The Cape Jewish Chronicle celebrates its 40th birthday in 2024. We take a look here at some of the interesting articles from yesteryear that were published.
The below articles were first published in the March 1988 issue of the Cape Jewish Chronicle.
March 1988 sees the 50th anniversary of the death in Cape Town of a Jew whose one stark deed reverberated throughout the world and made of him a hero – Sholem Schwartzbard.
It is through a simple postage stamp that Sholem Schwartzbard’s story was brought into prominence once again after several years of obscurity. Ben-Zion Surdut, a keen philatelist and collector and researcher of Judaica, some years ago came across a Ukrainian postage stamp showing the head of the infamous Nationalist leader, Simon Petylura.
This initiated a research into Petylura which revealed that he had led the anti-Bolshevik army in the Ukraine in the civil war that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution. His rampaging Cossack bands had been responsible for the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Jews in pogroms in that area.
Included in those numbers were members of the family of Sholem Schwartzbard. Born in Bessarabia he had fought in the 1905 Russian uprisings, helped organise Jewish self defence against pogroms whereafter he had fled Russia for France. He served with distinction in the French Foreign Legion on the Western Front during the 1st World War and later against Petylura’s Cossacks in the Ukraine.
In 1920 at age 32 he moved to Paris where, as a watchmaker, he lived with his wife, Anna. He became involved in the labour movements of the day, devoting himself also to the writing of articles, books and poetry in Yiddish. In 1925 he became a French citizen. All those who knew this fine-looking man spoke highly of him as quiet spoken, good-natured, poetic and scholarly.
Yet Petylura’s butchery of his people obsessed him. His very soul cried out for vengeance, particularly when he learned in 1925 that the monster was in Paris. Through a small postage stamp size picture, which he found in the Encyclopedia Larousse (the very one on Ben-Zion’s stamp) he managed to trace and identify Petylura and establish his daily routine.
On the afternoon of 25 May 1925 Schwartzbard accosted Petylura coming out of a restaurant in the Rue Racine. Declaring “This is for Proskourov!” he shot him dead. He made no attempt to escape through the growing mob but waited for the police to take him into custody.
Clearly Schwartzbard was prepared to pay the ultimate penalty prescribed for such an act of murder. The sensational 8-day trial that followed in Paris in 1927 (18 months later!) rocked Paris and made headlines throughout the Jewish and international world. The brilliant young lawyer, Maitre Henri Torres, whom Schwartzbard’s friends had hired to defend him, turned the focus away from his client’s act of vengeance and upon the merciless horror and iniquity of the Russian pogroms and the slaughter of helpless Jews. It was not Schwartzbard but anti-Semitism itself that was on trial. The more than 180 witnesses called to give evidence included such prominent people as the writer, Maxim Gorki, Leon Blum, the noted Socialist and Albert Einstein.
In addition to Torres’ brilliant summation, the defendant himself spoke most eloquently
“My judges” he said “I stand before you more as an accuser than as an accused. Yes! I accuse our century, the whole civilised world, which allowed such an outrage, such a wrong, to be committed. This, our modern world of tremendous progress, of machines and art and science, is guilty not only of having nurtured in its lap this poisonous serpent of anti-Semitism, but also of having closed its eyes to the shocking crime which is being committed against a whole people. I do not stand before you to plead for mercy, nor am I cowed by the threat of death. I am prepared to show how a Jew can die, how he is willing to bare his chest to his tormentors rather than turn his back on them. …Gentlemen, behind me stand thousand of martyrs who look silently upon you and demand justice. No pity, no mercy, but justice. My whole being is drawn towards them, and I, too, gentlemen, cry ‘no pity, but justice’.”
Schwartzbard was acquitted.
He was a celebrity, acclaimed by Jew and non-Jew alike. He even made a triumphant tour of the USA where he was universally feted. And then he returned to Paris and quietly resumed his former life, working in his watch-making shop.
Ten years later Schwartzbard was sent out to South Africa, to Johannesburg and then Cape Town, as an emissary for the Yiddish Encyclopedia. Once again he was welcomed as a celebrity. He was assisted in his work by the Yiddishe Kultuurfederatzie who secured for him the services of schoolteacher and journalist, Miss Hilda Purwitzky to act as his secretary.
Miss Purwitzky, who lives in Sea Point today, has possibly the greatest collection of memorabilia of Schwartzbard that exists anywhere. She has too a clear recollection of the man, his writings, his personality and the great impact he made upon those who met him. A two and a half hour interview with Miss Purwitzky gave life to the legend, as together we pored over her documents, cuttings and photographs.
According to Mr Willie Mann, former Capetonian and also researcher of our hero, Schwartzbard boarded with his aunt, Bathsheva Jaffe, in Belmont Avenue, Oranjezicht. My husband recalls his own father, Louis Chait, himself for many years a watchmaker, talking of Schwartzbard’s visiting him on several occasions and talking with him and my mother-in-law in their shop (so similar in style and size to his) in Darling Street. When going through Hilda Purwitzky’s photographs, I found one taken (as were so many thousands by Movie Snaps) outside the Post Office in Darling Street!
And then quite suddenly, about a month after his arrival in Cape Town, on 3 March 1938, Sholem Schwartzbard died of a heart attack, aged only 51.
He was buried, in a zinc coffin, at the old Jewish Cemetery at Woltemade, Gate 8. According to the ‘Cape Times’ report of 8 March 1938 this was “the largest funeral in the history of South African Jewry” – (reported as even larger than that of the late Rabbi Bender who had passed away the previous year). It was officiated by Chief Rabbi Israel Abrahams, with eulogies presented by Morris Alexander and also Baruch Leib Rubick.
After the war, possibly as a result of the initiative of Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz following a visit to Cape Town, a committee was formed in Israel to organise the exhumation and reburial of Schwartzbard there. This was successfully accomplished, with much of the ‘red tape’ work handled by Miss Purwitzky. Schwartzbard was finally laid to rest with great honour in the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Moshav Abichail near Netanya – at peace at last among his people in the Jewish Homeland.
Perhaps Schwarzbard was fortunate to have been spared the agony of knowing what was to happen subsequently to six million of his people. More specifically he would have been shocked to hear of the so-called “Petylura action” which took place in Levov in July 1941 – a 3-day orgy of killing, purportedly to avenge Petylura’s murder some 15 years earlier. During this action thousands of Jews were seized, hundreds disappeared without trace and at least 2000 were killed. A tragic postscript indeed for the man described in the Jewish Chronicle’ of 11 March 1938 as “the mighty and reckless hero who had taken upon himself the colossal burden of revenge for the woes of a stricken people.
Sholem Schwartzbard’s yartzheid will fall this year on 29 Adar, corresponding to Friday 18 March. Members of the Claremont Shul will commemorate this yartzheid and it is hoped that Capetonians elswhere will see fit to do likewise.
A walking tour of Woltemade Cemetery
by Irma Chait
On what I’m sure was the hottest afternoon in a string of very hot days in February, Ben-Zion Surdut, Willie Katz and I set forth on a pilgrimage to the old Woltemade Cemetery to view the grave of Sholem Schwartzbard.
This was to prove a most enlightening outing, with my two escorts, particularly Ben-Zion, veritable mines of information, proffering all manner of fascinating items of interest relating to Cape Town Jewry past and present.
As we headed Maitland-wards, with Ben-Zion in the hot i.e. driver’s seat, we passed what our pilot pointed out as the very first Jewish Cemetery in Cape Town, the Albert Road Cemetery. This forgotten corner site, he informed us, housed the grave of the very first Jew buried in Cape Town, whose son, born posthumously (to his father!) received the very first brith. And Ben-Zion assured us there was more extraordinarily interesting stuff there – earthy too!
We duly arrived at Woltemade Gate 8 to find the caretaker ready to lock up for the day. The ‘boys’ prevailed upon him to allow us to fulfil this task and off he rode on his bicycle, leaving us free to enter the old cemetery.
But this entry was greeted with the strangest, eeriest cry, that quite unnerved us. Ben-Zion, it transpired, had stood on the tail (hopefully only) of a tin black kitten, which reacted quite appropriately, if scaringly!
Resuming our composure – with my two Kohanim guides at all times observing the required distance from the graves – we pressed on, past the Tahara House in the direction of where Ben-Zion and Willie remembered Schwartzbard’s grave to be. We passed some wonderful old memorial stones of people whose names will ever be remembered in the history of Cape Town Jewry – with Willie all the time urging me, excitedly to “Photograph this one!” …“Don’t miss that one…!”
We passed Josef Homa, founder of Herzlia’s Minyan Yosef and then detoured to the Liberman-Buirski family plot where I photographed and took down, to Willie’s dictation, the wording on the late Esther Liberman’s stone. (See below).
Then onward, past Rose and Woolf Harris, till we came upon a stone which particularly moved us, of a World War Il serviceman killed in an aircrash in North Africa, after the war had ended.
“Take him!” directed Willie, and when I hesitated, “Irma, you might not find the place again”.
And all the time the little black kitten mewed on beneath our feet – with us repeatedly warning Ben-Zion to watch his step.
At last we stood before what was Schwartzbard’s penultimate resting place (see article) – a simple headstone with just his name and dates of birth and death – no tribute, no loving message from family, as etched upon the stones flanking him!
And once again, we spoke of Sholem Schwartzbard and paid tribute to the man whose act of vengeance had highlighted to the world a particularly horrific chapter in the history of his people – bringing to him his brief moment of fame.
Leaving Schwartzbard, we paused here and there to read out names and inscriptions on stones and take in the overall look, somewhat neglected, of the old cemetery. Was it Willie who recalled the late Rabbi Duschinsky’s saying that graveyards should not be repaired but should be left alone, to age without interference?
Our odyssey over at last, we passsed through the gates and duly sealed the lock. We said a last farewell to the old ‘souls’ – and to the little black kitty – and made our homeward journey in the continuing heat of the early evening.
Next morning, just at the point where Thad concluded relating the afternoon’s adventure to Lynn Jamieson, my secretary, Ben-Zion’s head popped round the door. He had come to bring me the promised postage stamp of Petylura’s head (see article).
“You know” said Ben-Zion “I just couldn’t sleep last night”
“Not surprising” thought I. “Who could, in that terrible heat?”
“It was that little black kitten” continued Ben-Zion, with a frown, “I couldn’t stop thinking about it…”
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