I was deeply honoured and privileged to deliver an address at this year’s Yom HaShoah ceremony in Cape Town. It is never an easy task to speak on such a day, but this year’s theme – Seeking Refuge – made it especially poignant, asking us to look not only at how the Shoah ended, but at the moments before, when escape was still barely possible.
Personally, one of the most moving moments came afterwards at the tea. There I met Miriam Herzfeld. Miriam, who recently turned 103, arrived in South Africa as a young Jewish refugee from Germany aboard the Duilio in 1937. Her interview had been played earlier
on the screen during the commemoration – her testimony steady and unselfconscious.
At the tea, Miriam squeezed my hand and thanked me for telling her story. In that quiet moment – from generation to generation,
ldor v’dor – history ceased to be something spoken about and became something handed gently from one human being to another.
Bless her. Her presence brought the meaning of the day into sharp, living focus.
In my address, I spoke about how the Shoah did not begin with gas chambers, but with language, laws, and indifference – with propaganda, slurs, discriminatory legislation, and neighbours choosing to look away. By the time murder became industrialised, a moral collapse had already taken place.
The theme Seeking Refuge required us to turn our gaze back to the 1930s, to a time when German Jews still faced choices – unbearable, uncertain choices – about whether to leave, where to go, and how to make life-altering decisions with almost no information. Families packed suitcases and walked away from entire worlds, knowing they might never see their parents, homes, or communities again.
Some of those journeys ended here, in Cape Town. In 1936, the Stuttgart arrived carrying hundreds of German Jewish refugees who had already lost their livelihoods, safety, and sense of belonging. They were not adventurers, nor “economic migrants”, but people cast out by their own country. For them, refuge was the difference between being reduced to numbers and being allowed to live again as human beings. I also reflected on the fact that when we speak of “survivors”, we often collapse very different experiences into one word. Some survived because they escaped just in time; others survived ghettos, camps, deportations, starvation, and death marches. These are different paths, but they form a single, torn yet unbroken thread of Jewish life.
Cape Town is woven deeply into that thread. The refugees who found safety here went on to build families, institutions, and a community shaped by a fierce commitment to justice – informed by having seen what happens when law and morality are turned against the vulnerable. Their descendants live among us today, carrying both stories and silences: names never spoken, questions never answered.
As Chair of the Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies, I believe that remembrance cannot live only in ceremonies, however meaningful. If we truly honour those who sought refuge – and those who never had the chance to do so – remembrance must shape how we live. It must mean standing firmly against antisemitism wherever it appears, and safeguarding the values for which, throughout history, Jews have paid such a terrible price.
Yom HaShoah is a day of mourning and warning, but it is also, paradoxically, a day of hope. That hope lies in survival, in rebuilding, and in moments like the one I shared with Miriam Herzfeld – reminders that, despite everything, the chain has not been broken.
May the memory of those murdered in the Shoah be a blessing and may the courage of those who sought refuge continue to guide us.
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