(Author: David Saks, Vol. 69, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2014)
- Feature image: President Nelson Mandela meeting with Cape Council – SA Jewish Board of Deputies, 1999. From left, Elliot Osrin, President Mandela, Michael Bagraim, Adv. Jonathan Silke
The elections of 7 May 2014 gave South Africans born after the country’s transition to multi-racial democracy in 1994 their first opportunity of voting in national and provincial elections. So far as members of this ‘Born Free’ generation had been concerned, living in a country where fundamental democratic freedoms are staunchly upheld and unfair discrimination, whether based on racial or other grounds, constitutionally prohibited was something largely taken for granted. By contrast, those old enough to remember the apartheid era, as well as the years of uncertainty immediately preceding the democratic transition, would know how far South Africa had come since then. They would also be far more aware of how fragile were those achievements, and of the truth of the famous aphorism (attributed to, amongst others, Thomas Jefferson) that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.
South Africa’s first-ever non-racial democratic elections on 27 April 1994 formally marked the passing of white minority control to majority rule. It was the culmination of a process that had begun a little over four years before, when President F W de Klerk turned the political scenario on its head by rescinding the thirty year-old ban on the African National Congress and other political organisations. The abolition of those restrictions ushered in at a stroke a new era of negotiations that for the first time involved representatives of the entire population. The effect was like the bursting of a dam; the ruling National Party quickly found that it could not put the genie back in the bottle even if it wanted to, and gradually became resigned to the role of negotiating itself out of power.
Reactions to the De Klerk revolution naturally varied. Amongst the black population, there was unrestrained euphoria; amongst whites, the mood ranged from cautious optimism to baffled fear and fury. Generally speaking, Jewish reactions fell into the first category, and not just because Jews tended to be on the liberal-left of the political spectrum. By the close of the 1980s, South Africa’s economy was in free fall, with losses to capital flight amounting to several billions each year, international sanctions being stepped up and foreign investment steadily dropping off. Countrywide political unrest was continuing apace, despite crackdowns by the state involving not just the police but the military (in whose operations in the unsettled townships many young Jews, together with other white conscripts, were compelled to take part). As a result, the Jewish population was shrinking rapidly as its younger members in particular departed for safer and more prosperous shores – Australia, in the main, as well as England, Israel, the United States and Canada. The 1970s had been the first decade in a century where Jewish numbers did not increase; the 1980s was the first in which they actually diminished, and by a significant margin. According to the national census of 1980, there were just under 120 000 professing Jews in South Africa; in 1991, according to the findings of a major socio-demographic survey conducted by Allie Dubb, the number had dropped to somewhere between 92 000 and 106 000.1 Whatever the future might hold, therefore, most Jews welcomed De Klerk’s reforms as a step in the right direction.
From a particularly Jewish perspective, the new era did not start well. Fearful of what the changing political landscape portended, white right-wingers countrywide launched a series of demonstrations, in the course of which such antisemitic demonstrations as burning Israeli flags and blaming Jews in general for the selling out of the white race featured prominently. The community also received a jolt from the ‘liberationist’ camp when the newly released Nelson Mandela was photographed warmly embracing Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat. It was an indication that the Jewish community’s longstanding Zionist loyalties would, to say the least, come under pressure in future.
As it happened, antisemitism on the right tended to manifest at a low level following this initial flare-up. The reality was that blacks and ‘Communists’, however so defined, were the primary bogeymen on the radar of this constituency. After the 1994 elections, the white right was finished as a political factor, and antisemitic activity from this quarter has long ceased to pose any serious threat to SA Jewry. In 1990, however, no-one knew how far this shadowy constituency might go in its determination to reverse the course of history and cling on to its privileges.
Graffiti on a grave in Bloemfontein’s old Jewish cemetery, 2010, a today comparatively rare instance of old-style right-wing antisemitism in post-liberation South Africa.
So far as the Arafat incident went, Jews had to adapt to the reality that the incoming regime would be a great deal less friendly to Israel than they would like, as well as the existence of strong support for the Palestinian cause within those circles. The community also had to pay the price for the close relationship that had emerged between Israel and the apartheid regime in the years following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, something that would naturally be exploited to the hilt by local anti-Israel campaigners. What helped to assuage its anxiety was the ANC’s policy, which prevails to this day, of recognising the legitimacy of the State of Israel and of its right to exist within secure borders alongside an independent Palestinian state based in the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories. It further helped that South Africa’s transition largely coincided with the launch of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Oslo Accords, signed a mere six months before the first democratic elections, held out the hope – sadly illusory, as things proved – that just as blacks and whites in South Africa had come together to finally resolve all the issues between them, so were Israelis and Palestinians doing likewise. In reality, there was little coherent basis for comparing the two situations. For those who better understood the complex dynamics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the collapse of the Oslo peace process in September 2000 and the sustained period of violence that followed it will have come as no surprise. In South Africa, the failure of the peace process resulted in a pronounced hardening of attitudes towards Israel within the ruling party, which in turn led to a number of verbal spats between government and the Jewish leadership. Despite this, the Jewish community’s traditionally strong Zionist loyalties have shown little sign of weakening, beyond the emergence from its ranks of a small number of left-leaning dissidents who have involved themselves in anti-Israel activities.
SA Jewry continued to be staunchly pro-Zionist, despite the negative attitude of the ruling party and the emergence of a vociferous anti-Israel fringe from within its own ranks following the collapse of the Oslo peace process. The second picture was taken during the notorious UN World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban in September 2001.
Notwithstanding these early hiccups, the leadership of the major Jewish communal organisations, in particular the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris, from the outset took a decision to actively identify with the transition process and to lead the Jewish community in doing likewise. For the SAJBD, this entailed a pronounced departure from its previous stance of political neutrality, for which it had been much criticised by progressive members of the community during the apartheid era. Whatever the failures of the past, it was recognised that the time had come to seize the moment and join with other South Africans in forging a new, and hopefully better society for all. For this, attaining universal democratic rights was just the first step; the next crucial stage had to be to help address the huge socio-economic imbalances in society, the legacy of over a century and a half of white minority domination.
To an extent, the decision of the Jewish leadership to become part of the transition process was aimed at allaying the inevitable feelings of anxiety that were rife within their constituency. Rather than remaining passive bystanders, with all the feeling of helplessness and irrelevance that this would engender, Jews were urged to become constructive agents in their own destiny. The mere fact of becoming positively involved would act as a morale booster. Certainly, it would be an effective antidote to the mood of fatalism and helplessness that had exercised so baleful an influence during the apartheid era. A positive attitude was needed even after the De Klerk reforms, since during the early 1990s, political violence and economic decline, and with it Jewish emigration, continued apace. Certainly, many Jews welcomed the dawn of a new era and sought to play a constructive role in bringing it about, but others feared that the country’s destiny was to become yet another authoritarian, dysfunctional failed state of the type so common in post-colonial Africa.
South Africa’s first-ever democratic, non-racial elections on 27-8 April 1994 turned out to be an inspiring success, confounding the doomsday predictions of the Afro-pessimists. The fact that the elections themselves went ahead so peacefully was remarkable enough, but the most miraculous aspect of the transition was that it ended at a stroke the ruinous political violence that had wracked the country for over a decade. This was followed by what might be termed the ‘Mandela Honeymoon’, a period of general thankfulness and relief amongst whites and non-whites alike that South Africa’s seemingly insurmountable racial divisions had at last been resolved and that all now were equal partners in building a better society. The inspiring leadership of Nelson Mandela, who went to extraordinary lengths to reassure whites that they had nothing to fear under black majority rule, was a significant factor in all of this.
President Mandela addressing a meeting of the SAJBD Cape Council, From left, Elliot Osrin, NRM, Michael Bagraim (Chairman) and Jonathan Silke (Chairman Western Province Zionist Council).
Uplifting as the first elections were, in practical terms the hard work really commenced afterwards. The legacy of apartheid included enormous gaps between black and white, both economic and educational. The challenge now was to begin closing those gaps as quickly as possible. During this time, Jewish business leaders became much involved with supporting outreach and upliftment initiatives promoted by Mandela. The businessman, philanthropist and Jewish communal leader Bertie Lubner, was, with Chief Rabbi Harris, responsible for the establishment of Tikkun (today Afrika Tikkun), a Jewish-headed initiative aimed at assisting those previously disadvantaged under apartheid and which was very much inspired by Mandela’s appeal to the Jewish community to assist in this regard.2
These initiatives initially met with some opposition in Jewish circles, given the mounting financial needs of Jewish welfare and other communal bodies. Over time, however, it came to be broadly accepted that concrete actions not just by government but by civil society as a whole were needed to address the legacy of apartheid. Today a wide range of Jewish communal bodies, including synagogues, Zionist organisations, youth movements and schools, include social outreach in the wider community as a component of their day-to-day activities. At the SAJBD’s national conference in 2011, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe appealed to the Jewish community to bring to bear its skills and resources to assist in the areas of job creation, education and skills development. The SAJBD responded by launching its ‘Jubuntu’ project, which documented what Jewish organisations and individuals were doing in these areas and provided practical guidelines as to how the lessons learned through these projects could be replicated and expanded upon by others working in the field.3
Central to the nation-building process was the drafting of a new national Constitution, one whose Bill of Rights would safeguard the hard-won freedoms of the liberation struggle. Civil society organisations were invited to make input into this process, and the SAJBD, through its Constitution and Legislation Subcommittee, became much involved. In particular, the SAJBD emphasized the necessity of the right to freedom of expression being so qualified as to exclude “propaganda for war, the incitement of imminent violence or the advocacy of hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm”. This limitation was ultimately incorporated into the relevant clause in the Bill of Rights, and is a crucial component of the legislation prohibiting what is regarded as ‘hate speech’ in South Africa. 4 The SAJBD subsequently also made important input into the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act of 2000, likewise in the area of prohibiting certain forms of hate speech. It has had occasion to invoke these clauses on numerous occasions in the course of confronting antisemitic discourse in the public domain, including in the media and political arena.
In various other areas of public policy the Jewish community has, at the representative level, likewise sought to play a meaningful part in the formulation of public policy, the fostering of a robust human rights culture and identification with national symbols. Its representatives have been involved in a range of civil society initiatives, amongst them the Hate Crimes Working Group, the Right2Know Campaign and interfaith initiatives such as the annual Reconciliation Day Interfaith Walk in Cape Town. The countrywide attacks on foreign migrants that took place in the early part of 2008 elicited a swift response from the Jewish community, whose multifaceted relief efforts on behalf of the victims were coordinated by the SAJBD in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
The SAJBD has also sought to instill a greater identification with South African symbols and holidays. For example, in 2005 it held a commemorative evening to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Freedom Charter and the following year led a Jewish delegation to participate in the 30th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising. For the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it coordinated an ambitious ‘Jewish 2010’ project to help community members feel part of the excitement as well as to involve visiting Jewish football fans in local Jewish activities. In the period leading up to South Africa’s fifth national and provincial elections, the SAJBD ran a pre-election ‘Make Us Count’ campaign, a series of public functions, volunteer drives and educational initiatives to encourage Jewish involvement in and identify with both the election process and the marking of twenty years of democracy in their country. The campaign commenced in November 2013 with the launch of a nation-wide voter registration drive, moved on to, amongst other things, the hosting in Johannesburg and Durban of pre-election debates between representatives of the major competing parties and culminated in the assembling of South Africa’s first-ever multi-faith, multi-ethnic and transnational Election Observer Team. Officially accredited by the Independent Electoral Commission, the team monitored events at some 260 voting stations in five cities and across three provinces.
Habonim members who volunteered for the SAJBD election monitoring team at the King David Linkfield Primary School polling station.
Commemorating 50 years of the Freedom Charter, 2005. SAJBD Gauteng Council Chairman Zev Krengel with Northern Province premier, Advocate Ngoako Ramahlodi, and Justice Albie Sachs.
Jewish participants in the 30th anniversary commemoration of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, 2006.
Of the Zionist youth movements, Habonim Dror has been especially involved in outreach work in the wider society. While it can be said that Jews have responded fairly well to initiatives aimed at the socio-economic upliftment of disadvantaged South Africans, a broader identification with the post-liberation national culture nevertheless continues to be lacking. In this respect, Jewish attitudes tend to mirror those of the larger white population of which they are a part.
Since 1990, a process of re-examining the mainstream community’s political behavior under apartheid and specifically its attitudes towards the anti-Jews who had been involved in the liberation struggle has been underway. This has taken the form of museum exhibits, academic symposia, panel discussions at national and regional conferences and numerous books and articles. A recent event was a round-table discussion involving SAJBD President Zev Krengel and anti-apartheid veterans Dennis Goldberg, Albie Sachs and Anne-Marie Wolpe held at the historic Liliesleaf heritage site in Rivonia. By no means all community members have been comfortable with all of this. Veteran communal leader Solly Kessler had been one of the more progressive voices during the apartheid era, but one occasion felt compelled to warn against too much “breast-beating and self-flagellation” over past events. Others asked why Jews should be continually excoriating themselves over their collective behavior during the apartheid years when no other sector of the white population was doing likewise. It was further argued that Jews, as a traditionally persecuted minority who in addition had been targeted by antisemitic measures by the pre-1948 National Party, at least had had something of excuse to remain politically passive.
On the other side of the spectrum, former Jewish activists (few of whom, it should be noted, had ever been much involved in Jewish communal life) objected to what they saw as mainstream Jewry’s claiming credit for what they had done to oppose apartheid now that it was fashionable to do so after having signally failed to support them at the time. Such individuals also tended to be far more critical of Israel and of the Zionist ideology in general, which has generated a fair amount of tension within the community.
South African Jews are passionate (to the point, perhaps, of obsessiveness) about recording their own history. Since 1994, a stream of popular and scholarly books has appeared, not only on Jewish involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle (most notably Gideon Shimoni’s Community and Conscience – The Jews in Apartheid South Africa, 2004) but on such subjects as the legacy of Jewish life in the country districts and the development of Zionism and Judaism in South Africa. In addition, numerous autobiographical works by prominent community members have appeared, including of such former anti-Apartheid activists as Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils, Norman Levy, Lorna Levy, Ben Turok, Rika Hodgson, Baruch Hirson, Isie Maisels and Lionel Bernstein. The same period has seen the establishment of the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town and of the South African Holocaust Foundation, whose centers in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg communicate to school children and the public at large the dangers of prejudice and the values of tolerance.
The mainstream religious leadership has also sought to become more involved in promoting humanitarian and ethical values in society. Chief Rabbi Harris, whose dynamic leadership during the transition years saw him receive, amongst other things, the OBE shortly before his passing in 2005, continued to play a leading role in this regard. His successor Chief Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein has been involved in high-level inter-faith structures. Amongst other writings, he has authored a “Bill of Responsibilities”, which has been widely adopted within the various faith communities. Within the more strictly Orthodox sectors of the community, however, there has been a general turning inwards, and focusing on specifically Jewish communal issues. Meanwhile, Orthodox Judaism’s extraordinary post-war revival continues apace, especially in Johannesburg. The strength of traditional religious life and its growing reach into the broader community has been demonstrated by, amongst other things, the enthusiastic response to the annual ‘Sinai Indaba’, involving an impressive array of international speakers, and the 2013 ‘Shabbat Project’ in which a significant proportion of the community observed Shabbat according to strict Halacha for the first time. Both initiatives emanated from the Office of the Chief Rabbi. For the more secular/cultural minded, Limmud SA was introduced in 2009 to provide lectures, presentations and debate on various aspects of Jewish art, literature, thought (not excluding Judaism, but including non-Orthodox perspectives), politics and history. Because of its featuring non-Orthodox presentations on Judaism Chief Rabbi Goldstein, with the backing of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues, imposed a ban on Orthodox rabbis participating in Limmud. This continues to generate a fair amount of controversy, although in general the past two decades have seldom seen the kind of confrontations between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish groupings as occurred in bygone years.
Participants in the weekly Avos U’ Vonim (‘Fathers and Sons’) post-Shabbat learning programme, Johannesburg.
As the organization mandated to protect the civil rights of South African Jewry, the SAJBD remains responsible for responding to all instances of antisemitism. In this regard, such quasi-government institutions as the SA Human Rights Commission and Broadcasting Complaints Commission of SA have proven to be effective vehicles through which to address these issues. A very positive aspect of South Africa has also been the dramatically low rate of antisemitic incidents recorded annually when compared with figures in other countries, amongst them France, Canada, the UK and Australia. Apart from rarely being much above the fifty-mark, as opposed to averaging over 500 in the aforementioned countries, the nature of the incidents recorded seldom takes the form of physical violence or serious acts of vandalism. That this is so testifies to the strong anti-racist ethos that South Africans have succeeded in fostering post-1994 (although even prior to that it is fair to record that for many years, antisemitic sentiment had rarely translated into actual acts of hostility against Jewish individuals and institutions). It is likewise important that South Africa has adopted a “unity in diversity” approach to nationhood rather than following a melting pot model in which all ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural differences are subsumed. One of the vehicles aimed at protecting and promoting different forms of group identity is the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Commission, set up in terms of the new Constitution in 2002. As recorded elsewhere in this Jewish Affairs issue, the first deputy chairperson of this body was former SAJBD President Marlene Bethlehem.
The fact that antisemitism levels have been comparatively low in South Africa does not mean that serious cases of anti-Jewish behavior have been entirely absent. Over the past two decades, there have indeed been a number of such incidents, all triggered by events taking place internationally rather than within South Africa. During the late 1990s, Jewish institutions being amongst those targeted in the spate of terrorist bombings carried out in Cape Town by suspected Islamist militants. In mid-1997, a Jewish bookshop in Cape Town was firebombed because a Jewish woman in Israel had displayed an offensive image of the prophet Mohammed and the following year Cape Town’s Wynberg synagogue was bombed immediately after a US bombing raid on Iraq. Since the beginning of the century, fortunately, attacks on Jews have taken less dangerous forms, such as verbal abuse, hate mail and the daubing of offensive graffiti. Jewish cemeteries, particularly in the country areas, are frequently vandalized, although in most cases casual vagrancy or juvenile delinquency rather than antisemitic motives have been the probable cause.
Following the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in September 2000, anti-Israel rhetoric has frequently crossed over into offensive and sometimes inflammatory rhetoric about Jews in general and South African Jews in particular. This has primarily occurred during times of conflict between Israel and its neighbors, such as during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the three-week war against Hamas and other Islamist groupings in Gaza commencing at the end of 2008 and, in particular, during the latest conflict with Gaza in July-August 2014. The early months of 2009 saw antisemitism in the country reach levels not seen since the 1940s. In January 2009, Deputy Minister of International Relations Fatima Hajaig caused an international storm when she said (to enthusiastic cheers) at a Lenasia protest rally that the Western powers were being controlled by Jewish money power, hence their failure to come to the rescue of the Palestinians. Hajaig was subsequently censured by the Cabinet and compelled to apologise by Acting President Kgalema Motlanthe. Following the elections several months later, she was the only member of the previous Cabinet not to be reappointed. That same year, the SA Human Rights Commission upheld a complaint by the SAJBD of antisemitic hate speech against COSATU International Relations spokesperson Bongani Masuku. The latter, in a series of inflammatory speeches in the aftermath of the Gaza operation, inter alia said that COSATU would ‘make life hell’ for any Jews who persisted in supporting Israel and that those Jewish families who members were serving in the IDF would be especially targeted. Masuku, with the full backing of COSATU, refused to comply with the SAHRC’s ruling that he apologise for his statements, with the result that the Commission instituted court action against him. The case will be heard in the latter half of 2014.
If 2009 was a difficult year in terms of antisemitic activity, 2014 has unfortunately been a great deal worse. In July alone, more antisemitic incidents were recorded by the SAJBD and Community Security Organisation than in the whole of 2013, and for the first time, it looks like the final total for the year will not be far off the annual figures logged in other major Diaspora communities, such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. In large part, the now ubiquitous role played by the social media has facilitated this unprecedented rise in threats and hate speech against the Jewish community. In response, the SAJBD has laid civil and/or criminal charges against various perpetrators, including against COSATU Provincial Secretary (Western Cape) Tony Ehrenreich. On 13 August the latter, via his Facebook site, described the Jewish Board of Deputies as being “complicit in the murder of the people in Gaza” and went on to write that the time had come “to say very clearly that if a woman or child is killed in Gaza, then the Jewish board of deputies, who are complicit, will feel the wrath of the People of SA with the age old biblical teaching of an eye for an eye”.
One of many cases of vitriolic antisemitism disseminated via the social media during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. Perpetrators, in the case of the ‘Phumza Zondi’ above, sometimes assumed fake identities to avoid detection.
If it has been necessary to sometimes adopt a confrontational stance when Jewish civil rights are threatened, the Jewish leadership has nevertheless remained committed to participating in the post-apartheid nation building process, whether in the constitutional, socio-economic, political or civil society arena. Indeed, it is recognized that such participation helps to build the kind of bridges of friendship and understanding through which the upholding if Jewish civil liberties becomes that much easier.
Notwithstanding all of this, there remains a persistent strain of negativity within Jewish circles, which in turn is reflective of common attitudes within the broader white population. The extent to which the upsurge in violent crime has undermined the community’s faith in the future can never be over-stated. Since the early 1990s, South Africa’s levels of violent crime have consistently been amongst the world’s highest, with statistics relating to car hijackings and home invasions reaching unprecedented levels. A survey on attitudes within the Jewish community conducted in 1998 found that of 267 respondents indicating that they were fairly or very likely to emigrate within the next five years, 211 cited ‘personal safety concerns’ as being the most, or one of the most important reasons for wishing to do so.5 Johannesburg, home to two-thirds of South African Jewry, was especially hard hit. It is certain that had this dire situation not been addressed, the high rates of Jewish emigration in the last quarter of the previous century would have continued, and this in turn would by now have probably reached the point of no return. The examples of once viable Jewish communities in such post-colonial African countries as Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe show that once a Jewish exodus gains a certain degree of momentum, it becomes impossible to halt, let alone reverse. What dramatically changed the situation was the extraordinary success of the Community Active Patrol (CAP), a crime-fighting initiative providing supplementary policing in areas where Jews are concentrated through a partnership between the community and security professionals. CAP was established at the behest of the Office of the Chief Rabbi and the Community Security Organisation (CSO), a Jewish civil defence body set up under the auspices by the SAJBD in 1993. In the beginning, it operated only in the suburb of Glenhazel and adjoining areas in 2006. After the first year, violent crime in the area had dropped by 79%.6 Thereafter, the model was progressively implemented in other areas of Johannesburg where Jews were largely based, and with comparably impressive results. The enduring success of the CAP initiative, in short, has transformed the position of Johannesburg Jewry, not to mention that of their non-Jewish neighbours.
Crime, while the most serious concern of the Jewish population post-1994, has not been the only one. Alongside it have gone dissatisfaction over declining public services, high level and now ubiquitous corruption and, in common with other whites, resentment over racially discriminatory affirmative action policies. Politically, Jews have become progressively more marginalized. Whereas there were nine MPs of Jewish descent in the 1994 House of Assembly (one of whom, Tony Leon, served as Leader of the Opposition in the years 1999-2007), two decades later only the ANC’s Ben Turok remained. The entry into Parliament of two new Jewish MPs, Democratic Alliance representatives Michael Bagraim and Darren Bergman, following the May 2014 elections may, however, be the harbinger of a new era in this regard.
Given the strong, and regrettably well-founded perception, regarding the inadequacy of public services, the Jewish community has gone about developing its own parallel institutions in such areas as security, schooling, social services and medical assistance. These have helped to maintain the kind of First World standards to which the community has become accustomed, but the strain it has placed on its resources is considerable. As a result, the sustainability of Jewish communal institutions remains a continued source of concern, and the problem will become all the more pressing should there be a renewed upsurge in emigration. Fortunately, rationalization strategies enabling organisations to share resources and avoid a costly duplication of services have been successfully implemented in all the main Jewish population centres, namely Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria, and even in Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein, where the Jewish population is now fairly small. For example, welfare in Johannesburg now falls under the umbrella of the Johannesburg Jewish Helping Hand and Burial Society (Chevra Kadisha) while in Cape Town, all major fundraising takes place under the auspices of a single United Jewish Campaign.
Well over 80% of the youth of the community now attend a Jewish day school, one of the key reasons for and indications of the strength and vitality of Jewish life in the country. This does, however, mean that young Jews only begin to mix with other South Africans when they arrive at university or enter the job market. To at least partially address this, Jewish educators have sought to partner with non-Jewish schools, both at the social and social outreach level, to ensure that at least some contact is maintained. A particularly successful initiative in this regard has been the annual Cycalive event, whereby learners from Torah Academy join with those from other Gauteng schools in cycling from Johannesburg to Durban as a fundraising and friendship-building exercise.
On the threshold of the 1994 elections, it was estimated that the Jewish population had declined by nearly one-third over the previous two decades, and it continued to decline even after the democratic transition. In 1998, a survey of Jewish attitudes towards various aspects relating to South Africa was commissioned. Its results provided a sobering picture of a community whose members, and particularly its youth, increasingly no longer saw a future for themselves in the country and either intended emigrating or were strongly considering doing so. In his address to the SAJBD on the occasion of its centenary conference in 2003, President Mbeki felt sufficiently concerned to draw attention to this and urge the community to rediscover its faith in South Africa.
In general, reports on the state of South African Jewry in international Jewish publications, backed by the undeniably depressing statistics of the time, adopted a lugubrious view of a community in crisis and on the verge of dissolution. That Jews were perceived to be giving up on the country and moving elsewhere also generated concern locally. As a controversial quip of the times had it, when the Jews start leaving, it means that trouble is coming, when the Greeks do so, it has arrived already and when the Portuguese began leaving, it’s too late. Jews were thus represented as being, as it were, the proverbial canary in the mine shaft, a weather vane people whose collective antennae, sensitized by centuries of wondering and persecution, were at some level more in tune with the hidden historical forces shaping the destiny of their society.
In fact, by the time Mbeki made his speech, things were already beginning to change for the better. There had been a noteworthy drop-off in emigration, which has continued to the present day to operate at more or less normal levels (with some immigration and returning émigrés offsetting those losses). An estimated 70 000 Jews remain in South Africa, of whom around two-thirds live in Johannesburg and most of the remainder in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria. Added to this were the unexpectedly encouraging results of a follow-up survey, conducted in 2005. This time round, a substantial majority of respondents said that they were either “very likely” or “likely” to remain in South Africa in the foreseeable future.7
Added to this were the impressively high levels of involvement in Jewish communal, religious and cultural life, something for which South African Jewry had always been renowned throughout the Diaspora and which, if anything, have only intensified in the years that followed. When this is seen alongside the gratifying extent to which Jews remain involved in the general affairs of the country, it can be said that for the Jewish community, the first twenty years of multiracial democracy have been essentially good ones.
Looking back on the past quarter-century, one finds that South African Jews in the main welcomed the political changes of the day and, at least at the leadership level, sought to participate alongside their fellow citizens in nation building, social upliftment and the safeguarding of the institutions of democracy. This continues to underpin how the Jewish leadership sees its role today, twenty years since the democratic transition. South Africa, despite the serious challenges that confront it, remains a politically and economically stable society, where diversity is respected, minority rights protected and fundamental human rights scrupulously upheld. For Jews, it provides an environment in which Jewish life in all its richness and diversity has been able to thrive, while at the same time allowing them to participate fully in the affairs of the wider society. Nothing, of course, can be taken for granted. Many fear that endemic corruption and mismanagement, not to mention racial polarization and popular anger that characterizes so much of public discourse today may yet scupper the hopes and dreams of those who helped to bring about the democratic revolution. That being said, South Africa has confounded the doomsday predictions of the naysayers many times in the past. With its robust economy, resilient democratic structures, rich natural resources and sophisticated First World infrastructure, there is every reason to hope that it will continue to do so as it begins its third decade of multiracial democracy.
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs. The above article has been adapted from the chapter he contributed to the book Liberation Diaries – Reflections on Twenty Years of Democracy (2014), reviewed in this issue by Naomi Musiker.
7
NOTES
- Dubb, A A, The Jewish Population of South Africa – The 1991 Sociodemographic Survey, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, Cape Town, 1994, pp1-3.
- Saks, D, Jewish Memories of Mandela, SAJBD and the Umoja Foundation, 2011, vii.
- Some of the main findings of the survey subsequently appeared in the book Jubuntu – Jewish Contributions to Education, Skills Development & Job Creation in South Africa, written by SAJBD Senior Researcher Steve Gruzd and published by the SAJBD in 2013. Extracts from the book appear elsewhere in this issue.
- See Kessler, S, ‘The South African Constitution and the Input of the Jewish Community’, Jewish Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2000.
- Jews of the ‘new South Africa’: Highlights of the 1998 national survey of South African Jews, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in association with the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research, JPR Report No 3, 1999, p20.
- Ibid.
- Bruk, Shirley, ‘The Jews of South Africa: Highlights of the 2005 Attitudinal Survey’, Jewish Affairs, Vol. 61, Rosh Hashanah 2006.
