Parow’s Jewish dynasty keeps vibrant history alive

Richard Mendelsohn has recently launched his book, The Jews of Parow. The History of a South African Community as a part of a three-pronged project to celebrate its Jewish history. We speak to him about the book.

What drew you to research and write this book?

Parow was a small Jewish suburban community founded in the early twentieth century on the unfashionable “northern” edge of Cape Town. It never numbered much more than a hundred families, and ceased to exist in 1993 when its synagogue was deconsecrated. Yet, despite its small size and its disappearance more than three decades ago, it has had a remarkable afterlife thanks to the generosity and vision of one of its leading early family clans, the Kaplans and Kushlicks, who together founded international steel company Cape Gate.

The Parow Project was conceived by Oren Kaplan, the grandson of one of its principal founders, to commemorate in 2024 the 95th anniversary of the establishment of Cape Gate in Parow in 1929. The triple outcomes of this multi-year project were:

• A richly illustrated book, The Jews of Parow. The History of a South African Community, authored by myself, a former head of the history department at the University of Cape Town.
• An exciting and innovative exhibition at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town, titled Echoes of Parow. The Story of a South African Jewish Community.
• A comprehensive and voluminous website, The Jews of Parow, housing the mountain of material discovered by the Parow Project research team.

What’s your history in Parow?

I grew up in Parow in the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of the Parow Jewish community. Like the Kaplan family, I have deep roots in Parow since my grandfather was an early leader of the community during the interwar years. My late mother was born and grew up in Parow in those years, and returned to Parow at the beginning of the 1950s, where she and my father, a general practitioner, remained until 1995, and were among the last Jews to leave. The excitement of this project was writing about people I knew and about a communal life I had experienced. Returning to Parow all these years later is a nostalgic but mildly melancholic experience. Voortrekker Road, the Parow main road, once alive with Jewish commerce, is now seedy and neglected, a site of urban decay.

What was it like to grow up there?

The post-war decades were a halcyon time. Like the many I interviewed for the project, I have happy memories of a safe and warm Jewish life, in the face-to-face intimacy of a small Jewish community. Cheder-going is one of our most commonly recalled memories, with afternoons spent in the company of “moreh”, our irascible but highly effective teacher, Rabbi Benjamin Lipshitz, and “geveret”, his gentle wife, Nechama Lipshitz, the niece of the great Rav Kook.

Tell us a little about the controversial rabbi.

Described by a former cheder pupil, as “the most misunderstood rabbi of his times”, Lipshitz, who had both a yeshiva and a Hebrew University education, served the Parow community for three-and-half decades from 1930 onwards. Lipshitz’s longevity, despite chronic conflict with the community, usually because of his robust and sometimes physical “old-world” teaching methods, was a mark of often grudging respect for a man of considerable accomplishment. He’s a fascinating case study of the South African rabbinate of his times.

What makes Parow unique compared to other SA towns with significant Jewish communities?

Parow’s waxing and waning through the course of the twentieth century mirrors the broader trajectory of South African Jewry, its growth and recession. The community’s social, business, and religious life is reflective of South African Jewish life at large. Jews in Parow practiced – or failed to practice – their religion, earned their livelihoods, and socialised together, as they did elsewhere.

What was the relationship like between the Jews in Parow and the Afrikaner communities?

For much of the twentieth century, Parow was a predominantly Afrikaner town. While Jews experienced antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century as they did elsewhere in South Africa, this had abated by the 1950s, the heyday of the Parow Jewish community. The many interviews I conducted with those who grew up in Parow during this era reflect the relative absence of overt expressions of antisemitism in their childhoods. Politically, the Jews of Parow, with singular exceptions, kept their heads below the parapet in an Afrikaner Nationalist-dominated neighbourhood.

Were there Jews in significant positions in the town?

Jews, including my grandfather, were elected to the village management board in Parow’s early decades, and when Parow became a municipality in 1939, Dr Jack Karpas was elected to the council. During the war, Karpas, a highly respected and popular figure, became the mayor of Parow, the first and only Jew to serve in this office. At the same time, he led the Jewish community, overseeing the building of its new synagogue. After he went on aliya in 1951, he played a major role in Israeli medicine as deputy director of Hadassah, deeply engaged in the formation of its new hospital in Jerusalem.

Mendel Kaplan and his family were from Parow. Can you tell us a bit about their place in the town and their interaction with it since the Jewish community left in 1993?

Kaplan, a philanthropist and international Jewish leader, had deep roots in Parow, of which he was immensely proud. His grandparents, Isaac and Rachel Bloch, were pioneering shopkeepers in Parow in the first decades of the twentieth century; and Parow’s early minyans were held in their home behind their main road store. Their daughter, Jessie, married Ike Kaplan, who together with his brother, Solly, and his friend and future-brother-in-law, Solly Kushlick, set up Cape Gate in Parow in 1929 in a garage they rented for £6 per month.

From these humble Parow origins, the family business grew over time into an international steel company. After the closure of the Parow synagogue in 1993, Kaplan, who had had his Barmitzvah in Parow, arranged for the shipment of the Parow shul’s furniture, seats, bimah, and pulpit, to the newly constructed Shivtei Israel Synagogue in Ra’anana in Israel. One of the Parow shul’s Torahs followed soon after. The interior of the synagogue has now been refurbished by the Kaplan and Kushlick families to commemorate the anniversaries of the foundations of their South African and Israeli businesses.

Is there anything Jewish in Parow today or any obvious traces of the community’s past?

Little remains today of the once thriving Jewish Parow except two buildings. The Talmud Torah, opened in 1957, was acquired by the municipality and served for a while as a now defunct Parow museum. The attractive shul, opened to great fanfare in 1951, was similarly acquired by the Parow municipality in 1993. It subsequently fell on hard times, deteriorating physically as it stood vacant for years. Incongruously, it was eventually leased by the council to a private enthusiast who set up a Whale Museum. The present use of the now renovated building is as a storage facility for the law enforcement department of the City of Cape Town.

What research did you do for the book?

The Parow Project occupied a research team centred at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town for more than two years. A group of postgraduate research students together with myself scoured archival records together with the Jewish press. Researchers working at the Deeds Office in Cape Town located every property transaction involving Jewish buyers or sellers since the start of Parow in the early twentieth century until its decline in the late century. In addition, I conducted more than 60 lengthy interviews with people who had grown up or had worked in Parow.

What’s the relationship between the Parow Jewish community and the Cape Town and other Jewish communities?

Parow was intimately connected with the neighbouring Jewish communities of Cape Town’s northern suburbs – Goodwood, Bellville, and Durbanville. The Jews of these communities shared a passion with Jewish communities throughout South Africa for Zionism.

Who is the book aimed at?

The intention is to provide a lively and accessible account of Jewish life in a small but representative South African Jewish community in the twentieth century. The book goes beyond congregational history, and attempts a broader and more comprehensive social history of a Jewish community. It’s also an exercise in collective biography, with brief accounts of the many individual and family stories that together constituted communal life. It’s aimed at all those interested in the history of South African Jewry.

• The Jews of Parow. The History of a South African Community is available at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town and at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre.