The man from Africa - the Ochberg Orphans

The man from Africa

David E. Kaplan , THE JERUSALEM POST
Apr. 2, 2008

Our knowledge of history is often lazily shaped by Oscar-winning movies. How
many people gained their understanding of Jewish life under the Romans from the
1960s blockbuster Ben Hur, or the rebirth of modern Israel from Otto
Preminger's Exodus?

But what about the movies that don't quite cut it at the Oscars? Have
significant chunks of the past been relegated to the abyss of the unknown?

Such may be the case of a recent documentary by director and producer John
Blair, who won the Best Documentary Feature statuette for his 1995 Anna Frank
Remembered.

Blair's recent entry, The Ochberg Orphans, which deals with the rescue
of Jewish children in 1921 from the war-torn Pale of Settlement and their
resettlement in South Africa, failed to make the final five nominees at this
year's Academy Awards, and an inspiring chapter of Jewish history may now never
reach a wider audience.

An aside to this little-known story is that the documentary also brought a
90-year-old former South African residing in Haifa out of obscurity.

In 2005, before Blair had begun making his documentary, The Jerusalem
Post ran an appeal from the London-based director for information about
South African philanthropist Isaac Ochberg, who helped finance and personally
participated in the rescue. Metro contacted Sam Levin, a former Director
of the South African Zionist Federation in Israel (Telfed), who in the 1920s had
been a youngster in Cape Town, to ascertain whether he had any personal insights
to impart to the director. Levin recalled meeting some of the rescued children
at the Cape Town Jewish Orphanage, where his parents had been active volunteers.
"One particular boy I will never forget," said Levin. "His arm was cut off below
the elbow. The Cossacks had murdered his parents in front of him and when they
were about to finish him off, he raised his arm to protect himself from the
thrust of the sword. They sliced off his arm and left him to die."

In an article that appeared at the time, Levin surmised that it was unlikely
that there were any Ochberg orphans alive today, particularly in Israel. So you
can imagine the surprise when this writer received a phone call from a Cecilia
Harris in Haifa, who revealed in a wavering voice: "I was an Ochberg orphan."

A few months later, Harris was on a flight to London, where she joined the
film crew en route to Eastern Europe, where she starred in the documentary.
Today, a giant poster of the movie hangs on a wall in her small Haifa apartment.

In the early 1920s, reports filtered through to South Africa of dreadful
pogroms taking place in the Ukraine. Cataclysmic forces were in play and,
unsurprisingly, Jews were caught in the middle. Following the collapse of the
old Czarist Empire in 1917, rival armies, the Reds and the Whites, were fighting
for control. Poor at the best of times owing to centuries of oppression, the
Jews' condition deteriorated. Famine was followed by epidemics of typhoid and
other diseases, and into this amalgam the most toxic of ancient antagonisms
exploded to the surface - anti-Semitism. Ukrainian and Polish peasants joined
forces with reactionary officers and troops to massacre Jews wherever they found
them. Pogroms were being reported daily - full details and exact numbers of Jews
killed are unknown to this day. The Pale of Settlement became an open hunting
season for Jews.

In despairing letters smuggled through enemy lines, Jews pleaded to their
kinsman in South Africa and elsewhere for help. These pleas galvanized South
Africa's Jewish communities like nothing before. "Why not try and mount a rescue
operation and bring at least some of the children out?" people asked at meetings
across the country. Overnight, an idea took shape and spread like wildfire.
Before any organization could step in, generous offers of financial and other
kinds of assistance were made. With abounding energy and enthusiasm, Cape Town
businessman Isaac Ochberg embraced the plan.

Two further questions arose: How could the orphans be rescued from a war-torn
region, and would the South African government create any difficulties in
admitting them? Ochberg quickly met with then-prime minister Jan Smuts, who
granted permission.

As reports of the Jews' plight continued to leak out, the dimensions of the
tragedy became clearer. No fewer than 400,000 Jewish orphans were known to be
destitute, so that whatever was done would only amount to a drop in the ocean.
That did not deter the community, who were determined to save whomever they
could.
The next step was for someone to travel to Eastern Europe and make
arrangements on the spot. Without hesitation, Ochberg offered to undertake the
mission. Fanny Frier, who would later become chairwoman of the Cape Jewish
Orphanage, recalled being an orphan in Brest-Litovsk, waiting for "the man from
Africa" to arrive.

"He was going to take some of us away with him and give us a new home on the
other side of the world," Frier said. Understandably, the youngsters had mixed
feelings. While they were excited about "going to a beautiful new country, we
also heard stories of robbers and wild animals and we feared we might be eaten
by lions or cannibals or sold off as slaves. However, when he appeared with his
reddish hair and cheery smile, we all took a great liking to him and called him
'Daddy.' He would spend hours talking to us, making jokes and cheering us up."

Ochberg's most traumatic problem was how to select whom to take and whom to
leave behind. In the end, he decided to choose eight children from each
institution - a total of 200. Since the South African government had stipulated
that the children had to be in good physical and mental health, this required
very careful selection. Only those who had lost both parents were accepted.
Harris, who was three years old at the time, was selected together with her two
older sisters. As no photographs survived, she has no knowledge of what her
parents looked like. She does remember being sick on the ship to South Africa -
the Edinburgh Castle - and her sister Lisa having to look after her.

Another contributor to the documentary was Liebe Klug from Cambridge, who
spends part of the year in Beersheba, where her husband Aaron - a 1982 Nobel
Laureate for chemistry - is on the Board of Governors at Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev. Her father, Alexander Bobrow, was a key player in the drama that
unfolded. "He had been an analytical chemist in a sugar factory," Klug told
Metro. During the Great War, he changed professions to social work,
joining the "Curatorium, which had been formed to help Jewish refugees in Pinsk.
At 26, he accompanied the 200 rescued orphans on the ship to Cape Town, where he
settled and met my mother," she recounts.

In testimony recorded before he died, Bobrow relates that "so many children
were found that we set up three orphanages. At first, Pinsk was so isolated by
the fighting that we were dependent solely on our own resources. We had neither
beds, bedding nor clothes, and I recall using flour bags to make clothes for the
children."

Bobrow relates how typhus broke out in one of the orphanages and how in the
course of his duties he had to walk through the streets as shells were
exploding. Balachou, the notorious Ukrainian, had descended on the city with his
gangs and the pogroms raged for nearly a week. Bobrow recalled how an old lady
tried to pacify the terror-stricken children by calling out: "The Almighty will
keep us and save us - now repeat after me."

As order was restored, supplies began to arrive, first from the Juedischer
Hilfsverein in Berlin and then from the Joint Distribution Committee - cocoa,
condensed milk, cooking oil and clothes. One of the American relief workers
Bobrow recalled meeting was "Henry Morgenthau, who would later become Secretary
of the Treasury under president Franklin Roosevelt."

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Ochberg moved from town to town, visiting
cities - Minsk, Pinsk, Stanislav, Lodz, Lemberg and Wlodowa - as well as
villages, collecting orphans. Three months later, with the 200 children in
London, he wrote to the leadership in South Africa who were eagerly waiting for
news.

"I have been through almost every village in the Polish Ukraine and Galicia
and am now well acquainted with the places where there is at present extreme
suffering. I have succeeded in collecting the necessary number of children, and
I can safely say that the generosity displayed by South African Jewry in making
this mission possible means nothing less than saving their lives. They would
surely have died of starvation, disease, or been lost to our nation for other
reasons. I am now in London with the object of arranging transport and I hope to
be able to advise telegraphically soon of my departure for South Africa with the
children."

"Never, to my dying day, shall I ever forget our first sight of the lights of
Cape Town and then the tremendous reception when we came ashore with half the
city apparently waiting on the quay for us," Frier recorded. So large was the
group of children that the Cape Jewish Orphanage was unable to house them all. A
considerable number went to Johannesburg, including Harris and her two sisters
as well as many others whose children now live in Israel. One was Phyllis
Ratzer, whose daughter, Rene Simpson, lives in Tel Aviv. "She often spoke of
'Papa Ochberg' and died in Johannesburg at the age of 94," Simpson said. Another
descendent of an Ochberg orphan is Yvette Shiloh of Haifa, whose mother, Andja
Avin, was rescued in Warsaw and made aliya in 1960, settling initially on
kibbutz Kfar Blum before moving to Kiryat Gat.

When Ochberg died in Cape Town, he left "what was then the largest single
bequest to the Jewish National Fund," Sam Levin told Metro. "[The JNF]
used it to redeem a piece of land in Israel called Nahalat Yitzhak Ochberg -
which included the kibbutzim of Dalia and Ein Hashofet. In the course of years,
the name Ochberg dropped off the signs and it's now known as Nahalat Yitzhak. I
am certain there is hardly anyone in Israel today who would know which Yitzhak
it was."