(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 68, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2013)
Knowing my fondness for old things Mervyn Smith, Hon. Life Vice-President of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, gave me a copy of the 104-page 1953 Rosh Hashanah edition of the Zionist Record, found in a shop on the Garden Route. Reading it sixty years later with the benefit of hindsight, I found it fascinating – both for the similarities and for the differences.
In 1955, the Zionist Record was one of four Jewish weeklies, many monthlies and lavish Rosh Hashanah annuals. The community also supported a weekly and a monthly Yiddish newspaper. Today we have one national weekly newspaper, the SA Jewish Report.
In 1953, the Jewish population of South Africa was 110 000 out of a total population of 12.6 million, of whom only 2.6 million were white – it is amazing that with those figures the five-year old Nationalist government thought it could rule the country – and it is even more amazing that they managed to do so for 46 years. In July 2012 there were 70–75 000 Jews out of an estimated total population of 48 810 000.1 Of these 50 000 lived in Johannesburg, 16000 in Cape Town, 2000 in Durban and 1000 in Pretoria – nine-tenths lived in the four larger urban centres, the balance in smaller cities and towns.2
The 1951 census established that 60 847 Jews lived on the Witwatersrand and 20 446 in Cape Town – nine-tenths lived in the 18 larger urban centres with only about 4000 in the small villages or farms. The migration from the platteland to the urban areas was already underway. This was apparent from the article by Rabbi JH Newman, Our Country Communities. The Board of Deputies, he wrote, had established a National Country Communities Committee to organise religious life. There were 35 rural communities that had a Jewish community large enough to maintain its own communal life. There were 70 “problem communities” in the Union where Jewish residents numbered between five and twenty families, too small to be able to support themselves as communities, too large to be allowed to disintegrate. More than 150 possessed fewer than five Jewish families – fifteen years previously half of these had supported synagogues and congregations with ministers. Rabbi Newman noted the almost complete absence of adolescents and young people, dispatched to boarding school in larger centres, leaving a rural community composed of elderly Yiddish speaking parents.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Herzlia School in Cape Town (established 1940) This movement has continued with country communities closing down as the children, followed by the parents, move to the big cities where their children can attend Jewish schools and the families can live a richer Jewish life with the availability of kosher food and more diverse cultural and religious opportunities. Instead of 35, there are now 19 communities able to sustain their own communal life, the 70 “problem communities” of between 5 and 10 families have decreased to 31 and those with fewer than five families have shrunk from 150 to 111.3 This shows that there are still a considerable number of Jews living in rural districts despite the constant haemorrhaging to the cities and overseas. Today the focus of the country communities rabbi has changed considerably. He has evolved from being a community’s to an individual’s rabbi, visiting the Jewish families in their homes instead of conducting services in minyan-less synagogues.4 The State of Israel had been established a mere five years previously and the Holocaust and the miracle of the establishment of the State were still fresh in the minds of people. The tragedy of Latvian Jewry: Nowhere has the slaughter been so merciless as in Latvia; of the 100,000 Jews about 1,000 remained alive, written by Isaac Levinson, was illustrated with a group photo taken in 1923 of Isaac and fellow Zionists in Ludz, Latgale, surrounding the visiting Vladimir Jabotinsky. Elias Gordin, who had been a social worker for the Joint Distribution Committee, told an exciting story of his participation in an Aliyah Beth expedition. Six cartons of cigarettes paid for the border guards to turn blind eyes while 60 young people from the DP camps were smuggled into Italy. A little later they confronted a group of Italian policemen who thought they had caught contraband smugglers, but after appealing to their consciences and their dislike of the English, the party was allowed through. Gordin later heard that their boat was intercepted and forced to go to Cyprus. They reached Israel in time to participate in the War of Independence. Another slice of forgotten trivia appeared in the reminiscences of l Zadikoff of Johannesburg When Herzl passed through Dvinsk. After hearing a rumour that Herzl’s train would be passing through, Zadikoff interrupted a meeting with the news and an excited crowd of students rushed to the station to await the arrival of the great man. They escorted him to the station cafe until the Czarist police arrived, shouting “Jewish meeting!” Herzl returned to the train promising to visit Dvinsk another time, waving his hat to them as the train left. This was in 1903, fifty years previously. “It was a scene which I shall never forget to the last day of my life”, Zadikoff concludes. Israel in 1953 was still struggling to cope with a flood of penniless refugees from concentration camps, DP camps and Arab lands who were pouring into a new state lacking industry, amenities and infrastructure. In the article In search of stability, a survey of the Israel scene in 5713, David Marmor noted that Israel now had 1 500 000 Jews, having had an unprecedented influx in the previous five years of 700 000 immigrants from more than 60 countries. (To compare, by Rosh Hashanah 2012, Israel contained 5 978 600 Jews (75.4%) and 1 636 600 Arabs (20.6%) in a total population of 7 933 200.5) Bananas and citrus were being exported, great strides had been taken in irrigation projects, the first shipment of phosphates had been undertaken, tyre and rubber factories had begun production and the foundations for a prosperous chemical industry had been laid. President Chaim Weizmann had died and Yitzhak Ben Zvi elected the new president. (The Rosh Hashanah journal carried a feature on his wife.) Albert Einstein had been offered the presidency after Weizmann’s death and an article Why Einstein Refused the Presidency quoted his letter of refusal which said, “I have neither the natural ability nor the experience necessary to deal with human beings and carry out official functions.” It continued: “My relationship to the Jewish people has been my strongest human attachment ever since I reached complete awareness of our precarious position among nations.” David Marmor further reported that Japan and Burma had established diplomatic relations with Israel which the USSR had severed – and then reinstated. Marmor added that there had been no change in Israel’s main foreign policy problem – namely peace with the Arab States. Israel’s position that the primary prerequisite for peace was direct negotiations with the Arab states had gained much support in the General Assembly of the United Nations, but a draft resolution calling the Arab States to enter into direct negotiation for a settlement of their outstanding differences failed to get a two-thirds majority. Nu? What’s new? Does the World Owe an Apology to the Arabs? asked Cape Town-born Abba Eban, then Ambassador to the United States, “Not even at the height of its power in the days of the Caliphate did the Muslim world possess such elements of power, status and prosperity as those which the western world had put into its hands”. He pointed out that there were now eight sovereign stages in the Middle East, not one of which had had its freedom four decades previously. “Escaping the long colonial struggles which bore down with heavy weight on other peoples, the Arab sub-continent was rushed through its period of tutelage with headlong speed and in some cases before the completion of its political maturity.” Eban regretted that the Arab refusal to reach a peace settlement was so persistently maintained and asked why American support for Arab independence in eight countries should merit praise while American support for Israel’s independence justified resentment: “The free flow of influences, ideas and commerce across the peaceful Middle East would contribute to the strength of the region as a whole.” As far as the Palestinian refugees were concerned, Eban believed that as the Arab governments had created the problem and had the capacity to solve it, these should do so. “If Israel, with its small area and limited resources, could create homes for 750 000 destitute immigrants, it is as least 100 times more possible for the Arab States, so much more lavishly endowed, to find homes for an equivalent number of kinsmen. If only the will exists.” He continues, “International influence is still unable to liberate us from illicit blockade and from constant eruptions of murderous violence on our frontiers. The contribution we can make towards the restoration of peace must be conditioned by our basic care for our territorial integrity and our survival and security.” It is tragic that despite many wars and the passing of six decades, Abba Eban would probably have expressed similar thoughts today. Sixty years on, that poorly developed country ranks 17th among 187 world nations on the UN’s Human Development Index, which places Israel in the category of “Very Highly Developed”. Israel has become a technologically advanced market economy with a rapidly developing high-tech and service sectors. No longer is it just bananas and citrus. Cut diamonds, high-technology equipment including metal products, electronic and biomedical equipment, processed foods, chemicals, transport equipment and agricultural products are the leading exports. Israel is a world leader in software, telecommunication and semiconductor development. The high concentration of high-tech industries in Israel, backed by a strong venture capital industry, has given it the nickname ‘Silicon Wadi’, which is considered second in importance only to its Californian counterpart. Israel had been invited to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and had signed free trade agreements with the European Union, the United States, the European Free Trade Association, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Jordan, Egypt, and the Mercosur trade bloc – the first non-Latin-American country to do so.6 The new year annual had an alarming picture by Annie Shulman of how Travelling through Arab Lines We Visited Mount Scopus. Flanked by Jordanian soldiers, they joined a monthly convoy to relieve the Israeli police guarding the university on Mount Scopus, driving with shuttered windows, enabling the driver to see only a few inches of road ahead. Established in 1925, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had received strong support from South Africans. Idel Schwartz, founder and later president7 of the Cape Town Dorshei Zion Society, had attended the opening and donated a chair of Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. Isaac Ochberg, famed for bringing 200 Ukrainian orphans to South Africa in 1921, had donated money for extensions and scholarships. Tragically, during the War of Independence attacks were carried out against convoys moving between the Israeli-controlled section of Jerusalem and the University. One of these killed 79 Jews, including doctors and nurses going to the university’s Hadassah Hospital. The campus was cut off from Israeli west Jerusalem and Jordan denied Israel access to Mount Scopus, except for these monthly trips to change the guard.8 Shulman found the university overrun with weeds, a place of desolation, the windows cemented with bricks for protection from shelling. She wandered by torchlight though the library catacombs with its many shelves of valuable books – founded in 1920 the library was the oldest section of the university and its collections of Hebraica and Judaica the largest in the world. The archaeology department, filled with valuable artefacts, could itself do with an excavation, the abandoned study of its President, Prof J Magnes, was in a state of chaos with dead flies and desiccated moths, a disconnected telephone hanging lifeless. They visited the Hadassah Hospital, its expensive equipment lying unused. She returned in the convoy with excited young policemen delighted to be returning home, filled with sadness at the arrested growth, stunted development and enforced stagnancy she had witnessed on Mount Scopus compared to the progress and achievement everywhere else in the country. Today, with four campuses including Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is no longer desolate and weed filled. In 2012 it was ranked overall the 52ndbest university in the world in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, 16th in Mathematics, 27th in Computer Science and 44th in Business/Economics. The Center for World University Rankings ranked it 22nd best in the world. A survey by The Scientist magazine ranked it as the 9th best university to work in, and the 2nd best outside of the United States.9 Of interest is the fact that the University of Johannesburg, in the news for eschewing ties with Israeli universities, did not qualify for the Shanghai list of the top 500 universities and, compared to Hebrew University’s ranking of 175 in the Webometric World Excellence listing, ranks 2223. The annual contained eyewitness reports by visitors to Israel – on a crowded bus ride; on whether Israelis take holidays (outings and children’s camps); on trying to play cricket on the beach; On the Building of Timorim on a new site; on Television in Israel by Percy Baneshik (TV only came to South Africa in 1976); on four months spent lecturing anatomy to the inaugural anatomy department at the Hebrew University’s new campus to a keen class of 54 students, most of whom had arrived as refugees. Hebrew was their common language but not one in which the guest lecturer, Dr M Arnold, from Johannesburg, was fluent. The article The only Ghetto character still remaining in Modern life is the Shadchan by David Dainow, for over twenty years the editor of the Zionist Record, claimed that shadchanimin Israel were planning to form a union, join the Histadrut and secure a law ensuring that no rabbi would marry a couple without receiving proof that the shadchan had been paid. Dainow published Our Shadchan: A Humorous Satire the following year. The leader article by the editor, When Israel Rallied to the Defence of a Jewish Community, focused on the Slánský trial and the storm of protest that had erupted in practically every country: “The cry of ‘let my people go’ was uttered with a sense of pride, in the full knowledge that there was a place on earth ready and willing and capable of receiving them. It placed the entire issue in a new perspective and reasserted the importance of Jewish statehood.” An important principle had become established – that Israel would rally to the defense of Jews wherever they might be attacked. Unlike in Nazi Germany, there was now a State of Israel willing to take in refugees. The 1953 show trial of Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, and 13 other Communists (11 of them Jews) accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy was the result of a split within the Communist leadership, and was part of a Stalin-inspired purge both of ‘disloyal’ elements in the Communist parties, and of Jews from the leadership of Communist parties. After torture the victims confessed to all crimes – 11 were executed and three sentenced to life imprisonment. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the harshness of the persecutions slowly decreased, and the surviving victims quietly received amnesty one by one. In 1968, the Czechoslovakian President awarded medals to nine of the defendants – the honour came too late for the six executed recipients.10 Who knows the name Slánský now? One forgets how rapidly events overtake each other and Today’s News becomes Tomorrow’s Fish Wrap. Also of historical interest was an article by Dr S Rappaport on What the Hebrew Newspapers Said about the Boer War: Gallant Boer Republics vs. the British Empire. Rev Solomon Schechter, discoverer of the Cairo Geniza, lecture in Rabbinics at Cambridge and father–in-law of Cape Board of Deputies founder Morris Alexander, walked out of a Cambridge service when prayers were offered for victory, saying, “The less G-d Almighty knows about this dirty business the better for all of us.” The first page of the Rosh Hashanah annual contained a three-quarter page advert for the Jewish National Fund. The SA JNF was continuing with the second stage of the mighty Huleh reclamation project and had “undertaken to convert 60 000 dunams of disease-ridden swamp into rich pastures to feed Israel’s ever growing population”. It also aimed to purchase 200 000 dunams of abandoned Arab lands from former owners and plant millions of trees in the Martyrs Forest to perpetuate the memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust. This brought back memories as a child in Kimberley, listening to my mother, very involved in Zionist work, collecting money for the project. The swamp, breeding grounds for malaria, was drained by the JNF between 1951 and 1958 and the completion of the massive project was greeted with much pride unhampered by the knowledge of problems emerging only later. Water polluted with chemical fertilizers began flowing into Lake Kinneret. Soil, stripped of natural foliage, was blown away by strong winds, the peat of the drained swamp ignited spontaneously, causing underground fires difficult to extinguish and the disappearance of the lake led to the disappearance of its endemic fauna including the Huleh painted frog. In 1963, a small area of recreated papyrus swampland was set aside as the country’s first nature reserve and reflooded. In the early 1990s as a result of heavy rains part of the valley was flooded and the flooded area left intact. The new site has become the stop-over for an estimated 500 million migrating birds that now pass through the Huleh Lake Park every year travelling between Africa, Europe, and Asia. The cherry on the top was the reappearance in November 2011 of the painted frog, classified as extinct in 1996.11 A review on South African Zionism in 5713 by A Mureinik, press officer of the SAZF, commented on important discussions between the Board, the SA Zionist Federation and the Boards of Jewish education resulting in a resolution on education with special reference to Jewish day schools. He mentioned the Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations – mass functions were held in all large centres with hundreds having to be turned away from the Johannesburg City Hall. 2000 youth had gone to Zionist camps and 700 children had attended a JNF youth rally. A combined Hachsharah farm was opened at Ogies, a photographic exhibition in the Johannesburg public library helped to publicise tourism and there was to be an exhibition of Israeli products at the Rand Easter Show – blissfully free of the future BDS intimidation. The Johannesburg Women’s Zionist League had 42 branches and the passing of Jacob Gitlin, leader of Western Province Zionism for many years, was noted. Ark of the old St. John’s Street Synagogue, Oudtshoorn, now preserved in the town’s Cultural History Museum. The paper reported that there were 375 Zionist societies, including 87 youth societies. The SAJBD had 327 affiliated organisations, including 147 Hebrew congregations, 52 philanthropic bodies, 32 Zionist bodies, 24 women’s societies and 28 miscellaneous organisations, with the Zionist youth groups affiliated en bloc through the Zionist Youth Council. The New Year magazine contained annual reviews of the Zionist activities in the provinces, each surrounded by advertisements from those communities. Impressions of a visit to the Oudtshoorn community by Monty Mann12 was flanked by advertisements from tobacco manufacturers and leaf tobacco dealers; from Mementoes of Oudtshoorn which advertised ostrich feather industries, manufacturers of ostrich feather evening cloaks, ostrich feather evening bags, fans, earrings, club rosettes – their main money spinner could be guessed from their telegram address – Dusters; from Oudtshoorn Footwear Manufactures which was represented all over South Africa, Rhodesia and South West Africa. (Oudtshoorn, Mann reported, had a happy relationship between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations.) A nameless “correspondent” in his report Accent on Youth – Natal Jewry in 5713 wrote that “Pietermaritzburg members showed no great enthusiasm for religious or cultural matters but had a fine sense of communal responsibility for the IUA and UCF collection” and Durban had set up a youth commission and established an embryo youth centre with weekly youth services in the synagogue and a new nursery school.L Leibowitz in Eastern Province Jewry 5713reported that, no longer satisfied with local speakers, the Eastern Cape was threatening to reduce their campaign contributions if they did not get the Chief Rabbi or prominent overseas speakers. They had welcomed the visit of the captain and crew of the SS Haifa. Paul H Ebstein in Bloemfontein Jewry in 5713 stated that they enjoyed the visits of the Mobile Film Unit and wanted more films from the SAZF. The first Maccabi bowls tournament had been held in Bloemfontein and the social highlight had been the visit of Larry Adler, the American harmonica player, to raise money for the Huleh reclamation scheme. (Adler had also visited Kimberley where my mother, the local convenor, asked him to sign my autograph album!) The companies advertising also showed the changes the decades had made and covered a wide range of occupations, many kosher butcheries; “Campbell’s Tea Lounge next to Empire Theatre, a well-known rendezvous of the Jewish community”; sweet manufacturers; Sterilised Milk Pty Ltd manufacturers and distributors of pasteurised milk in sterilised bottles – something we now take for granted; manufacturers of paper products, cardboard boxes and suitcases; Bag Merchants; Express Coal Agency for all classes of coal, firewood, smithy, coke and anthracite; many furriers; clothing factories including Cape Town’s Maccabee Clothing Limited; Maison Champagne continental ladies hairdressers; Aybeecee Agencies in Bulawayo and I Lubner Manufacturing Upholsterers. Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation had not taken hold, judging by an advertisement for Grand Mousseux Champagne, reading Leshona Toiva Tikoseivu. Rabbi Sher, chairman of the Ponevez Sick Benefit Society placed an advert as did the Hebrew Order of David which had a full page Rosh Hashana greeting from its 22 branches. Throughout, the magazine is lavishly bedecked with advertisements – product of a keen Zionist support and an energetic advertising department. The publication concludes with fourteen pages of New Year greetings starting with Aberdeen, Aberfeldy and Aliwal North through the alphabet to Vanderbijl Park, Van Dyk’s Drift, Vereeniging, Victoria West, Viljoenskroon, Vryheid, Warmbaths, Willowmore, Witbank, Zandvlakte and Zoekmekaar (where Mr and Mrs Rudolph Israelsohn and Miss Dora Cohen of Glasgow Scotland extended heartfelt greetings for the New Year to all relatives and friends at home and abroad and wished them well over the Fast). Some of the controversies in the community today were alive and well sixty years ago. Rabbi Kossowksy writes about The Batmitzvah Controversy. He opposes them for a number of reasons, including the social aspect and that they might prove to be the thin edge of the wedge separating the demarcation between the orthodox and the reform services.He brings the subject of mixed choirs into his argument: “The fact that some Orthodox congregations introduced [batmitzvahs] was no reason. The Yeoville Synagogue, which is undoubtedly an Orthodox Synagogue, had a mixed choir for many years and consecutive rabbis were powerless to do away with it until an opportune moment arrived for its abolition. [This] should constitute a precedent for doing away with bat mitzvahs.” Another point of dissension, dating back to 1912 if not earlier, was the difference between Cape Town and Johannesburg, In This is Cape Town – notJohannesburg, Golda Myburg writes, “I had not been very long in Cape Town before I became aware of a strange imperviousness to any ideas or points of view emanating from Jewish communal circles in Johannesburg… In many ways communal workers are more receptive to modern ideas than their Johannesburg counterparts… It has succeeded in drawing a relatively high percentage of young people into her communal institutions… The differences are one of the most serious obstacles to national unity as anyone who had attended a nation-wide conference will know… Johannesburg has been too much inclined to assume a dictatorial air and to ride roughshod over the opinions and wishes of other communities. It seems to me that the only safeguard of harmonious relations among our various Jewish communities would be to ensure that all organisations are constituted in as democratic a manner as possible so as to allow full participation and free expression of opinion by all sections.” Apart from the enormous positive strides Israel has made economically and socially, little appears to have changed vis. a vis. its relations with its Arab neighbours. However, sixty years has made an enormous difference to the position of the South African attitudes to Israel under the ANC government. Although for some years the National government prevented money being sent to Israel as punishment when Israel voted against it at the United Nations, it never reached the level of vituperative condemnation seen under the ANC regime, some of whose tripartite members, like COSATU, view it as a white colonialist, racist apartheid oppressor to be isolated and overthrown. An article by Zionist Record journalist Karl Lemeer13The Afrikaner’s Interest in Israel: An Outstanding Feature of 5713, expressed the belief that Afrikaners had rediscovered Israel as a result of the visit there by Prime Minister DF Malan and Dutch Reformed Church ministers. His relief at the discovery and apparent acceptance by the Afrikaners was driven by the Jewish community’s memory of their antisemitism so recently discarded. In 1937, the same Dr D F Malan had said, “We are not race-haters, but antisemites. We shall follow the same course as Germany, Austria and Italy, and we shall deal with the Jews in South Africa as the above-mentioned countries.” Antisemitic opinions had also been expressed in the past by Minister of Economic Affairs Eric Louw, as well as by Members of Parliament B J Vorster, Dr Verwoerd and Dr TE Dönges; three years later Grey Shirts founder Louis Weichardt became a senator. Even Nazi Robey Leibrandt, sentenced to death after landing secretly in South West Africa from a German submarine, was pardoned when the National Party came to power. An admiration for Jewish achievements in Israel would counter such prejudices.14 Lemeer saw the golden jubilee of the SAJBD as another milestone. He believed that the celebrations had had an important impact on the relations between Jews and non-Jews, with almost 200 non-Jewish guests at the golden jubilee dinner (including the Governor-General, Minister of Transport and prominent personalities). As a result, “the work of the Board has become widely known in non-Jewish circles throughout South Africa… Among non-Jews the Board’s stature and prestige has grown immeasurably and with it the esteem in which the Jewish community’s contribution to the commercial, industrial and cultural life of this country is held.” Unfortunately, changing political realities has resulted in a changed perception of Israel, with the ANC government preventing official visits to Israel, even if the visitors would benefit from the knowledge gained. The Israel apartheid slander and the propaganda and political activism of the BDS movement has impacted on the government’s attitude towards Israel and might affect the future ability of South Africa’s Jews to maintain their beliefs in Zionism in comfort. Interestingly, only one article touched on the problems of living under apartheid. This wasSouth African Jewry in 5713: Few Worries but Many Perplexities by E Tannenbaum, although to be fair the Zionist Record was a Zionist annual whose raison d’être was promoting Zionism. By 1953, the National Party had passed a whole raft of discriminatory laws, all invisible to readers of the annual.15 When Dr Malan gained power, he had issued a statement saying that “both he and the Government stood for a policy of non-discrimination against any section of the European population in South Africa”and he looked forward to the time when there would be no more talk of the so-called “Jewish Question” in the life and politics of this country.16 But he only mentioned the European population. He and the government certainly stood for discrimination against the majority of the population. Tannenbaum does not list discrimination among his few worries, being more concerned about the perplexity of constructing an effective programme for the youth. But the subject was of concern to the Zionist Record. Despite his silence on the apartheid iniquities in this Rosh Hashanah article, Karl Lemeer had a regular weekly column in the Zionist Record where he discussed without hindrance his views on the situation in South Africa: “I used my column to embrace all groups – oppressors and oppressed”, he wrote in his book Apartheid and Survival: A Jewish View published in 1965 under his real name Henry Katzew17 and in which he criticised the SAJBD for its “very real failure… to abandon all discussion on the very real problems of South Africa… A Jew or a body of Jews, without a conscience, is plain nonsense.”18 He continues, “For years my column in the Zionist Record has been the only expression of writing in the Jewish Press on the problems of our country… I cannot accept discrimination on the basis of race or colour… The two forces – the Afrikaner’s struggle for survival and the Black man’s demand for free opportunity – are not irreconcilable… The politicians cannot be the architects of White survival.”19 He doubted whether a group’s survival could ever rest on legislation or manipulation. Differences were not dictated by colour of skin. Lemeer/ Katzew became the editor of the Zionist Record in 1968. In his article Tannenbaum wrote that the liberal found himself in an anomalous position because his major preoccupation was the advancement of the non-Europeans and as a result there was a tendency for the Jewish liberal to devote himself exclusively to causes outside organised Jewish life. Many such people were lost to the Jewish community, some of whom in other situations would be the Jewish leaders of the future. (This alienation was to become a major problem for the community.) This concern is reflected in additional sins suggested for consideration on Yom Kippur: “The sin, to be concerned only with Judaism and not with all humanity, or to be concerned only with all humanity and not with Judaism.”20 Reading the journal left me with a feeling of deep sadness. Joy at the expansion and development in Israel, sadness that peace was still not attainable. Joy that the South African Jewish community was still viable, sadness at the contraction of Jewish influence in South Africa and most specifically at the attitudes taken towards Israel by the ANC government – attitudes marked by double standards and hypocrisy. In his South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid, RW Johnson comments that, oddly, despite the fact that less than 2% of South Africa’s population are Muslim, there was a strong Muslim presence in foreign affairs and it was hardly an exaggeration to term South Africa an enemy of Israel.21 How this will play out in the next sixty years remains to be seen. Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council, 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
