Jewish Ghosts of the Past

The Cape Town Holocaust Centre & the South African Jewish Museum

By Lauren Kramer

Visit a centre that pays homage to the Holocaust and you don’t expect to feel uplifted, inspired and encouraged. For those with even a scant knowledge of this dark period in history, the Holocaust means massacre and the virtual defeat of the human spirit. But at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, which sits directly across from the Jewish Museum of South Africa on Hatfield street in Cape Town, what you get is a sense of perspective, particularly when you visit both museums consecutively. Learn the history of the Jews of South Africa, and how the Holocaust has touched Jews on the tip of this great continent, and you cannot help but feel moved and hopeful for the future.

The Holocaust Centre, built in 1999, begins its story not in Europe, but in South Africa. “Only recently South Africa emerged from the injustices of Apartheid, with its abuse of human rights,” one of the first informative panels announces. “The events of the Holocaust remain a tragic warning to us all.”

The centre goes on to detail the build-up to the Holocaust and the succession of events that culminated in the large-scale annihilation of Europe’s Jewish community. But it returns frequently to the South African story, juxtaposing the occurrences in Europe with what was happening in this country.

In 1937, the passing of the South Africa Aliens Act

prevented German Jews from immigrating to South Africa. Those that sought to prevent their arrival were by and large Afrikaner intellectuals, the same group that formulated the Apartheid system as a way of safeguarding Afrikaner identity and racial purity.

The Aliens Act came on the heels of the arrival into South Africa of some 3,600 German Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1936. The Greyshirts, the most prominent of the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi groups that were formed in the 30s, were outraged, and their sentiments were shared by D.F. Malan, the leader of the Purified National Party, who explained thus why he was closing the country’s doors: “There are too many Jews here, too many for South Africa’s good and too many for the good of the Jews themselves,” he is quoted as saying.

The Holocaust Centre begins by offering visitors a snapshot of life in Bedzin, Poland, prior to Nazism. In 1939, the town was home to 27,000 Jews, more than half the population, people whose families in that area could be traced back to the 16th century. We see photographs of friends, a wedding, a classroom scene and children in kindergarten.

"By giving us faces and names of Jews lost to Hitler’s maniacal regime, the centre allows us to delve into the particular, rather than offering a wash of numbers that are simply too broad to fathom."

Some 600 of their faces are on display on a nearby wall, along with the following explanation: “On average, the Nazis killed six times the number of people you see here, every day for four years, simply because they were Jews.” By giving us faces and names of Jews lost to Hitler’s maniacal regime, the centre allows us to delve into the particular, rather than offering a wash of numbers that are simply too broad to fathom.

The exhibits and panels go on to describe the ghettos, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the mass murder of Jews and the implementation of the Final Solution. There are large black and white pictures of faces writ with suffering and hardship, descriptions of the death marches, and for those who survived the Holocaust, the pain they experienced after liberation.

The images are coupled with auditory commentary from survivors about their experiences, and while their voices and stories are compelling, on an emotional level they are difficult to listen to.

Just before the exit, we see the faces of 39 Holocaust survivors who settled in Cape Town after the Holocaust. A media screen displays the testimony of some of those survivors, describing the memories that torture them to this day.

The Holocaust Centre ends with a quote from the spiritual leader of the Rainbow Nation, Desmond Tutu, from a speech he made in 1999. “We learn about the Holocaust so that we can become more human,” he says, casting the centre’s information in perspective. “We learn about it so we can become more gentle, more caring, more compassionate, valuing every person as being of infinite worth so precious that we know such atrocities will never happen again, and the world will be a more humane place.”

Slavery to Freedom

A few steps away, the South African Jewish Museum is housed in Tikvat Yisrael Synagogue, the country’s first synagogue that opened in 1862. For years it sat in the shadow of the larger Gardens Synagogue, housing only a few historic artifacts. But that changed in 2000, with the injection of R40 million that permitted the construction of an adjoining structure that tells the story of Jews in South Africa fluently and concisely.

"Some 50,000 Jewish South Africans left the country in the past 15 years, reducing the population to 70,000, many of them older residents."

The synagogue is a magnificent structure, with hardwood floors, elegant columns and intricate patterns adorning the roof. Jews began arriving in South Africa in 1806, the museum explains. By 1880, 4,000 Jews had arrived, and thereafter, tides of immigration from Eastern Europe, and from Lithuania in particular, had transformed the Jewish community into a significant minority based in Cape Town.

Johannesburg started taking over as the focal point of South African Jewry by the 1860s, with the discovery of gold and diamond in the Witwatersrand. This helped swell Jewish numbers in the country by 40,000 by 1910. At its most, in the early 1990s, the Jewish population had reached 120,000, according to Eric Michaels, a project director at the museum.

No history of South Africa could be complete without mention of Apartheid, and in the annuls of the country’s Jewish history, Mandela’s words of praise are writ large. Taken from his book, Long Walk to Freedom, he says: “In my experience I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on the issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.”

This sense of congratulation is modified by exhibition boards alongside his quote, which caution that most Jews accommodated themselves to segregation and Apartheid, but that a “significant number” challenged the inequities of life in South Africa and sought a more humane and just society.

Visitors get a brief glimpse at these few heroes from all segments of the workforce. There’s journalist Joel Mervis, lawyer Israel Aaron Maisels, dancer Phyllis Spira, writer Nadine Gordimer, artist Irma Stern and politician Helen Suzman, to name a few. A large multimedia screen displays video footage of South African Jews who live all over the world, reflecting on their choices.

Some 50,000 Jewish South Africans left the country in the past 15 years, reducing the population to 70,000, many of them older residents, as evidenced by the salt-and-pepper shades of hair at synagogue during a Friday night service in December. “My contemporaries have children all over the world, confesses Michaels, 77. “They’re going daft trying to visit them each year.”

Michaels refused to predict the shape of the next half century for South Africa’s Jews. But evidence of the vibrancy of their community is ubiquitous, particularly when you visit these two venerable institutions in the shadow of the Gardens’ lush trees. Witness their achievements in the face of adversity, South African anti-Semitism and the emergence from the nightmare of the Holocaust, and you cannot help but feel hope in the air.

 

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