On Johannesburg’s Long Avenue, a kosher deli is located right next to the kosher supermarket, opposite a kosher burger restaurant. The nearest synagogue is only a few hundred meters away.
One look at an online map and it’s clear: Glenhazel, a suburb of South Africa’s commercial capital, has an active Jewish community.
Karen Milner, head of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, or SAJBD, can confirm the observation. “The kosher restaurants [in Glenhazel] they are full. If you go to the kosher shops, they are absolutely packed,” he told DW. “If you go to our synagogues, they are full. If you’ve gone on a weekend, there are about 20 events to choose from — for a small Jewish community, that’s remarkable!”
According to estimates by the SAJBD, the umbrella representative and civil rights group of the South African Jewish community, between 56,000 and 60,000 Jews live South Africa. In a country with a population of around 60 million, this is only a small fraction. However, it is the largest Jewish community on the African continent and the twelfth largest in the world.
The majority of South Africa’s Jewish population lives in Glenhazel and other areas of Johannesburg. Smaller communities can also be found in Cape Town, Durban and other parts of the country.
Escape from Europe
The history of Jewish immigration to South Africa began centuries ago, with Jews among the passengers on the ships of Portuguese explorers and Dutch traders. But Jewish immigration to Africa’s southernmost country really took off under British colonial rule.
From the late 19th century, increasing numbers of Eastern European Jews fled the pogroms in their countries of origin, mainly from Lithuania, and found their way to South Africa. After the Nazi seized power in Germany, some Jewish Germans also managed to escape to Africa. During World War II, South Africa’s Jewish community is said to have reached its peak of 120,000.
In 1948, the white supremacist National Party founded it apartheid regime in South Africa. Jews were classified as “white” and could benefit from the highest level of civil rights. Despite this advantage, a disproportionately large number of Jews opposed the unjust apartheid regime, SAJBD’s Milner said.
“Many of the anti-apartheid activists were influenced by their own experience or their parents’ experiences during the pogroms in Eastern Europe or the Holocaust,” he said. Among them were writer Nadine Gordimer, Albie Sachs—who would later be appointed to the Constitutional Court—and civil rights activist Dennis Goldbergwhose grandparents came from Lithuania.
Goldberg, who died in 2020, was a member of the South African Communist Party and a co-founder of the South African Congress of Democrats, an organization of predominantly white, democratically-oriented left-wing members. He was arrested in 1963 and sentenced to four life terms and finally released in 1985.
Goldberg served as a technical officer in the armed wing of the African National Congress, the political party of South Africa’s first black head of state, Nelson Mandela.
Goldberg’s basic anti-Zionist stance led him to distance himself from Israel’s settlement policy, which he saw as comparable to South Africa’s apartheid policy. Israeli governments have always rejected such accusations, citing their commitment to international law.
The ANC maintains ties with Palestinian groups
The ANC, which has been in power since the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994, has continued to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as apartheid, comparable to apartheid in South Africa.
The ANC has always maintained ties with Palestinian groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat. Recently, it took days for the South African government to condemn the October 7 attacks by Islamist militant organization Hamaswhich cost an estimated 1,200 lives in Israel — even though South African nationals were among those killed and kidnapped.
Unlike Israel, Germany, the United States and the European Union and other countries, South Africa does not list Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hamas is even rumored to have an office in Cape Town.
Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor drew sharp international criticism when she admitted to a phone call with Hamas officials shortly after the October 7 attacks, which she said was to discuss humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. He denounced allegations of support for militant attacks on Israel.
The Jewish community is in shock
Kathy Kaler, director of radio station ChaiFM – which, she said, is the only Jewish radio station in Africa and the only Jewish talk radio outside Israel – has noticed the change in South Africa’s Jewish community since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict .
“For the first two weeks after Black Sabbath [October 7]we changed all our programming,” he told DW. “Our listening community didn’t want any other topic that wasn’t about Israel and what was going on with Hamas.”
Kaler said she suspects that every Jew in the world knows someone who has been directly affected by escalation in one way or another. Even in Johannesburg, the community is in shock.
“For the first two weeks after October 7, nobody went out,” he said, adding that kosher restaurants and cafes remained empty. “We’ve just been winding down and now we’re slowly getting back to going out and making life as close to normal as possible.”
Increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7
The wariness of many South African Jews is justified. Until the Oct. 7 attacks, anti-Semitic incidents in South Africa amounted to only a few cases of graffiti or online abuse each month, SAJBD’s Karen Milner said.
However, according to their latest figures, 180 anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the country since the beginning of 2023 — 110 of them after October 7. Five of these were direct attacks. Jewish institutions have already increased security measures in response.
Milner fears the government’s one-sided stance could encourage further attacks. However, she remains convinced that anti-Semitic incidents are far less likely in South Africa than in Europe.
“Rabbis and Religious [continue to] they dress the way they like,” he said, referring to the signature yarmulke. He said people were “a bit worried and cautious at this stage”, but added that they did not need to hide their Jewish identity.
“We don’t think the threat is so high that people are not visibly Jewish in public.”
This article was originally written in German.