Background Report South Africa’s Jewish Community

South Africa’s Jewish community is one of the most closely knit and identity-conscious in the world. But its numbers are decreasing, due in part to intermarriage and assimilation. It is the most ardent and active Zionist community, contributing proportionately more to Israel than any other. But aliya is threatened because middle class professionals find jobs and housing more easily obtainable of home.

Those are some of the paradoxes of South African Jewish life cited by Prof. Marcus Arkin, director general of the South African Zionist Federation, in an article published in the New Year supplement of the Zionist Record and South African Jewish Chronicle. There are others. A higher proportion of South African Jews attend universities than any other ethnic group in the country. But “we are a community of non-readers of serious books, often abysmally ignorant of our Jewish heritage,” Arkin noted.

More South African Jews are affiliated with the Orthodox trend than any other but they are “somewhat philistine in their approach to spiritual values” and face “the problem of apathy among our youth and non-involvement in communal affairs by our young marrieds,” Arkin wrote.

The article, titled “The Numbers Game — Questions Visitors Ask About SA Jewry, ” stressed that “grappling successfully with … qualitative issues is infinitely more significant for our future as a community than sticking with the numbers game” represented by proportions and percentages It also offered some comparisons between South African and American Jewry.

At the outset, Arkin, formerly head of the department of economics and dean of the social science faculty of Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, stated: “We know that we are a dwindling community both in absolute and in relative terms. In the decade of the fifties, we had reached our numerical peak of about 118,000 when we comprised some four percent of South Africa’s white population. Since then, net emigration, a low birth rate, assimilation and intermarriage have reduced our numbers to not more than 100,000 (i.e. less than 2.3 percent of the white and about. 5 percent of the total population).”

ZIONISM PROVIDES STRONG BOND

Zionism has provided South African Jews “with their strongest bond of communal unity and discipline,” Arkin wrote. “Almost every Jewish household contributes to the Israel United Appeal and … this is the only country in the Zionist world where such fund-raising is an integral department of the Zionist Federation.”

Continuing, Arkin wrote: “It is probably a conservative estimate to suggest that at least 70 percent of our community over the age of 15 has visited Israel at least once and that Israel is the first choice in overseas travel. The contrast with American Jewry in this regard is astonishing. Certainly not more than 10-12 percent of the Jews of the United States have been to Israel, which ranks well below Europe, Mexico and the Caribbean islands in their travel preferences.”

According to the writer, “This lack of firsthand knowledge of Israel on the part of American Jews probably is the main reason for the superficial value judgements and naive responses to the Jewish State’s complex political and social problems which abound even in the serious journals of American- Jewish opinion.”

INVOLVEMENT IN SYNAGOGUES AND TEMPLES

Between 70-75 percent of adult Jews in South Africa “are paid-up members of a synagogue or temple and of these Orthodox outnumber Reform by something like five to one,” Arkin wrote. But the visitor from America ” is surprised to discover that by and large our Orthodox congregations possibly are less strictly so than their American counterparts and that Reform here has just as much in common with the Conservative movement as with American Reform….He is also somewhat astonished to learn that the lay and spiritual leaders of both camps display less than brotherly affection for one another….”

South African Jewry has become extensively urbanized and university educated “with a resultant increasing concentration on the professions of law, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, accountancy and engineering, “Arkin observed.” It is a phenomenon which has serious implications for aliya. Since middle class professionals comprise a significant proportion of potential olim, realistic employment opportunities for them are to be found only in Israel’s major conurbations where the housing problem is most acute. If we were a community of mechanics, plumbers and electricians, development towns like Karmiel, Afula and Arad with their cheap and plentiful residential facilities would prove for more attractive.”