By Gwynne Robins
When the new SA Jewish Museum was built, it discarded everything in the old Jewish Museum that had no significance to it and ten years later the Jewish Board of Deputies, as trustees of the original Jewish Museum, took these over and with the generosity of Marco van Emden and the United Jewish Campaign, cabinets in the foyer of the Samson Centre were erected for these objects.
Among them are items from defunct country communities whose possessions were significantly meaningful to them to be donated to the Museum in memory of their communities.
One day the Kaplan Centre forwarded me an e-mail from Dr Cyril Kaufman from Israel who was trying to find a Hebrew document written by his grandfather Rev Avraham Zalman Kaufman, one of the founders of the Maitland Hebrew Congregation and Chief Shochet of the Cape Western Board of Shechita for 45 years from 1907 until his retirement in 1952.
It contained the detailed history of the Congregation from the time he arrived in South Africa in 1903 until 1954. The document had been enclosed in a stoppered glass tube and then in a lead tube and placed in the wall behind the cornerstone of the Maitland Shul. Cyril was concerned that it had disappeared without a trace.
I reassured him that on the contrary the scroll had been donated to the Museum in 1989 when the shul was dismantled; it was in perfect condition, the ink was as clear as the day it was written, it had been translated to English and that it was on display in the Samson Centre and I sent him photos as proof.
On 2 August an excited Cyril arrived from Netanya to see it for himself. He explained that he and his wife Norma (Fleishman) and their two eldest children, Aaron and Sara, had made aliyah in the 1974, followed later by his parents, brother, sister-in-law and their children. After his parents passed away, his father in 2004, his mother in 2011 they found amongst his mother’s effects a box filled with faded photos of relatives, a Tanach in which was recorded dates of births, deaths and other important family occasions as well as a diary, hand written in 1893 by his 15-year old grandfather giving their family’s history. One of the things that startled him was that in 1892 his grandfather had signed his name as Kropman, yet why in South African did he chose to be known as Kaufman? There is no one alive to ask.
Because it was written in Pre-Revival Modern Hebrew, Cyril had difficulty understanding it, so he approached the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The professor described it as a wonderful example of such Hebrew and asked if there were any other Hebrew documents written by his grandfather so they could assess the development of his Hebrew skills as he had grown older.
Using the material in this diary, Cyril embarked on a search for his family, tracing names through My Heritage and JewishGen, Yad Vashem records, old family documents and photos, as well as photographs of tombstones and is writing a family history starting from 1775, his Zeida’s birth in Lithuania in 1878 through to the present.
We took out the glass tube. With awe and reverence, he placed the individual pages under the Perspex I had suggested he used to flatten the scroll prior to photographing the pages his grandfather had lovingly inscribed using tail feather quills which he had carefully plucked and sharpened from turkeys sent to him from Koffiefontein to slaughter for Yomtov.
When the Hebrew University Professor received Cyril’s photos, he was most impressed to see how Rev Kaufman had adapted his Pre Revival Modern Hebrew to that of spoken Hebrew in 1954 –and his perfect grammar.
We have something else from the Maitland Hebrew Congregation — something equally unique. A Simchat Torah chocolate box from 1934 with a picture of the shul on it. There are unlikely to be any other 80-year old Simchat Torah chocolate boxes in the world, let alone one from Maitland. The owner cherished it for years, keeping his exam papers in it, before passing it on, in his old age, to the Jewish Museum for safe keeping.
It is discoveries like this that show how important it is that the Jewish Board of Deputies values and treasures our inheritance both religious objects and objects from vanished country communities.
