“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. 21st 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.
