"a jewel of mpumalanga" a Nelspruit Travel Page by Kanjoo

recently south african jewish community alongwith the jews worldwide marked holocaust memorial day... so we traced out the lineage of rather minor communities scattered in the countrysides and visited for yom hashoah... i was previously not familiar with 'hashoah' but word 'yom' in urdu means day so it was interesting fact how it reached there i mean the word but any we visited Nelspruit, Bothaville and Fauresmith in 5 days...it was more research than tourism but anyway i enjoyed it... let me start here from Nelspruit. its a real jewel of the lowveld in the most eastern province nowadays known as Mpumalanga (previously aka Transvaal) the entire region is filled with wildlife, its so green and definitely the main attraction is kruger national park which is beyond the borders in swaziland and mozambique as well but our trip was for some other purpose.... nelspruit is located on Crocodile River...its about 50 km from Barberton and about 350 km from Pretoria... it was proclaimed in 1905 and named after 3 brothers... 1st one was Nel who farmed cattle in the area....anyway 30 km to the north of Nelspruit is another lovely little town aka White River... we spent a night there with Mr. Dave Berkowitz... and the following info which i m gonna write are obtained from him however not suitable for touristic purpose as the requirment of this website but i was insisted....the 1st documented jewish presence in the lowveld appears to have been in the year 1871 when a danish geologist Emil Cohen seems to have joined the gold rush.... in 1880...david benjamin due to a close relationship with south african president of that time president Paul Kruger was granted a mining concession in the area (in Lydenburg district)... while jews settled in various town in lowveld but the most succesful community was of Lydenburg district...in 1932 due the efforts of Mr. Barnet Dredzen (who was uncle of Dave, our host) and his brother Lazar a small synagogue was built...Barnets family later shifted to London, and they started some engineering business and became one of the UK's most succesful people....however today almost total eclipse of jewish country life has been well documented...the few country areas here with the potential to revive a possible jewish precense are Nelspruit and White River....