The artist Arthur Goldreich was an outspoken critic of the authorities in his native South Africa and in Israel where he lived for many years.
In one celebrated episode he was the architect of an elaborate charade in which he posed as a South African leaseholder of a farm near Johannesburg which sheltered a disguised Nelson Mandela. When the charade was exposed, Goldreich, a communist, managed to escape from custody while awaiting trial. Had he been convicted of the charges of armed insurrection that he faced, he would have faced either a life sentence or even execution.
Goldreich’s revolutionary zeal was not limited to his work with the African National Congress. He also volunteered for Palmach, which fought for the Jewish national movement in Palestine after the Second World War. In his later years he was a fierce critic of what he considered to be the mistreatment of the Palestinians.
Arthur Goldreich was born in 1929 in Pietersburg in South Africa and grew up as an Afrikaans-speaking, Jewish boy. His confrontations with authority began at the age of 11 he wrote to Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister, demanding that his school teach Hebrew rather than German. The school relented, and German lessons were discontinued.
In 1948 his world was transformed in two ways. Israel declared its independence and the apartheid Nationalist Party won South Africa’s election. Many of the new leaders had fascist and racialist views that he found abhorrent. Goldreich left to join the Jewish fight for their own nation-state. He returned to South Africa at the age of 33 and became an abstract painter, gaining a prize for being the best young painter in South Africa in 1955.
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With his family, he rented a farm, Liliesleaf, with financial backing from the South African Communist Party. It was there that he sheltered Mandela, and the farm became an operations centre for Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing.
Years later, during the famous four-hour speech from the dock in 1964 at the Rivonia trial, in which he said he was “prepared to die” for a democratic, non-racial South Africa, Mandela admitted that he “frequently visited Arthur Goldreich in the main house and he also paid me visits in my room”. He also said that it was under his recommendation that Goldreich “be recruited to Umkhonto we Sizwe”. As Mandela later recalled: “He was knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding.”
Goldreich made trips to countries around the Communist Bloc to seek military assistance and weapon-making expertise. He then set about planning the destruction of industrial and administrative targets.
Eventually, in July 1963, police raided the farm, and 16 ANC members and other radicals were taken to Johannesburg for trial. Goldreich bribed a guard and escaped, disguised as a priest. He fled to Swaziland, then Botswana and thence to Israel where he settled.
In time he became head of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He started its industrial and environmental design department and founded the Arthur Goldreich Foundation to help to support Bezalel students.
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He also involved himself in theatre and created the sets for King Kong, a celebrated South African musical tracing the tragic story of a real-life boxer. He also lobbied the Israeli government to sever its ties with Apartheid South Africa. He only returned to the land of his birth briefly for a reunion in 1994, once the apartheid regime had imploded. On that occasion he revisited the farm at Rivonia, which had been turned into a museum — it is described by the ANC as a “heritage site of our struggle”.
Goldreich became a fierce critic of the Israeli government, accusing it of straying from the high-minded original ideals of Zionism and acting in a way that was reminiscient of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He came to believe that the government had become more interested in territory than in peace and supported the idea that Israel should withdraw from what he labelled “the occupied territories”.
Goldreich’s wife, Tamar de Shalit, pre-deceased him. He is survived by his four sons.
Arthur Goldreich, painter, was born in 1929. He died on May 24, 2011, aged 82