(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 70, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2015)
The SAJBD Cape Council is the proud possessor of an interesting collection of religious and historic artefacts, acquired as trustees of the former Jewish Museum and now on display at its offices. Among them are objects that have been donated by ex-servicemen and their families. This article looks at Jewish participation in World War II as seen through these artefacts.
It was touch and go whether South Africa would enter the war on the side of the Allies or remain neutral. General Smuts was in a fusion government with JBM Hertzog, many of whose supporters had strong pro-German and anti-British feelings. Smuts approached Woolfie Harris, Chairman of the Cape Board (1937 -1942), to ask for the Board’s help in swaying certain border-line Members of Parliament. Harris invoked the assistance of his nephew by marriage, Dr Louis Mirvish, the first gastro-enterologist in the country (and one of the founders of the Jewish Museum) to assist him in visiting MPs, some of whom had been Dr Mirvish’s patients. It was by a majority of 13 votes that South Africa entered the war.1
The SAJBD “pledged that the Jewish Community would do all in its power to assist the Union and its Allies in their fight for victory”.2 The Cape Council held recruiting drives, including in the City Hall, and met with the Cape Town War Emergency Committee to take steps to integrate the community’s effort with the recruiting drive.3 To prevent allegations that Jews were not ‘doing their bit’, the Board began to collect statistics and information. In December 1942, it published The Jewish Contribution: Facts and Figures about the War Effort of the Jewish People showing that Jewish enlistment constituted 9% of the total Jewish population of South Africa, well above the average. After the war, in 1950, the Board published South African Jews in World War II, which contains details of the nearly ten thousand South African Jews who enlisted in the Union Defence Force.4
At Pinelands No, 2 Cemetery there is a war memorial, where each year after the Yom Hashoah ceremony members of the armed forces lay wreaths to honour the Cape Town Jews who laid down their lives. Oranjia, the Cape Jewish Orphanage, has an illuminated Roll of Honour listing forty of their “boys and girls who had) honoured their Home and themselves in responding to their Country’s call.” Six of them were killed, including two who had arrived among those rescued from the Ukraine by Isaac Ochberg.5
The Cape Committee co-ordinated a Soldiers’ Assistance Committee which saw to the cultural and religious needs of the Jewish soldiers and provided gift parcels to them for Passover and the High Holy Days. Examples of religious books provided to the troops are among the artefacts on display. Among the Cape’s collection is an olive-wood covered prayer book presented in 1943 by the SA Jewish Board of Deputies to the Jewish servicemen in the Middle East as Christmas gifts (!) and containing Readings from the Holy Scripture by Chief Rabbi Hertz for the Jewish Members of His Majesty’s Forces. There is also a Haggadah of Passover for Members of the Armed Forces presented by the Jewish Welfare Board, New York (1943).
SA Gifts and Comforts, headed by General Jan Smuts’ wife, Issie, provided gifts to soldiers. Some of the funds raised by the Union of Jewish Women for war-related causes went to SA Gifts and Comforts.6 Among the artefacts given to the Cape Council is a cigarette tin distributed to soldiers by the SA Gifts and Comforts Fund by Ouma Smuts with the inscription Welcome New Year with peace 1945. It was donated by this writer, in memory of her father, Dr Louis Schrire, then a captain in the UDF.
Also on display is a Prayer Book for Jewish Members of H.M. Forces 1940, presented by the Potchefstroom rabbi, Capt Rev A.M. Kaplan, the Jewish Chaplain at Potchefstroom Military Camp. It was reported in the Potchefstroom Herald that Chaplain Captain Kaplan directed his sermons to the soldiers, speaking of the peaceful nature of the Jewish nation and “how if mankind followed the teachings of the Scriptures, there could be no war.”7
Flashing forward to another war, there is a copy of A Guide for Jewish Servicemen, harking back to the days of apartheid when conscription was a reality and the enemies were not Nazis, but fellow citizens in the townships or resistance fighters in neighbouring countries. The booklet contains chapters on General Articles, What to Expect, What to take to Camp with you and Jews in the SADF – including sections on Shabbat, Kosher facilities, festivals and antisemitism (“The SADF has taken a clear official stand against Anti-semetism (sic)… Should you come across any Anti-semetism of any kind and on any level, inform your Chaplain or the Principal Jewish Chaplain immediately. Steps will be taken, proportionate to the nature of the incident”).
Recently donated by Sheila Beder are five South African ration books – one for each member of the Singer family. Her father, Barnet (Bertie) Singer, belonged to the Active Citizen Force – she remembered him patrolling the streets in Cape Town wearing a helmet. These ration books belong to a forgotten period of South African history, a period of queues and war-induced shortages. White bread was unobtainable, so women would sift coarse flour, behind drawn curtains, using illegal, home-made sifters to make white bread. Fuel, foodstuffs like sugar, butter and flour, wool, yarn and even toys were in short supply and could only be obtained with official ration coupons such as the rare ration books now in our collection.8
The local Jewish community gave generously to assist both those who were fighting and their fellow Jews caught up in the unimagined horrors that were happening in Europe. Evidence of this on display is a tin charity box, painted green.On the lidis written (in Yiddish),“A Gift from your brothers and sisters in South Africa”, on a map of Southern Africa with Rhodesia, Union of South Africa, Salisbury, Bulawayo, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town identified.
Hereby hangs a tale. A picture of an identical box, but in orange, was sent to the Cape Town Holocaust Centre with a request for identification. The Centre sent the photo on to the Cape Board for an answer. The writer recognised the box because the Board had an identical one in its collection. She explained that the United South African Jewish War Appeal (SAJWA) had been established in Johannesburg in 1941 by the Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation. Money was sent via the Joint Distribution Committee to Jewish refugees in Switzerland, Greece and Spain, to Jewish communities in Algiers, Tunis and Casablanca, to the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Palestine who were sending parcels to Jews who had escaped into Russia and for relief in Palestine itself. Money was also sent to the Teheran child refugees and, while allowed, to Stockholm, to provide food parcels to prisoners in Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau. After the war, the SAJWA sent money and parcels of food, clothing and medicine through the Joint to survivors and refugees living in DP camps.
When Sara Nuss-Galles was clearing out her late father’s apartment, she came across this orange tin. She found no help from the Internet in identifying it and, as she and her husband, Prof Arie Alexander Galles, were planning to visit South Africa, she decided to seek an answer here.9 Sara’s parents Hirschel Tzvi and Prywa Nuss, from Piaseczno near Warsaw, had fled East with their two sons. As they refused to accept Russian citizenship, they were sent on a six-week train journey to Siberia – 90% of the occupants perished on the way. There they survived two years in a work camp, chopping trees in the forests. When the Polish government in exile protested at the treatment of its citizens, the family was sent to the Dzalalabad area of Kyrgyzstan. There was just as little food – they picked grass for soup – but at least the weather was warmer. In 1946, when Sara was ten days old, they were repatriated to Poland. Her father returned to his grandparents’ home in Gora-Kalwaria – but found no Jews, only hostile strangers living there, the home still furnished as it had been the day they had left. He stopped at a coffee shop and the owner, who recognised him, gave him food and warned him to leave the area immediately. The Holocaust was over, he said, but the Jewish remnant was not welcome and people were being thrown off trains. Thus, the family smuggled itself across the border to the Bergen Belsen DP camp, where they lived for five years before leaving, in 1951, for Chicago.
In Bergen Belsen, they were given the tin box. One would have to have been a starved refugee to understand how much this gift would have meant. It had travelled with them to Chicago and been treasured for the rest of Sara’s parents’ lives. The donor, Mrs G Leavis, c/o 67 Duncan Road, Bulawayo, had filled in her details in the section, “If you want to write to us, we will answer with pleasure”. Now Sara wanted to find Mrs Leavis to thank her.
The author sent a query to a Bulawayo internet site. Some weeks later, she was delighted to get a response from someone who used to play with Gladys Leavis’s children and had found her great-granddaughter’s contact details. Sara wrote and thanked the family for “reaching out in kindness to post-World War II refugees.” The grandson responded that his mother “was and is still very sensitive about being Jewish, perhaps because she was bullied at school. My brothers and I have a gap in roots with our past because of this as it was not talked about when we were little”. Sara arranged to contact them the next time she was in England.
Also in the Board’s collection is the original drawing by the British Jewish artist JH Amshewitz for the poster advertising a “Citizens Mass Meeting to express sympathy with the millions of victims of Nazi brutality” to be held on “a Jewish Day of Mourning and Intercession” in the City Hall on 29 December 1942. This followed the release of information by the Jewish Agency in Palestine that Jews were being systematically exterminated in Europe “by the most satanic means the deranged minds of men can devise”, a tragedy so great that “there were no tears to mourn this dire catastrophe, its magnitude is beyond all weeping.”10 This was probably the last thing Amshewitz drew – he died in Muizenberg on 6 December. His son, Harry, was serving in the RAF as a fighter pilot at the time.11
Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history.
NOTES
- Dr Mirvish told this to his son, Sidney, shortly before he died. Mirvish, Julian, and Gwynne Schrire, ‘Dr Louis Mirvish: Doctor, Philanthropist, Art Lover’, (Jewish Affairs, 2004, 59. 1)
- No name, South African Jews in World War 11, SA Jewish Board of Deputies, Johannesburg, 1950, 5
- Leon Segal, Cape Board Chairman 1942 -1946 In Gwynne Robins, (ed) ,South African Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape Council_ 1904 -2004 5664-5764 : A Century of Communal Challenges, Kadimah, 2004, 50
- South African Jews in World War 11
- Belling, Veronica, From Cape Jewish Orphanage to Oranjia Jewish Child and Youth Centre: A Hundred years of caring for our children, Oranjia Jewish Child and Youth Centre, Cape Town, 2014, 49-50
- The UJW also supported the Governor-General’s War Fund, the Home Comforts, the Navy League, the Merchant Navy, Medical Aid for Russia, Bundles for Britain, Chinese War Relief and Holland Relief.
- Potchefstroom Herald 6 Sep 1940.
- SOUTH-AFRICA] Off Topic. Rationing – Archiver; archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com › SOUTH-AFRICA › 2007-07 “A. Labuschagne” < snowgoose-al@shaw.ca, 07 Jul 2007 05:43:15 -0600 References:<003401c7c06a$54104fd0$cf09d0c4@franklynyh8ts7> Frank Lyn” < franklyn@tiscali.co.za July 07, 2007
- Prof Galles is, like her, a Polish Jew born in Uzbekistan, his family having moved there also from the Siberian work camps – most of his family were killed in Belzec. For the last ten years he has been working on a series of 15 large drawings of aerial views of death camps, called Fourteen Stations / a kaddish for shoah victims .
- Zionist Record, 27.11.1942
- South African Jews in World War 11, 85
