The story behind the Arcadia Jewish Children’s Home

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

It began when Astrid Broll’s mother was born on September 10, 1902. Three days later her own mother, Astrid’s grandmother, died. Her grandfather was unable to cope with his other eight children and placed them in Nazareth House, a Catholic institution.

The new-born infant, named Anne after her deceased mother, was given to a family who changed her name to Elma Jacobs and raised her as a Catholic.

The eldest child, 12-year-old Sophia, was deemed to be too old for the orphanage so she was sent on her own by ship to the Norwood Jewish Orphanage in London. She stayed there until she was 18, then returned to South Africa at which point she changed her name to Vera.

“I remember meeting her for the first time,” Astrid recalls accompanying her mother on a visit to her sister. “I was a little girl of five or six. Her husband was a tailor in Eloff Street in Johannesburg in one of the old ‘broekie lace’ buildings.“When the Jewish community heard about the seven Jewish children who had been placed in a Catholic institution, they immediately took them and placed them in a rented house in Hillbrow and that was the beginning of Arcadia,” officially opened on September 8, 1903.

“They were there for a short while,” she says. “They did offer my grandfather (Benjamin Samuels) a house and help to take the children back – they wanted the children to be with the father obviously – but he said he couldn’t.”

Astrid had no idea what had happened to him until very recently, when she discovered that he had gone to the United States and remarried.

Also in 1903, Max Langermann donated four stands in the Johannesburg suburb of Kensington, with the idea of establishing an orphanage. With this in mind, it was decided that the house in Hillbrow be only temporarily rented and a matron, a cook-general and a “native servant” engaged, the then-named South African Jewish Orphanage being under the overall supervision of the Jewish Ladies’ Communal League.

The house proved to be too small for the growing number of children, so a new building was erected on the Kensington stands and in October 1905, 20 orphans moved in. In 1922, the committee heard that Villa Arcadia in Parktown, designed by Sir Herbert Baker in 1909, was for sale and it was purchased for 30 000 pounds to house the orphans who had by then grown to 81.

Meanwhile Astrid’s mom was blissfully unaware of her origins and the fact that she was Jewish. “She had never been told that she was adopted – her mother and father subsequently had three children of their own, so she was the eldest.

“She went to church, had a cross over her bed, but was always interested in Jewish affairs. She went out with Jewish men, went to Jewish art exhibitions.

“When she was 21 and still living with her parents, her biological sister Ada came in through the gate – she looked a lot like my mother – and said: ‘Are you Elma? Well, I’m your real sister.’”

Ada had searched for the whole family, no easy task as they had all been adopted from Arcadia by different parents.

“Of course there was a big upset – her adoptive parents came and explained the situation to her and she was devastated. The younger ‘siblings’ then changed their whole attitude towards her, both because she was Jewish and possibly because her ‘mother’ had always favoured her above the others,” Astrid surmises.

Elma then embarked on a mission to connect with her true siblings. Her brother Louis had been adopted by the Goldman family of Springs and in the last five years, Astrid has connected with his two daughters, her first cousins, one of whom lives near her son in London.

At the age of 29, after two prior engagements, Elma married Astrid’s “very frum” father, William Leslie Kerby (originally Ludwig Kopelowitz), who was 22 years her senior. “He went to shul twice a day every day of his life,” Astrid recalls.

Of her mother’s siblings, Astrid met Louis, Vera and Ada. She also remembers going to visit her mother’s adoptive family, with whom her mother maintained contact, despite their change in attitude.

She remembers her mother keeping a strictly kosher home.

In spite of the fact that she only met her biological family at the age of 21, she had no trouble integrating with them.

“When I met my first cousins in London for the first time, we just connected immediately,” Astrid recalls.

Astrid’s mother went to school until standard five (not uncommon for the times) but “basically educated herself. She was a very cultured person.

“She was a great art collector, as was my father, and was a patron of the arts, introducing young artists to the right people. That’s how they knew Herman Wald,” she says, referring to the well-known sculptor among whose works are the memorial to the Six Million in West Park Jewish Cemetery and the Stampede in central Johannesburg.