Kathrine Garrun looks at the role that community archives -- including digital archives -- play in telling the story of South African Jewish life. 

ON Sunday, 18 April 2021, a devastating fire on Table Mountain spread rapidly to the University of Cape Town (UCT), and soon ignited the roof of the historic Jagger Reading Room, engulfing the treasured African Studies Library. The fire resulted in irreparable loss of historical collections. Although also situated on upper campus of UCT, and perilously close to the flames, the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, and its archival store, was untouched by the fire.

​Such a loss would have been unimaginable. Our collections -- personal papers, congregational and organisational records, oral histories, and photographic materials -- tell the story of South African Jewish life. They not only connect South African Jews to their past but are crucial repositories for any future research on the community and South African Jewry. 

Dmitri Abrahams looks at how the South African media reported on the Holocaust between April and November 1945. He suggests that the different reportage reflected not only the ethos of the publication and their stance on World War II, but also the deeply polarised thinking of the papers’ respective readership -- with regards to both the war as well as what was happening back home in South Africa.  

THE liberation of concentration camps in 1945 and the revelation of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany caused major upset in South African society.
​
As a part of my dissertation on Holocaust memory in South Africa I analysed how the South African press reported on and understood the liberation of the concentration camps. The liberation of the concentration camps by Allied forces happened during an uncoordinated, chaotic period in which information emerged piecemeal. The press had already reported on the persecution and mass murder of European Jewry from at least 1942 so when the news of the liberation of the camps reached South African shores, they had some background with which to engage with the topic which suddenly flooded the pages of their daily and weekly newspapers. 

THIS last July I visited Poland as a participant in the Poland Holocaust Study Tour 2022, organised by the Austrian Service Abroad, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. Although the Holocaust is not my area of study, I had spent my honours year absorbed in memory studies of violent histories. In particular my research looked at apartheid security police violence at Post Chalmers, a ‘death farm’ in the Eastern Cape.

Ilana Stein reflects on what Judaism says about our responsibility to the planet and explores environmental awareness in the South African Jewish community. 

​​I always wanted to be a game ranger. When I began working in conservation tourism, I discovered a world filled with people who discussed rhino numbers and elephant footprints with an intensity that inspired me. I was thrilled to be part of this group of people who, when faced with habitat destruction, extinction of species and environmental degradation, would unequivocally declare “not on our watch.” But as a practicing Jew I found myself asking whether Judaism explicitly cares about the environment.

With both the South African and Irish Jewish communities being predominantly Litvak in origin, Yanky Fachler explores the commonalities between these two communities.   

​If my Litvak great-grandfather Jacob Becker, after whom I am named, had not spent a year in Pretoria in the late 19th century and not brought back to Lithuania a pocketful of South African passports, my grandfather, Sam Becker, would have been unable to use his South African passport to escape from Nazi Germany for Britain prior to World War II. As a result, I lived in England for the first 25 years of my life. I then lived in Israel for the next 25 years. Moving to Ireland a quarter of a century ago suddenly made me mindful of my own – and Ireland’s – Litvak heritage. When I was researching my book, Kaleidoscope: Key characters who helped shape the Irish-Jewish community [1], something that Dublin-born Max Nurock, a former Israeli ambassador to Australia and New Zealand, once said resonated. Nurock had stated that “Ireland’s Jews are a community founded largely by an incomparable generation of Litvak pioneers.”

Considering global and local Jewish communal concerns around 'continuity', ​Gabriella Saven argues that we need to encourage dialogue and inclusion when it comes to reproductive experiences, particularly amongst those considered to be on the ‘fringes’ of the South African Jewish community.​

Babies are always on my mind. Not because I have any, or plan on having one soon, but because as a young South African Jewish woman whose identity revolves around family and community, conversations around reproduction can feel ubiquitous.

My Honours thesis explored reproductive attitudes in the South African Jewish community amongst self-identifying progressive women. Despite a growing field of reproductive research in South Africa and abroad, there is little research into the intersections of reproduction and religion. I asked how progressive Jewish women in Cape Town reconcile communal expectations around gender and reproduction with their secular and progressive outlooks. 

​Reflecting on the Jewish history of District Six, Craig Nudelman explores how this connection is understood and remembered by the Jewish community and broader South African society.

District Six is arguably one of the most challenging physical spaces confronting Cape Town, if not South Africa. From its creation as an official ‘district’ of Cape Town in 1867, housing freed slaves, immigrants, merchants, labourers and artisans, to the largely empty and contested space it is today, this area is a potent reminder of the injustices of apartheid. Because of the forced removals of black and Coloured South Africans, which took place between 1966 and 1976, District Six has been ingrained in our minds as a symbol of apartheid and segregation. Yet, rarely featured in our national conversations is the Jewish connection to District Six. A once vibrant and multiethnic community, District Six was home to thousands of Jews from the 1880s to their departure in the mid-1940s and -1950s. District Six is arguably also emblematic of how Jews ‘became’ white in the South African context. Considering our long association with District Six can we also ‘claim’ District Six as ‘ours’?

Rozanne Sack and Wendy Hendler, co-founders of Koleinu SA, write about the challenges of confronting sexual abuse against males in the South African Jewish community. 

​David*, a member of the Johannesburg Jewish community, is a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse. He is one of very few men to come forward and report his abuse to Koleinu SA. For victims of sexual abuse, especially those from smaller communities such as ours, where the perpetrator is usually well known to the victim and an active member of the community, reporting sexual abuse is inhibited by both fear and shame.  

Founded in 2012, Koleinu SA was established as a helpline for victims of abuse in the South African Jewish Community. It has since grown to become an advocacy and training organisation in the areas of gender-based violence (GBV) and child sexual abuse. Although Koleinu SA’s helpline has taken hundreds of calls over the past eight years, the vast majority have been from women. Not because GBV and sexual abuse does not happen to men and boys in the Jewish community. Rather, because of the compounded shame and humiliation that male victims experience. We have some understanding of the huge barriers that women and girls have to overcome in order to come forward. For males it is doubly difficult. Most will suffer lifelong consequences and carry their secret to the grave.

​Maya Schkolne ​suggests that despite the many positives of Jewish community schools in South Africa, their lack of diversity -- particularly racially and socio-economically -- can leave students ill-equipped to contribute meaningfully to broader South African society.  

​The twelve years of my formal schooling was at Jewish community schools. First, I attended Herzlia Milnerton Primary, which has since closed, transferred to Herzlia Highlands Primary, continued to Herzlia Middle School, and, in 2006, I matriculated from Herzlia High School. As a student, I was challenged to grow academically within an excellence-driven environment. I enjoyed Art, Drama and History as well as the communal seders and school plays. Like many of my fellow students, I had some extracurriculars outside of school. And, yet, when I reflect back on the twelve years of formal education that I received, despite the many positives, there was a stark disconnect from what I was exposed to during my time at school and to the experiences and lived realities of the majority in South Africa.

TO my utmost delight I no longer find myself schlepping my kids to and from school every day. This is not because of lockdown but rather, as of last year, all three of my children have now matriculated, each having spent every year, from preschool to grade 12, at a community Jewish day school. If recent research on the South African Jewish community is anything to go by, this may be unremarkable to some and quite expected by others. But for me it wasn’t what I had originally envisaged for my offspring. My husband, however, was determined that they follow in his footsteps at United Herzlia Schools.