The most meaningful award you can get

When Discovery chief executive and founder, Adrian Gore, accepted the Absa Jewish Achiever Business Icon award in 2019, he made it clear that winning an award from his own community was the most meaningful award one could get.

“When you win some global award, they don’t really care who you are,” said Gore at the time. “But this is different, this is about my family and my community. Here, everyone recognises who you are, and what my community thinks of me matters.”

His sentiments have been echoed by winners through the 25 years of Absa Jewish Achiever Awards.

For the phenomenal award winners, no matter the calibre and extent of the work they have done and their achievements, being celebrated at these awards is humbling. It also has an impact on their careers and lives going forward.

Gore went on to say that he acknowledged that the award meant he had a responsibility to “exhibit the right values and help build communities in this country”, and he accepted it with gratitude.

Again, like Gore, so many of our Jewish winners have taken the cudgels of their Achievers’ celebrity, and have used it for the betterment of our community and our country.

When Professor Barry Schoub won the Kia Community Service Award during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he said, “I’m deeply honoured, humbled, and gratified to receive this award, dedicated to recognising service to the Jewish community. For me, it has been a great honour and an enormous privilege to be able to give something back to this wonderful and very special community during the COVID-19 crisis.”

Schoub said he believed there were many others in our community who were at least equally, if not more, deserving of recognition for what they had done for the community. “Many exceptional members of our community have played their indispensable part, providing the statistical and epidemiological data for planning, devising the safety protocols for shuls, functions, and schools,” he said.

“I feel privileged to belong to this special South African Jewish community. Sometimes, it may take a crisis or a challenge for us to take a step back and reflect on how blessed we are,” he said. “From the Chevrah Kadisha to the Beth Din and the SA Jewish Report, we are undoubtedly and unequivocally the leaders of the world, Jewish and non-Jewish.”

When veteran South African lawyer, judge, and member of the Bar of England and Wales, Sir Sydney Kentridge received his Lifetime Achievement Award in the same year, he spoke of how much he valued getting this award from the South African Jewish community, saying, “That’s where I come from” and “I so value my Jewish background.”

Absa Jewish Achiever Business Icon 2020 Professor Michael Katz, an expert in corporate and commercial law, also expressed his gratitude, saying that “receiving an honour from one’s own community was extraordinarily meaningful”.

Advocate Carol Steinberg, who won the Europcar Women in Leadership Award in 2022, spoke of her fellow winners and nominees as sharing her philosophy regarding South Africa, “If not us, then who?” she asked. “People who are role models and heroes and have stood up at the right time to do the right thing. And that’s an amazing thing about this powerful and vulnerable community.”

When Dr Taddy Blecher won 2023’s Bertie Lubner Humanitarian Award in honour of Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris at the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards, he said, “It’s an unbelievable, unimaginable honour to receive this [award] from my beautiful Jewish community.”

Blecher, the chief executive and co-founder of the Maharishi Invincibility Institute, Imvula Education Empowerment Fund, and Invincible Group, accepted his award saying, “I’m so grateful and proud to be just one of many Jews in this country who have devoted so much of their lives and resources to serving our fellow men and women in South Africa.

“So many of the key supporters of our work to help marginalised youth in our country are Jewish South Africans, here and across the world,” he said.

Justin Blend, who won the Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2022 with his brother Greg and Grant Friedman of Africrest Properties, told how he had first attended the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards 17 years earlier.

“I was in awe of all the nominees and winners,” said Blend. “I made myself a promise that I would give everything I had to create a great business which would one day be worthy of winning an award. Now, in my 17th year in attendance, that dream has become true.”

Like Blend, this moment in every Achiever’s career is a moment when they are acknowledged by their own community, their own people. It’s a unique and special time in anyone’s life.

So, to ensure we have the best ever crop of Absa Jewish Achievers in 2024, nominate now. Go to: bit.ly/ja2024nom