Extracts from Yearbook from Oranje Orphanage in Capetown
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ALL ACTIVITIES of the Cape Jewish Orphanage since its foundation were to be overshadowed by a great enterprise commenced towards the end of 1920, that caught the imagination of South African Jewry as nothing else has done. This was the episode usually referred to as the "Immigration of the Ukraine Orphans." 

To understand its origin, there is a need to recall the circumstances existing in the former Russian empire after the crash of the old Czarist regime in 1917. Rival armies were fighting for control-the Reds on one side against the Whites, who hoped for the restoration of the Emperor, while in the middle were Allied contingents as well as unorganised guerrilla bands. With law and order rapidly melting away, transportation came to an end. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers roamed about, among equally vast armies of German ex-P.O.W.'s, trying to make their way home after the Soviets made peace with the Kaiser at Brest-Litovsk. 
Poor at the best of times, owing to the oppression to which they had been exposed for generations, the condition of the Jews in what had been Russia became even worse. Famine over vast areas was followed by epidemics of typhoid and other diseases. In this misery ancient antagonisms came to the surface. 

Isaac Ochberg

Polish and other peasants joined forces with reactionary officers and troops, to massacre what ever Jews came in their way. Pogroms were reported almost daily, of which the full details and numbers will never be known. In despairing letters, smuggled through the enemy lines, survivors asked their kinsmen in South Africa and anywhere else in the world for immediate help. A great surge of anger and pity swept the community. Why not try and bring some of the war victims to the Union of South Africa particularly the children? Overnight the idea took shape, spreading like wildfire from town to town. Before any organisation could step in, generous offers were made of financial and other help. 

No one was more in sympathy with the plan than Isaac Ochberg, Two further questions now arose-how could abandoned children be rescued, and would the Union Government create any difficulties in admitting them? Ochberg immediately contacted the Prime Minister, General J. C. Smuts, and Mr. Patrick Duncan, the Minister of the Interior, who granted permission to land, without restriction, as many youngsters as could be saved.
A South African Relief Fund for Jewish War Victims had already come into operation, when, at a special meeting called in his office on August 19, 1920, Ochberg proposed that the Cape Jewish Orphanage "take all the responsibilities of bringing the children out, and taking care of them." In addition it should act as a clearing-house, whence they could be distributed among charitable people for adoption. "I further suggest," said Mr. Ochberg, "that a sum of £10,000 be raised by the Relief Fund and earmarked for this purpose.  This would suffice for the emigration of 200. 

As the details of the position in Europe leaked out, the tragedy of the situation became clearer. No fewer than 400,000 Jewish orphans were known to be destitute in Russia, so that whatever was done could only be a drop in the ocean. 

By January 1921, when Bernard Alexander of Johannesburg persuaded the Union Government to give on a pound for pound principle to the Pogrom Orphan Fund, it was felt that not 200 but 250 children could be brought to South Africa. 

The next step was for someone to go to Europe and make arrangements on the spot. Without a moment's hesitation, Isaac Ochberg offered to undertake this responsible and by no means unhazardous task. At a Committee Meeting on March 9, 1921, Joseph Kadish told his colleagues: "This is the last meeting at which our President will be in the chair before his departure to fetch the children from Russia. He will meet with hardship and danger on his mission, but I hope he will overcome all the difficulties and return safely to Cape Town with the boys and girls."
Overseas the Federation of Ukrainian Jews did it’s utmost to assist but with civil war raging over large areas of Poland and elsewhere, and only a minimum of transport in operation, there were very definite limits to what could be achieved. With the greatest eagerness his friends at the Cape waited for news, their interest stimulated through the visit to the Orphanage of the famous Jewish poet, Peretz Hirshbein, who, in a moving address, gave a word picture of the waifs in the blood-stained ghettoes. 

Hard at work in Eastern Europe, Ochberg, in a letter to the well-known Port Elizabeth communal leader, Adolph Schauder, outlined some of his adventures. Having thanked his friend for a note, only delivered to him after a delay of many months, "owing to my movements in the Ukraine, where postal communications did not reach us," he expressed thanks for 16 cases of second-hand clothing just to hand. 

  "You will be glad to hear that I returned last night to London," he continued, "after living through a very trying time during the last three months of my mission to the Pogrom areas . . . I have been through almost every village in the Polish Ukraine and Galicia, etc., and I am now well acquainted with the places where there is at present extreme suffering. You can rest assured that I shall distribute to deserving quarters the clothes your community have so kindly' donated. I succeeded in collecting the necessary number of children, and I can safely say that the generosity' displayed by South African Jewry in making it possible to remove them means nothing less than saving their lives. They would surely have died of starvation or disease, or have been lost to our nation for other reasons. I am here now in London with the object of arranging transport, and I hope to be able to advise telegraphically soon of our departure for South Africa with the children."
This letter was written on a crudely-printed letterhead, reading: 

"Jews War and Pogrom Orphan Transport-South 4fricaii.  Representative: 

Isaac Ochberg, Esq., President Cape Jewish Orphanage, Cape Town, South Africa. 

Temporary Shelter: Warsaw, Sliska 28." 

Ochberg proceeded from town to town, also visiting, amongst others, Minsk, Pinsk, Stanislav, Lodz, Lemberg and Wlodowa.
Living in South Africa there are still a fair number of people, now middle-aged, who once belonged to those unfortunate youngsters. One of them, Mrs. Fanny Lockitch, now Chairlady of the Cape Jewish Orphanage was then a little girl named Fanny Shrier. "I was born," she said, "in the town of Voronesz, which came into the news during the Second World War, but I hardly remember anything of that. My father, who was in the Russian Army, died in a gas attack, while my mother passed away during the 1918 Influenza. Then somebody put me into an orphanage in the city of Brest-Litovsk, where the Germans and the Soviet had signed the 1917 Peace Treaty. I was only a little thing, but my brother Jack, two years older, and now living in Salisbury in Rhodesia, was also there, and that made the place a little more homely for me.
"Although the war was over, we were suffering from lack of coal, from lack of clothes, from lack of food and from lack of care. To give an idea of conditions, I can remember how we had the Russians in the city at one moment, and a few days later the Poles. Looking out of the Orphanage windows, one could see some of the hand-to-hand battles with bayonets, and the corpses lying in the street that led up to the fortress." 

Several hundred children in the orphanage, as well as those looking after them, depended for survival upon the famous Jewish American organisation, the Joint Distribution Committee, which was again to do such wonderful work in the struggle against Hitlerism about 20 years later. 

"One day," said Mrs. Lockitch, "we heard that a 'Man from Africa' was coming. He was going to take some of us away with him and give us a new home on the other side of the world. Nearly all the orphans had lost both parents, many of them in pogroms, on the Ukrainian border, at Minsk, Pinsk and other places. One poor little boy, who afterwards came to South Africa and is now a successful man in Johannesburg, had his hand hacked off by some ruffian." 

"Among us children the news aroused mixed feelings. We all liked the idea of going to a beautiful new country, but we also heard stories of robbers and wild animals, and that we might be eaten by lions. However, when Mr. Ochberg appeared, with his reddish hair and cheery smile, we all took a great liking to him and soon called him 'Daddy'. He would spend hours talking to us, making jokes and generally cheering us up.
Almost the worst problem confronting the visitor was how to make his choice from the vast number of destitute boys and girls. In the end he decided to choose eight children from each institution, to make up the total of 200 for which he had sufficient funds. Since the Union Government had laid down that any children coming must be in good health, this demanded very careful selection. Only full orphans, i.e. those who had lost both parents, were accepted, and then only if they were reasonably intelligent. Those suffering from mental defects were immediately eliminated and, in the words of one worker, "the cream of each orphanage picked." 

"How well I remember," said Mrs. Lockitch, "the scare stories that went around. 'We will be thrown in the sea,' was one. Another said, 'We would be sold to the natives as slaves,' and a third even, 'We might be eaten by cannibals.'" 

In each case the Principal and the Matron were consulted before the final decision, care being taken to ensure that no child was taken away who did not wish to go. 

Ochberg had managed to secure some helpers, including a teacher named Alexander Bobrow, Mr. & Mrs. Boris Glasman, and Miss Bettman, now Mrs. Leah Marks, a well-known Cape Town communal worker. "So many children were found," said Mr. Bobrow, "that we soon were obliged to set up the orphanages. At first Pinsk was isolated by the fighting and we were thrown almost solely on our own resources. We had neither beds, bedding, nor clothes. I remember our using flour bags to make aprons and other garments for the boys and girls."
Typhus broke out in an orphanage and at one stage Mr. Bobrow, in the course of his duties, had to walk through streets in which the shells were bursting. Balachou, the notorious Ukrainian fanatic descended on the city with his gangs and the pogroms raged for nearly a week. At one of the orphanages an old woman pacified the terror-stricken children by calling out: 

"The Almighty will keep us and save us-Now you repeat it after me. 

As order was restored, supplies began to arrive, first from the Juedischer Hilfsverein in Berlin, and then from the Joint Distribution Committee, including cocoa, condensed milk, cooking oil and clothes. 

The Polish authorities were not very helpful and many children travelled to Warsaw by cattle-truck. Quaint old photographs show the youngsters lined up, their hands symmetrically folded in accordance with the taste of the cameraman. The passports themselves are probably unique. Though their covers carry the usual words in Polish and French, "Paszport-Passe­port," with the Polish Eagle, they were made out "in quantity." On the pages usually devoted to the prescribed form of thumbnail snapshot, with personal particulars, group photos appeared, some with as many as 30 or 40 small children sitting in rows. On the face of each one whose name was eliminated in the passport the Polish official had inked in a cross, through which the pathetic little countenances stared as though behind prison bars. 

Many years later one of these documents was put into use afresh, as indicated in a letter from Mr. Jan Majeweski, Consul for Poland in the Union, who wrote to the President of the Cape Jewish Orphanage on February 9, 1942:
"We set off for Africa," said Mrs. Lockitch, "each with a tiny package of the clothing that had already been sent to us from overseas, and a few pitiful trifles like photographs or dolls. We travelled in slow, overcrowded, dirty trains to Warsaw. In the middle of that city was a restaurant, belonging to a Jewish woman who became a legend to the children on account of her kindliness. "Panya" (Mrs.) Engel, she was called. During the several months the Ochberg orphans stayed in schools near here Panya Engel, with a few friends, worked incessantly to ease their way. Just as it seemed as if most of the difficulties had been overcome, there was an outbreak of a serious eye disease-trachoma-which held up their departure for many weeks more. Fresh delays occurred when, as a result of his hardships, Ochberg himself was taken ill. 

Some of the senior boys and girls were selected to act as "monitors" as in school, and then the great trek began. 

"We said goodbye to Warsaw," said Mrs. Lockitch, "and travelled by river boat down the Vistula to Danzig. There, on the Baltic, we boarded a steamer bound for London, and the other kind people took charge of us, and put us up in a hotel. As a sign of our appreciation we were taught to sing "God Save Our King" for the entertainment of some of our visitors while we waited for the ship to take us to South Africa. A few of us were again taken ill, and spent the time in London in hospital, one lad, by the name of Srulik Ellman, having to be left behind and only joining us in Cape Town a year later."
But all the troubles were finally sorted out, and early in September 1921, with Mr. and Mrs. Maman as Principal and Matron, the party set off in the Edinburgh Castle. Ochberg toe was oil board, and all the passengers took the most friendly interest in the small emigrants. 

"Never until my dying day," said Mrs. Lockitch, "shall I forget our first sight of the lights of Cape Town, and then the tremendous reception when we came ashore on September 21, with half the city apparently waiting on the quay for us." 

So large was the group of children that the Cape Jewish Orphanage could no longer house them all, and a considerable number went to Johannesburg, where they were installed at Arcadia, the corresponding institution in that city. 

Photographs show the speed with which the little Ukrainians were absorbed into the South African community. The same pathetic little persons who were clad in the ill-fitting outfits reappear shortly as neatly-dressed and nicely-mannered boys and girls, obviously profiting from the kindness and instruction which they received. Special English4aiiguage classes were organised, in which Mr. Cohen of Cape Town Central School took a leading part. Many youngsters presently entered Cape Town High School, where Mr. A. P. Blair was principal. At a later date this school was taken over by the well-known historian and scholar, Dr. Louis Herrman. A new extension to house the Ukrainians was officially named the Isaac Ochberg Wing.

The warmth of the friendship and the hospitality of South Africa showed itself in number­less invitations to Jewish homes, not a few of the children being directly adopted. Subsequent events more than justified the experiment of bringing out the Ukrainian children, not a few of whom became persons of consequence in their new fatherland. The touching affection which they showed to Ochberg in particular, was never forgotten and, more impressive than any words, is the plain fact that one of the boys, who gave his life in World War II, left his property to the Cape Jewish Orphanage