News 6

Kimberley ex-pats Newsletter no 6

September 2015

Dear Kimberley Expatriates (not ‘patriots’ as I might have said at first) and those that may have an interest in the Jewish Community of Kimberley SA.

The Jewish New Year is once more approaching and we might be thinking of how we have celebrated Rosh Hashanah in Kimberley when we were young. We send good wishes to Barney and Arnie and all those still praying in the beautiful synagogue there and hope they will have their bochrim with them and enjoy a happy and meaningful Simcha. And the same wish for a happy and productive New Year to all of you.

Here is a picture of our family – probably about the time when my father Noel Kretzmar was the President of the shul in about 1941. I am sitting on his lap and my brother Theo between him and our mother Beryl. (Can someone in Kimberley perhaps please tell me what years Noel was the President.) I know he started a special fund to look after the shul building which I think has stood the community in good stead over the years.

Beryl never left Kimberley – she went to Girls’ High School (as I did) and then worked in her father Jacob Bergman’s diamond office when she left school and eventually married the new doctor in town in 1935. She moved from 22 Milner Street to Carrington Road and then moved further up the road to the corner house corner of Dalham Road. (They were going to build a house further up the road – had plans for a double story house on a plot that they subsequently sold to Natie and Fay Cohen).

The corner house they moved to had been the headquarters of the officers of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers (or something) in the Boer War. There is a fortified ammunitions dump in the back yard. (We called it the ‘air raid shelter’). My mother had a beautiful lounge in the front room with antique chairs and lamps and china and silver filigree ornaments in a stinkwood corner- and also a Sheridan display cabinet. When my children were small they loved this room and called it the ‘museum’ because of all the fascinating things in it and charged the family an entrance fee as they showed us around the treasures. Today I have a chair from that room in my bedroom and also I have many of the little silver filigree figures and glass animal miniatures from my mother’s collection, that now enthral my grandchildren. And Karen has a lamp with a china kissing couple as a base and Anthony has a walnut glass fronted bookshelf from that home in our current houses in London.

When we last visited Kimberley, the family house has got a ‘historic monument’ plaque on it. It is owned by a socially mobile black family who turned this ‘museum’ room into a digital cinema with booming speakers and big screens. The rest of the house and the outbuildings were also unrecognisable. Still the beautiful Jacaranda trees are yet glorifying the garden.

I learned recently that a writer in South Africa called Peter Bayer has written a highly praised historical adventure novel called The Last Mentsch, in which some of the characters spend time in Kimberley. It is populated by several real characters and some who are ‘composites’ of actual people. The story is told by Yitzhak, the son of one of the early pioneers, who arrives in the Cape as a 12-year-old from Lithuania – about the life of his father, Theodore. It sweeps from the Cape in 1862 to the Kimberley diamond mines and then to the gold rush on the Reef in the late nineteenth century.

Peter Bayer is a well known South African journalist, having worked on the Rand Daily Mail for many years. He was also a prolific magazine feature writer and photojournalist. In recent times, has pursued a career in academia, writing and lecturing on a variety of Journalism and communications degree modules. The Last Mentsch was written in fulfilment of a Masters in Creative Writing, awarded cum laude at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2013 and shortlisted for the prestigious EU Literary award the same year. You can get it from Amazon if you want to explore further.

Our Jewish community of Kimberley website http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley grows in stature and we have had contact from many people round the world. I wrote on the ‘Pioneers’ page about the house (Dunluce) of Gustave Bonas, the President of the shul, whose name is on the cornerstone dated 1902. I could not find any information about the man himself. Soon afterwards I was delighted to be contacted by someone called Charles Bonas who wrote:

Dear Geraldine,

I have just found your website on Kimberley and was very pleased to see it. Gustave Bonas was the brother of my great, great grandfather – Henry Bonas. I have a picture of him when he was one of the original families (Joseph Brothers) who controlled the Diamond Syndicate before De Beers took over.

He told me that the family came originally from outside Cracow, Poland – one brother went to Ireland dealing in watches and then somehow the family ended up in London and Manchester, with a brother sent to South Africa and another to Antwerp. He said: ‘My family is still very much involved in the diamond trade – If you look on www.bonasgroup.com under history you can find a picture of him. I am based in London (St Johns Wood) but in Africa every month.’

Best wishes

Charles

Here is one of the pictures which you can see better on the Bonas Group website or indeed on the Kimberley site http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/Gustav_Bonas.html

I urge everyone reading this newsletter to write us a story about your own family (even if not so illustrious) and send us some pictures of your time in Kimberley for the website..

You can visit the graves in the cemetery on the ‘cemeteries’ pages where all the graves in both the old and the new cemetery can be seen. They are not individually catalogued so you have to look for them. http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/Cemeteries.html. If you want to have pictures of your family graves, (or indeed his beautiful pictures of the synagogue) please contact Jono David to purchase them jono@gol.com

I wonder if anyone has pictures of the ‘Grinne’ Shul in Baronial Street. That’s gone now seemingly without a trace.

If you have missed any of my previous ex-pats Newsletters you can find them here on the website. http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/News.html. Perhaps you would like to write about your family for the next newsletter?

I you are thinking of sending a donation to the Kimberley Community this year you should please pay 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

If you would like to draw the attention of any friends or relations to the Kimberly Community Website – you can just cut and paste the paragraph below.

Please take a look at the new Kimberley Jewish Community website created to celebrate and document the Jewish families who lived and worked in Kimberley South Africa. http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/Home.html

If you have a story to tell, pictures to contribute or any comments to make, please contact the webmasters Eli Rabinowitz and Geraldine Auerbach via the contact page of the website.

* 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

**Announcement of the Kimberly Community Website

Take a look at the new Kimberley Jewish Community website created to celebrate and document the Jewish families who lived and worked in Kimberley South Africa.

If you have a story to tell, pictures to contribute or any comments to make, please contact the webmasters Eli Rabinowitz and Geraldine Auerbach via the contact page of the website. http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kimberley/Home.html