The Land
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LYNNE MEREDITH COHN
STAFF WRITER
Detroit's out African Jews
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ulian Wendrow was 4
when he realized that
South Africa was not a
place he could spend his life.
He was riding his bicycle
in the town square in George
on the Cape. An African
woman, nursing her infant,
sat under a large tree near-
by.
"All of a sudden, I just hear
this commotion, police ran,
screaming at the woman in
Afrikaans• jou fawken kaffer,'
[you f—ing kaffer, slang for nig-
ger]. They beat this woman a few times.
She started crying, clutched the infant"
to her.
Stunned, Julian jumped on his bike
and rode home. "My mother said,
What's going on?' And I told her about
the incident."
His mother told him to be careful, ex-
plaining that in South Africa, "you can't
trust anyone. For me that was a turn-
ing point."
The sentiments of Mr. Wendrow, who
came to Detroit in 1986, are typical of
South African expatriates. Although
they are from vastly different back-
grounds, Detroit's South African Jews
left their homeland mainly because they
could not tolerate apartheid.
"Politically, I think, we all felt un-
comfortable with the system. As things
developed, becoming more oppressive,
I didn't think it was going to end up as
the kind of society I wanted to live in or
bring up my family in," said Dr. David
Schwartz, chairman of the gynecolo-
gy/obstetrics department at Sinai Hos-
pital. Dr. Schwartz came with his wife
Elda to the United States in 1977.
"We were always politically con-
cerned, being Jewish and seeing what
was happening," says Carol Maisels,
who with her husband Jeffrey immi-
grated to Salem, Mass., in 1966. Twen-
ty years later they came to Detroit,
where Dr. Maisels chairs Beaumont
Hospital's pediatrics department.
Within Alan Goodman's family, there
were "many divergent opinions" on
apartheid. In fact, the president of the
synagogue they attended was a strong
supporter of the Nationalist Party and
its apartheid policies.
As a student at Rhodes University in
Grahamstown on the eastern Cape, Mr.
Goodman became involved in the stu-
dent disobedience campaign, protest-
ing "archaic" dorm rules and inhumane
treatment of black staff members.
Blacks were required to work long days
and were given only tea and bread to
eat.
That was "the turning point for me,"
says Mr. Goodman, executive director
of Jewish Family Service. "Man's in-
humanity to man, I thought, would nev-
er change."
He moved to Israel in 1971; his fam-
ily thought he was crazy.
As a soldier in the Israeli army, Mr.
Goodman sat in a foxhole on the Jor-
danian border, fearing the approach of
terrorists. "I remember feeling the bur-
den [of South Africa] dissipating from
me — guilt and stress," he says.
South Africa is a land of riches —
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minerals, climate and crops. It is a large <
country, divided into provinces — Cape,
Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free
State. Blacks and whites came to South
Africa at roughly the same time —
blacks from the north, beginning in the
17th century, and white Europeans
from Holland in 1652. The British came
in the 1800s.
A Jewish presence in South Africa
can be traced to the introduction of re-
ligious tolerance under the Batavian
Republic in 1803 and the subsequent
British takeover. The first Jewish con-
gregation was established in Cape Town
in 1841.
The ancestry of most South African
Jews goes back to the shtetls of Lithua- ,_,
nia. Hilary Isakow says, "Jews who -\
came to South Africa came from one
part of Lithuania, where there were
very brilliant rabbis. In Europe, they
were considered to be the cream."
Audrey Sobel says the Lithuanian
rabbis "saw the way things were going
[in Europe] and said if Jews didn't get
their education," they would fall apart
as a people. For that reason, the rabbis <
advised their young scholars to leave.
Eastern European Jews went as far
as their money would take them. Some
got only as far as South Africa, while
others made it to the goldene medinah
(Yiddish for golden land, America,
which European Jews thought had
streets paved with gold).
"A lot of Jewish families in South ,'
Africa know they have relatives in the
States but don't know who they are or
where," Mrs. Sobel says.