ANT KATZ

In a nice and neat Sydenham house lives 87-year-old Annette Bert (nee Rosenberg) and her husband, Jack, a pharmacist who will be 90 this year and – believe it or not – still works at a hospital.

Passers-by would have no idea that Annette’s roots are deeply intertwined with those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (see below) and the Betar movement.

Annette told Jewish Report that “Jabotinsky used hold weekly clandestine meetings to teach the Jewish people to defend themselves – ‘don’t bend your knees to anyone,’ he would tell them, “it was time to hit back’.” She knows this because her late mother Reizel Rosenberg (nee Kaplan) used to attend the Jabotinsky’s meetings in the forest outside Shavel (now called Shauli) around 1912.

PICTURED RIGHT: Reizel Kaplan met Louis Rosenberg, a coppersmith, in Lithuania. After the birth of their first daughter, Cecelia, Louis emigrated to SA in around 1914 to avoid WW1. It would be nine long years before he could bring Reizel and Cecelia out to SA – where they settled in Winberg. Five more Rosenberg’s were born of the marriage: Issy (‘21), Sam (’23), Barney (’25), Annette (’26) and the baby, Lilly, in 1928.

“My mother talked of Jabotinsky all the time,” says Annette. She was a committed disciple and instilled his vision among all she met. “He had been my mother’s mentor. Anti-Semitism was rife in SA those days,” says Annette.

Reizel Rosenberg became one of the founders of the Betar movement in SA. Eventually, in every small town in SA where there was a Jewish community, there was a Nesher, a Betar youth group. Annette headed her own group of about 20 members. “We dressed in black and khaki and the other Jewish youth movements called us Nazi Jews,” she says.

“We were a thorn in the side of all other youth movements, they believed in buying land but we believed in fighting for it,” she says emphatically.

She wrote the Betar marching song

Many ex-Betarim will remember the following Betar Marching song – it was Annette Bert who wrote it:

We’re wanting some men for the ranks of our qun* (pronounced ken)
To fight for our land Palestine
For we’re wanting you to be active and true
To be true to the ideals of Betar

To know what we mean when say that we’re keen
And to fight for our right with all our mightt
Until we regain our land once again!

• * The qun (pronounced ken) were the older age groups of Betarim

Annette and Lilly met Jabotinsky

Jabotinsky visited SA twice: in 1936 he addressed Joburg Jewry at the Plaza Cinema in Rissik St; and again in 1939 where Annette, who was by now living in Bertrams, Joburg, met him at the HOD centre.

PICTURED LEFT: Annette Bert in Israel several years ago with her daughter-in-law Lindsay

Lilly was there too. “I remember how proud he made me feel,” she tells SAJR. “He told us to be proud to be Jewish and not allow ourselves to be bullied.”

Annette recalls Jabotinsky telling them how everyone had to work towards a future Israel on both sides of the Jordan River.

Looking back, says Annette: “We were fighting for an Israel, we wanted a State, but we never in our wildest dreams would have believed that we would have what we have today.”

STORY CONTINUES BELOW PICTURE

PICTURED ABOVE: 16-year-old Annette Bert, seated second
from right in the front row, at a Betar camp in 1942

Some anecdotes from Jack

Jack Bert told SAJR Online that he used to carry a bicycle chain with him at all times because groups of anti-Semites always attached lone Jews.

“We once got on a tram in Doornfontein and a big ‘gates’ gets up and asks if there are any Jews on the tram. So my cousin opens his jacket and shows that he has ten knives sewn into it.

“Boy, did that ‘gates’ jump off the tram and run away fast,” says Jack laughing raucously.

Reizel’s parents (Annette’s grandparents), Rabbi Edel and his wife, were picked up at a railway station by the Germans and sent to the camps. Jack and Annette’s late son, Phillip, found record of it on the Internet.

“Can you believe how meticulously the Germans kept records of everyone, by name, and how and where they were killed?” says Jack.

• Ze’ev Jabotinsky MBE was a famed revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defence Organization in Odessa. He was born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky in 1880 and died in 1940. With Joseph Trumpeldor, he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I and later established a number of Jewish organisations such as Beitar, Hatzohar, and the Irgun.