Courtesy Times of Israel -   https://www.timesofisrael.com/

‘Typical Scottish Jewish girl’ makes home in Zambia after dumping legal career in UK

Lynne Mendelsohn runs an animal sanctuary in Livingstone: ‘My Jewish identity is important and I’d like to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. I tell people it’s my tribe’

By Sue Surkes     - TIMES OF ISRAEL

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia — A 57-year-old former lawyer who describes herself as a “typical Scottish Jewish girl” dumped her round-the-clock professional lifestyle in the United Kingdom for a small town in Zambia, where she works (round the clock) running one of the country’s few animal rescues.

Lynne Mendelsohn attended schools in Glasgow and Buckinghamshire and studied at Newcastle University. She took a law conversion course and worked mainly in London for construction and engineering firms.

In her later years, she focused on offshore wind projects, which involved much traveling and an average working day of 12 to 13 hours, six and a half days a week.

“Then a litigation case was settled before a trial, and for the first time, I had three weeks to take a break,” Mendelsohn recalled.

“I got a friend to come with me to climb [Tanzania’s Mount] Kilimanjaro, go on safari, and visit Zanzibar. Those three weeks made me realize how burnt out I was and how much I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this.”

“I was coming up to my 40th birthday, which is when you’re prodded to evaluate things,” she said.

Lynne Mendelsohn with a canine rescue. (Courtesy: Zambezi Animal Welfare Services)

A few months after her 40th, she closed the door on her law career and bought a lodge in Livingstone, the Zambian town closest to the iconic Victoria Falls.

While growing up, she had always had pets but lacked the skills to be a vet. “At 14, I was thrown out of the physics class, and my friend did my math homework,” she remembered.

At the same age, she began volunteering with disadvantaged and disabled children and orphans. She volunteered during her travels.

“I became very aware of my relative privilege,” she said. “At Kilimanjaro, we were all standing in expensive climbing gear while local children ran around with distended bellies.”

A classroom of children from rural homes in Zambia. (Royal Mayhem, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

While running the lodge and its restaurant, Mendelsohn and a friend from the Kilimanjaro trip raised funds to help some 200 Zambian children attend school. (School tuition fees were subsequently abolished.)

She also started rescuing dogs and building kennels in a closed-off area of the lodge. “But a hotel and restaurant with barking dogs wasn’t great.”

Together with a Zambian with some veterinary knowledge, she launched an outreach program in 2015 that offered free rabies vaccinations for dogs and deworming and treatment against fleas. “There was a huge turnout,” she said. “We treated 250 dogs in one day.”

That led to the creation of the Zambezi Animal Welfare Services.

Feeding the cats at the Zambezi Animal Welfare Service (ZAWS) sanctuary in Livingstone, Zambia. (Courtesy: ZAWS)

The sanctuary she now runs is still the only one south of Lusaka and one of the only ones in the country.

After the COVID-19 pandemic halted tourism, Mendelsohn left the lodge and sold it.

She borrowed and recently bought a farm where she and animal-lover friends established the permanent sanctuary. It employs 12 Zambians.

Over the years, Mendelsohn has experienced a divorce and an armed robbery at the lodge which left two dead, one injured, and Mendelsohn with a period suffering PTSD.

Lynne Mendelsohn of the Zambezi Animal Welfare Services’ sanctuary in Livingstone, Zambia, rescues a sick dog. (Courtesy: ZAWS)

She and her team are currently dealing with a string of traumatic dog deaths caused by donated dog food that was contaminated with ataflatoxin — a mold in maize, which is an ingredient in dog food.

Raising funds is hard, even though it costs just $2,500 per month to pay salaries (she takes no money), food for staff and the animals, electricity and water.

Bath time at the shelter run by the Zambezi Animal Welfare Service (ZAWS) in Livingstone, Zambia. (Courtesy: ZAWS)

But she has no plans to leave. She mentioned a one-legged man on crutches who walked three kilometers (just under two miles) with four dogs on string leads to get them vaccinated, spayed, and neutered. “How can I quit when there are people like him?” she said.

She continued, “It drives me crazy, but I love it here and have never felt so at home even though I’m very much a foreigner and, in many ways, very different. Many Zambians are lovely, friendly people, and Livingstone is a small town where everyone knows me, whether I like it or not.”

Community outreach by the Zambezi Animal Welfare Services, Livingstone, Zambia. (Courtesy: ZAWS)

Zambia and Livingstone have a rich Jewish history. Mendelsohn knows of one other Jew who resides there part-time today.

“As part of my identity, being Jewish is important,” she said, “but the religious side is not for me. I tell people here it’s like my tribe.”

The Jewish cemetery in Livingstone, Zambia, July 10, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)

She added, “I’m going to stay in Livingstone and would like to be buried in the Jewish cemetery.”

Lucia Capelluto's story highlights the tragedy of the Rhodes community

 Lucia  Capelluto’s story highlights the ordeal of Rhodes

Published by the SA Jewish Report (with thanks)

by Lee Tankle \

on

 May 9, 2024

On the 80th anniversary of the deportation of 44 000 Jews from Hungary and 1 900 Jews from Rhodes, this year’s Yom Hashoah ceremony in Cape Town felt all the more pertinent because 16 Holocaust survivors from Rhodes are buried at Pinelands Cemetery.

Those at the ceremony were able to hear the story of one such survivor buried there, Lucia Capelluto, through her son, Isaac Habib. In recounting his mother’s story, he read a letter that his mother sent to her mentor in the years after the war detailing her experiences.

Habib told of his mother’s deportation, her time spent at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and how she eventually married and came to South Africa.

The Germans entered Rhodes in September 1944. On 20 July 1944, a German decree ordered Jewish men to present themselves at the office of L’Aeronautica, known for being the building on the island where Jews were rounded up. Men aged 16 to 60 showed up and were arrested. A few days later, the rest of the Jewish community entered the office of L’Aeronautica. They were arrested, and had to hand over money, jewellery, and other personal effects.

In the mass deportation of Jews from Rhodes, the old and sick were loaded into trucks, the rest had to get to the harbour on foot. Then, as many as 1 900 men, women, and children were crammed into three old open boats for a 10-day journey to mainland Greece.

They were transported to Haidari’s detention camp, 15km from Athens, where they remained for three days, and then taken back to Athens, where they were packed into cattle trains to Auschwitz.

Thirteen days later, on 16 August 1944, the train arrived at Auschwitz. It went right into the middle of the internment camp at Birkenau, and 1 700 people were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Lucia was one of only 200 left to become camp inmates.

Capelluto detailed the daily life and torment she experienced in the camp. “As the days passed, there was less food in the camp. The prisoners dying of hunger and sickness became more numerous every day.”

The grand doctor in the camp would select the sick daily and send them away to the hospital and then eventually to the gas chambers.

Lucia’s sister, Mattie, she wrote, became weepy and delirious. Her shouting brought blows from the baton. She witnessed her sister die on 4 October 1944, three and a half months after her capture.

Habib recounts how his mother went from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, which she described as the point when she knew that the worst was about to start.

“The worst period was from mid-March to the end of April. Typhus and dysentery were raging. I slept between someone who had typhus and my sister, who had dysentery. Yet I caught nothing. The only faint hope I had was that we could feel that we were near the end of the battle,” Habib read.

Out of the 100 women and girls deported from Rhodes and taken to Bergen-Belsen at the time of liberation, only 15 survived. Five more women perished in internment after liberation.

Capelluto remained in Rome after liberation from the camp, and posed as the wife of an Italian officer to leave the camp. She moved to Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, to be with her sisters after failing to return to Rhodes, and married Gershon Habib.

Ethan Werb, the head student at Herzlia, followed the testimony, by saying, “By remembering the Holocaust, we educate ours and future generations about the consequences of hatred and indifference. We teach them to embrace diversity, to cherish the rights and dignity of every individual, and to build a world where the horrors of the past remain just that.

“We’re here, and we’re here to stay. The date 7 October is another reminder that in spite of our persecution, we’ll overcome whatever we face, that in spite of the rising antisemitism globally, we’re here to be the light. We’re here because we’re am Yisrael. After centuries of suffering and persecution, our beloved state of Israel was reborn. And now we know that the Jewish people will never go through another Holocaust again. This is our greatest revenge – the generations, the youth,” Werb said.

“As Jewish youth, we promise to share the stories and testimony of the survivors because we’re the survivors. We’re your revenge, your victory, your legacy. We’ll honour that legacy with humility, courage, knowledge, and love. And by being proud Jews, now and forever.”

Israeli Ambassador Eli Belotsercovsky sent a video message to the Cape Town community saying, “Every year, we say, ‘Never again!’ And this year, we saw it happen again. We see blind hatred towards Israel and Jews. The date 7 October was the only time since the Holocaust that such a huge number of Jewish people were murdered – 1 200 innocent people most savagely and brutally. And the perpetrators of this attack were motivated, like the Nazis, by blind hatred towards the Jewish people. We have about 130 hostages still in the Hamas tunnels, and we’ll do everything in our power to bring them home.”

Going home – reversing the Zimbabwe Narrative

Reversing the narrative  - source https://www.sajr.co.za/going-home-reversing-the-zimbabwean-narrative/

Going home – reversing the Zimbabwe NarrativePublished 7 months ago on Jul 20, 2023By Tali Feinberg

The story of the Zimbabwean Jewish community in recent decades has largely been one of exodus. However, 35-year-old entrepreneur Yaron Wiesenbacher is reversing that narrative. Last month, he packed up his life in Cape Town, closed his business, boarded a plane with his dog, and headed back to his homeland.

“My life in Cape Town was good, but I think moving back has been on my mind for about five years,” says Wiesenbacher. “There’s a lot of economic opportunity here. For me personally, I think there’s a lot more growth opportunity here in Zim.”

His sister has emigrated to London, his brother lives in Johannesburg [while running his businesses in Zimbabwe], and his parents live half the year in London and the other half between Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Bulawayo. “So, most of the time it was just me left in Cape Town. I kind of thought, well, now it’s my time to live where I want to live. I was ready for a new challenge.”

Wiesenbacher was born in Bulawayo in 1988. “I went to school at Carmel, which is an amazing Jewish primary school that is still going. It doesn’t have many Jews in it, but it’s still being run as a Jewish primary school. I finished school there at 12, and then went to Christian Brothers College. We left in 2002 because of the economic situation and moved to Cape Town. I lived there for 21 years, and was in restaurants for the past 10 years. I had a coffee shop in Cape Town called Hard Pressed Café, and then opened Merle’s Schnitz. I am now back in Bulawayo, commuting between Bulawayo, Harare, and Victoria Falls, working for my brother who has a few different restaurants in all those three cities.”

Like many Jews, his family’s story is one of wandering and finding refuge.

“My grandparents on my father’s side left Germany in the 1930s. So I have the German surname and the German passport. They settled in Northern Rhodesia, which later became Rhodesia. My mom was born in Bulawayo, my dad was born in Harare. My mother’s father was born in South Africa, but my mother’s mother was born in Bulawayo. Both sides are quite well known in the Zimbabwe Jewish community.” His grandfather, the late Freddy Wiesenbacher, was president of the Harare Hebrew Congregation for many years.

Now, Wiesenbacher is back in his family’s heartland and literally in the home he grew up in, which was never sold.

“Emotionally, leaving Cape Town was difficult, but now that I’ve done it, I’m happy with my decision. Being back here has been amazing. Friends always ask, ‘Is there loadshedding in Zim?’’ I laugh because, like, we invented loadshedding. We really did. It’s been going on for 20 years and there’s very often no power. But everyone’s kitted out with a generator or solar power, or knows what to do when the power is off. Kind of a ‘let’s get on with it’ attitude.

“I feel like in Cape Town, when the power is off, everything stops. Here, when the power is off, you just keep on going.

“I’m a Zimbabwean and for me, this country has the best people in the world. Time moves slower here and there are more hours in the day for me. I really just love being here. The air, the weather, the lifestyle.”

The rescue dog Wiesenbacher took with him to Zimbabwe has “adjusted very well, and is living her best life!”, and he has adopted another dog.

Being warmly welcomed by people has eased the transition. “Already knowing a lot of people here made a difference, but people do go out of their way to help and make you feel welcome.”

Slotting back into the Jewish community that he knew and loved growing up has been comforting. Nothing demonstrated this more than when he sat down to a communal seder with “the last 30 Jews in Bulawayo”.

“This tiny community that was once so strong, having the ability to tell the story of Pesach together – it feels like one big family. Everyone chipped in and made the meal, and there was one long table. It was very special to be part of it.”

There are about 100 Jews left in Zimbabwe, with about 30 in Bulawayo and 70 in Harare, including some Israelis. “Every now and again, we get a minyan. If someone’s got yahrzeit, we message each other and people turn up.” They also mark all the chaggim.

Wiesenbacher says many Zimbabweans are returning, especially young people. “There’s a lot of opportunity here for work and for things to happen. It also feels like there’s more equality between people. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed. For example, there’s no one begging at traffic lights.” The thing he misses from South Africa is a food delivery service like Uber Eats.

The full Jewish life that the South African community provides is also something he’ll miss.

“I want to say thank you as my family and I always felt so welcomed. I feel privileged to have been part of it. I went to Herzlia to finish school, and I felt very lucky to be able to do that. And all the little things, like having CSO’s number in my pocket. We shouldn’t take for granted what an amazing community we have in South Africa. Even though it’s a small community, just know that there’s an even smaller community a little bit up north! So, I’m grateful to the South African Jewish community.”

Wiesenbacher encourages other young people to move back to or emigrate to Zimbabwe. “I think there are incredible economic opportunities, an amazing climate, amazing people, and it’s safer than most countries I’ve been to. Having lived in South Africa and now having lived here, I feel 10 times safer here. It’s not to say I’m completely safe and that nothing bad happens here, but if you can get a job here and you can find your feet, I think it’s a great place to live.”