In her early twenties, Devorah Lehrman married Chaim Wulf, and they soon had a son and a daughter. Sixteen years later, they had a third child (now the author’s husband), who grew up and went to medical school at the University of Cape Town. When, three years in a row, he won an academic award funded by the Ochberg Foundation, he tried to thank the foundation staff for their thoroughness in continuing to assist the descendants of the original orphans. But he found that they had no role in selecting the award winners. Isaac Ochberg had touched two generations of the same family by coincidence.
Other coincidences lit the long path in the evolution of this book. Devorah’s first son married the daughter of Ochberg orphan Rosha, and Devorah’s second grandson married the granddaughter of Ochberg orphan Laya, although there were only 200 Ochberg children in the large South African community of over 100,000 Jews. The author’s maternal great-aunt, Rebecca Levinson, was the matron, or house mother, of the Cape Jewish Orphanage in Cape Town only a few years before the children arrived from Europe. The author’s paternal aunt, Rhoda Stella Getz, was a volunteer librarian at the orphanage after the Ochberg children grew up.
When they were in their sixties, first Naomi and then Devorah died of breast cancer. Although they saw each other fairly regularly throughout their lives, the sisters’ relationship had been forever changed by their separation and different fortunes.
Isaac Ochberg served as president of the orphanage for several more years, but in 1930 he gave up his work with the children, partly for health reasons and partly to work for the development of what was then Palestine (Israel). He died of stomach cancer at age fifty-nine, a year before World War II began. For many years, on the anniversary of his death, the Ochberg children recited the Mourners’ Kaddish, a prayer said only by close relatives of the deceased, as if Isaac Ochberg had been their father. Alexander Bobrow married, moved to England, and lived into his nineties. Lively little Faygele Shrier became Mrs. Fanny Lockitch and had three sons, but stayed involved with the orphanage, serving as chairwoman for five years. She was of invaluable assistance in the writing of this book. In 1991, the few children still living in the Cape Jewish Orphanage (usually known as Oranjia) were moved to small group homes, and the building was sold and demolished.