The Jews of Parow

[Reviewer: David Saks, Vol 79, #2, Summer 2024)

I may be sticking my neck out here, but it may well be that no other Jewish community anywhere has gone about recording its own history with as much avidity as that of South Africa’s. It is not just about the various broad-ranging general histories of South African Jewry as a whole that have appeared over the decades, but even more tellingly it is demonstrated by the remarkable plethora of publications on specific individual communities and/or congregations as well as communal institutions, biographies and memoirs that have appeared over the decades. In terms of subject matter in other words, the micro has received as much attention, if not more, than the macro.

Published material has ranged from full-length books to the innumerable articles on aspects of the SA Jewish experience that have appeared in this journal alone. Somehow when it comes to Jewish South Africans, there is a heightened sense of concern that the story of a particular community, congregation, institution or otherwise needs to be properly recorded before that information is irrevocably lost. And in this regard, there can be nothing more emblematic than the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth’s long running and surely unique Jewish life in the South African country communities project, now at least three decades old. The reader is referred to the obituary in this issue of Rose Norwich and to the article on the subject by another stalwart of the project, Adrienne Kollenberg, that appeared in this journal in 2016: https://www.jewishaffairs.co.za/the-sa-friends-of-beth-hatefutsoth-jewish-life-in-the-south-african-country-communities-project/. The editor can add here that another soon-to-be-produced communal history, in whose research and writing he has occasionally been brought in to give input, is that of the Jewish community of Pretoria.  

The emergence and eventual demise of entire Jewish communities is not limited to the smaller towns and rural districts. With the traditional internal migration of Jews within the same city, not just individual congregations but entire large suburbs and districts that once had a thriving Jewish presence have likewise disappeared. In these cases, too, many articles and even entire books have been written (an early example being that on Johannesburg’s Fordsburg-Mayfair Hebrew Congregation). Now a new book on a former significant and now long vanished urban Jewish community, this time in Cape Town, has appeared. Published by the Isaac & Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research at the University of Cape Town and authored by the eminent historian Richard Mendelsohn, the self-explanatory title reads The Jews of Parow – The History of a South African Jewish Community (hereafter JoP).

The Kaplan Centre was of course founded and endowed by the late Mendel Kaplan, of whom it can safely be said that no-one did more to safeguard and promote the South African Jewish legacy, both in terms of his fulsome financial support and his own visionary, hands-on contribution to multiple landmark publications and projects. That the KC, at the behest of Oren Kaplan, Mendel’s son and successor in the family business, decided to take on “The Parow Project” as it came to be called is primarily due to the deep roots the Kaplan family have in Parow. It was here, in 1929, that family patriarch Isaac Kaplan, together with his brother Solly and brother-in-law Solly Kushlick founded the business that would become the international steel company Cape Gate. In addition, this book (which aside from being meticulously researched and superbly written is also beautifully produced and copiously illustrated – so far as production values go, no expense has been spared), the Parow Project also resulted in an exhibition, titled Echoes of Parow. The Story of a South African Jewish Community hosted at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town and a comprehensive website, The Jews of Parow, housing the plethora of information uncovered by the project’s research team.

It was fortuitous that in addition to his fine track record as an author and academic, Richard Mendelsohn himself had deep roots in Parow, having grown up in the suburb in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Jewish community was in its heyday. His grandfather Heshel Daitsh was an early leader of the community during the interwar years and his parents Enid and Dr Leonard Mendelsohn, a general practitioner, remained in the suburb until 1995, being among the very last Jews to leave.

With Professor Milton Shain, Mendelsohn had previously co-authored a general history of South African Jewry (The Jews in South Africa – An Illustrated History, 2008, revised and reprinted 2014). The Parow Project provided an opportunity to write a different kind of history, one that explored a small and typically South African Jewish community in depth and at the local level. As the author puts it, “The book argues that the Parow experience, while in some ways distinctive, is nevertheless an instructive microcosm of the South African Jewish experience at large. Parow’s waxing and waning through the course of the twentieth century mirrors the broader trajectory of South African Jewry, its growth and recession, while the community’s social, business and religious life is reflective of South African Jewish life at large. Parow’s waxing and waning through the course of the twentieth century mirrors the broader trajectory of South African Jewry, its growth and recession, while the community’s social, business and religious life is reflective of South African Jewish life at large.”  For more on Prof Mendelsohn’s reflections re the origins, writing, themes and contents of the book, see the October 2024 CHOL (Community History On-Line) newsletter (Newsletter 10 CHOL.pdf). 

As described by the author, the core subject matter of JoP includes the social, professional and business lives of the Jews of Parow; their religious and recreational lives (“with its uneven contest between prayer and play, with shul often taking second place to rugby and cricket at Newlands, and bowls and golf at the King David Country Club”), the ties that closely bound the community together, including ethnic solidarity and kinship, and of course Zionism; The place of Jewish women in a communal order still very largely male dominated and the community’s “cautious relationship with a conservative, predominantly Afrikaans speaking host society”. JoP is also very much about telling individual and family stories: “the founding matriarchs in the early twentieth century, who were forced by unhappy circumstances to raise their children on their own; the entrepreneurs, some of very humble origin, who built major industries; the shopkeepers, large and small, and their close relationships with their diverse customers; the doctors, lawyers and pharmacists, who once dominated Parow’s professional life”.

Every community has its veriebels, and these feature too. Most notably in Parow’s case was the perennial feud between much of the community and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Benjamin Lipshitz, who despite regular attempts by successive rounds of communal leaders to remove him was able to survive and serve the community for over thirty years before retiring. Much of the book is devoted to recounting the multiple clashes over the years between Rabbi Lipschitz and those bent on getting rid of him. Rabbi Lipschitz was clearly not an easy character, but he was undoubtedly an interesting one. An accomplished Hebraist, he was a prolific contributor to Jewish publications both during his years with the congregation and after his retirement to Israel.

Another of the many strong and compelling personalities whose stories feature in the book is “the matriarch of the Bloch/Kaplan/Kushlick clan” Rachel Bloch whose daughter Jessie married Isaac Kaplan. A founding mother of the Parow Jewish community, she played a leading role in Jewish life from the community’s very establishment. The above reference to those women pioneers “forced by unhappy circumstances to raise their children on their own” applies very much to her, as she was widowed at an early age.

The story of the Jewish presence in Parow commences in the very early years of the 20^th Century and effectively concludes with the formal closure of the synagogue in 1993. In the case of the old shul, it was happily not the end of the story as after its closure, Mendel Kaplan arranged for the shipment of its furniture, seats, bimah and pulpit to the newly constructed Shivtei Israel synagogue in Ra’anana, Israel. A Parow Sefer Torah followed shortly afterwards. Thanks to the Parow Project, beyond furnishings and furniture, the broader social narrative, personal stories and detailed institutional histories have likewise now been preserved for posterity. A quote from the Foreword by the project’s initiator and endower, Oren Kaplan, sums it that achievement as well as anything:

Recently there has been a mini explosion of efforts by South African Jews to document the history of their respective Jewish communities in South Africa, many of which are no longer extant. From Kimberley to Vryburg to Potchefstroom, websites and video workshops record and memorialize the Jews and their communities in these places. This book is our contribution to this effort. While there is no longer a Jewish community in Parow, our hope is that the community will live on through this book.

Mendelsohn, Richard, The Jews of Parow – The History of a South African Jewish Community, published by the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, multiple illustrations, maps, index. 407pp.  The book is available at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town.