PROPERTY RECORDS
The Deeds Office in Cape Town, overlooking the parliamentary precinct, has provided a possibly unique insight into Jewish property ownership, a very promising area of research for South African Jewish communal history. Rows of shelves hold the erf registers of local areas including Parow, detailing the transfers of title, erf by erf, over time, while the title deeds themselves fill whole storerooms. The project’s researchers have created a master spreadsheet – mined from the multiple volumes of erf registers recording Parow property transactions – of all transfers involving Jewish names and, where known, companies with Jewish ownership. The erf registers lead to the title deeds, which have also been sampled. This exhaustive exercise has pointed to the primacy of property ownership as the preferred place of investment for Parow Jews, and arguably South African Jewry at large, in both the immigrant and South African-born generations.
