Persona

Feldman, Richard

1897-1968

Richard Feldman was born on September 15, 1897, the son of Joseph and Minnie Feldman, in Lithuania and came to South Africa at the age of 13. His education took place at the Jewish Government School, Johannesburg. He joined the family firm of L. Feldman and Tobacco & General Supplies Ltd., where he rose to be a director. In 1931 he married Freda Ginsburg and had one son and one daughter. He died on 14th February, 1968, after a long illness.

He was a man of wide interests and with a strong social conscience. After the first world war he became Chairman of the Doornfontein Branch of the Jewish War Victims Fund. His sympathy for the underdog led him to join the South African Labour Party and he was secretary of the Party's Organizing Committee before being elected to the Transvaal Provincial Council in 1943, a position he held for 11 years. He was a member of the Central Rand School Board and his interest in education, both European and non-European, showed itself in many ways.

For several years he was an executor of the Morris Isaacson Education Fund, which grants bursaries to deserving African students. This fund had its origin in the Peretz School for Africans, which Feldman established earlier and which was incorporated into the Isaacson Fund.

The South African Ort. Oze was another body which benefited from Feldman's enthusiasm and he played a vital role in developing Ort (Society for the Promotion of handicrafts and of industrial and agricultural work among the Jews) in South Africa.

All his life Feldman was a writer and was a contributor of articles to the daily press on a wide variety of subjects. His abiding love was for the Yiddish language which he had learnt as a boy. In 1935 he had published in Warsaw a volume of short stories in Yiddish entitled Schwartz un Weiss.

These stories had as their theme the difficulties of living experienced by the non-Europeans in South Africa. After the second World War a second and enlarged edition of his work was brought out.