...and Arthur makes 10...

“The streets of Yeoville came alive with Jewish song and dance as a procession including Sifrei Torah marched from the old Torah Centre to their new premises a few blocks away.  The Torahs were carried by distinguished rabbis and held under a  chupah. Participating in the march were the S.A.D.F. 21^st Batallian Brass Band, Scottish bagpipes as well as pupils from the Shaarei Torah, Torah Academy, Yeshivah College and Yeshiva Toras Emes Schools.” (Jewish Herald, February 1986)

After Deputy Mayor Councillor, Professor Harold Rudolph cut the ribbon, Mr Sam Sher, who sponsored the establishment of the Torah Centre fastened a mezuzah to the front door of the new Shul. The spiritual leader of the Torah Centre, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch said “ as religious Jews we can rejoice for it is our policy to always look to the future.”

Throughout the history of Johannesburg, the migration of Jewish people away from the centre of town where the first synagogue was built in the late 1880s,  has contributed significantly to the  changing face of the city.  In the almost thirty years since the Torah Centre was opened in Yeoville, most Jewish people have moved away from the area.  Today the Torah Centre is the only functioning synagogue in suburb where there were once at least ten vibrant synagogues in a large Jewish community.

The optimistic Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch now lives in Jerusalem, where he is the Vice-President of the Rabbinical Court, and it is a daily challenge to draw the Minyan (the quorum of 10 Jewish men required to perform the daily prayers).

 

I spoke to Arthur Kohn, one of the ten men who faithfully returns to the Centre three times a day, seven days a week, to participate in communal prayer.  Arthur walks to the Torah Centre, which is a few blocks away from his flat in Honey Street, Berea. Walking, buses and taxis are Arthur’s standard means of  transport all over Johannesburg. It is years since he drove a car, he tells me. On Jewish holidays he visits other synagogues: The Torah Academy, Hamar and Beis Menacham. He is not too sure what suburbs they are in but he knows where the taxi stops.  

Born in Pietersburg from German and South African parentage, Arthur knows very little about his ancestry. His father was a German Jew, “a perfect German gentleman” who used to polish his shoes and place them in the same position beneath his bed to the centimeter, every day of his life.  He died when Arthur was four and there are no other memories apart from an impression that he was a “good man.”

After his father’s death, Arthur’s mother, a travelling saleswoman who “knew the shoe trade inside out” supported Arthur and his brother as a single mother until she remarried. The family moved from Pietersburg, to Germiston, to Vryburg, and finally to Johannesburg.

In the late 1980s, Arthur was retrenched from his job as a foreman for a mining company based in Booysens and he decided to get into the second hand book trade.  He set up a table at the Johannesburg station, for which he paid R 35 per day, and stored his books in a storeroom at the station at night.  He started off with “a couple of paperbacks” and gradually expanded the business.  “I was always reading so I knew what was popular and as I sold, I learned what people wanted and didn’t want.”

Five years later he branched out to other flea markets – the Bruma Market, which was “a total washout”, and a flea market in Randburg which was more fruitful but impossible to sustain because of the difficulties of transport to and from the market. He worked also for some time with a well-known First Edition Dealer, assisting him with the restoration and storage of stock.

He is a heavy smoker, to the dismay of his wife and friends, and has an antipathy to any green foodstuff. For years he and his adored little black  mongrel, Rocky, were a feature of Eastern Jo'burg life as he trudged the streets with his bag of book-finds in search of stock.

Some years ago he married for the second time, very happily, and is now semi-retired. He is still involved in the Used Book Trade, though, by putting his experience to bear in helping another local dealer.

He is an inveterate optimist who has always lived without fear on the edge of things, sustained by a practical Jewishness and faith.