Introduction

I first became interested in the story of Vryburg’s Jewish community through my own family’s connections to the town. Why opf all places did my grandparents choose Vryburg when they left Mabalstad? That local story also sits within a much broader wave of Eastern European Jewish migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People left because of poverty, political instability, and rising antisemitism, but their destinations were often shaped by family ties, hometown links, and news carried by letters and anecdotes from travellers who went back home to visit. In the sections that follow, I sketch that backdrop—why South Africa drew migrants, how landsleit networks guided settlement, and how rural trade, especially smousing, helped Jewish life take root in towns such as Vryburg.

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Jewish Migration in a broader historical context:​

Mass emigration from Eastern Europe reshaped Jewish life worldwide. Gur Alroey estimates that between 1875 and 1914 roughly three million Eastern European Jews—about 20% of world Jewry—left their homes, helping create new Jewish centres across Western Europe, Great Britain, North America, South Africa, Australia, Latin America, and Palestine. He argues that economic pressures drove emigration up to World War I, with violence after 1881 compounding hardship; after 1918, safety concerns became more pronounced. He divides the movement into four phases: 1875–1898, 1899–1914, 1914–1918, and 1919–1924, when the United States sharply restricted immigration.

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Why South Africa?

Destination choices depended on opportunity and access. South Africa emerges as appealing because diamond—and later gold—discoveries drove growth, while established settlers and aid networks lowered the barriers to migration. As Adrienne Kollenberg notes, earlier English and German Jewish communities helped pave the way for Eastern European arrivals, many of whom traveled via London with support from the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter. In South Africa, migrants were predominantly from Lithuania and Courland.

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For many Litvak Jews, decisions were shaped by practical information—letters, stories, and reputations that traveled ahead of them. Chaim Gershater (1955, 269) describes how quickly such news could spread in a small, close-knit community:

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“How did it happen that Lithuanian Jews went to South Africa? Lithuania was a small and compact community; contacts with the outside world were infrequent. A letter bearing a foreign stamp was, therefore, a great event, and within the community, news traveled fast. The letter would be discussed in the marketplace, at the communal bath-house, and in the house of prayer. Itinerant preachers would spread the tale far and wide.”

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The allure of rural South Africa

Rural and frontier towns such as Vryburg offered a practical start. Joe Davidovitz, born in Vryburg in the early 1930s, recalls his father saying that when he arrived, the opportunities were in the platteland. Herrman (1935, 224) notes that as early as the 1860s, Cape Town Jews left for “districts where competition was less to seek their fortunes.” He adds (p. 256): “They went into remote districts and traded. They opened shops where there was no population, and farmers came from miles around and bought their goods.”

 

Paul Cheifitz (2009, 18) explains that lacking capital and a profession, many newcomers began as peddlers. “The work was hard, but it built local knowledge and relationships that could lead to shopkeeping and other ventures.” Eli Goldstein notes that the smous economy could even pull some traders into agriculture. As he explains: “Often, they [traders] were paid in produce, such as milk and eggs. Debts were sometimes paid with cattle, leading some smouse to venture into farming.”

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Herrman (1935, 250) links this pathway to capital accumulation and chain migration: “[Through smousing] the new arrival increased his little capital until he could give up the hard rough life of the tocher and venture his savings in diamond buying or some commercial speculative concern where profits were more attractive.” He adds that success was often reported back home, sometimes with money to help relatives emigrate.

 

One example is Harold Hirsch Sussman, my great-grandfather. His 1925 journey to South Africa with his four children from his first marriage was sponsored by his younger brother, Aaron (Arje Meir), after he made money from diamond diggings near Barkly West. In an incredible act of generosity, Aaron supported the children of his eldest brother, who had passed away when they were young, and many of his siblings. Beyond covering their passage, Aaron helped them set up a business in South Africa.

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Herrman also credits these traders with shaping the rural built environment: “Frequently, villages grew up around them. More than one South African town started at the place of a Jewish storekeeper, as witness the town of De Aar, built on the farm and around the business place of the Friedlander brothers, who settled there in 1880, and Garies in Namaqualand, which grew up round the store established by Maurice Eilenberg.”

 

The Frontier Jew:

Kollenberg argues that rural South Africa offered more than economic opportunity to Jewish émigrés. The platteland gave newcomers “the chance to rebuild community life at a manageable scale.” In Vryburg, I get the sense that Simon Liberthal—who led the local community—helped recreate a corner of Talsen. He and his fellow congregants, together with their rabbis, maintained a proud Jewish identity and built communal life (Kosher slaughter, cheder, a mikve), even when it was difficult. These were small communities with limited financial and cultural resources; antisemitism and assimilation were persistent pressures. On the frontier between Boers, Brits, Germans, and indigenous communities in places such as Bechuanaland, immigrants also had to sustain Jewish practice far from religious authorities and established places of worship. Sheri Rabin’s Jews on the Frontier describes this kind of improvisation in ways that echo Jewish life in Vryburg.

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Old-country (landsleit) networks

Information and support also travelled along shared origins. In Vryburg, many families traced their roots to Talsi (Talsen) and Tukums in Latvia, including Lemkus, Friedman, Lieberthal, Toube, Immerman, and Blumberg. The earliest Jewish settlers were German Jews (Abt, Hammerschlag, Rosenblatt & Sonnenberg) from the same region (Cassel) and were often linked by marriage and commerce.

 

Such clusters show how migration often followed existing ties: people went where relatives, neighbors, or fellow townspeople had already settled.

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Diane Fine tells of Fewiel Taube (Philip Toube), born in Talsi in 1861; the Toubes later made Vryburg their home. Fine notes that he “remained closely connected to other families from the same region. The Immerman, Bergman, Friedberg, and Davidovitz families came from the same regions of Talsi and Tukums in the Province of Courland. The refugees coming to South Africa tended to travel to areas where others from their region had already congregated and stayed there recreating the communities of the home country.”

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This broader pattern also helps me make sense of my own family story. My paternal grandparents, Benno Sussman and Gertie Engelberg, were from Tukums—which likely explains how they met and married. Gertie’s mother was a Kallmeyer from Talsen. Those connections may also help explain why my family ended up in Vryburg, and why they were so close to the Lieberthals.

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Moreover, larger commercial ventures—like Solomon and Company in Vryburg and later Headermans and Vryburg Wholesalers—were staffed by Jews, reinforcing both economic and social linkages. Beyond work, these older networks may even help explain why some people who did not live in Vryburg still came to be buried in the local Jewish cemetery.

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Conclusion

Taken together, these accounts show how Vryburg’s Jewish community emerged where large historical forces met personal networks—and why family histories like my own so often trace back to specific towns and clusters of names. Economic upheaval and insecurity pushed people out of Eastern Europe; letters, word of mouth, and landsleit ties shaped where they landed and whom they could rely on. In South Africa, rural towns offered a practical route to stability: smousing built relationships and capital, opening paths into shopkeeping and, at times, farming. Distance from formal institutions also required everyday ingenuity to sustain communal and religious life. The sources converge on a clear pattern—migration, networks, work, and adaptation—that helps explain how Jewish life took root in Vryburg.