CAPE TOWN, South Africa — For five Kansas City Jewish families on safari in southern Africa, bolting on a few days in this sparking port city was an afterthought.
After living with the lions, giraffes, elephants and more exotic birdlife than can be imagined, they stopped here for a bit of R&R before tackling the 18-hour flight back to the United States.
They planned to stop at the South African Jewish Museum, they told their tour guide, a native of the city, who decided to accompany them for his first visit too.
So on a recent spring Monday, the 11 negotiated the considerable security in place at the museum, located a few blocks from the South Africa Parliament.
Once inside, on the threshold of the functioning, ornate synagogue in the heart of the museum compound, the group was told they could not go in since the shul was occupied by a school group.
We will be synagogue mice, we told them — hoping to gain a glimpse of how the Jewish community functioned in real time. The museum guide ushers us in.
What Kansans Audrey Asher, Mike Lerner, Donna Oberstein, Ace Allen, Melanie and Dan Allmayer, Sheila and Ken Sonnenschein, my wife, Matilda, and I encountered amazed us.
About 60 grade school students from a nearby township were engaged in a special program to learn about Judaism, tolerance and human rights.
They sang songs with snatches of Hebrew.
They were really engaged and joyful — as were their museum hosts.
The local South African Jewish Museum is actively working to brighten the ethnic rainbow in this nation of 56 million where apartheid ended three decades ago.
Marlene Silbert, a local educator and early anti-apartheid activist, launched the museum’s Education Outreach program at the beginning of the decade after developing a national high school curriculum for Holocaust education.
Jewish history, including the Holocaust, “are relevant to contemporary society,” she said.
Since the effort launched, 35,000 school children have taken part.
Inside, they walk past an enlargement of a note written by Nelson Mandela 20 years ago, which hailed the Jewish community for being singularly “broad-minded … on issues of race and politics.”
The Anne Frank Foundation, in Basel, Switzerland, is aiding the museum’s efforts to touch the lives of students about the age of Anne Frank when she crafted her journal.
“Our own focus is increasingly on Africa, where we support projects for the empowerment of women and access to education for children and youths,” said Barbara Eldridge, executive secretary with the foundation.
The impact is immense, according to Auburn Kelly, a mathematics teacher in the Cascade Primary School just outside Cape Town. He accompanied the immaculately uniformed, ebullient students to the museum and chatted a bit with the Kansas Citians. For weeks prior to the visit and weeks after, his students were transformed by their foray into a wider world.
“It was something awesome,” he said.
Silbert, who is 83, said the South African students readily understand the strong link between the oppression of Jews in Europe a century ago and their own personal lives in 2018.
“The conditions under which Jews lived relate to the way many black people continue to live in informal settlements,” she said. “During apartheid the majority of people had no running water or electricity and while this has changed considerably, there are still many black people living in overcrowded shacks.”
One foundation dedicated to black empowerment applauds the efforts.
“Exposing children through interactive experiences to religious and cultural diversity within our society sensitizes them to issues of prejudice, xenophobia, racism and discrimination,” said Corinne Abel, chief executive officer of the HCI Foundation, the social outreach arm of a black empowerment investment company, said that the museum’s exercise is transformative.
“Occupying the space of the ‘other’ and walking in the shoes of the ‘other’ provide experiences which open the young person to the sense of what it feels like to be different and to be an outsider. This program then provides an excellent interactive educational model for promoting empathy, tolerance and understanding in a diverse nation like South Africa,” Abel said.
The local educational establishment endorses the program. It is flourishing, even though on the national level relations between South Africa and Israel are strained. Pretoria recently frowned on efforts to bring Israeli desalination experts to town to help with the area’s water crisis. The national government, mindful of its ties to the developing world, is focused on the plight of Palestinians.
But that seems far off at the museum.
Kelly said that his students could not stop talking about the outing after their return. One of them, Brian, after the field trip spoke with passionate certainty when he said that religions at their best are the same, built on a core of tolerance.
Mitchell’s Plain, where the school is located, is one of the nation’s largest townships with a population of 300,000. Four gangs often tangle near the school, and gunfire occasionally erupts.
“Our community is the poorest of the poor,” Kelly said.
Here is what some of his grade school charges wrote about the museum trip.
“I was so excited to come to the museum. I didn’t sleep last night.”
“All religions are important, they are even a bit similar.”
“I learned shalom, don’t hate and educate.”
“I learned to be kind, not to bully or discriminate.”
‘I learned that all of us celebrate in different ways.”
“I loved going into the shtetl, with beautiful small houses. It felt so real.”
“This place was very brilliant, like ‘wow.’ We learned about history, helpfulness and Jews. I learned about many different cultures.”
The students were bubbling, singing snatches of Hebrew songs as they bounded by the Kansas City group, picked up a piece of fruit gifted to them by the museum before they boarded buses to take in, most for the first time, this port backed by iconic Table Mountain. They live just a half-hour bus ride away.
Getting out of their township, taking a few precious hours to imagine the struggles of others in a wider world, was liberating, Kelly said.
“They were just free.”
