Last exit from Durban By Yair Sheleg From Ha'aretz Daily

South Africa's Jewish community is shrinking as many young people leave to search for `the good life' somewhere else. For those who remain it isn't easy to adjust to new realities.

Marlene Bethlehem, president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, has three children. The eldest, Louise, 37, immigrated to Israel 16 years ago, "due to her revulsion at apartheid." The second daughter, Lael, 33, remained to fight apartheid racism; today she has a senior public position, protecting the nation's forests. The youngest, Keith, 32, planned on staying in South Africa, before an event occurred that changed his life, his mother says.

"My brother, Ronnie, a well-known economist, was kidnapped and murdered four years ago," Bethlehem explains. "My son, an attorney by profession, decided to leave the country. He asked me: `Do you want these murders to come still closer to you?' Within four months, he was set up in London, partly because his wife is English."

Bella Miller, a 76-year-old widow from Durban, has a similar story to tell. "I have three children," she says. "When Howard, my eldest son, had his car stolen, he decided to leave the country. A year later he was settled in Washington. My second son, Ivan, who lived in Johannesburg, also had his car stolen; but he decided to remain and improve security arrangements. The youngest son, Michael, lives in Cape Town; he's still single, and likes to enjoy himself." She adds that a car belonging to a nephew, a physician, was also stolen, "and immediately after this happened, he phoned his wife and told her to put the apartment up for sale. They immigrated to Israel, because their children have pretty good Hebrew."

When Bethlehem and Miller speak about "cars being stolen," their reference is to armed robbery of vehicles. Such car theft, it turns out, is one of the most prevalent forms of crime in South Africa.

The spate of car theft has reached such alarming proportions that local police squads have set up special units to deal with the epidemic. Since special security devices are installed in cars, criminals have started robbing them directly from their owners, at gunpoint. Drivers in South Africa understand that they are at particular risk when they enter and leave their automobiles; also, cars idling at traffic lights and junctions can be targeted by thieves. So, after they climb into their cars, the first thing most drivers do is to make sure that doors and windows are locked.

Car theft, however, isn't the only widespread form of crime in the country. With unemployment rates high, many young people resort to crime. Thus, home security systems have become a particularly conspicuous emblem of the South African lifestyle, particularly in wealthy areas.

Any self-respecting home owner places a sign at the entrance to his residence, identifying the security company responsible for it. Potential thieves are to read the sign and draw their own conclusions.

For many home owners, however, the warning signs aren't enough. They enclose their homes with fences, walls, and sometimes barbed wire.

The heavy security measures of private homes are utilized, and often upgraded, by Jewish communal institutions. For instance, a preschool institution at Johannesburg's Glenhazel area (an affluent suburb where many Jews live) is encircled by an electronic fence. A guard posted by the nursery school's entrance opens its bolted, steel door only after first receiving a go-ahead from the secretary's office inside, where electronic surveillance monitors are mounted.

Crime isn't the only threat posed to the quality of life in South Africa. Many fear that the country's economic future is far from secure. True, during seven years of democratic rule, the inflation rate has dropped from 18 percent to just 7 percent. And the new government did not nationalize private companies, as many feared would happen - instead, it launched rapid privatization programs.

Yet privatization and other policies have aggravated unemployment levels in South Africa, and stirred grave concerns about possible mass layoffs in the future (tension is rife between the government and professional unions in this regard). The fears of many whites, Jews among them, about the future of the economy have been exacerbated by the government's declared commitment to sponsor affirmative action policies on behalf of blacks, to offset the legacy of apartheid discrimination.

The principal economic worry involves the stability, or lack thereof, of the local currency, the rand. Devaluation of the rand began during the apartheid period, when South Africa's economy was boycotted by the international community. The rand's value continues to sag today, due to a combination of factors - lack of foreign investment (investors are worried about South Africa's uncertain economic-political future), and also so-called "regional influences," meaning the blatant lack of stability of neighboring countries, especially Zimbabwe (where the regime tacitly or explicitly encourages attacks against white farmers).

Search for stability

Recoiling from this inauspicious mix of rising crime rates and economic uncertainty, many have decided to emigrate. Representatives of different generations of the Jewish community tend to quarrel about the causes of this flight from South Africa. While Miller and Frank Schneider, another retired Jew from Durban, say that their children have left mainly in response to crime, Jonathan Russon, an accountant from Johannesburg, believes that most of his Jewish peers who have left the country have done so mainly to "search for more stable salary levels and currencies."

Whether the exodus is rooted mainly in social, political or economic determinants, there is one common denominator running through all of the individual stories. Jews and others are leaving South Africa in the hope of "finding a more secure future."

As for the reasons for leaving, there generally isn't much difference between Jews and other white South Africans. Jonathan Ribin, a Jewish musician from Johannesburg, notes that a community of 12,000 non-Jewish white immigrants from South Africa is taking root today in Perth, Australia. Jews tend not to have special reasons to leave, since anti-Semitism is rare in the country.

Recent signs of an anti-Semitic trend have been limited almost exclusively to Cape Town, on the southern tip of the country. A group of Muslim extremists, the Pajad, which has been active in the city in recent years, is responsible for Cape Town's exceptional status. The group originally devoted its efforts to constructive causes like the war against drugs; as time went by, however, its fundamentalist Islamic credo became more militant. There have been anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in Cape Town in recent months; and just a few weeks ago, when the international anti-racism conference was taking place in Durban, a Jewish doctor in Cape town was assaulted and badly injured by a band of Muslim radicals.

Yet anti-Semitism in Cape town remains limited to a string of isolated incidents; and there is no noticeable anti-Semitic trend in the country as a whole. Trends in Glenhazel convey hints that the country's Jewish community is not concerned about the possibility of an anti-Semitic upsurge. Numerous Glenhazel Jews wear skullcaps in public. And Jews in this Johannesburg suburb recently sponsored a fair in the local mall, selling gifts and special items in preparation for the High Holy Days and Sukkot.

There were performances of Hasidic songs and a shofar-blowing contest, and the fair was publicized far and wide, by organizers who were manifestly not worried about any sort of hostile backlash.

Jewish emigration from South Africa is thus part of a general current trend of white departure. On the other hand, the Jews began to leave long before the collapse of the apartheid regime. Trying to pinpoint the moment when confidence about the future began to flag, many in the Jewish community refer to the year 1976 as a key turning point. In June of that year, riots flared in Soweto, outside of Johannesburg, and many saw that as an ominous sign of troubled times ahead.

Marlene Bethlehem explains: "Before apartheid collapsed, many people, like my eldest daughter, left because they couldn't accept the regime. And in recent years, many, like my youngest child, have been leaving because they fear that the present government isn't able to preserve law and order."

Though identifying the precise causal dynamics can be difficult, the bottom line regarding South African Jewry is written in stark numbers. In 25 years, a community of 120,000 people has dwindled to 80,000 (some say that the current number is still smaller).

Most of the emigrants are young people. Looking for a "better future," young Jewish South Africans first depart from relatively small cities and towns across the country that have hosted modest Jewish communities throughout the past century. Jews who remain in South Africa are concentrated heavily in two communities, Johannesburg (60,000) and Cape Town (50,000). The smaller communities are shrinking, heading toward the point of no return.

Departure from the small South African Jewish communities is not always part of an internal migration trend whose final destinations are Johannesburg or Cape Town. And many young Jews who pack their bags to leave the country for good have their parents' blessing. Schneider, for instance, says that "all over the world, parents usually want their children to remain close by; but we ourselves, and other parents like us, have persuaded our children to leave because they don't have a future here."

Many families are far-flung, with members settled in a bewildering array of locales around the globe. Marlene Bethlehem is a case in point: there is a daughter in Israel, a son in London, and a daughter in Johannesburg. Bethlehem's friend Gale Goldberg has a son in Toronto, a son in Los Angeles, a daughter in Australia, and a daughter who lived in Israel before returning recently to South Africa.

For such parents, annual vacations become globe-trotting affairs, a series of shuttle visits between children located in different countries and continents. Even parents of lesser economic means scrape together the funds to finance such global excursions, "to see the children." South Africa's Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris explains: "Some women go out and work so that by the end of the year they're able to afford such trips." Others, such as the Schneider parents, make an effort at least once every other year to visit children overseas.

Some elderly parents who require supervision and medical care have been adversely affected by this global scattering of South African Jews. It may be that some, or all, of their offspring live overseas. In some cases, children are unable to provide the funds needed to support their aging parents, so the burden of providing for these dependent senior citizens falls upon the organized Jewish community. Meantime, the Jewish communal organizations have their own economic worries - they are troubled by the devaluation of the rand, the cessation of government subsidies to private social welfare and educational institutions, and by the flight of many former donors, wealthy South African Jews who have left the country. Jewish social welfare and education institutions are saddled today with heavy debts; and donors who remain in the country are besieged by ever-increasing demands.

Up to now, the organized Jewish community has met these challenges with great success. Jewish senior citizens homes admit all members of the community, whatever their income level (this model applies to many Jewish communities around the globe; unfortunately it is not in effect in Israel). The ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement, a conspicuous presence in the South African Jewish landscape, operates a special housing complex for people of all ages who have been unable to purchase apartments on their own.

Memories of apartheid

"The schvartzes," sighs B., a wealthy member of Durban's Jewish community, "don't know how to run the state." The Yiddish term for blacks, an internal Jewish code word redolent of deep disdain, appears often in conversations with older members of the Jewish community. These South African Jews don't even attempt to conceal their nostalgia for what they regard as the good old days of apartheid. Days in which law and order prevailed, when the police were tough and only white people competed in the professions - in short, when there were no schvartzes, and when there was no affirmative action to benefit the blacks.

P., for instance, also from Durban, says: "Life under the old regime was more comfortable, at least for us. There weren't all these problems with the various communities. The police were strong; and there wasn't a rash of crime and kidnapping, as there is today. You could walk on the street without being afraid of crime." Today, P. complains, "the schvartzes don't like to work. Factories are closing since workers strike, and do protest dances instead of working. So foreign investors take their money elsewhere."

Attitudes among the younger generation are more complex. Blunt expressions of contempt and disdain of the sort uttered by the older generation are not common among younger South African Jews. Yet for many it still seems natural that blacks work as servants. An Israeli who spent a few months this year as a guest in South Africa's Jewish community recalls one telling incident: when he offered to help clear away the dishes at a special Shabbat table, his hosts were angered. "It took us five years to get the servants accustomed to doing all the work," he was told. "Don't mess it up for us." In another, similar incident, he drew incredulous looks when he insisted on shining his own shoes - the Israeli was informed there was a servant to do that sort of work.

Like other whites, Jews have little social contacts with blacks. Errol Goodman, who has a senior position in Johannesburg's organized Jewish community, explains: "While apartheid was repealed on a legal level, it remains in effect in social terms. Jews, like all other whites, shut themselves away in their own neighborhoods. They are leaving state schools and transferring to private educational facilities, because when blacks entered the state school system, its level declined - that was natural, since in previous generations blacks received just a minimal amount of education."

David Ackerman, a 22-year-old Jewish student from Durban who is active in the Zionist Federation, does not miss the apartheid regime in any way. Yet like many of his older peers, he harbors some doubts about the new government.

"For my father, the change of power was a personal trauma," he recalls. "Not because he supported apartheid. He simply claimed, as somebody affiliated through work with Durban's Technicon, that lecturers ought to be hired by virtue of their abilities, and not because of skin color. Taking that position was enough - he was accused of racism. Students hit him; and in the end he had to leave his job, apparently to vacate it to a black instructor. Though he found work at a private institution, the episode was, for him, traumatic."

Asked whether he believes that his parents and their peers could have done more in the struggle against apartheid, Ackerman gives a negative reply: "They knew that the regime was awful, but they couldn't do anything about it, since it was a totalitarian government. They were a small minority, one which was frightened about an upsurge of anti-Semitism, akin to what characterized the regime here during the Nazi period. And you can't ignore the fact that Jews, like all the other whites, profited from apartheid. They had a very comfortable daily life."

When the chief rabbi, Cyril Harris, arrived from Britain, took up his position in South Africa's Jewish community and delivered an apology in its name for its not having done enough to defeat apartheid, Ackerman's grandfather wrote an article criticizing the new rabbi, claiming that the community could not have done more.

It is worth mentioning that the Jewish community today sponsors a number of initiatives to assist the nation's black population. For instance, Harris has been instrumental in establishing Tikkun, an organization that works for the benefit of black communities. Tikkun's activities include the establishment of a cooperative for growing organic vegetables, a support center for youth at risk, a medical center for pregnant women, and special classroom instruction for children who have reading difficulties. The ORT education organization has also joined efforts on behalf of black South Africans, establishing a vocational training center for blacks in Johannesburg. But these are relatively isolated initiatives. In terms of attitude and social networks, the Jewish community as a whole remains detached from the black public.

The `new South Africa'

This reality of detachment raises a broad question: How do South African Jews really view their place in the state? Do those who choose to remain do so simply because they have no alternative - due to a lack of economic resources or an inability to transfer their business abroad? Or do they genuinely see themselves and their children as being part of the "new South Africa," which is now governed by the black majority?

The Jewish establishment issues clear declarations in support of the latter. It affirms its commitment to the new South Africa for a combination of tactical-practical, and authentic-emotional, reasons. Practically speaking, the Jewish establishment doesn't want to be suspected of disloyalty; it is comprised of people who have decided to stay in South Africa and link their own personal future to the fate of the country.

During the annual meeting of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies last month, Board leaders were emphatic about their belief and commitment to the "new South Africa." SAJBD chairman Russel Gaddin declared: "Our community has so much to offer - so much experience and knowledge - which can be harnessed to build the new South Africa ... As citizens of the country and as human beings, don't Jews bear an obligation to improve the lot of the state's vast majority?"

Striking a similar note, Bethlehem says: "I definitely view myself as a proud South African. I am particularly proud of the way in which the state's dramatic transformation, and the reconciliation which came following the political change, came about peacefully. I am definitely connected to the land, and the landscape."

The establishment also has an apparent desire to arrange the historical record in a way that reflects a prominent Jewish involvement in the struggle against apartheid. Visitors to Cape Town's Jewish Museum, which opened just a few years ago and documents Jewish history in the country, report that the handful of Jewish activists who helped spearhead the struggle against apartheid receive disproportionately lavish treatment. The museum apparently wants to to create the impression that the group's outlook was representative of the community's position.

Helen Friedman, a member of this group who remains active today in the campaign to help blacks, reflects that "when I was an anti-apartheid activist, nobody, including the Jews, wanted to know what I was up to; they stayed away from me. That they didn't help me goes without saying. During the past 10 years I have suddenly gotten a lot of publicity and recognition - from the Jewish establishment as well. But nobody really comes to see what exactly it is that I do. They put a picture of me in the Jewish Museum and wrote about me, but nobody asked me to describe what I did."

Friedman notes, however, that she hasn't been entirely neglected by the Jewish community. In fact, she says, "I have in the past five years received a lot of love and backing, and most of the people who finance my support organization are Jewish."

Difficult transition

SAJDP director-general Judah Kaye astutely analyzes the Jewish community's dilemma: "We got used to viewing South Africa as a Western country, as a land which has a Western culture. The challenge we face is to become accustomed to life in an African state."

There are many indications that the community is finding it hard to make this transition. The South African Jew lives in what Marvin Smith, former SAJDP president, calls "internal exile." His body, Smith explains, is in South Africa, but his soul is enclosed in Western "bubbles" that he has contrived. Community members live in elegant, affluent, and heavily protected houses that are located in American-style suburbs; they work in fortress-like office buildings where international business deals are made; and they try to remain sealed off, protected from aspects of the African environment outside (soaring levels of AIDS, unemployment, poverty and crime).

Arguably, the trend of "returning to religion" which has taken root in the Jewish community, particularly in Johannesburg, reflects this impulse to cut loose from the local setting. The South African Jewish community has long been characterized by its unusually strong religious and Zionist commitments. A majority of its members, even those who travel to synagogue on Shabbat by automobile, define themselves as Orthodox. As children, a large portion of the community's members attended Jewish day schools throughout the week; Hebrew lessons were stressed in these institutions, as was the strengthening of bonds with Israel. Zionist youth movements have enjoyed extraordinarily strong membership rates.

Intermarriage rates were very low in the past. Though it has risen somewhat today, it remains at just 15 percent - as compared to the 50 percent intermarriage figure that looms in the United States and other Western countries.

The dominant social, religious, ideological and educational trends were affected by apartheid and its legacy. As Rabbi Harris puts it, the trends are explained "by the generally isolated character of society in South Africa. Separation hasn't existed only between blacks and whites: the blacks themselves were separated along tribal lines. Muslims also keep to themselves."

Under seven years of black rule, the Jewish community's religious profile has strengthened. Institutions encouraging Jews to become Orthodox - Chabad, Or Sameah, Esh Hatorah - are flourishing in Johannesburg, recruiting hundreds of new members each year, and black Orthodox skullcaps are a prominent part of the community's landscape. Increasing numbers of people adhere to kashrut and Shabbat laws and rites. Many concur with Ackerman's analysis, depicting the process as "a desire to clutch something that is well-known." Religious frameworks, he notes, "provide a sense of social security which offsets the general uncertainty and fears about the future."

Despite the strong Jewish and Zionist components in the community's identity, Israel is not the destination preferred by most who choose to leave. Most emigrants head for Australia, Canada and Britain; if a green card is available, they set off for the United States. Israel receives just 20 percent of those who leave.

A number of explanations are put forth to account for Israel's relatively low level of popularity among immigrants: Immigrants want English-language countries and are deterred by Hebrew. Devaluation of the rand means that a large villa in South Africa is sold for around $200,000, a price that fetches not much more than a modest apartment in many parts of Israel. It seems that the main factor spoiling Israel's appeal is what many refer to simply as "the good life." Goodman puts it this way: "The community here is very spoiled. We have a good, comfortable life. If people decide to leave, they don't want to go to a place where life is hard, like Israel."