I visited the museum today. Spooky to think that somewhere in South Africa are distant relatives of mine.  One of our grandmother’s uncles (something like that) emigrated here in the 1880s, along with 30,000 others from Kaunas.

The Jewish Museum in Cape Town offers visitors a journey back in time. Most museums do. The striking feature of this museum, however, is that the journey to the past also brings us to a completely different part of our world, from Africa’s southern tip to a seemingly modest little country far to the north, to a country where around 90% of South Africa’s Jewish population has its roots (there are today about 80,000 Jews in South Africa).

The museum’s basement is dominated by a village environment (shtetl) from the late 1800s. A few houses are reconstructed in full scale, and you can clearly see how people lived and co-existed at the time. The village is called Riteve. It was recreated in the museum on the basis of entries made in the 1990s by a group of experts who went from South Africa to Lithuania to find traces of the family of the museum’s founder, Mendel Kaplan.

via Lithuanian footsteps in South Africa.