(Author: David Saks, Vol. 77, #4 Summer 2022)
When he arrived in Johannesburg in 1892 to take up a position with the newly established Johannesburg Hebrew Congregation, Reb Yehuda Leib Schrire would certainly have been aware that standards of religious observance would not be on the level of those back in his native Lithuania. It came as a profound shock to him, however, to discover just how low they actually were, so much so that he very soon threw up his position and relocated to Cape Town, where standards of observance were relatively higher.[1] Reb Schrire would no doubt have been surprised to learn that a hundred years hence, Johannesburg would not only have decisively replaced Cape Town as the hub of traditional Orthodoxy in the country, but that it would be one of the most vibrant centres of Orthodox Judaism in the Diaspora.
How this transformation came about is the subject of a newly completed PhD thesis by David Fachler, entitled ‘Tradition, Accommodation, Revolution and Counterrevolution: A history of a century of struggle for the soul of Orthodoxy in Johannesburg’s Jewish community, 1915-2015’ (University of Cape Town, Dept of Historical Studies, January 2022. His supervisor was Associate Professor Adam Mendelsohn, director of UCT’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research).
Fachler begins the story in 1915, some twenty years after the disgusted Reb Schrire departed the treife medina of Johannesburg forever. This makes sense as that year was in crucial ways a pivotal one in the development of organised Judaism in the city. On 30 May, the rival Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation (the ‘mother synagogue’, founded in 1887 and located in President Street) and its 1892 breakaway the Johannesburg Hebrew Congregation (JHC) amalgamated to form the United Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg, based in the JHC’s magnificent new Wolmarans Street premises and with Rabbi Prof J L Landau as Chief Rabbi. Just as importantly, the amalgamation led the following year to the establishment of the city’s first Beth Din (Ecclesiastical Court). These developments notwithstanding, Jewish religiosity remained at a distinctly low ebb in the still young mining town (which only officially became a city in 1928). Fachler’s thesis, the first comprehensive study of Orthodox Judaism within Johannesburg, examines how Johannesburg Jewry moved, in his words, “From a splintered and largely immigrant community in 1915 with weak religious and educational institutions, and a pattern of religious laxity, Orthodox Jewry has transformed into a highly organized and structured community with high levels of religious observance” [from the Abstract]. Since Johannesburg Jewry comprises some two-thirds of the SA Jewish community, its history is largely that of SA Jewry as a whole.
How did this eventual transformation come about? As one would expect, the change from the widespread apathy and ignorance of the early decades to the vibrant, involved and educated Orthodox community today was not smooth and seamless, nor was it inevitable. There would over the years be numerous points of conflict, whether over different ideological perspectives on matters of religion, the character and content of Jewish education, synagogue ritual and practices, the issue of conversion, attitudes towards Israel and Zionism and the ever-complex matter of how to balance continued adherence to basic standards of halacha (religious law) at the formal, structural level with the realities of an overwhelmingly non- or at best partially practising laity.
In focusing on “the internal workings and dynamics of the Orthodox religious leadership”, Fachler identifies the split into two broad camps of what he terms “the accommodators and the Litvak traditionalists” as a dominant and recurring theme in how Orthodox Judaism evolved and developed in the period under discussion. In essence, the approach of the ‘accommodators’ was to adapt the demands and norms of spiritual leadership to the realities of where the broader community was holding in terms of their religious practices and levels of knowledge. This unavoidably meant turning a blind eye to the multiple breaches of halacha that even the more committed members of their congregations routinely committed in order to keep the greatest number people in the fold as possible while preserving communal unity (something that has always been one of the foremost concerns of the country’s mainstream Jewish leadership, whether religious or secular). By contrast, the ‘traditionalists’ wished to reintroduce the Lithuanian legacy of rigorous Talmudic scholarship and strict adherence to ritual and observance, “with a strong emphasis on a strict and exclusively Orthodox lifestyle”.
If one had to sum up the core findings of Fachler’s work in a single sentence, it would be how the influence of the once dominant accommodators progressively receded until eventually the traditionalists came to dominant the field almost entirely. That, however, would be an over-simplification of what was in reality a much more nuanced, complexed and multi-faceted process, with all its inevitable ebbs and flows. Often, it would be necessary for the traditionalists to themselves ‘accommodate’ their aims and ideals to the practical realities confronting them, while the accommodators in turn would regularly have acquiesced in the introduction of more exacting standards of Orthodox practice at both the clerical and lay level. It is important to stress here that being in the ‘accommodator’ camp did not necessarily indicate lower levels of Orthodox commitment, but may well have been underpinned in the main by a ‘realist’ or perhaps ‘pragmatic’ approach to what the community at large would accept. As Fachler points out, “many of those who saw themselves as accommodators were disappointed with the level of observance of their flock and sorely wished for a more religious community. Yet they adopted a pragmatic approach which understood the financial hardships imposed by Sabbath observance and advocated for a gentle and patient attitude with the stress on moral refinement and personal spiritual fulfilment” (p72). Further on, in reference to what outgoing Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris said at the inauguration of his successor Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein in 2004, Fachler writes, “it appears, that the accommodators not only collaborated with those to their right but were also cognizant of the changes in the religious atmosphere, and to a certain extent, expressed appreciation of this development”.
Prior to 1933, the date that the internationally acknowledged Torah sage Rabbi Yitzchak Kossowsky arrived from Lithuania to take up the position of Rosh Beth Din (Head of the Ecclesiastical Court) and rav of the Federation of Synagogues, the division between accommodators and traditionalists essentially did not exist. It would be more correct to say that the accommodators pretty much had the field to themselves, given the low levels of religious observance and limits to what the vast majority of the community were willing to commit themselves to. Even after that date, change was only fitful and incremental. The “preeminent religious figure in Johannesburg” at the time was Rabbi Prof Judah Leo Landau, Chief Rabbi of the Federation of Synagogues and of the mainstream United Hebrew Congregation, of whom Fachler writes, “Comfortable with both the Yeshiva world and that of the Jewish enlightenment or Haskalah, this university educated rabbi differed significantly from his new rival, whose exposure to the world beyond eastern Europe and its yeshivas was limited. As far back as 1900 upon ascending his first pulpit in Manchester, Landau delivered an exposition on the contemporary role of a rabbi. He declared that the role required one to leave the ghetto walls and become au fait with the new generation and its modern requirements” (p18). By contrast, “Kossowsky and his allies formed a camp that saw itself as responsible for continuing the traditions of Eastern Europe, with a strong emphasis on a strict and exclusively Orthodox lifestyle. In this camp only slight adjustments could be made for the lax level of observance of the Johannesburg community” (ibid.). Even so, Rabbi Kossowsky would himself to an extent have to ‘accommodate’ himself to the realities of Johannesburg Jewry in the 1930s, notably by aligning himself with the nascent religious Zionist Mizrachi movement. In Eastern Europe, he had been one of the heads of the ultraorthodox, and non-Zionist, Agudath Israel movement, but in the absence of any Aguda affiliate in Johannesburg, Mizrachi was “the only viable ally” (and was itself still a very young and small presence on the communal scene).
Rabbi Kossowsky’s arrival marked the first time that “a scrupulously religious personality held a senior rabbinic position in Johannesburg”. In Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz’s assessment, Rabbi Kossowsky “strengthened the right wing of Orthodox Jewry”, while Rabbi Kossowsky himself asserted that he had “single-handedly fought for Sabbath observance, family purity, and dietary laws” (p39). In the assessment of his one-time English language tutor Edgar Bernstein, “South Africa was a disillusionment to Kossowsky. He found neither the reverence nor the learning that he had expected here … He laboured to move the community more nearly to the pattern of East European Jewry he had left but it was an unavailing struggle. Sociologically South African Jewry belonged to a different world” (p38, op. cit.). Fachler adds that while he enhanced the prestige of his own congregation, the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, it is “unclear whether the congregants, let alone the community at large, was ready for this radically different style of spiritual leadership” (p37).
Despite the inevitable limitations placed on how much could be achieved, Rabbi Kossowsky’s nearly twenty years of service in South Africa was a turning point in the community’s history and did much to lay the groundwork (vigorously pursued in turn by his son Rabbi Michel Kossowsky, a founder and first Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva College) for the steady growth of the traditionalist camp after the war. In subsequent chapters, Fachler chronicles how the traditionalists grew in influence and confidence, boosted in the latter decades of the century by “the arrival of a new conservative crop of British and American rabbis” (p19). He observes how some of these new leaders would go on to “split off to form a vigorous and independent group which from the 1970s would mount a serious challenge to accommodator and traditionalist alike”, and whom he refers to as the ‘innovators’. The feistiest of these challengers in the early days was the Kollel Yad Shaul (generally referred to simply as the Kollel, although the word denotes a type of higher learning institution rather than being a name in and of itself), with equally assertive and independent institutions like the Vilna Gaon Torah Centre and Yeshiva Maharsha emerging a decade or so later and which likewise sought to foster genuine Haredi-style movements predicated on rigorous observance of Halacha, intensive learning and a policy of separatism with regard to those sections of the community not realising these standards.[2] The most effective and enduring of the institutions established by the innovators, however, were the various thriving branches of Ohr Somayach. While likewise committed to raising the levels of strict Orthodox learning and practice in the community, Ohr Somayach’s relatively relaxed approach, which accepts that there are different levels of spiritual growth among its members and avoids placing undue pressure on them to change, has ultimately had greater resonance among Johannesburg Jewry than its predecessors in Orthodox outreach.
It is one of the striking achievements of Johannesburg’s Orthodox community that despite the sharp divergences between its various constituencies that arose from time to time (the year 1965 in particular saw bitter public clashes between representatives of the establishment accommodators – whose previous dominance by then was being seriously challenged – and leaders in the traditionalist camp) the divisions and even occasional outright splits that these occasioned did not cause serious or lasting harm to the Orthodox movement as a whole. Moreover, it proved possible over time to resolve even some of the most sensitive disputes (the fraught question of Kashrut supervision, which Fachler deals with at length in later chapters, is one such issue) through brokering sensible, creative and inclusive solutions with all the relevant parties. That today there is still a single Beth Din recognised across the board by the former ‘accommodators’ (who now, ironically, tend to describe themselves as ‘traditional’), Mizrachi/modern Orthodox streams and strictly Orthodox ‘Haredi’ factions that began coming increasingly to the fore from the 1970s onwards is testimony to that, as is the broad support enjoyed by the Office of the Chief Rabbi and Union of Orthodox Synagogues. Certainly, no previous Chief Rabbi enjoyed the same level of whole-hearted support from the so-called “ultra-Orthodox” communities – they include Adass Yeshurun, the first congregation in Johannesburg to make strict Sabbath observance a condition for membership, the Kollel Yad Shaul (which in the 1970s spearheaded a genuinely revolutionary adoption by hundreds of mainly young families and individuals of a thoroughly committed, Haredi-style Orthodox lifestyle), the Ohr Somayach centres and Yeshiva Maharsha – as does the current Chief Rabbi Doctor Warren Goldstein. Even more revealing of how the traditionalists now dominate even the mainstream structures is the growth of Chabad, which from its modest beginnings as a small, ultra-Orthodox outreach movement in the early 1970s has flourished to the extent that its rabbis comprise, in Fachler’s assessment, between 50% to 70% of the SA Rabbinical Association’s membership.
Fachler provides a detailed analysis of Chief Rabbi Goldstein’s philosophy and approach, noting how he has “changed the Chief Rabbinate and moved it rightward …The first Chief Rabbi to have been trained at a traditional Yeshiva, his tenure, if not reminiscent of the innovator movements, has been strongly traditionalist in orientation and sympathy”. He goes on to comment that “the agenda that Goldstein has carved out appears to run contrary to what the accommodators envisaged” (which – deliberate or otherwise – may well be somewhat of an understatement!)
Fachler is careful not to underplay the severity of the ideological and policy-related disputes (sometimes exacerbated by inevitable personality clashes) that periodically erupted within the Orthodox establishment. Mention has been made of the Kashrut controversies, which first surfaced in the late 1950s and continued to do so right into the 1980s. Essentially, it concerned the unhappiness of certain strictly Orthodox groupings – initially spearheaded by the Adath Jeshurun Congregation (founded as an independent community by strictly observant German Jewish immigrants in 1936) and later taken up by new “ultra-Orthodox” movements like the Kollel Yad Shaul and Chabad – over existing standards of kosher supervision and production. For many years, Adath Jeshurun ran its own separate shechita, Adassia, which over time came to be relied upon by other members of the growing Haredi community in Yeoville and other parts of Johannesburg. When this service was faced with closure because of opposition from the mainstream Orthodox leadership (which accused the separatists of undermining its authority), newly qualified attorneys and businessmen associated with the Kollel and Adath Jeshurun took the unprecedented step in 1976 of petitioning the Minister of Agriculture to recognize the Adath and its followers as a separate religion headed by Rabbi Yaakov Salzer. The Minister eventually acceded to this request, which enabled Adassia to continue operating independent of the Beth Din. This bizarre situation, in which Johannesburg’s two leading strictly Orthodox congregations declared themselves, and were recognized, as constituting another religion altogether, continued until the mid-1980s, when the introduction by the Beth Din of a Mehadrin department was accepted by those requiring a higher standard of Kashrut supervision. All remaining points of difference were ironed out over the next few years, so that “almost three decades later, the quarrels between the establishment and the strictly Orthodox communities, at least in matters of Kashrut, have been confined to history” (p147).
By the close of the last century it was obvious, not only in South Africa but throughout the Jewish world, Israel very much included, that traditional, Torah-observant Judaism had confounded widely held predictions of its imminent demise (or at best relegation to an irrelevant fringe part of Jewish peoplehood) by consolidating and thereafter steadily growing, in numbers, influence and organisational capacity. Alongside this unanticipated phenomenon, the non-Orthodox and secular Jewish movements (Zionist, cultural or other) were by then mired in a serious crisis of confidence over their future viability in the face of plummeting levels of Jewish literacy and practice among their adherents and rapidly climbing intermarriage rates. The fact that the Orthodox community had never considered non-Orthodox versions of the faith to be Jewish at all had always stung, even when the Reform and Conservative movements seemed to be sweeping all before them, but it was a great deal harder to endure now that Orthodoxy was in the ascendancy. One indication of the resentment felt by this camp – especially as Orthodox spokespeople had no compunction in declaring how all this proved that they were right all along – was the coining of the opprobrious term “Orthodox triumphalism” by commentators on the Jewish religious scene, particularly in the US where the non-Orthodox “streams” (as they referred to themselves as) constituted by far the greater part of the affiliated community.
As its subtitle puts it, Fachler’s thesis chronicles and considers “a century of struggle for the soul of Orthodoxy in Johannesburg’s Jewish community”. That struggle, as he demonstrates throughout his work, was fundamentally between the ‘accommodators’, who resisted the strict implementation of much of Jewish religious law in order to keep a largely non-observant laity in the fold and preserve communal unity, and ‘traditionalists’ who pushed for Halachic standards and levels of traditional Jewish learning to be raised. It began in 1915 with the accommodators all but unchallenged and ended a hundred years later with the traditionalists in total control of mainstream Orthodoxy and its institutions, the Beth Din, Union of Orthodox Synagogues and Office of the Chief Rabbi included.
The significance of the traditionalists’ triumph, however, should not be misinterpreted. Fachler shows how for all their initial impact and influence, innovator movements like the Kollel were ultimately only partially successful in establishing a South African variant of what in other ultra-Orthodox enclaves of the Jewish world would be regarded as ‘Haredi’. In a revealing footnote concerning his interview with Rabbi Dr Akiva Tatz (p147), Fachler records that the latter had “insinuated that the undemanding mentality of the average South African Jew, while promoting unity and acceptance, has come at the cost of religious and scholastic excellence”.[3] Another note records that Rabbi Larry Shain, one of the founding rabbis of Ohr Somayach, felt the Kollel faculty to be “too intense for the average South African” (ibid). In support of these observations, it is significant that with the demographic decline and northward shift of the Jewish communities in Yeoville and Observatory, the heartland of Haredi Johannesburg, many inhabitants of those suburbs “chose to immigrate to likeminded communities in Israel and the United Kingdom, rather than move elsewhere within Johannesburg” (ibid). Similarly, although the Adath Jeshurun (now spelled Adass Yeshurun) Congregation still exists and continues to rigorously uphold the uncompromising, Torah-true standards set by its German-Jewish founders, hardly any of the original members of the congregation or their descendants still live in the country, the great majority having long relocated to Israel, the UK and other places which have a strong Haredi presence. Having said all this, however, there is no doubt that the ‘innovators’ contributed very substantially to the overall shift in religiosity that has made Johannesburg Jewry one of the premier hubs of observant Orthodox Judaism in the Diaspora. As Fachler adroitly expresses it (p165), “it was primarily the traditionalist position, fortified with a pro-establishment flavour inherited from the accommodators, and augmented by aspects of the innovators’ religious zeal, that ultimately defined Johannesburg Orthodoxy at the turn of the twenty first century”.
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs
NOTES
[1] For more on Reb Schrire’s trials and travails and subsequent career within Cape Town’s Orthodox community, see ‘You are not in Lithuania anymore’ – Yehuda Leib Schrire in Johannesburg, 1892-3 – Jewish Affairs
[2] The author’s father, Rabbi Mordechai Fachler, was one of the first members of the Kollel Yad Shaul recruited to South Africa. He was subsequently involved with institutions associated with both the traditionalists and accommodators, serving as a dean at the Yeshiva College Campus and as a pulpit rabbi in several large synagogues.
[3] Trained as a medical doctor, Rabbi Tatz had himself been introduced to observance by the Kollel. After studying at Ohr Somayach, Jerusalem, went on to a stellar international career as a speaker and author.
