Jewish and Rothschild graves in Tarkastad
Description
The Rothschild* name is globally associated with money and wealth, but did you know there were Rothschilds in the Karoo Heartland town of Tarkastad in the late 1800s, and that they’re not buried in a consecrated Jewish cemetery?
There are two Jewish graves enclosed with a low wrought iron fence in the Christian section of the Tarkastad Cemetery. The two headstones have been cemented horizontally on the graves, like most of the other Jewish graves in the cemetery, to prevent any further damage.
Michealis and Bertha Rothschild arrived in SA in 1876 and were resident in Tarkastad by 1883. Their children, Louis Michael (b. 22 March 1883), a corporal in the Anglo-Boer War, Bernard (b. 1885), Bertha (m. Samuel J. Greenberg of Johannesburg, Isadore (b.1901, died 1902), Johanna (8 days old, died 1902) were all born there. Machealis’ two brothers arrived shortly after them. The Rothschilds of Tarkastad were not related to the Rothschild family in Frankfurt, Germany. They came from a small town in the Prussian Empire.
Louis Michael was educated in Cape Town, served in the Boer War as a Corporal on the British side, and moved to Johannesburg where he married Rebecca Sarah Abrahams in 1925. They had three sons. Bernard attended Tarkastad Government School, married Sara Levitz in 1928, had two sons and one daughter. He also moved to Johannesburg.
It is unclear when the cemetery land was consecrated, but it had not been established when the 7-month-old Margarita Rothschild (the daughter of one of Michaelis’s brothers) passed in 1900, nor when Michealis (aged 54) and his two very young children (13 months and 8 days) all died in 1902. They died because they had no access to crucial medical attention at the time. They were all buried in the Christian cemetery.
The first Jewish grave in Tarkastad cemetery was that of Feiga Steinhard, who died in 1908.
In 1929 there were 12 members of the congregation and they purchased a Torah in 1930. The congregation was never big enough to have its own synagogue, so they used a small addition to the local White Hope Masonic Lodge (established 1881) as a gathering place for services and high holy days.
In 1964, Rabbi Duschinsky ** reported that there were 11 Jewish graves in the cemetery.
The only anti-Semitic incident recorded in Tarkastad was reported in the Tarka Herald somewhere in the 1880s. They published an article deploring the imprisonment of an English clergyman. While the local outcry focused on the clergyman’s plight, it prominently featured the auctioneers, who happened to be the Rothschild family, responsible for his debt and framed the situation using antisemitic tropes.
* The Rothschild family is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish noble banking family originally from Frankfurt, Germany. The family’s documented history starts in 16th-century Frankfurt, but they rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild who established his banking business in the 1760s and expanded to Paris, Frankfurt, London, Vienna, and Naples. During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world. Today, their assets cover a diverse range of sectors, including financial services, real estate, mining, energy, agriculture, and winemaking.
** Rabbi Eugene Duschinsky came to South Africa from Hungary in 1945 at the age of 33. He was educated in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England and the United States. He received his Rabbinical Diploma in Pressburg and an M.A. from the Yeshiva University in New York. He served as Rabbi to the Country Communities.
