequest was the equivalent of R100 000!

A great many students have graduated on Morris Isaacson bursaries awarded by the Institute – 70 in the last decade alone in the following fields: Commerce (17), Science (11), Engineering (10), Health Science (10), Medicine (5), Education (5), Law (3), Arts (3), Business Administration (3), Built Environment (2), and Architecture (1).4 During the 2011 academic year, there were 21 students studying on Morris Isaacson bursaries!

NOTES

1.He was not sure of his date of birth.

2.As an adult, Isaacson was not religious, and would not be buried in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.

4. These figures are for the first decade of the present century.