Ladino legacy lives in SA’s Sephardic community

While most of South African Jewry are Ashkenazi and are familiar with Yiddish, there’s a smaller Sephardic community with many members who historically spoke a Judeo-Spanish language called Ladino.

Within Ladino’s history lies the story of a community which came to South Africa via Spain, Turkey, Egypt, Rhodes Island in Greece, and later Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Michele Benatar’s ancestors were all Sephardic. “Originally, they came from Spain. After the Inquisition, they left,” she says. Along the way, some of her grandparents lived in Turkey and Egypt, but ultimately both sides of the family ended up in Rhodes Island.

Coincidently, both her paternal and maternal grandparents left Rhodes in the early 1930s. “They left because they heard that fortunes could be made in Africa,” Benatar says. Her paternal grandparents came to what is today the DRC, and her maternal grandparents landed up in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia.

“During World War II, Rhodes was occupied by the Italians, who worked with the Nazis to deport the Jews into concentration camps,” Benatar says. This affected much of the community her grandparents left behind, but some of them survived.

“Due to all these different influences, we spoke the old Ladino,” Benatar says, a language she learned from her grandparents and parents. “This is a mixture of Spanish and some Greek words along with smatterings of other languages because of all the areas they lived in along the way.”

Until she was 12, Benatar grew up in the DRC in a town called Kipushi, where her father owned a shop. Her home language was French. When her mother passed away and the government began to nationalise everything, her father left the country with Benatar and her siblings, along with most of their community. Like much of the Sephardic community from the DRC, Benatar and her family went to Cape Town, while those from Zimbabwe mainly went to Johannesburg. Though Benatar now lives in Johannesburg, when she goes to Cape Town, she always visits her beloved Sephardic community.

Benatar and Isaac Habib, who today splits his time between Cape Town and Rhodes, share a similar heritage. Habib, a tour guide in Rhodes, is deeply connected to his ancestors’ history. “My father was born in Turkey, but came to Rhodes when he was a little boy,” he says. “My mother came from Rhodes.”

Habib’s father left Rhodes in 1937 because 80% of the community lived below the poverty line. “My mom was a Holocaust survivor, she was taken from Rhodes to Auschwitz. After surviving, she went to what’s now the DRC, where she met my dad.

“I grew up in the Congo hearing Ladino, Spanish, and French at home,” Habib says. Ladino survived in the Congo because 99% of the Jews there were from Rhodes, he says. Habib says that in 1522, the Turks, under the Ottoman Empire, took the island of Rhodes from the Knights Hospitaller, a military religious order that had roots in the Crusades. Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, who ruled the empire, opened the gates of Rhodes to the Jews of Spain who were already in the Ottoman Empire. So, Ladino survived there for 400 years until the Jews who remained in Rhodes were taken to Auschwitz.

“The Holocaust took its toll because 200 000 Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino were killed and so, the language started to vanish,” Habib says. Today, it’s a dying language. Nonetheless, Habib found his niche in Cape Town in the Sephardi community, and he extends these connections in Rhodes, where he spends five months of the year as a tour guide.

Johannesburg-born Natasha Bernstein says her Sephardic family can trace their lineage back to the Spanish Inquisition. “They fled to Rhodes, wider Greece, and Turkey. All my great-grandparents landed up moving to Rhodes and in fact, lived across the road from each other in La Juderia – the Jewish Quarter in the Old Town of Rhodes.”

Both sides of Bernstein’s family left Rhodes as the racial laws against Jewish people gained momentum before the Holocaust. Her maternal great-grandparents came to the DRC and her paternal great-grandparents to Zimbabwe. They all ultimately moved to Johannesburg.

“My parents met at a Sephardi mixer when the shul here first opened,” Bernstein says. “Even though I don’t speak Ladino, I’ve been exposed to the language since I was a child.”

She knows Ladino sayings, the names of Sephardic foods, and the words of Ladino songs sung in shul. “I’m blessed to have maternal grandparents who speak the language fluently and have been instrumental in keeping this dying language alive in our family.”

One of the few Holocaust survivors from Rhodes is Bernstein’s 90-year-old cousin, Sammy Modiano. “When I met Sammy in Rhodes, he spoke to us in Ladino about his life on the island as a child, his time at Auschwitz, and how we must always remember who we are and be proud Jews,” Bernstein says.

“It’s my generation’s responsibility to continue the legacy with as much pride and passion as them.”

Jack Halfon’s family history is also rooted in the Spanish Inquisition, after which his ancestors were taken to Turkey. “My parents spoke Ladino from the time they were born, as did their ancestors,” he says. “Both their families moved to Rhodes Island between 1927 and the early 1930s.”

Yet in the wake of the Great Depression, Halfon’s father was sponsored by his brother to move to Rhodesia. A few years later, his future wife joined him. “My parents, my sister, and I spoke Ladino,” Halfon says. “That tradition was carried for close to 500 years.”

At the age of 30, Halfon moved to South Africa, and later started a family. While he never taught his children the language, he still speaks fluent Ladino to his sister and some friends. “It’s not widely spoken, but in my generation – I’m 77 – there still are a significant amount of people with the same background who speak it,” he says.