Fasting far from home – tales of travellers on Yom Kippur

A man secretly fasting in an Arab country; a national-team cricketer breaking his fast during a team meeting; and a woman refused entry into a shul are some of the Yom Kippur experiences South Africans have had in weird and wonderful places across the world.

In August 2007, Israeli-born Johannesburg-based engineering professional Ishai Klawansky bagged a job with a big American dredging corporation in Bahrain building massive islands off the northern coast of the Arab country. It was a multimillion-dollar project.

“I’m a dual citizen, I’m Israeli and South African, so I’ve got two passports,” he says. “When I started working in Bahrain, I wasn’t sure what the status of me being an Israeli in an Arab country was, so I went there on my South African passport. Yom Kippur occurred a month or two after I arrived.”

Having not really disclosed to anyone in Bahrain that he was Jewish and Israeli, he worked quietly at the office and, amid the scorching heat, fasted the whole day without telling anyone. “I wasn’t sure where that information would end up if I did,” Klawansky says. “The Bahraini government was very involved with the dredging company. Even though I worked with a whole host of different nationalities, lots of local Bahrainis were involved.”

Being an Israeli, Klawansky wasn’t sure if he was even allowed to be working in Bahrain, so he felt scared to divulge that he was fasting. “I didn’t want it to become known to the company’s Bahraini partners and cause problems.”

That said, Bahrain isn’t antisemitic or anti-Israel, Klawansky says. “Until the Abraham Accords were signed recently, there weren’t any official relations between Bahrain and Israel. But even though I was there on my South African passport, I’m also Israeli, so you can’t ignore that.”

Former cricketer Adam Bacher’s admirable performances during the Proteas’ three-match Test series in Pakistan in October 1997 overlapped with Yom Kippur.

He scored two 50s, including 96, as South Africa became the first team to win a Test series in Pakistan since Sri Lanka in the 1995/1996 season.

“Fortunately for me, Yom Kippur fell on the day after the first Test match, so I didn’t have to worry about what to do, if I should play or not,” Bacher says.

He says his teammates respected the fact that he was fasting, and were curious about it.

As the breaking of the fast happened during a team meeting, everyone in the Proteas camp learnt about the fast and its timing. “The whole meeting was stopped to allow me to break my fast on an Energade, our sponsor at the time.”

All in all, Bacher reminisces, “It was interesting and memorable to spend Yom Kippur in an Islamic country with people who didn’t understand what the fast was about. I think my teammates enjoyed learning about the experience.”

Johannesburg trauma counsellor Andy Nossel was in Amsterdam during the yom tovim to visit her grandparents. Besides reading a book titled The Practice of Happiness, which she felt was quite profound on Yom Kippur, she didn’t know what to do with herself during the fast. “I went to the shul, but they weren’t letting strangers in, so I went walking.”

After wandering around the city, she meandered through a park and chanced upon a cemetery. “It turned out to be a Jewish cemetery with tombstones which had fallen. It felt profound that I ended up in a Jewish cemetery in a strange city on Yom Kippur.”

Later, someone explained to Nossel that in Amsterdam, people weren’t very open about being Jewish. “You had to be known,” she says. “You couldn’t just rock up at a shul. They were still quite paranoid, not comfortable.”

SA Jewish Report editor Peta Krost, then a journalist at the Saturday Star and Sunday Independent, didn’t feel comfortable about going to Munich on a press junket over Yom Kippur during the late 1990s, but it turned out to be a Day of Atonement she’ll never forget.

“I didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to see a country I’d never seen,” she says. “Also, the trip included a visit to Dachau, the concentration camp on the outskirts of the city. Somehow, being able to walk through Dachau on erev Yom Kippur made sense to me.”

Just before entering Dachau, the tour guide pointed out to the group that Krost was the only Jew with them, and that this might be upsetting for her.

“I steeled myself and kept to myself as I walked through the grounds of this place of destruction, where so many of our people had been murdered and treated like sub-humans.” There were 32 000 documented murders there, and many thousands weren’t documented – mostly Jews.

Krost discovered that Dachau wasn’t just the first concentration camp created by the Nazis, it was also the prototype for many others. Above the entrance gate was that chilling phrase, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes one free), making Krost feel quite queasy.

“I saw the mounds of teeth, hair, and the rows and rows of bunks that abused people were shoved together to sleep on,” she recalls.

Krost felt the urge to find a shul, specifically so she could hear Kol Nidre at the start of the fast.

“I found a shul, and sought solace there among people who all looked so familiar to me. It was as if I recognised faces from home. Then, I spotted a woman and thought to myself, ‘Wow, that looks like my Israeli cousin, Rochel!’” Rochel was the daughter of Krost’s paternal grandfather’s sister, a generation above her.

When the service concluded, and they were all walking out, Krost called the woman.

“She immediately turned around and with her, I recognised her husband, Yitzhak. It was a warm reunion. I didn’t know until then that Yitzhak was a Holocaust survivor whose whole family were murdered, and that he went back every year around Yom Kippur to remember them,” she said.