“Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto theatre,” predicted to be the next Molly Picon, Chayela Rosenthal survived the Vilna Ghetto, the Kaiserwald labor camp in Latvia, and the concentration camp of Stutthof and its subcamp Sophienwalde in Poland and eventually became a leading actress and comedian in South Africa. 

Chayela Rosenthal was born Chaya Rozental on April 28, 1924 (some sources say 1922), into a literary and artistic family. Her father published the Yiddish daily newspaper, Der Ovnt Courier, in Vilna. Her older brother Leib was a prolific Yiddish writer, social activist, and poet who had published his first book of poems at age fourteen. He was a member of the Young Vilna Literary group and of the Yiddish-language Maydim Puppet Theatre, which from 1933 to 1941 specialized in children’s productions as well as left-wing parodies of political and social issues in Vilna. She also had a sister, Mary.

Rosenthal attended the Epstein High School, a private Jewish school, where she was top of her class, excelling in mathematics. She was also an excellent athlete and ice skater. Her passion was the arts, however, and her dramatic talent was recognized early on. She did voiceovers for the Maydim puppet theatre, and sang her brother’s songs on the radio as a teenager. When she was sixteen, she was chosen to represent Soviet-occupied Vilna in the International Folk Festival of Songs in Moscow, scheduled for June 1942. On June 24, 1941, however, the German army invaded Vilna and the culturally rich Jewish world of the 

In early September 1941, the Nazis forced the remaining Jewish population of Vilna into two ghettos. To raise the spirits of the inmates, actors and playwrights formed a theater company in the ghetto, which would allow actors and writers permits to work. The young charismatic Chayela was a regular feature, singing in jazz ensembles and appearing in starring roles in musical productions, many written by her brother. 

In 1943, the Nazis liquidated the Vilna Ghetto. Rosenthal’s father was murdered in the Ponary forest outside Vilna. Her brother Leib was sent to the Klooga labour camp in Estonia, where he was murdered just before the Liberation. Rosenthal, her mother, and her sister Mary were sent to the Kaiserwald labor camp in Riga, where her mother was executed on arrival. After a few weeks, Chayela and Mary were transported to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig/Gdansk, where they suffered starvation and typhoid. From there they were transferred to Stutthof’s subcamp, Sophienwalde. After two years of hard labor, in March 1945, they survived a women’s death march into the Baltic Sea. 

On March 10, 1945, Russian troops arrived and the German troops scattered, leaving the remaining women alive. Chayela and Mary found their way to Lebork, Poland, where some young men from Vilna invited them to stay to protect them from the Russian soldiers. Here Chayela met fellow survivor, Israel Jutan, a journalist who had taken on the journalistic nom-de-plume of Xavier Piatka. Xavier had a job with the Polish administration in Lauenberg, and Chayela joined the State Yiddish Theatre group directed by Ida Kaminska and formed from troupes from Wroclaw and Lodz. Chayela and Xavier married in 1945.

In a 1946 performance, Rosenthal was spotted by American Yiddish icon Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalich, who arranged an audition for her with the impresario Sol Hurok. Unable to obtain a visa for her to the United States, Hurok managed to get her a visa to settle in France. 

In France, Rosenthal first performed on the Yiddish stage in Yiddish actor, stage manager, director, and writer Jonas Turkow’s company and then later on her own. She also toured the Displaced Persons camps, entertaining the refugees. In Paris she was the first singer of Jewish songs to appear on French television and was broadcast widely on the French Radio Nationale. Many of her songs were recorded under the “Polyglotte” label, and she even won herself an entry in the French Theatrical Encyclopaedia. 

Rosenthal was first brought to South Africa in 1950 by South African Yiddish actress and impresario, Sarah Sylvia (1890-1976), on behalf of African Consolidated Theatres. Rosenthal was part of a troupe organized in France by Mark Markov and Etta Topol, former members of Maurice Schwartz’s company who had settled in London, where they had directed the Grand Palais theater until the war broke out; they subsequently performed in air raid shelters.

When she arrived in South Africa, Rosenthal was already an accomplished actress and recording star, who Picon and Kalich had been predicted would be the new Molly Picon. Rosenthal, however, preferred to settle on the furthermost tip of Africa, in beautiful Cape Town, despite the fact that South Africa (unlike London, New York, and Buenos Aires) had never had a permanent professional Yiddish theater company. She fell in love with Cape Town and preferred to avoid the stress of performing in New York, wanting to live a more normal life and start a family. The sporadic Yiddish theater that amateur groups performed was focused in Johannesburg in the former Transvaal (today Gauteng), rather than Cape Town. In 1947, interest in Yiddish had been revived by the establishment of the South African Yiddish Cultural Federation, which organized lectures and an amateur theater group for which it was desperately but unsuccessfully seeking a permanent director. 

As a seasoned professional, Rosenthal was not prepared to throw in her lot with the local amateurs, either as actress or director. Instead, she preferred to perform solo, in Yiddish comedies and one-woman shows in the 1950s and 1960s in Muizenberg, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Only 24 kilometers outside Cape Town, the seaside town of Muizenberg—nicknamed “Jewsenberg”— was a gathering place for Jews from all over South Africa and from the former Southern Rhodesia during the summer months. Rosenthal performed there regularly in the summer vacation unless she was overseas. 

Rosenthal’s performances, in a mixture of Yiddish and English, were not confined to the big cities, however. She also performed in Parow, in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, in the Western Cape country towns of Worcester (1960) and Paarl (1973), and in Benoni (1957) and Potchefstroom (1961) in the Transvaal. Fairly sizeable Jewish populations still lived in the smaller towns. In addition she always maintained a close relationship with Mark Markov and Etta Topol, in whose company she had first been brought to Johannesburg and who had settled in Bulawayo. In 1958, 1961, 1968, and 1972, she performed at the Jewish Guild in Bulawayo, and in 1960 Mark Markov was featured with her at her annual concert in Muizenberg. 

Rosenthal participated in charity galas and shows benefiting numerous Jewish organizations in South Africa and Israel.  She sang in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French, Russian, Polish, and Afrikaans, much to the delight of her South African fans. Her shows were made up of a potpourri of character sketches, songs, and skits, all interpretations of traditional and modern Jewish life. In 1959, she produced a Stage Show LP of Israeli and Yiddish songs performed at various shows and recorded by Gallotone. 

Rosenthal had not given up on her dreams of the international stage and frequently performed overseas, in Israel (where her sister had settled), London, Paris, and New York. In 1956, during the Sinai campaign, she was praised for having performed in all the military camps, as well as in the villages and towns. On May 26, 1956, a special broadcast to South Africa was arranged for her with the famous Hollywood actor and singer Danny Kaye. 

In 1964 Rosenthal was invited to be the entertainer on the maiden voyage of the Israeli ship the SS Shalom, from Haifa to New York and back. During the seven days she spent in New York, she met Jacob Jacobs, actor-producer, director, and author of some 150 musical productions, including arguably the most famous Yiddish song on the international stage, “Bay mir bistu sheyn.” In 1965 Jacobs invited Chayela to return to New York to perform alongside Latvian Yiddish comedic actor and songwriter Max Perlman (who had recently visited South Africa) in the musical comedy Goodbye Charlie at the Anderson Theatre on Second Avenue and 4^th Street. She also appeared on TV and performed for another nine months in one of New York’s exclusive night spots, in a show entitled “Hello Molly.” 

In 1970 Rosenthal was invited by Jacobs to play the starring role in “The President’s Daughter” at the Billy Rose theater on Broadway. A review describes Rosenthal as cavorting like “a bouncing chatterbox, reminiscent of Molly Picon.” She spent another nine months in New York, then travelled to Chicago and Boston before leaving for Canada.

In 1977 Rosenthal made her debut on the English stage in Cape Town, as Mrs. Hollander in Woody Allen’s play Don’t drink the water, for which she was nominated for a Three Leaf award in the category of best female performer. 

For Rosenthal, humor was a very serious business. She said more than once that her hardest task was writing her own material. She commented that being a female comic was very tough. 

[B]eing a women I can’t tell rude jokes, anything that has a double meaning. Neither can I be on the bill of lower class venues—you never know how that sort of audience will react. So I have to reserve myself for five star hotels—and then—oi vey—there is the danger of over exposure. I write all my own material a comedian has to be original—and what do I find? That everyone all over the country is telling my jokes—MY JOKES! And once they are told they are gone, pfft!... We Jews have the knack of making fun of ourselves, We are a nation who can take a joke against ourselves, we can always see the humour in a situation…

Tears and laughter are never far apart… Because very often the jokes are to hide the sadness. I tell them so I can forget those terrible years, the terrible years during the war. I have locked them away… but let me tell you that it was worse, far worse than you will ever read in a book or see in a film (The Citizen, July 7, 1977). 

Owing to anti-Apartheid boycotts, South Africa was late in receiving the rights to perform Fiddler on the Roof.  In 1979 in Cape Town, Rosenthal shone in the part of Golda, even though she was already critically ill with ovarian cancer. A review in the leading Afrikaans daily newspaper, Die Burger, claimed that the roof of the Nico Malan theater must have lifted at least two inches from the applause on opening night, while Rosenthal was simply described as “formidable.” She died only a week after the play ended, on September 1, 1979.

Largely unbeknownst to anybody, the heroine of Joshua Sobel’s play Ghetto—a Hebrew play based on the true story of the theater that functioned in the Vilna Ghetto—was based on Rosenthal. It was produced in Cape Town in 1987 by Israeli producer Rudi Nadler-Nir; a 1991 production in Johannesburg was specifically dedicated to Rosenthal’s memory. 

Rosenthal left an even more lasting legacy in her two daughters, Naava (1952-2010) and Zola (b. 1959). By the age of eleven, Naava was performing alongside her mother. In 2003 she composed a musical play based on her mother’s life, entitled Better don’t talk! that included the songs that her uncle Leib wrote in the ghetto especially for her mother. Naava travelled the world with her musical, most movingly in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the very stage on which her mother had once performed. In 2009, she published a book about her father’s life, No Goodbyes: A Father-Daughter Memoir of Love, War and Resurrection. 

Zola, Rosenthal’s younger daughter, inherited her mother’s and her uncle’s musical talent and writes songs and music. Most striking is a song, “Hert zikh tsu,” that she wrote for Holocaust Memorial Day in 2018 in a combination of Yiddish and English. She has also developed a website dedicated to her mother: chayela.com