Joan Weltman
Joan's family history reaches back to Lithuania. Her father was born there and immigrated to South Africa with his parents around 1902, when he was very young, later studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh before returning to Johannesburg to practice as a general physician. Her mother was born in South Africa in 1913 to parents whose family also came from Lithuania in the late 1800s, and she grew up in a small town on the West Rand called Reinfountin before moving to Johannesburg and then Cape Town. Joan's parents met when her father vacationed in Cape Town, corresponded for a few months, and married in the early 1940s. Joan grew up in Johannesburg with a sister and a brother.
Raised in a heavily Jewish area of Johannesburg, Joan attended public schools that were predominantly Jewish and received her Jewish education through daily cheder before school, continuing her studies after her bat mitzvah. The community was strongly Zionist, and she belonged for a couple of years to a Zionist youth movement. She studied at university in Johannesburg and qualified as a speech and hearing therapist. She met her husband, Michael Beckman, an accountant and CPA who worked in direct marketing, and they married when she was 21. They had two children in South Africa before immigrating.
Joan immigrated to Dallas in 1985, choosing the city for its warm climate, strong Jewish community, business opportunities for her husband, and the presence of South African friends and family, including Beverly and Peter Lewin. Her older children, Talia and Danny, entered Solomon Schechter, and she soon had a third child born in Dallas. She became deeply involved in the PTO and school, joined the JCC, and belonged to Shearith Israel synagogue. She later volunteered for organizations including Golden Acres and Grace Hospice. Divorced about five years after immigrating, she raised her family while maintaining the close family ties and traditions, such as Friday night Shabbat gatherings and traditional cooking, that she cherishes from South Africa.
Full Transcript
thank you very much and when you're done just push this button and it'll turn green and that means it's off thank you good morning thank you joan thank you so much for being here we're here for the purpose of doing a video interview for the roots to boots project and we're at the dallas uh jewish community center the date is september the 10th 2014. what i'd like to do first is to ask you to give me a very brief history of your parental family in europe and how they came to south africa my dad was born in lithuania and at the age of two he thinks he came to south africa they immigrated to south africa there's not a whole lot of detail that he remembers um but he knows he came either shortly after birth or within two years of being born so where were they where was he born in lithuania no his grandparents were not alive um his parents his parents his pe his mother and his father came
immigrated to south africa in 1902 and so basically he grew up in south i did not know my grandparents at all my grand mother died shortly thereafter that after they emigrated i don't know the circumstances my father's father my grandfather died when i was a very young child i think also when i was about three or four so i didn't know his parents at all my mother was born in south africa her parents my mother's grandma maternal grandparents were born also in lithuania and i can't remember the name of the town that they were born in but they came sometime in 1800 the late 1800s
and she was born in south africa in 1913. her parents died her mother died when she was a teenager her father died shortly thereafter do you know what their profession was in south africa i don't know i do not know either of either sex maternal or paternal my mother didn't talk much about her parents and neither did my dad he couldn't ever remember what cities did the um did they grow up my mother grew up in a small town on the west rand which is west of johannesburg called reinfountin she grew up there went to school there and it was quite a thriving jewish community there and then she came to the big city
of johannesburg um they were just her and her brother that lived there my father went straight to johannesburg he grew up in johannesburg he actually went to university in england he was a doctor and graduated in out of edinburgh and then came back to johannesburg to practice as a general physician my mother didn't even not go to college um when she finished school she had to go out of work so she was actually moved down to the cape town which is on the coast worked there and met my father somewhere in between and they got married in 1919 just before the end of the second
world war they got married to 1940 something do you know how they met i think they met i think my father went for a vacation down to cape town and met my mother and then they were corresponded for a couple of months and and what i never knew this but when my mother just passed away a few years ago and i found all these letters between my mother and father so they yeah it was it was wonderful so they corresponded and then i think they got married within about three or four months after having met and lived in johannesburg i have there was my sister
my brother myself and we grew up in johannesburg or went to university in johannesburg my sister then immigrated to israel and she actually went originally as a volunteer for the six day war to israel my brother immigrated to america he's a doctor he was a doctor and did his housemateship here in new york and i immigrated after i got buried and came to dallas let's talk about your childhood in south we living in in joburg as a child what type of a school did you go to i went to public school um at that time the public in the area where we lived the public
schools were like 70 jewish so it was wonderful it was no need for a jewish day school for myself so we went to the public schools for both elementary and high school and where did you get your jewish education i went to hreda in elementary school from a very young age and also so it was every day before school we would go in and have hada and then often times in the afternoon i also had a bakmitzvah so carried on the hair after my atmosphere as well but we were in a very jewish area all my friends were jewish the school was predominantly jewish so
there was a lot of jewish around us aside from being culturally jewish was the community also zionist yes very zionist very very science did you belong in to any zionist youth groups i belonged to haponin um but just for a short period we most of my friends my brother my sister their friends we went to some jewish movement at some point in our lives my family was not for very long in a year two years myself i was up on him for about two years so you say you did you you said you went to university i went to university in johannesburg what did you
study i graduated as a speech and hearing therapist so that is my profession um i do not practice it now though and when and how did you meet your husband it was very easy to meet people in south africa when i was younger we a lot of jewish people always we had parties or get togethers and that's how i made him married him there what is your husband's name my husband's name is michael beckman and so how old were you when you met i was just started i just started university so i was um 18. at what point when did you marry we got married i was 21 and we lived in south africa i had two children in south and i immigrated to united states in 1985.
okay tell me about your choice to immigrate here what were the motivating factors um my sister as i said had left and immigrated to israel and then eventually she came to america with her husband um my brother had immigrated to america so when i finished school um before i got married i came to america to visit them and i knew i wanted to live here also the politics of the country was such that i did not want to have my husband or my son go into the army then and fight for a cause i certainly didn't believe in because there was conscription tuned to the
army at that point in time um so i am i always wanted to immigrate when my when i got married my husband family they none of them had emigrated or traveled overseas or anything like that but then once he was introduced to me i kept on pushing and pushing and pushing and when eventually he was ready and we traveled a lot to united states um he was involved in a business that we dealt with people here in dallas in terms of business and so status was just a natural point of entry for us what was his business he was an accountant by profession a cpa
but he was in direct marketing so you already had contacts here in the dallas area correct okay okay so so um so dallas was your your city of choice at the point that you decided to imagine dallas was very high on the list there were a couple of other factors one was um first of all i didn't want to go the cold so i wanted to go anywhere south i wanted to raise my children in a very jewish environment one where i didn't have to struggle to be jewish and um somewhere where my husband felt he could earn a living so those were the factors
that govern where we where we went to then oftentimes when i traveled here to dallas with him on business i learned of more and more south africans who'd moved here and some who we knew very well from he had grown up with in south africa so that was a very important part in making our decision of where to come so who were the some of the south african families that were that you knew here before you came uh beverly and peter lewin and barbara and annie stokel and who else there were some doctors and they had moved away so that's about it so you had
a you had a good base of connections absolutely when you how old were the children when you moved here uh at that point it had got to had two children um my oldest child talia was eight and dany my son was five okay and what's what school choices did you make for them when you came here well when we came here um beverly lewin and peter were very instrumental in directing us where to go what to look and what to do and we went straight and put my kids into solomon shakhtar which is anna neckla right so it just wasn't even a choice at least
this is what you're doing right exactly and did you have more children after that i had a son that was born here hello in here and did he also go to all three children and then did you also affiliate with a synagogue um yes i did then and i belong to the same one and that's sheriff israel so still and members of sheriff so it sounds like you had a very easy time of integrating with the south african community correct how about the rest of the jewish community what was your experience in terms of integrating into the larger jewish community for me it was very
easy my kids went straight into school i became very involved with the school i did a lot of volunteer work i was very involved with the pto and so did a lot of work at the school was always at the school i felt pregnant pretty quickly after i came here within the first month so i was delivering color to the rooms with a big belly and i was very involved and and moved very quickly and easily into the jewish community i also joined the jcc and i was involved with that and with it with my kids we put i put them into camps here so
very quickly i just made myself part of the community and has that followed on since have you haven't been able to continue that involvement i'm still involved very involved with the show and i was involved with the school as well i'm not really involved with the jay anymore as my kids have grown up and left um and the school i've got you know i'm not i'm not involved with it but i am part of it what about any other organizations have you reached out into the community at all i do a lot of volunteering within the community so i do volunteering a lot for the
i also do volunteering i used to volunteer for golden acres um i do volunteering for grace hospice now but i basically see that they're jewish clinton very nice and has your husband had an opportunity to be involved with the jewish community he was um i was divorced about five years after we immigrated and he since passed away i see okay so the children are what ages now some i have a daughter who's 37 she lives in detroit michigan i have a son who is in la he is 34 and my baby is 28 and he lives here okay so you must have grandchildren i have
two two grandchildren and where are they in michigan and michigan so you've got the kids kind of spread around opportunities to travel to see them okay so um is there anything about south africa that you miss absolutely um i would say south africa just holds a very special place for me um i think if it wasn't for the politics um i would be back there not that there are long to go i would i'll go there every year i'll go back i have a lot of friends there i still have family there the life it's very it's very very easy to be jewish um you
don't have to struggle at it you don't have to work at it you don't have to make a point of being part of a community because you it's just very easy um a lot of the suburbs in johannesburg are very jewish still and it's wonderful to and it doesn't matter which one you are in in that in the northern suburbs of um you know most people go to shore everybody knows when it's yom kippur everybody knows when it's rosh hashanah it's just very easy and very comforting i guess are there any particular traditions that you've brought with you here that might be unique i don't
know if you'd call it unique as a pa but definitely you know every friday night shabbat do shabbat every friday night we all get together in somebody's house so i don't know i don't think that's typically south african but it's a tradition tradition we used to do there you know what else would it be uh what about foods particular birds foods i guess are very russian you know we do a lot of we do what my mother used to cook and i guess her mother used to cook as well um yes we bring up we do that still here now so i guess a lot
of what they used to do in russia we do i've brought it through with me arranged you know children i've told them how to make herring chopped herring we do a lot of hearings a lot of liver a lot of the baking that we did there so were there any particular challenges that you faced when you moved here or was it pretty easy for me i made a point of getting involved because that's the person who i am so it wasn't that difficult for me the other thing is because i've traveled to dallas so many times before that it wasn't totally strange for me so
it was very easy for me just to move and and head on out because i am that kind of a person okay well as you know the process that we're going through here is to provide a legacy not just for the dallas jewish historical society and the the particular project the roots to boost project but also for your family to know about you so i'd like to give you an opportunity at this point to add whatever you might want to add that would be included in the video particularly for your family anything that you might want to tell them for them to remember about you
and your experience in your life either in south africa or here or anything else that you think might be pertinent that you would like recorded for historical purposes and i am lucky i have been able to take my children back to south africa as adults with their families so they really understand where i come from because i think that's very important they do understand where i come from what we're about i keep very close ties with my family in and the family that's emigrated all over the world and my kids are very much part of it um i have a sister who lives here in
the united states and my brother had immigrated to florida [Music] although he's since passed on we are all very close i keep very close contact and i guess that's very important of something that i have brought from with me from south africa is the closeness the family ties and i think they do understand that and i'm lucky enough to have it you know they experience that as well and you i i think what partly what you might be telling them is that in going forward it's important for them and their generation and to pass to their children the importance of family correct and the importance
of closeness and maintaining those bonds correct correct the importance of that bond correct i think also because um when my father came to south africa those ties were lost a lot of them were lost because his parents died when he was young and the same thing goes for my mother there were never those ties so definitely my generation i know my cousins in south africa my first cousins we kept very close contact yeah i think because it wasn't there before so we we definitely try to maintain that and i think that's very important for them i would say a lot most south african jewish people
is the family ties and to maintain that i'm hearing that a lot from many of the south africans that i'm interviewing and i'm uh i'm hearing that same value yeah well joan i want to thank you so much for taking the time to thank you thank you with me and uh you know adding to this very very special project that we're working on um you will get at some point a copy of this video for your own archives and to share with your family well thank you very much thank you so much it's been it's been a pleasure thank you