Isaac Lewis, South African Jewish Diamond Magnate and Philanthropist, Dies

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

Isaac Lewis, South African Jewish diamond magnate, died here yesterday at the age of 78.

The name of Isaac Lewis was a household word in South Africa. He was keenly interested in Jewish communal affairs and established the Isaac Lewis Jewish Orphanage in Johannesburg, which was dedicated some time ago by General Smuts.

Isaac Lewis made his home at Verceniging, in the southern Transvaal. He was born at Neustadt, in the then Russian province of Kovno, now Lithuania, in 1849.

As a young man, in 1870, he went to South Africa, and settled in the Kimberley region. That was the year in which diamonds were discovered there, and in which, also. Cecil Rhodes went out from England to join his elder brother, then a farmer in Natal. Three years later Barnett Barnato went thither from London and began his career. Lewis formed a partnership with Samuel Marke, of Johannesburg, who is now a Senator of the Union of South Africa.

He was a director of the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company, the Swaziland Corporation, the South African Breweries, and the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company, which has turned to industrial uses the gigantic falls of the Zambesi River, the largest cataract in the world. Though less known to the public than some others, he was one of the most forceful and successful members of the group of mining and industrial promoters which include Rhodes, Barnato and Alfred Beit, and which brought about the extraordinary financial and political development of South Africa.