The History of a South African Community
The rise and demise of the Jewish community of Parow over the course of the 20th century represents a microcosm of the South African Jewish experience. Never numbering more than a few hundred people at its height, this small community in an unfashionable suburb of Cape Town embodies a story that reflects South African Jewish life at large in all its richness and complexity.
This lively, richly illustrated history traces the history of this small, vibrant and enterprising Jewish community in the Cape Town suburb of Parow since its foundation after the Boer War. Professor Richard Mendelsohn has drawn on over sixty interviews and a rich vein of documentary records to explore the social, professional and business lives of the Jews of Parow; their religious and recreational lives, caught in an uneven contest between prayer and play; their cautious relations with a conservative, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking host society; the place of Jewish women in a patriarchal order; and the ties, including those of Zionism, ethnic solidarity and kinship, that bound the community closely together.
The book is a work of collective biography. It tells many individual and family stories, including those of the founding matriarchs in the early twentieth century, who were forced by unhappy circumstances to raise their children on their own; the entrepreneurs, some of very humble origin, who built major industries; the shopkeepers, large and small, and their close relations with their diverse customers; the doctors, lawyers and pharmacists who once dominated Parow’s professional life; and, above all, Parow Jewry’s remarkable and controversial rabbi, who served the community for three and a half decades despite repeated efforts to oust him.
The book will officially be launched in mid-September. Alongside the publication, a unique, immersive exhibition, “Echoes of Parow, a South African Jewish Story”, which draws on the book for inspiration, will open at the South African Jewish Museum. The exhibition will be on display from mid-September for six months. The book can be purchased from the museum shop.
Richard Mendelsohn is a retired former head of the Department of Historical Studies of the University of Cape Town and Deputy Dean of the University’s Faculty of Humanities. As Richard grew up in Parow in the 1950s and 1960s, its Jewish heyday, the social history of its Jewish community is a project that is both professional and personal.

For more information please go to www.sajewishmuseum.co.za
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