OUDTSHOORN JERUSALEM OF AFRICA

206 pages, frontispiece, 36 illustrations, 3 maps, green rexine gilt, silk place marker, a very good copy.

The Friends of the Library, University of the Witwatersrand, number 135 of an edition limited to 250 copies.

'Oudtshoorn: Jerusalem of Africa, is a very significant contribution to South African Judaica, from both a historical and sociological point of view. It is, too, an important, if unusual, addition to South African literature and culture. Ably translated from the original Yiddish, the long essay – for that is what it is in essence - which give the book its title describes a unique immigrant community which flourished in the Little Karoo as long as the ostrich feather industry, from which it derived its existence, prospered.

The "Jerusalem of Africa" as Oudtshoorn was known, had a proportionately larger concentration of Jews than any other centre in South Africa. As Leibl Feldman informs us, the vast majority of Jews in Oudtshoorn came from two Jewish communities in Lithuania, Kelm and Shavel. Feldman adds, with implied censure, that in Oudtshoorn the immigrants imitate and perpetuated all the traditional and religious customs they had observed in their Old Homes. They did not build the purely secular Jewish culture which Feldman would have liked to see.' From the Foreword by Dr. Frank R. Bradlow.