Title: A Handful of Sand: Genesis 22:17 Jewish Cape Town, 5779
Author: Tony Raphaely
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Cape Town, South Africa 2020
ISBN 9781775847229 / ISBN 978-1-77-584722-9
Softcover, 21 x 25 cm, 296 pages, 300 colour photos
Tony Raphaely: When I grew up in Cape Town, after the Second World War, and before the National Party came to power and instituted their infamous apartheid regime, there were about 25,000 Jews living in the Cape Peninsula and nearby towns. Today, I understand, the figure is about half that number. A few months ago, visiting an exhibition of Roman Vishniac's work in London, I was reminded of his celebrated book, A Vanished World - a compendium of photographs he took of Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s. Today it is recognised as cone of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish life in eastern Europe at that time.
History teaches us that no Jewish diaspora community has tenure, so to give historians of the future a pictorial window into Cape Town's wonderful Jewish community, I decided to publish an image-only book showcasing a selection of the city's diverse - and in many ways dynamic - Jewish citizens. Books of this nature usually focus on community leaders and high-profile business people, including those at the top of their professions, but as Cape Town's Jewish community comprises a broader spectrum of occupations, readers will see a picture of a surgeon in an operating theatre together with images of a tree feller, a caregiver and a judge.
Jewish Cape Town 5779 portrays a cross section of the community, highlighting its diversity and wide-ranging impact on the Mother City. While a book can - and hopefully will - be written about Cape Town's Jewish community since the first settlers arrived in the 1800s, this isn't it. My goal was to capture a representative sample of the Mother City's Jewish population in the current Jewish year. Virtually all photographs featured here were taken since last Rosh Hashanah. In closing, as education and learning are the cornerstones of our Jewish culture, I am happy to donate the proceeds of this book to support Jewish Capetonians at schools and universities in Cape Town and the surrounding areas.