Johannesburg was not yet a year old when this congregation was founded. Since then it has changed its name, its rabbis, and its address more than once — and never stopped being, in one form or another, this same community.
Johannesburg was eleven months old.
Founded to maintain the Jewish cemetery and hold services for the city's earliest Jewish residents. Within months it was renamed the Witwatersrand Hebrew Congregation.
Johannesburg's first purpose-built synagogue. Within a few years, disagreements over style and Halacha split the young community into three separate congregations — President Street, the Fox Street Beth Hamedrash, and the Park Street Synagogue.
Designed by Swiss architect Theophile Schaerer and modelled on the Hagia Sophia, the new Great Synagogue seated 1,400 people beneath a vast central dome, its four half-domes cradling the women's galleries and a gold Star of David set at its centre. It was, for decades, the largest synagogue on the African continent — and the first in the city built with its Ark facing north, toward Israel, a custom every Johannesburg synagogue built since has followed.
The Witwatersrand Hebrew Congregation and the Johannesburg Hebrew Congregation amalgamated to form the United Hebrew Congregation, with the Great Synagogue as its principal home. Rabbi Dr Judah Leo Landau, who had consecrated the building the previous year, became the congregation's first Chief Rabbi — a role that, for most of the twentieth century, doubled as the official seat of South Africa's Chief Rabbinate.
Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz led the congregation from 1945, and in 1957 publicly challenged the government's attempt to extend apartheid into religious life, insisting South Africa's synagogues remained open to worshippers "of any creed or colour." Over these decades the Great Synagogue hosted the community's public mourning for the victims of the Holocaust and its celebration of the founding of the State of Israel. Chief Rabbi Bernard Casper was inducted in 1963, and Rabbi Cyril Harris succeeded him in 1987, serving as Chief Rabbi of South Africa until 2004 — through the years the congregation's own Rabbi Dovid Hazdan led it out of Wolmarans Street and into its new home in Houghton Estate.
With attendance declining as Johannesburg's Jewish community moved north, Rabbi Dovid Hazdan was approached to take on the Great Synagogue at Wolmarans Street — the beginning of a tenure that would carry this congregation through its hardest years and into a new home.
For five years, as the inner city deteriorated around it, Rabbi Hazdan kept walking into the CBD to keep the congregation davening. When the Great Synagogue finally closed its doors in November 1994, after eighty years, he did not let the community close with it — he moved it into his own backyard in Oaklands.
What began in a backyard grew into Great Park. On Rosh Hashanah 2000, Rabbi Hazdan led the congregation into its new home on 4th Street — built, at a smaller scale, to echo the dome, columns and arches of the building it succeeded, and carrying the original bimah, rabbi's pulpit, chandeliers and ner tamid with it.
Great Park marked its centenary as successor to the Great Synagogue — a single, unbroken line back to that room above Wainstein's store.
In July 2026, Rabbi Hazdan concluded his tenure — thirty-seven years after he first arrived at a struggling synagogue in a deteriorating city centre.
Rabbi Yisroel and Rebbetzen Leanne Binstock join Great Park as its clergy — with Leanne, raised in Johannesburg, returning to lead the community that shaped her.
A shul that met in a backyard in Oaklands.
When the congregation left Wolmarans Street, it did not leave empty-handed. The new building on 4th Street was designed, as closely as scale allowed, to echo the dome, the columns and the arches of the synagogue its members had prayed in for eighty years — and it carried real pieces of that building with it.
The bimah. The rabbi's pulpit. The chandeliers and candelabra. The clock, and the ner tamid that has burned continuously above one Ark or another since long before most of us were born. Even the foundation stones of Johannesburg's earliest synagogues made the journey — set into a building that is, in every sense that matters, still the same congregation that met in a shopkeeper's store in 1887.
Every generation of this congregation has had to decide it was worth continuing. Ours is no different.
