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Name: ROLLNICK, Joseph Ralph
Birth Date: 1881 Taurage, Lithuania
Death Date: 31 Aug 1925 Ostend
Married: In Cardiff 1901 Rebecca 'Rita' Fligelstone b. 27 Mar 1877 Cardiff, d. 28 Nov 1937 London
Children: Zelda (28 Nov 1911 Cardiff-1968)
Book Reference: EAMR
War Service: WW1 with EAMR - A Sqdn. 4/12/14 - 10/3/15 - Re-enlisted 10/12/15
General Information:
'Congo Joe'
Nat Probate Calendar
Freemason Bulawayo Lodge 4 June 1909
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://rolnicks-of-lithuania.com/chap1.pdf CHAPTER ONE - CONGO JOE ROLLNICK Congo Joe! We always knew that Congo Joe Rollnick was some sort of cousin of our mother Lily, the daughter of Wolf Rollnick of Wynberg, and that Joe had made a fortune in the Congo. And we knew that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, twice, and then gambled it all away, and committed suicide. And it wasn’t just our branch of these Wynberg Rollnicks that knew this. If you had Googled “Congo Joe Rollnick” a few years ago (before I started uploading things about him) you would have made only two hits. One was the following, from Jake Rollnick1: My great (great?[great?]) ) uncle was called Congo Joe Rollnick. He travelled up to the congo poaching elephant and selling their tusks around Europe. He had left his wife and kids in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and became an obsessive gambler. Here comes my one claim to fame.......he broke the bank of Monte Carlo twice, and on both occasions lost it ALL. I know, he may not sound like a very pleasant man. I once heard him being talked about (briefly) on the discovery. But they only called him Congo Joe, no Rollnick! How did he make his fortune, only to lose it again? In “Rhodesia Jewry and Its Story” by Eric Rosenthal the first Rollnick reference is to a report that the Jewish 1 community of Bulawayo (then in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) had started a Relief Fund on behalf of distressed Jews in Russia, following the pogroms in Kishinev and Bialystok. “Within a few days a sum of £210 had been collected, including several outside gifts, £11. 11s from S. Robinson in Gwelo, £7.12.6. from Que Que, collected by H. M. Liptz [sic], and a third from far-away Kalomo, Northern Rhodesia, where Mr. Rollnick raised ten guineas.” Then, in the second reference Eric Rosenthal writes “The fate of J.L. Rollnick is typical of the ups and downs of the pioneer settlers. Coming to Northern Rhodesia in the early 1900’s he entered into a trading partnership with Charles Solomon, but was almost ruined when his premises burnt down uninsured. Moving over to the Congo, he became associated with Lever Brothers, for whom he built up a business in vegetable oil and similar products, that helped to make him one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest man in Central Africa. At one time he was credited with owning over 1,000,000 (pounds) and, even if this were an exaggeration, there was no question of his ability and enterprise as a business man. Of enormous physical strength, one of his favourite tricks was to tear in half a whole pack of playing cards. With his newly-won fortune he went overseas, to tour the most spectacular gambling spots in Europe, actually achieving the proverbial feat of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo! But alas, his fortune changed and, at that same resort, he ultimately speculated away every penny he possessed. Confronted with the prospect of complete ruin, poor Rollnick committed suicide. It is a tribute to his personality that Lever Brothers both paid for his funeral and put up a memorial stone in his honour.” You might think that this is all one needs to know about Congo Joe but the reality is that Rosenthal’s book went unpublished for good reason. Commissioned by the Rhodesia Board of Jewish Deputies, the book was found to lack accuracy and to require a “tremendous effort of correction”. The manuscript was shelved and found again only decades later. Even in the few lines above there are some errors. The first, trivial one is that Joe was J R Rollnick and not J L. The Rhodesia Board of Deputies established a Historical and Archives Committee in 1949/50 which was chaired by myself. Eric Rosenthal was commissioned to write a history of Rhodesian Jews. There was a long delay before we received it and the consensus was that to a great extent it lacked accuracy and it required a tremendous effort of correction. It was, therefore, decided to pend and shelve the manuscript. http://www.zjc.org.il/showpage.php?pageid=16 enlisted the help of Diane Backhouse, archivist of Unilever, the successor to Lever Bros, she could find no trace of any relation between Joseph Rollnick and the Company, and no record of any monument having been set up nor any funeral having been paid for. And we now know that Joe died in Ostend, so maybe even the Monte Carlo story is out. But a diligent search of the available records can add a great deal to what we know about Joe. In the first place, we can easily solve the problem of his cousinhood with the Wynberg Rollnicks. I had found, searching for Joseph Rollnick on the web-site Ancestry.com, that Joe had married in 1910 a Mrs Rita Harris. Our Joseph Ralph Rollnick is the son of Myer Rollnick, merchant.