shoshana kordova

By Shoshana Kordova

CAPE TOWN and JOHANNESBURG - One Helen spent 13 out of her 36 parliamentary years as the sole liberal [legislative] voice in apartheid South Africa; the other Helen began activist life by driving her green Mercedes into poor black townships in the 1960s to distribute blankets, bread, shoes and peanut butter. One Helen says the only reason she belongs to a synagogue is to make sure the Reform rabbi will have her cremated, which traditional Judaism opposes; the other Helen says creating a now-11-year-old national social-service umbrella organization is part of what Judaism means to her.

Helen Suzman - who represented the Progressive Party (now called the Democratic Alliance) in South Africa’s parliament from 1953-1989 and will be 86 in November - and Helen Lieberman - the 62-year-old founder of Ikamva Labantu, a non-profit organization that manages more than 1,000 community-based projects in townships - are Jewish women whose different anti-apartheid paths illustrate two of the available channels of protest: the political and the social, the coincidentally Jewish and the resolutely Jewish.

But the prominent role of individual Jews in anti-apartheid activism contrasts starkly with that of the Jewish community as a whole, which met apartheid with a stentorian silence.

“Clearly the vast majority of South African Jews did acquiesce in apartheid, as did the vast majority of white South Africans generally,” writes James T. Campbell, who teaches Africana studies and history at Brown University in the U.S., in his essay “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Immigration and the South African Left.” At the same time, he writes, “Jews were massively overrepresented in the ranks of the opposition.” Campbell estimates that Jews, who constituted just 4 percent of the post-World War II white population of South Africa, represented at least 40 percent of South Africa’s white left.

During the apartheid era, the Jewish South African Board of Deputies, the community’s putative representative body, adopted a policy according to which individual citizens were left to stake out any position on apartheid they wanted to, or none at all, so long as “the community as such does not take a political stand,” says Professor Gideon Shimoni, the South African-raised director of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to Shimoni, the Board claimed it had no mandate to speak on behalf of all Jews, whom it did not want to endanger by inducing possible anti-Semitic repercussions to apartheid opposition.

Because Suzman spoke out in parliament on behalf of human rights for all South Africa’s citizens as an individual, and not as a Jew, she actually personifies the Board of Deputies’ position, explains Shimoni, author of a recently released book called “Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.”

“Helen Suzman did what she did as an individual citizen, and [the Board] claimed she doesn’t have to do what she did for Jews or Judaism, and she has no right to,” says Shimoni. “She never was a leading person in the Jewish community, she never had a leadership position in the Jewish community. She’s the living proof in a way of what the Jewish Board said should be done.”

In her 36 years in parliament - 13 of them as the sole Progressive Party representative and six of those as the only woman among 165 MPs - Suzman became known in part for her dedication to seeing the reality of her country with her own eyes. Most famously perhaps, the “see for yourself” principle entailed visiting political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, and reporting on and trying to ameliorate their conditions.

Suzman “didn’t give a damn” about the sexist and anti-Semitic remarks that came her way in her parliamentary years. “It’s only if you’re a shrinking violet that you give a damn about these things - and I am not a shrinking violet.”

Mandela writes in his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom” that Suzman was one of the few, if not the only, members of parliament who took an interest in the plight of political prisoners. Shortly after her first visit to the Robben Island jail - which included taking notes on prisoner complaints and inspecting the cells herself - Mandela writes that a particularly cruel warden was removed from duty. A picture of Suzman and Mandela, and another of her with his ex-wife Winnie Mandela, decorate Suzman’s bookshelves.

‘Deep superstition’

Suzman doesn’t attribute her pursuit of justice to any aspect of Judaism, which she rejects as a religion but remains connected to as an ethnicity. “I find [Jewish tradition] extraordinary because I don’t believe in any of it,” Suzman says in a discussion on the laws of keeping kosher after her black maid, Betty, brings toast with anchovy paste, tea and coffee into the study of her Johannesburg home. “I have no religion.”

“We had candles on Friday night - but it was just in order to have a nice dinner,” says Suzman, describing Jewish ritual as “deep superstition.” She says her father used to attend High Holiday services, adding: “But he wasn’t religious, he was cynical. I think I inherited that.”

But that doesn’t mean the petite, blunt-spoken Suzman spurns her Jewish heritage. She doesn’t even want people to mistakenly think she does, which is why she has never taken down the mezuza that the previous owners of her home left on the front doorpost 10 years ago. Suzman says she considered removing it but decided not to, saying, “I thought it might be interpreted as wanting to be considered non-Jewish, and that I don’t want. I’m a secular Jew, but I am Jewish.”

Even now, Suzman doesn’t criticize the formal Jewish community for its apartheid-era passivity. Although she says she thinks “Jews should be very anti-persecution on a racial basis,” Suzman leaves every individual to grapple with his or her own conscience, just as the Board wanted. “It’s up to them,” says Suzman, referring to South African Jews. “You can’t advise people on things like that. People must do what they think is right, for themselves and the community, if they care about the community.”

Jewish values

By contrast, Lieberman emphasizes “Jewish values” as an important element of her social activism.

“As a Jewish woman, this is part of what Judaism means to me - that you cannot only look at your Jewish community,” says Lieberman shortly after her husband returns from saying the mourner’s kaddish at the synagogue across the street from her up-market apartment in the Sea Point neighborhood of Cape Town, where many Jews live. “To me, the right set of Jewish values is that every human being is equal in this world. You can have heritage, culture, tradition. You cannot enjoy it with eyes shut to the rest of the world.”

Lieberman’s Ikamva Labantu - which means “the future of our nation” in Xhosa, one of the most dominant of nine official black South African languages - manages programs that include 525 daycare centers, 22 senior centers, seven small businesses and four disabled children centers and the Western Cape Blind Association, among other projects.

At Ikamva headquarters in Cape Town, blind secretaries answer the phones and type in Braille. In a separate room, women from townships create beaded accessories such as belts, a skill that Ikamva taught them as part of a training and work program. At the sewing area in the back of the building, workers create black cloth dolls as well as Jewish ritual objects including kippot (skullcaps), challah covers, matza covers and tallit (prayer shawl) bags, all of which are sold in a shop on the premises in addition to the orders sent to customers.

Although Lieberman specializes in social work, she doesn’t consider work for Jewish social institutions - to the exclusion of others that may have an even greater need - to be sufficient. “It’s not just [a matter of] saying, ‘Okay, I’ll only care for the Jewish aged home, I won’t care for the aged elsewhere.’”

Nonetheless, Lieberman says she has witnessed “a big change” in the Jewish community, which she says has become more actively involved in wider social issues. “As a whole, there’s a much greater consciousness and a much greater outreach,” she says, but maintains that “we still live in our small pockets” of mostly privileged white areas.

Although her balcony has a Jacuzzi and overlooks Table Mountain to one side and the Atlantic Ocean to the other, Lieberman says she doesn’t “live that life” of isolation from the reality of the poorer conditions around her. Lieberman has given up day-to-day control of Ikamva to managing director Sipho Puwani, and refuses to be photographed for this article, saying it’s time for her to “fade out of the picture” and let other people get the accolades. But she still finds herself spending full days in the townships, and excuses herself from her interview with Haaretz several times to answer the door and conduct a marathon of mini-meetings. At the end of the interview, she moves to her dining-room table to place plastic tools in a red toolbox she plans to give to a child undergoing chemotherapy.

Suzman, too, claims to be retired even as she continues her battle for equal rights. She’s helping her maid Betty get the deeds for her house, which has already been bought in full - and she’s still visiting jails. Suzman has no patience for the “sheer inefficiency” with which she says Betty’s deeds have been withheld or for the “lousy legal defense” that a prisoner she’s trying to help has received. “I am convinced that he has been framed,” says Suzman, claiming the prisoner was thrown in jail on trumped-up charges after he reported a drug-dealing affair involving senior political figures. “It’s a travesty of justice.”

And the fight goes on.