A Light unto his People

A Beacon to his Family

Over a century separated the passing of Cecil John Rhodes and Mendel Kaplan and less then four kilometers separated their two holiday homes on the Muizenburg - St James coast where they both - before their time - passed on. If Rhodes’s final words were, “So much to do, so little done,” Mendel would have no reason to so rebuke himself.  As Rabbi Tanzer so aptly pointed out at the funeral in Cape Town, “Yes, Mendel was taken too young, but look what he packed into his 73 years. Few could have done or achieved what he did if they had lived to be 200.” The inference from the rabbi – Mendel, like a revered biblical character, lived to an age measured by his deeds rather than the number of years he dwelled among the living.

In 1940, my father was entertaining his three year old nephew, Mendel, in the waiting room of Lady Buxton Home in Claremont while his mother, Jessie, was closeted in a nearby room with a nurse and her newborn son Robert. An elderly gentleman with a goatee white beard observed this young lad pumping my dad with endless questions and offering opinions beyond his tender age.

“Bright lad, your son.”

“No, he is not my son, my nephew.”

“His name?”

“Mendel.”

“Hmnn, I must remember, he is going to go very far in life, I can tell.”

The sage-like man was none other than South Africa’s wartime Prime Minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts.

Fulfilling Smuts’ prophesy, Mendel’s trajectory from businessman to philanthropist and to world Jewish leader was impressive. As a philanthropist he was guided by an anecdote related at the funeral by his son David, concerning one of the European Rothschilds who was asked how much he was worth.

“Seventeen million dollars,” was the reply.

“Surely more,” the fellow persisted.

“You asked what I am worth. This is what I have donated in charity. I am worth what I have given away, not what I still have.”

This anecdote was Mendel’s Magna Carta as he set about revolutionizing fundraising strategies, first in his native South Africa and then globally.

From holding many of the key leadership positions in the South African Jewish community, he would then, through his unique abilities and personal gravitas, work his way rapidly to top positions in the global Jewish world, emerging as Chairman of the World Jewish Congress and the first non-American - apart from the only South African - to emerge as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency (JAFI). The Commonwealth’s Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said of Mendel, “I saw him steer organizations and resolve tensions with wit and humor, subtle diplomacy and an overreaching sense of direction. I valued his advice more than that of any other lay leader I know. He was a living textbook in how to manage an otherwise unmanageable people.”

His tenure at the helm of JAFI 1987 - 1995 was probably the most iconic period in modern Jewish history, marked by several historical events that rank as salvation sagas worthy of biblical comparison. ‘Operation Solomon’ was nothing short of a miracle. For centuries, the Jewish world was not even aware of the existence of an ancient Jewish community in the northern province of Gondar. A total of 14,324 Ethiopian Jews were rescued and resettled in Israel.

No less a modernday ‘exodus’ was the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union. Jewish Agency emissaries were sent to the far corners of the Commonwealth of Independent States – to communities that had been cut off from organized world Jewry for more than two generations. In the short space of less than a decade, Russian-speaking people in Israel rose to one fifth of the population with their own political party in the Knesset.

History may one day record that this was the emblematic period when Israel was transformed from a “Zionist experiment” to a viable state, “whose future” in the words of Abba Eban, “will be longer than its past.”

This chapter covering Mendel’s monumental tenure as Chairman of JAFI has been recorded in a book entitled, ‘Riding the Wave.’

And talking about ‘riding the wave’, it was amongst some real waves that Mendel once saved Natan Sharansky from drowning. The story doing the rounds at prayers was about when Sharansky was staying with Mendel at St. James and the two of them went to the local beach for a swim. After a few minutes Mendel advised Sharansky to come out, “It’s dangerous, there are cross-currents. After all,” reminded Mendel, “this beach is not called ‘Danger Beach’ for nothing!”

Sharansky was defiant and reminded Mendel, “I took on the might of the Soviet Empire and its KGB thugs; you think I am afraid of a few waves.” Needless to say, a few minutes later, Mendel had to drag his esteemed but exhausted guest from the water. “Bloody refuseniks,” Mendel was thought to have muttered under his breath!

Recording the journey of his family from Lithuania to South Africa in his book ‘From Shtetl to Steelmaking’, Mendel traces the saga from ‘der Heim’ to prosperity in the new country. But in embracing the future, he never forgoes the values of his roots and so he writes a second book, ‘From Steelmaking to Shtetl’, where he revisits the past and explores the beauty of our collective Litvak heritage. Imbued with his discoveries, Mendel establishes the Isaac & Jessie Kaplan Jewish Museum in Cape Town. Replicating Shtetl life with life-size structures of homes, cobbled streets, classrooms and synagogues, Mendel went further and reproduced to the last detail, the well that stands today outside a once-owned family farmstead near Riteva.  The museum, its façade appearing as Jerusalem stone, is an interactive learning center recording the enriching legacy of the South African Jews who came from Eastern Europe and their contributions to South Africa in business, art and culture, academia, community life, sport, Zionism and the struggle against apartheid.

Mendel’s commitment to education stemmed from an inner passion. Despite the demands of running a cross-continent steel enterprise, he read widely, studied deeply and wrote nine books. Recognizing that Jewish education was critical to Jewish survival, one of his many investments in this regard was his establishment of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies and Research, a gift to the University of Cape Town. Each year he sponsored scholarships in South Africa to the children of his employees, and in Israel to Druze and Ethiopians. He studied the Mishna and financed its translation into English.

Above all else, Mendel was a family man, as all tributes at the funeral attested to. His wife Jill was his “right hand” in every way. He seldom travelled overseas without her, unusual for a frequent flyer businessman and global leader today. He included his family in everything he did - at the drop of a hat he would have left an important business meeting in Johannesburg to catch a plane to see one of his sons playing in a rugby match in Durban. He was known to interrupt meetings with presidents and prime ministers to take calls from the family. At his last public appearance when he welcomed all the new South African immigrants at the kotel in July 2009, he took along his grandson, because “I was on duty that day.”

Mendel was an Israeli citizen who lived much of each year in his beloved Jerusalem. On his 70^th birthday, he organized a family visit to the City of David, one of the many projects in Israel that his foundation has sponsored, as he wanted all to see and understand that the 3000 year old masonry provided tangible historical testimony of our religion, heritage and sovereignty ‘cemented’ to our ancient capital. Interrupting the guide, as Mendel was apt to do, he proudly bellowed, “Jerusalem is our capital and was so thousands of years ago. The remnants here embody the unique and eternal tie between Jerusalem and the Jewish people, a tie which has no parallel in the history of nations.”

No less unique and without parallel, Mendel will be sorely missed.

David E. Kaplan is a 1^st cousin to Mendel. A partner in a law firm before making aliyah in 1986, David today is a freelance journalist and editor of a number of magazines. He is a former Chairman of Telfed and is editor and chief correspondent of its magazine which is distributed to the entire Southern African community in Israel.