Celebrating the ‘man from Africa’ who rescued Jewish orphans

While we are gripped in the vice of an international pandemic, one can only imagine what about 300 000 Jewish orphans must have experienced 100 years ago in the wake of the Russian Revolution in Eastern Europe. The diseases they faced weren’t coronavirus, but typhoid and smallpox and worst of all, the seemingly incurable malady of antisemitism.

Pogroms were rife in 1921. It was hunting season, and the prey was Jews, with the most vulnerable being Jewish orphans. Jews smuggled letters of their plight out of this region that was experiencing a cataclysmic clash between the Red and White armies. One such letter reached Isaac Ochberg, a Jewish Ukranian-born businessman in Cape Town. It inspired him to take on the cause of saving as many Jewish orphans as possible, bringing them to safety in South Africa.

On 14 March 1921, at his own expense, Ochberg left for London on his dangerous mission to rescue Jewish children. Almost miraculously, he returned with close to 200 Jewish children.

This year, to mark the centenary of this heroic rescue, the SA Jewish Report will host a webinar on 14 March, organised by the Isaac Ochberg Heritage Committee (Israel) in partnership with the Megiddo Regional Council.

To understand the hell the Ochberg orphans came from, one has only to learn of how orphan Harry Stillerman at the Oranje Orphanage in Cape Town lost half his arm.

A band of Cossacks on horseback had come galloping into his shtetl, shot his parents in front of him, and when one of them was about to slash Harry with his sabre, the young boy raised his arm to protect himself. With one strike, he severed Harry’s arm off at the elbow and left him to bleed to death in the mud. But five-year-old Harry didn’t die because the “man from Africa” found him and brought him to South Africa.

Transforming fiction into fact, Ochberg, like a benevolent Pied Piper of Hamelin, crisscrossed by truck, train, and horse-drawn cart, a region beset by civil war and pogroms, plucking up orphans in cities, towns, and shtetls. Had they not been rescued, the odds were that they would have perished.

Those who survived the horrors of the 1920s would have perished in the World War ll devastation of the 1940s. Ochberg recognised that there was always going to be a hunting season for Jews, and so he worked tirelessly to save children and for a future Jewish state.

Ochberg represented the South African Jewish community at the 16th World Zionist Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1929, when the Jewish Agency was established as a government-in-waiting for a state-in-making.

Another of the orphans saved by Ochberg was the late Fanny Frier, who would later become chair of the Cape Jewish Orphanage. She recalled waiting for Ochberg to arrive as an orphan in Brest-Litovsk. “We were told a man from Africa was coming to save us. He was going to take some of us away with him and give us a new home on the other side of the world,” she said. Fanny said they were scared, but when Ochberg appeared, “with his reddish hair and cheery smile, we all took a great liking to him and called him ‘daddy’. He would spend hours talking to us, making jokes, and cheering us up.”

For Fanny and many of the other orphans, Ochberg would be known as “Daddy Ochberg” because as she would say, “he was the only daddy we would know”.

Reporting on his progress during the rescue, Ochberg wrote to an awaiting Jewish community in South Africa, “I have been through almost every village in the Polish Ukraine and Galacia, and am now well acquainted with the places where there is extreme suffering. I have succeeded in collecting the necessary number of children, and I can safely say that the generosity displayed by South African Jewry in making this mission possible means nothing less than saving their lives. They would surely have died of starvation, disease, or been lost to our nation for other reasons.”

Today, there are thousands of Jews who are alive because of “Daddy Ochberg”, descendants of the Ochberg orphans from South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Israel. They will reunite on 14 March at the webinar to celebrate this great man. The last reunion was in 2011, when the Isaac Ochberg Memorial Park was inaugurated in Megiddo, Israel.

In the webinar, a panel discussion will be followed by a recorded ceremony from Ochberg Park. There will be messages from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Jewish Agency Chairperson Isaac Herzog, and others.

Ochberg was, after all, not only a saviour of children but a Zionist visionary who left large bequests in the 1930s that went to Jewish institutions of learning in Palestine as well as the purchase of huge tracts of land that established Kibbutzim Dalia and Gal’ed in the Megiddo district.

These kibbutzim would later absorb survivors of the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of World War II and so, from saving children in 1921, Ochberg would leave a legacy of salvation into the future that would help Jews in need again nearly three decades later. It’s little wonder that the message of Isaac Ochberg resonates down the century. It’s from the Talmud: “He who has saved one life is as though he has saved the entire world.”

In 2016, when I addressed Limmud South Africa and all the Jewish schools in Johannesburg about Ochberg, I started with King David Linksfield, posing the question:

“Has anyone here ever heard of Isaac Ochberg?”

A hand went up shyly.

“How come?” I asked.

“He saved my great grandfather, Solly Jossel.”

It dawned on the packed auditorium of students that this was no dry history lesson but something personal, meaningful, and instructive. Their friend wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for one man – Isaac Ochberg.

• David E. Kaplan is a founding member and the present chairperson of the Isaac Ochberg Heritage Committee (Israel) and a former chairperson of Telfed. A journalist, Kaplan is the editor of the ‘Hilton Israel Magazine’, ‘Inbal Jerusalem Magazine’, and the founder and editor of the online multimedia platform, Lay Of The Land.