When Zimbabweans in Israel converge on July 11 at the Ra'anana Bowls Club for a reunion, they may well exceed the number of Jews remaining in their former country.
THE FIRST Hebrew School of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo, 1901.
Photo: Courtesy
For those up on international news that should come as little surprise. Reminiscent of the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when basic commodities were priced in the millions of Deutschmarks, Zimbabwe under authoritarian President Robert Mugabe goes one better - even at a price tag with a trail of zeros, the desired chicken, loaf of bread or aspirin might not be available. Once the bread basket of Africa, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) today is a basket case, unable to feed even its own people.
From a peak of some 7,500 Jews in the 1970s - comprising some 80 percent Ashkenazim - the country's community today numbers only about 200 souls, an eighth of whom are residents of Savyon Lodge, the retirement home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city.
Zimbabwe-born Dave Bloom, vice chairman of Telfed (an organization representing all Southern Africans in Israel), takes solace in the fact that over 700 former Zimbabweans live in Israel today, "representing some 10% of the size of the community at its zenith."
That many Zimbabweans made Israel their home is hardly surprising. From its humble beginning, the community was proudly Jewish and passionately Zionist. When Bulawayo's 100-year-old synagogue was engulfed in flames in 2004, the conflagration resonated as the end of an era.
In 1894, 21 Jewish traders and ex-soldiers from an expeditionary force sponsored by the British South Africa Company gathered in the tent of Messrs. Moss & Rosenblatt to form a congregation in Bulawayo, a sun-blistered town of tin and wooden shanties with roads that were little more than sand paths. On September 18 that same year, the community gathered in its new synagogue - no longer a tent, but a hut - to consider the establishment of a Zionist society. A lengthy discussion ensued as to whether the society should identify itself with Herzlian Zionism or with Hovevei Zion, the precursor to political Zionism. In other words, three years before the first Zionist Congress in Basel, a group of pioneering Jews, trying to eke out a living in the most primitive conditions in central Africa, were discussing the Jewish people's alternatives in their quest for a national homeland. Hardly having established a home for themselves, they were seeking a national home for their people.
EZER WEIZMANN visiting Salisbury (today Harare) with a guard-of-honor of members of the Jewish youth movements. Debbie Zabow, the first girl in Habonim uniform on the left, is today a resident of Kfar Saba.
Photo: Courtesy
In 1919, Lord Edmund Allenby visited Rhodesia. As a World War I hero who only two years earlier had conquered Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, he was welcomed by the local Zionist leadership. Asked what he thought lay ahead for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people, he responded emphatically, "Hard work and increased immigration." History records that in the 1930s, the per capita financial contribution of Rhodesian Jewry to Palestine was the highest in the Diaspora. This was a tradition that continued into the 1970s.
Even before the embers of the Bulawayo Synagogue cooled in 2004, Bloom, who describes his erstwhile community as a "shtetl in Africa," believed it was time to "preserve the past before nothing was left or no one alive to tell the story." He started collecting material, which he posted on his Web site (www.zjc.org.il).
Visiting the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, he made copies of newspaper cuttings, minutes of meetings and photos. In a collection of documents recording interviews with early Jewish settlers in Rhodesia, he discovered the unpublished manuscript by the renowned South African historian Eric Rosenthal on "Rhodesian Jewry and its Story." From these writings we learn of an Englishman, Daniel Montague Kisch, the first Jew to feature in the history of Rhodesia. By 1860 he had become a prospector "and so joined the expedition of diggers, mainly Australian, on the wearisome trek to a golden will-o'-the-wisp on the Tati Fields." Kisch had a frontier way of dealing with issues. When Sir John Swinburne, a future MP, but then chairman of the London & Limpopo Company working on the Tati Concession, tried to assert his authority over Kisch, he received the latter's resignation in the form of a broken nose.
Like Kisch, Moss Cohen also came to Rhodesia from England, although because of his alleged Irish "associations" he was better known as Paddy Cohen. The area was a tribal kingdom and Cohen wrote in a diary entry how "King Lobengula took a fancy" to him and granted him a trading license, "the sole rights in all his territory."
"I gave him a horse for it," he added.
Later, when the issue of prospecting rights for gold arose, the king, Cohen wrote, "gave a promise that I should be the first to get one. He would not give it in writing, but I was satisfied with his (verbal) promise."
Things never quite worked out that way. Rosenthal recounts the trials and tribulations of this colorful Jewish personality who fell in and out of favor with all the major players of the time, a time period known as the "Scramble for Africa" - including King Lobengula; mining magnate Charles Dunell Rudd, Rhodesian pioneer Francis R. Thompson, better known as "Matabele," and imperial colossus Cecil John Rhodes - over who owned what rights.
Before its posting on Bloom's Web site, very few had seen Rosenthal's monumental work, commissioned by the Rhodesian Jewish Board of Deputies in 1949. Since its completion, it attracted little else than dust. "Very few even knew of its existence. Gems were coming out of the woodwork," Bloom told Metro. People all over the world were dusting off the past to reveal a treasure trove of Jewish history in central Africa, much of which is now available on his site.
Mindful of the tragedy that befell the shtetls of Eastern Europe, where the past itself was no less a victim than the people of history's toxic twists, Bloom, of Polish ancestry, was determined to pictorially document all the Jewish graves in Zimbabwe. "So far, we have posted on our Web site photographs of over 4,000 headstones… covering Harare (formally Salisbury), Bulawayo and all the smaller country towns." Former Zimbabweans from all over the world have been contributing to the site and, Bloom says, "we now have over 200 family biographies. These personal narratives present a colorful history not only of the families, but also of the country, illuminating how people arrived in what was then Rhodesia and why they came."
