The land of Rolexes and handouts

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 02:12 21/07/2008 The land of Rolexes and handouts By Cnaan Liphshiz For 27 years, Owen has worked as a free professional at a large company. Now, his pension of 61 million Zimbabwe dollars will only buy him six apples at the central market place of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where he lives. He says that while the economy is ruined, Zimbabwe's 270 Jews enjoy better personal security than in South Africa. Owen, who requested his real name be withheld for safety reasons, was the only resident of Zimbabwe who 10 days ago attended a large reunion in Ra'anana for ex-Zimbabweans, organized by Telfed, the South African Zionist Federation Israel. "The whole idea in Zimbabwe is low profile. Don't raise your head. This is why I don't want my name mentioned," he said at the Ra'anana Bowling Club, where 300 Southern Africans turned out. Yet for Owen, moving to South Africa as many Zimbabwean Jews have done over the years, is not an option. "In Harare we can still walk and feel safe. We don't have South Africa's huge crime problem, we can go into town and all that," he explained. As for moving to Israel, Owen says that he will stay in Zimbabwe as long as his children receive a good education. "Also, I stay because it's my home - even with all the nonsense going on," he says in an apparent reference to the dictatorial rigging of elections and executions of dissidents by President Robert Mugabe. At 57, Owen's one of the youngest members of his dwindling community. "They're all old people, and they have no access to the decision makers," he added. Zimbabwe's Jews are too old to leave, Owen says, and outside funding is the only way for them to survive in a failed economy afflicted by the worst inflation rate witnessed anywhere in recent years. "You need at least a few trillion to manage," he says - the equivalent of a few hundred U.S. dollars. Owen relies on foreign currency to maintain a lifestyle which he calls "affluent." Whipping out from his pocket a slim iPhone cellular device, he browses through pictures of his spacious home in Zimbabwe - which he jokingly calls "the only country where people like me wear Rolex watches and get food handouts."

A Shtetl in Africa

A Shtetl in Africa
Jun. 12, 2008

David E. Kaplan , THE JERUSALEM POST

When Zimbabweans in Israel converge on July 11 at the Ra'anana Bowls Club for a reunion, they may well exceed the number of Jews remaining in their former country.

THE FIRST Hebrew School of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo, 1901.Photo: Courtesy - http://www.zjc.org.il/

For those up on international news that should come as little surprise. Reminiscent of the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when basic commodities were priced in the millions of Deutschmarks, Zimbabwe under authoritarian President Robert Mugabe goes one better - even at a price tag with a trail of zeros, the desired chicken, loaf of bread or aspirin might not be available. Once the bread basket of Africa, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) today is a basket case, unable to feed even its own people.

From a peak of some 7,500 Jews in the 1970s - comprising some 80 percent Ashkenazim - the country's community today numbers only about 200 souls, an eighth of whom are residents of Savyon Lodge, the retirement home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city.
Zimbabwe-born Dave Bloom, vice chairman of Telfed (an organization representing all Southern Africans in Israel), takes solace in the fact that over 700 former Zimbabweans live in Israel today, "representing some 10% of the size of the community at its zenith."

That many Zimbabweans made Israel their home is hardly surprising. From its humble beginning, the community was proudly Jewish and passionately Zionist. When Bulawayo's 100-year-old synagogue was engulfed in flames in 2004, the conflagration resonated as the end of an era.

In 1894, 21 Jewish traders and ex-soldiers from an expeditionary force sponsored by the British South Africa Company gathered in the tent of Messrs. Moss & Rosenblatt to form a congregation in Bulawayo, a sun-blistered town of tin and wooden shanties with roads that were little more than sand paths. On September 18 that same year, the community gathered in its new synagogue - no longer a tent, but a hut - to consider the establishment of a Zionist society. A lengthy discussion ensued as to whether the society should identify itself with Herzlian Zionism or with Hovevei Zion, the precursor to political Zionism. In other words, three years before the first Zionist Congress in Basel, a group of pioneering Jews, trying to eke out a living in the most primitive conditions in central Africa, were discussing the Jewish people's alternatives in their quest for a national homeland. Hardly having established a home for themselves, they were seeking a national home for their people.

EZER WEIZMANN visiting Salisbury (today Harare) with a guard-of-honor of members of the Jewish youth movements. Debbie Zabow, the first girl in Habonim uniform on the left, is today a resident of Kfar Saba.
Photo: Courtesy - http://www.zjc.org.il/

In 1919, Lord Edmund Allenby visited Rhodesia. As a World War I hero who only two years earlier had conquered Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, he was welcomed by the local Zionist leadership. Asked what he thought lay ahead for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people, he responded emphatically, "Hard work and increased immigration." History records that in the 1930s, the per capita financial contribution of Rhodesian Jewry to Palestine was the highest in the Diaspora. This was a tradition that continued into the 1970s.
Even before the embers of the Bulawayo Synagogue cooled in 2004, Bloom, who describes his erstwhile community as a "shtetl in Africa," believed it was time to "preserve the past before nothing was left or no one alive to tell the story." He started collecting material, which he posted on his Web site (http://www.zjc.org.il/).

Visiting the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, he made copies of newspaper cuttings, minutes of meetings and photos. In a collection of documents recording interviews with early Jewish settlers in Rhodesia, he discovered the unpublished manuscript by the renowned South African historian Eric Rosenthal on "Rhodesian Jewry and its Story." From these writings we learn of an Englishman, Daniel Montague Kisch, the first Jew to feature in the history of Rhodesia. By 1860 he had become a prospector "and so joined the expedition of diggers, mainly Australian, on the wearisome trek to a golden will-o'-the-wisp on the Tati Fields." Kisch had a frontier way of dealing with issues. When Sir John Swinburne, a future MP, but then chairman of the London & Limpopo Company working on the Tati Concession, tried to assert his authority over Kisch, he received the latter's resignation in the form of a broken nose.

Like Kisch, Moss Cohen also came to Rhodesia from England, although because of his alleged Irish "associations" he was better known as Paddy Cohen. The area was a tribal kingdom and Cohen wrote in a diary entry how "King Lobengula took a fancy" to him and granted him a trading license, "the sole rights in all his territory."

"I gave him a horse for it," he added.
Later, when the issue of prospecting rights for gold arose, the king, Cohen wrote, "gave a promise that I should be the first to get one. He would not give it in writing, but I was satisfied with his (verbal) promise."
Things never quite worked out that way. Rosenthal recounts the trials and tribulations of this colorful Jewish personality who fell in and out of favor with all the major players of the time, a time period known as the "Scramble for Africa" - including King Lobengula; mining magnate Charles Dunell Rudd, Rhodesian pioneer Francis R. Thompson, better known as "Matabele," and imperial colossus Cecil John Rhodes - over who owned what rights.

Before its posting on Bloom's Web site, very few had seen Rosenthal's monumental work, commissioned by the Rhodesian Jewish Board of Deputies in 1949. Since its completion, it attracted little else than dust. "Very few even knew of its existence. Gems were coming out of the woodwork," Bloom told Metro. People all over the world were dusting off the past to reveal a treasure trove of Jewish history in central Africa, much of which is now available on his site.
Mindful of the tragedy that befell the shtetls of Eastern Europe, where the past itself was no less a victim than the people of history's toxic twists, Bloom, of Polish ancestry, was determined to pictorially document all the Jewish graves in Zimbabwe. "So far, we have posted on our Web site photographs of over 4,000 headstones… covering Harare (formally Salisbury), Bulawayo and all the smaller country towns." Former Zimbabweans from all over the world have been contributing to the site and, Bloom says, "we now have over 200 family biographies. These personal narratives present a colorful history not only of the families, but also of the country, illuminating how people arrived in what was then Rhodesia and why they came."
Each family has its own story. Marvyn Hatchuel's father came from Morocco. Hatchuel, who is organizing the July reunion, is a former president of CAZO - Central African Zionist Organization. "In 1904 my 20-year-old father was in Alexandria [Egypt] on business when he met a fellow Sephardic Jew, Behor Benatar, from Rhodesia, who had originally come from the Mediterranean island of Rhodes. He told my dad, 'You want to make money, come to Rhodesia. My brother and I run a concession store at Penhalonga, a gold mining town in eastern Rhodesia.'"

Wandering off, Hatchuel continued, his father found himself pounding the port area of Alexandria. A ship bound for east Africa grabbed his attention and on the spur of the moment he bought a ticket to Mozambique. Disembarking at Beira, Hatchuel had insufficient money to pay for any further passage. So the young Moroccan followed the railway track and walked the breadth of Mozambique until he crossed over into Rhodesia and completed the last stretch to Penhalonga. "I believe when Behor Benatar saw my father enter his store, he nearly collapsed. Anyway, he gave him a job. At night and under candlelight Dad would sit with a dictionary and a newspaper and in that way taught himself English," Hatchuel related.

When Hatchuel the elder had arrived in Penhalonga, he spoke to his employers in Ladino. When he left, he was fluent in English and six years later, in 1910, he opened - together with the Daniel brothers - one of the first general wholesale stores in Salisbury.

The community's Sephardim, who came mainly from Rhodes, "started arriving in the early 1890s," said Nick Alhadeff of Kfar Saba, who at one time or another held all the top positions in his former community - president of the Sephardic Congregation of Rhodesia, Chairman of the Board of Deputies and President of CAZO. Alhadeff's father left Rhodes for Rhodesia in 1931 over a split-up in the family's bank. "Rather than choose to become either the managing director of his uncle's bank or the breakaway one of the nephews, he opted instead to join his brothers in Rhodesia," Alhadeff explained. It was a fortunate choice. Those members of his family who did not leave Rhodes "ended up in Auschwitz."

The Sephardim were part of a unified Jewish community until 1931, "when all hell broke loose. It was over some difference in the conduct of the shul service," Alhadeff told Metro. "Jews! Who can remember the exact details, but soon thereafter, the Sephardim had their own shul." Time, however, is a great healer. "I, the son of a Sephardic Jew, became the first of my community to write the bar mitzva exam under Rabbi Konviser of the Ashkenazi shul. I became a member of both congregations, a sign of the changing times," he recalled.

Times were changing in more ways than one. In 1960 Harold Macmillan delivered his famous address in the South African parliament, in which he declared that "The winds of change are blowing through this continent," referring to the growth of the nationalist movements across Africa that were seeking independence from colonial powers. National aspirations were no less rooted in Africa's Jewish communities, as their youth movements as well as the adult leadership increasingly identified with the Jewish state. Fundraising for Israel and aliya became an integral part of local communal life.
It was an age when Jewish pride was riding high, reinforced by Israeli victories in war as well as subsequent daring air raids on Entebbe and Iraq. The older generation was quite happy to regard their youth as future Israeli citizens.

Attending the upcoming reunion in Ra'anana will be many of those former members of the Habonim, Betar and Bnei Akiva youth movements who may have stood in honor guards for Menachem Begin, Ezer Weizmann, Moshe Dayan and Chaim Herzog, who all made a point of including Rhodesia in their visits to Southern Africa during the sixties and seventies. They were following in the legacy of their parents and grandparents, who would have welcomed such figures as Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, Nachum Sokolow, Dr. Alexander Goldstein, Moshe Sharett and Dr. Abba Hillel.

"We may have been a small community, but we led by example," says Hatchuel. "Most of the CAZO heads made aliya - Mervyn Lasovsky, David Melmed, Eric Brod, Boris Cass (Honorary Life President) and Adolf Leon. And let us not forget the women's Zionist leadership."

Women like Rachel Baron, a vibrant speaker and founder of WIZO in Bulawayo, who became an international figure in the women's Zionist organization. Years later she would settle in the country for which she had worked so tirelessly, joining her two daughters, Beverly Kaplan and Merle Gutman, and their families. Kaplan was a founding member of Manof, a moshav founded by Southern Africans in the Lower Galilee. Gutman, founder and life president of ESRA (English Speakers Residents Association) has been the recipient of the President's Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Volunteerism.

"It was a wonderful childhood," Gutman told Metro. "Life revolved around the shul, the Jewish Guild Hall and Habonim." Like all one-time Zimbabweans, she laments what has befallen her former country. "It's so tragic, so cruel and so unnecessary. I feel no less for the country as a whole than what has befallen the Jewish community. It is horrific how a tyrant [Mugabe] can so wantonly destroy his own country and persecute his people and the world stands idly by. South Africa has not only failed its neighbor, but has been complicit in supporting this tyrant."

Reunion of ex-Rhodesians/Zimbabweans:
• Date: Friday, July 11 at 9:30 a.m. for brunch
• Venue: Ra'anana Lawn Bowls Club
• For further information, contact Marvyn Hatchuel at (09) 774-7181 or Dave Bloom at 054-465-0220.

Zimbabwe expats use reunion to plead cause of Jewish peers

Zimbabwe expats use reunion to plead cause of Jewish peers
Jul. 13, 2008
JOSH SCHEINERT , THE JERUSALEM POST

A reunion of 281 Zimbabwean expatriates living in Israel was held in Ra'anana last week to raise funds and awareness as to the precariousness of the situation in their former country. Ironically, the number represented more Zimbabwean Jews than in all of Zimbabwe today.

Dave Bloom, vice chairman of Telfed, the South-African Zionist Federation that also represents Zimbabwe, and himself a native of then Rhodesia (Rhodesia changed its name to Zimbabwe in 1980 when Robert Mugabe became president), spoke to the crowd about a community in a "battle to maintain themselves in a country that's all but collapsed economically and politically."

He announced that $300,000 had been raised through the Joint Distribution Committee, World Jewish Relief and Chai South Africa, but that more was needed. (see picture left - Bloom addressing audience)

The African Jewish Congress (AJC) in Johannesburg has been at the forefront of these efforts and coordinates sending supplies and provisions by truck over the border.

Funds raised have gone towards buying generators and community upkeep, but mostly they are going towards buying food and basic provisions, like medicine, that are becoming increasingly scarce in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. However, a community member noted the cost of kosher meat and the ability of getting a kosher butcher from South Africa has made it increasingly rare in the recent past.

Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, the AJC's spiritual leader and coordinator of its Zimbabwe efforts, explained the biggest concern was to ensure that the members of the Jewish community, and the people that work for them in their homes, are taken care of "in a manner that is respectful and sustainable." Asked if he was confident the AJC could meet this concern amid the current period of turmoil and uncertainty, he answered, "Absolutely."

Silberhaft noted, however, that raising money is becoming the biggest obstacle. "The demands on us are increasing on a weekly basis," he said.

Paul Hammer, who left Zimbabwe five years ago with his four daughters, explained at the reunion that it was the inability to obtain that quality of life and services that the AJC is trying to maintain that proved the tipping point in persuading him to say goodbye to the land of his childhood.

His daughters were not getting the quality of education or health care he felt appropriate, and blamed the country's failing economy. "All the professionals fled from the hyperinflation," he noted.

Still in touch with a few Jewish friends who have remained behind, Hammer calls the situation in Zimbabwe today "a disaster." Bloom explained those hardest hit were individuals, Jewish or other, living on fixed incomes.

"They are trapped by the fact that their money has disappeared," he said.

"But we live in hope," said Hammer, trying to sound upbeat that the present hardships would pass one day and that individuals and families still in Zimbabwe, Jewish or not, would overcome the present catastrophe.

However, he, along with Bloom said they did not feel the situation would change in the foreseeable future, economically or politically.

"I would be surprised if there would ever be any resuscitation of the community over there," said Bloom.

However, a community resident who plans to stay in Zimbabwe unless things become completely unbearable believes the backbone of a future community will be made up of mostly former Israelis who go to work temporarily in agriculture. "It won't be as when people lived their lives here," he said, "but there will be Jews."

Picture above shows youngsters at the reunion with Zimbabwe roots
L -R front row Josh Koff (from U.S) , Mia Hammar, Daniella Hammar L- R Middle RowNatalie Hammar, Taum Hammar, Janine Feldman (with son Danny) L-R Back Row Sharon Favish (with son Eitan)

Zimbabwe Jews holding out

by Moira Schneider (JTA)

With Zimbabwe in the throes of an economic and political crisis, the country's tiny Jewish community is holding steady. Most say they don't want to leave.


CAPE TOWN (JTA) -- With Zimbabwe in the throes of an economic and political crisis, the country’s tiny Jewish community is holding steady.

The president of a synagogue in the city of Bulawayo says Zimbabwe’s approximately 320 Jews have been left largely unharmed by the violence surrounding last week's presidential election that drove opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai from the race.

Observers outside the country have called the vote, in which President Robert Mugabe was re-elected, a sham.

Hylton Solomon, the 52-year-old president of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation, says the Jews of Zimbabwe have become accustomed to the grim situation in their country.

“Over the years, everybody has been so disappointed,” he told JTA. “It’s just another day. They just accept” it. “The Jews, certainly in Bulawayo, I don’t believe feel threatened, and I don’t think they ever have.”

Though they have been spared the violence, Zimbabwe's Jews have been hit hard by the economic crisis. The country has been beset by electricity, food, water and fuel shortages.

Jewish aid officials assisting the community say, however, that few Zimbabwe Jews intend to leave.

It's a community that has dwindled to 320 from a high of about 7,500 in the 1970s, when the country was called Rhodesia and ruled by a white minority.

The Jews are split between the capital of Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. Two Jewish day schools, one in each city, have mostly non-Jewish students. The Ashkenazi and Sephardi synagogues in Harare have combined their services, and there is one rabbi in the country, David Alima of Bulawayo.

Mervyn Smith, the president of the African Jewish Congress -- an initiative of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to attend to the needs of far-flung Jewish communities in sub-Saharan Africa -- says he sensed a mood of resignation among Zimbabwe’s Jews on a recent visit.

“There isn’t a fear of physical danger, but there’s almost despair that the economy and the whole situation can ever right itself,” Smith said.

The country is suffering from skyrocketing inflation estimated at 20 to 30 percent per week. Last week, it took 40 billion Zimbabwe dollars to equal $1.

Many Jews have seen their savings totally eroded.

“People are depressed, but what is really having an impact on everyone is the collapse of the economy,” said one community member who asked to remain anonymous. “Our money is worthless.”

Most Zimbabwe Jews of Zimbabwe are elderly; just six Jewish children live in the country. Of the 110 Jews in Bulawayo, 26 live in Zimbabwe’s only Jewish old-age home, the Savyon Lodge.

The economic crisis has hit them particularly hard.

“Many were dependent on their savings and pensions; they thought that they could live with dignity and be independent to the end of their days,” said one community member. “That is not possible. Things are either unavailable or unaffordable.”

The executive director of the African Jewish Congress, Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, says he spends 90 percent of his time on issues relating to the Zimbabwean Jewish community.

“We provide everything from medication to rent to basic foodstuffs,” Silberhaft said. “Nothing is affordable, nothing is available. We send water purification tablets because the water is no longer safe to drink.

“The reality is that there’s almost nothing on the ground -- there’s no toilet paper, cotton, wool, medication,” he said.

Silberhaft visited Zimbabwe in late May and said the Jews in the country were prepared to carry on. At his monthly distribution of essentials, the rabbi said he “watched proud Jewish people that used to be in the category of ‘haves’ queuing for salt, toilet paper and jam.”

Silberhaft recently went to London to raise awareness of the crisis and raise money for the African Jewish Congress’ Zimbabwe fund.

Though a June 13 report in the London Jewish Chronicle said the Jewish Agency for Israel was planning a secret emergency airlift of the country’s remaining Jews, Silberhaft insists there are no such plans.

“I met with Zeev Bielski,” the agency’s chairman, “and there’s absolutely no evacuation plan whatsoever,” Silberhaft said. “What the Jewish Agency and we say is, if you want to leave, as long as there are commercial airlines, why wait for an evacuation? Leave now and we will take care of you.”

One community member said that despite constant calls for them to leave by panicked family members abroad, most Jews in Zimbabwe do not feel the need to run.

“As a community we carry on without any interference and celebrate all the festivals,” she said. “I don’t feel any urgency to leave.”

“The situation is dire, not unsafe,” said another Zimbabwe Jew who spoke to JTA on condition of anonymity. “No one that I know has been harmed in any way.”

She added, “I feel safer here than in Johannesburg.”

Many of Zimbabwe’s non-elderly Jews regularly commute to neighboring South Africa.

“The younger people like me have homes in South Africa,” said Solomon, the synagogue president. “I often question why I’m not more positive in making a plan to move, but I don’t know whether South Africa is the place to move to, quite honestly. I’m still making a bit of a living here and I have the best of both worlds.”

Solomon says he visits Cape Town every four to six weeks for about 10 days to see family and go to movies and restaurants.

“It’s just a bit of a bittersweet sort of life,” he said.

Last July, Solomon was jailed for a night for violating Zimbabwe’s price controls by overcharging on a box of spaghetti.

With everything that has happened, however, Solomon sounds a note of optimism.

“Something positive is going to come out of all this,” he said. “The economic situation just cannot carry on like this anymore.”