My renewed hope for a changing South Africa

There’s nothing quite like coming back to your hometown. The place that shaped your childhood, wove its way through your adolescence, and guided you into adulthood.

I have now lived more of my life outside Southern Africa than in it. While I have Aussified (and hopefully not ossified), I still feel like I am caught between continents. 

My wife and I left a South Africa torn by racism and riven by the injustices of apartheid. Poverty and suffering were endemic. 

Yet this was the country that gave my parents refuge from the horrendous hostility and devastation of the Holocaust. This was the land that allowed the Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews, to recreate the tight-knit communities they had left behind. In time, they not only celebrated it with their cuisine and Yiddish culture, but also by renewing its proud and demanding intellectual tradition at the southern tip of Africa. It was here that I learned the Torah from singular scholars, some from the old country itself. 

I have returned many times over the years to visit my family and speak to local Jewish congregations. Most often, I was seen as the 'visitor' from thriving and creative Australia, sharing stories of our proud achievements in this accepting and lucky land.

Australia was seen as a place of refuge for many Shoah survivors and a proud example of multicultural achievement and multi-faith harmony: a peaceful and accepting nation in contrast to the volatile and violent reality of post-apartheid South Africa. 
 
On my most recent visit this year, nothing was quite the same. I had changed, Australia had changed, South Africa had changed. The world shifted on October 7, 2023. There was a tectonic transformation in Jewish consciousness and the very identity of so many of us suddenly felt alien. What we had assumed about our lives and the future no longer held. We were, in the Talmudic phrase, in an upside-down world.

The South African Jewish community wanted only to hear about antisemitism in our land down under. They were incredulous about our near-top ranking in the planetary anti-Jewish Olympiad. For some, there was a barely concealed schadenfreude, for others a genuine fear for their families who had migrated to Australia, who had had left their homes to escape danger and were now meeting it in their place of refuge.

For many, it was just confirmation that hostility towards Jews and Israel was as universal as the wild grass, as deeply rooted as the African baobab tree, and as widely spread as its extensive and strong root system.

By contrast, for the first time in many years, there was a spirit of optimism in the South African Jewish community. In the Jewish area of Johannesburg, still protected by its own armed security services, there was a vibrancy and confidence.

The stupendously high walls, electrified fences and plans for even more secure access zones into the gated communities still exist. There are desperate beggars on so many street corners and obvious debilitating poverty, staggering unemployment and crime in this country of deep political corruption and incompetence. My niece’s friend had her phone brazenly snatched outside Kosher World; my brother-in-law recounts people held up while waiting at traffic lights.

But despite the dangers and the awareness that beyond the high walls there is gross hunger and heartache, there remains a belief in the future of South Africa and in the vitality of this now small Jewish community. 

There are highly successful and determined Jewish businesspeople contributing not only to the economy but also to the social welfare of the country. There are Jewish educators and artists, social activists, doctors and lawyers. There are growing religious communities with new beautiful shuls, batei midash (study halls) and shtibels (small prayer centres) popping up alongside a rich variety of kosher restaurants and delis with countless products bearing the kosher certification of the Johannesburg Beth Din. On Shabbat, I witnessed hundreds of young frum families making their way to shul and the synagogues I attended were well supported. 

Some of these people are making an important contribution to the new South Africa. Ruhama Welcher, a doctoral candidate at the University College of London living in Johannesburg, is as frum as she is brilliant. She has spent long hours in schools in places such as Soweto, examining the impact of factors that impact on learning.   

She tells me of one outlier school where all the students achieved university entrance, despite many coming from highly dysfunction families, including child-headed households and extreme poverty. Some students arrived at the school in grade eight unable to write their own names. The school itself lacked basic facilities – temporary classrooms with poor lighting and at least 45 students per class. 

These students succeeded through the passionate and idealistic principal and teachers who had them study long hours and camp at the school on weekends. They called it prison for a year and opportunity for a lifetime. 

It occurred to me that this was a vignette of South Africa today: a place of extremes where deprivation and despair sit alongside great strength and remarkable resilience.

Recent South African governments have been strongly anti-Israel and led a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. But in the Jewish community, there is now a sense of having come through the worse and a hope that the new coalition government and a chastened ANC will, in time, temper its vile anti-Israel rhetoric and egregious actions against Israel.

There have been cases of antisemitism, including a recent hate speech case against a Cape Town comedian for his “depraved videos and utterances” against Jews, and the same vulgar and vituperative antisemitism from the right and the left.  

But South Africa’s universities didn’t have campus occupations and they don’t have weekly anti -Zionist protests.  

There is also a strong belief that most ordinary citizens of South Africa are not intrinsically antisemitic, and that their Christian beliefs make them more sympathetic to Israel than their failing ANC leadership. In fact, one of the largest African churches in South Africa is called the Zionist Christian Church (ZCC), its HQ is called Zion City and it is located in Moriah in the Limpopo Province!

I left South Africa more optimistic about its future than in a long time.

There are still power cuts and potholes but while the lights in the Johannesburg streets go out with uncomfortable regularity, you can’t put out the light in everyone’s eyes. This beloved country is not just a place to cry or sigh for. It’s also a place to fly to  and barrack for.