The South African Jewish Board of Deputies has rejected apartheid and condemned racial discrimination.
In a resolution adopted after a three-day debate at its biennual National Assembly here, the Board, which represents South Africa’s 120,000 Jews, endorsed the “removal of all provision in the laws of South Africa which discriminate on grounds of color and race.” The resolution also “rejects apartheid” and “calls upon all concerned to do everything possible to insure the establishment of a climate of peace and calm in which dialogue, negotiation and processes of reform can be continued.”
The Board of Deputies, an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, adopted the resolution in response to a request from the WJC which earlier this year asked its affiliates in 70 countries to join in the worldwide campaign against racism and apartheid.
As part of this campaign, the WJC reported the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva had been informed of world Jewry’s opposition to apartheid. Last February, the representative of the WJC and B’nai B’rith in Geneva submitted a formal statement to the Commission which said that “the Jewish people identifies itself with the struggle against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and apartheid.”
According to Aleck Goldberg, executive director of the Board of Deputies, the wording of the resolution his group had adopted, in its explicit rejection of apartheid, “is more for reaching than that of previous resolutions passed. “The Jewish community is believed to be the only ethnic segment of South Africa’s white minority to publicly call for an end to apartheid within the country.
In New York, Israel Singer, the WJC’s secretary-general, praised the courage of South Africa’s Jewish community. “It was no accident that a concurrent resolution expressing solidarity with the State of Israel was adopted,” he said. The action of South Africa’s Jews “was not only an expression of Jewish ethical and moral values but a refutation of the lie that Zionism is racism as asserted by a political majority in the United Nations ten years ago.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
