Kimberley, South Africa
Kimberley ExPats Newsletter no 19
Kimberley Ex-Pats Newsletter no 19
2 September 2018
Dear Friends
Rosh Hashanah is upon us and I hasten to wish everyone a sweet and happy New Year wherever you are.
Today is 'Klezmer in the Park' again. Here is a picture from a few years ago when Jeff Hammerschlag, Gail Bernard with her Kimberley sign and I met there. It’s great that this lovely day of Jewish music in Regent's Park is continuing and thousands come and picnic. It’s something lovely that I established when I was the Founder Director of the Jewish Music Institute, starting from 1983 till my retirement at the end of 2011.
Gail, who as she says, looks very much like her mother Stella Levinsohn, has written a story for the website about her experience in traction in bed for months as a five or six-year-old with a rare childhood hip condition ‘Perthes Disease’. (this is not actually a disease, but a rare childhood condition the affects the blood supply to the hip causing pain and limping)
Gail’s story is wonderfully upbeat for a small child to go through such trauma, including a horrific spell in hospital where she was very unhappy. She remembers there was a steady stream of visitors – though she can’t recall them all. She specially remembers Sybil Perel – whom she says she loved and called Sister Sunshine. She recalls Marion and Michael Lusman, Lorraine David, Julie and Ralene Jacobson. She would love to hear from you if you visited her and remember her in her ‘climbing frame’ bed.
I know that Mike Dalrymple (also on our newsletter list) also had this condition and I remember visiting him in bed at the Perel’s house down the road. Let me know if you visited either of them and your memories of this condition. (It seems that today most Drs don’t recommend such drastic treatment.) See Gail’s story soon under families, https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/Families.html
Wedding gallery
I have at last sent Eli my own wedding picture (February 1962) for the wedding gallery. The gallery in now in two volumes, 1914 to 1952 and then 1952 onwards. We now have 21 weddings documented – but it’s just scratching the surface. We want to document ALL Kimberley weddings. Barney Horwitz has promised to digitize and send us the wedding register, which he found by chance on a shelf under the tahara cloths. Lisette Datnow has offered to help with this. Please, please Barney, this is invaluable historical information about the community that can easily be lost again or stolen. Could you possibly make this your New Year’s resolution to put this into action? I am sure there are many people who can help you with this. please let us know what help you need.
Making Your Family Page
Having explained to you in Newsletter 18 how to set about making your family page/s I have been moved to work on my own. I am doing it in stages, first writing about my mother’s family, the Bergmans who came from Courland, Latvia and how they got to Kimberley and then my father’s family the Kretzmars. This has involved much research – made so easy today on the internet into the places they came from and the early days in Kimberley. It has also brought me into contact with cousins I’m not regularly in touch with for their verification and they have all been able to contribute somethings that they have gleaned about the family. We all asked too few questions at the time when there might have been someone to answer them and you have probably also got boxes and albums of old pictures with no names or dates on them.
I was particularly interested in finding out about Courland – where the Bergman’s came from.
My mother’s father, Jacob Bergman, was born in 1873, one of the 8 children of Osser Yitschok and Gita Bergman (nee Immerman) in Kandau, a town in Western Latvia about 90 miles from Riga in an area known as Kurland or Courland. Before writing about the family I’m going to write a bit about Courland as I had the feeling that coming from Courland was a priveleged position, but I did not know its exact whereabouts, history or culture. I knew too that Jacob and his family including my mother, had visited the family in Courland in 1928.
Courland is an area of Latvia just north of the border with Lithuania’s Kovno Guberniya. If you look at the yellow bit in the map below you see that to the West is the Baltic Sea with year-round open Ports such as Libau and Windau and to the North the Gulf of Riga. (The Port of Riga, just North of Courland can be icebound in winter.) Further East, Courland’s northern border is the Dvina River.
Jews gravitated to Courland first from Prussia settling on lands owned by German Barons, then later slipping across the border from Lithuania, as they were able to practice a wider range of occupations,
with fewer restrictions. Though the area was annexed by Russia in 1795, it was still greatly influenced by German culture and language. Courland did not become part of the Pale of Settlement for Jews decreed in 1804.
Some of the enlightenment of Jews in Germany rubbed off on the Jews of Courland. There were no yeshivot and many Jews rather chose to send their children to the less religious Jewish schools known as Chederim. Here they learned German and Russian in the morning and Hebrew in the afternoon. Some Jewish families sent their children to the local Christian schools and specially aspired for them to go to the German Gymnasium for a wide ranging high school education. In cultured Jewish families the younger generations were fluent in German as well as well conversant in Russian and French. They were on a par with the intelligent Christian mercantile class of Latvia.
In 1799 a law was ratified according to which the Jews already living in Courland became citizens with the right to reside in the province, to establish communities, and to engage in commerce and crafts. This encouraged migration from Lithuania which was actually illegal. So, their position was promising but always precarious.
100 years later in 1897, the Jewish population of all Latvia reached the impressive number of 51,000. The positive contribution of the Jewish community to the swift development of industry and trade in Latvia in the late 19th century was huge. The biggest woodworking factories, the majority of timber and grain trading, large flax mills, flax export companies and distillery businesses, were in the hands of Jewish business people. Members of the Jewish community owned 10 banks in Riga.
In the province of Courland, there were important Jewish business firms in Mitau (the seat of the Courland government) Jacobstadt, Friedrichstadt, and especially in Hasenpot. Tukkum had the advantage of two railway lines meeting there. In the cities the Jews were wholesale dealers in dry and fancy goods, agents, jewellers, etc. The sea-port cities of Libau and Windau were prospering and Jews there did very well. But the inland towns like Zabeln, Kandau (where the Bergmans resided), Talsen and their surroundings were economic backwaters in beautiful mountain and lake surroundings – often called the ‘Switzerland of Kurland’. The Jews of such Courland villages followed generally the same trades and professions as Jews in Lithuania and Poland: small traders, peddlers, distillers, and artisans, especially locksmiths and tinsmiths.
After the assassination of the liberal minded and reforming Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a wave of reaction including anti-Semitism hit the Russian Empire. In accordance with new laws, the Jews living in Riga, Mitau, and Libau, whose actual trade was different to their officially registered one, were forced to move back to the Pale of Settlement. Jews were banned from working in Government organizations and their access to university education was restricted.
That is the time when many Jews emigrated, mainly to the USA, Great Britain and South Africa – as our family did. Families with Jewish Courland origins can be found all round the world.
For those left behind, some joined various socialist political groups ripening for revolution. Various Zionist groups also started operating. During the WWI, in 1915, the Jews of Kandau – and all Courland were deported at a few days’ notice, by the Russians on suspicion of espionage in favour of Germany. Some 75,000 Jews from Kurland were evicted. into the depth of Russian Empire. The majority of them settled in Russia. Those who returned home found the Jewish communal buildings and privately-owned houses had been destroyed. Latvia became an independent state after the war and Jews were tolerated, if not actually welcomed.
By the end of the 1930s, some 93,000 Jews lived in Latvia. Almost half of them, 43,000 people, resided in Riga. Latvia fell under Soviet rule in 1940. All the banks, industrial plants and retail businesses, including the Jewish owned ones, were nationalized. Among the 15,000 Latvian citizens deported to Siberia on the 14th of June 1941, about 2,000 were Jewish.
Nazi troops occupied Latvia in early July 1941. There are more than 200 sites in Latvia, where mass executions of Jews were carried out during WWII. More than 70,000 Latvian Jews as well as Jews deported from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other European countries were exterminated here. Sadly, that is what must have happened to many of our close relatives who were not able to emigrate in time.
Only 14,000 members of the Latvian Jewish community survived WWII. Jews from other regions of the Soviet Union relocated to post-war Latvia and by 1959, its Jewish population increased to more than 36,000 people.
Latvia became one of the centres of the Zionist, dissident, and Jewish national movements in the Soviet Union. Jewish activists struggled for the right to emigrate to Israel and to openly honour the memory of the Holocaust victims. Many activists were arrested for printing Jewish books, newspapers, and magazines, and learning Hebrew and Jewish history, which were all made illegal under Soviet rule. (some of our relatives were involved and embroiled with this - see below)
In the 1970s, more than 1/3 of Latvian Jews emigrated to Israel, the USA, and Western Europe. That included Beryl’s first cousins Dora Zaidin and her Brother Ilya whom we later met in Tel Aviv with Dora’s daughter pianist Noemy Belinkaya and Ilya’s daughter Rina – more about them later too.
You can have as much space as you like to write about your family. It’s a website and can expand as much as we want it to. There is no restriction.
Support for Kimberley Synagogue
If you want your family name mentioned or if you want to send a donation to Kimberley synagogue they will be ready to act and ever so grateful. Here are the details as usual.
Donations to the Kimberley Community should be paid directly into the Shul Bank Account, the details of which are below: Please confirm to: Adrian (Barney) Horwitz [ahorwitz@lantic.net] and tell him which names to mention in shul.
The banking details of the Congregation are as follows :
Bank : Standard Bank
Branch : Kimberley
Branch Code : 050002
Swift Code: SBZAZAJJ
Account Name : Griqualand West Hebrew Congregation
Account Number: 04-005-444-6
I have not heard what their plans are for the High Holydays and if their bochrim are coming again, but we wish them and you all a happy, sweet and lovely time with your family and a good year ahead.
Best wishes to all
Geraldine
Geraldine Auerbach MBE, London
2 September 2018
(if you don’t want to be on this email list – please let me know)
Geraldine Auerbach MBE
T: 020 8907 1905 M: 07971 818 262
