Seligman Swartzman Gillis Sandman Joffe Yachad Lederman Fleishman

Burial Plot(404/B/10)

He was born in Lithuania, then part of Imperial Russia, on 14 February 1876 and emigrated to South Africa at an early age. He arrived in Rhodesia at the pioneer town of Bulawayo in 1897. Bulawayo was a typical frontier town with many saloons and hotels catering to the needs of the locals and new arrivals. In 1907 he surfaced in Salisbury where he met and later married Dina Masinter, a recent arrival from Russia. They established themselves at Mazoe, then a mining camp about 20 miles from Salisbury. Ralph was born in Salisbury in 1908 and shortly thereafter the family moved to the Lonely Mine, a newly established gold mine situated in dense bush country about 40 miles from Bulawayo. Between 1909 and 1911, Lena and Alexander were born in Bulawayo. Before 1914, Dina took her three children on a voyage to England to see relatives. Their visit was cut short by the imminent outbreak of War in 1914 and she returned accompanied by a governess to help look after and bring up the children. By this time the family had moved to the Eiffel Blue Mine near Gatooma where Joseph operated a business in partnership with brothers Jacob and Victor. The Eiffel Blue Mine closed down around 1916 and Joseph moved to the Queens Mine some 20 miles from Bulawayo where he operated a trading store. Ida had been born in Salisbury in 1914 before the family left the Eiffel Blue Mine. When Joseph and his family were at the Queen's Mine, Rhodesia was struck by the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918 and Dina caught a bad attack of the flu. Joseph closed the business and took the family into Bulawayo where they remained until Dina recovered. Joseph was soon in business again, this time at the Wankie Colliery which was in a low lying area and an extremely hot part of the country. In 1922 he sold out for health reasons and decided to take the family on a holiday overseas to Lithuania to see his mother, Miriam and Dina's mother, Malka. When the family returned to Rhodesia in 1922, Joseph was soon back in business after acquiring the trading rights at the Sherwood Starr Mine which was a new discovery in the Que Que district and he remained there until 1926. After the failure of the Golden Snake venture, Joseph sold the business at the Sherwood Starr Mine and moved to Bulawayo. In the meantime, the last of his five children, Esther (Esme) was born at Gwelo in December, 1926. Joseph's fortunes did not prosper and he moved from one mine to another hoping that one of them would turn out to be a bonanza. In 1929 it seemed that his luck was about to turn when he opened a business at the Alaska Mine in the Sinoia district. This was a promising copper and gold mine but the bottom dropped out of the copper market as the Great Depression of the 1930s set in. The mine closed and Joseph was on the move again. From 1931 to 1938 he was trading on a number of small mines in the Que Que District. Joseph had a stroke of luck around 1938 when he and his brother Jacob found a nugget of gold of 150 oz. in a river bed. This realized about £600 and helped keep creditors at bay. In 1938 he bought the store at the Que Que Limeworks when his fortunes started to improve again. The Limeworks turned into the Rhodesian Iron and Steel Corporation when deposits of iron ore were discovered nearby. Joseph remained at the Limeworks until his death in 1950. By this time he had seen his little shop turn into a thriving business which was cared for by his widow and family. http://www.zjc.org.il/showpage.php?pageid=280