SAJFP gathers outside Beyachad to say Kaddish, mourning the people killed, lighting candles and placing memorial stones. Beyachad is the headquarters of a number of both Jewish and Zionist organisations. Specifically the headquarters of the Jewish National Fund – South Africa (JNF-SA), South African Zionist Federation (SAZF), South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), The Jewish Agency for Israel, the Israel United Appeal, and the Community Security Organisation (CSO).
Zionism is not Judaism and Zionists are not the gatekeeper of the Jewish faith. And yet, the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) has worked tirelessly to interweave Zionism with Judaism leaving no room for dissent.
The SAZF has sent South African politicians and religious groups on propaganda trips to Israel, it has encouraged South African Jewish youth to break the law and become part of the genocidal Israeli army, and celebrates the death of ordinary Palestinians.
Dr. Warren Goldstein, who currently occupies the position of Chief Rabbi of South Africa, has released a number of videos, since October 2023, defending Apartheid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
SAJFP distances itself from this unelected official who, by virtue of his title, may be mistaken to represent the South African Jewish community. In fact, Goldstein has repeatedly shown his disregard for large parts of the community.
It is telling that in many of Chief Rabbi Goldstein’s videos, including the January 28 video on the ICJ verdict, he used colonial language and racist tropes. He refers to Israel and its defenders as “civilised nations” with “liberal Western values” fighting the “forces of barbarism”, using this framing to justify the murder of more than 44 000 Palestinians, almost half of whom are children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more. This is the same rhetoric that has been used over millennia by colonial empires that dispossessed and subjugated peoples they considered “uncivilised”.
Last week, Chief Rabbi Goldstein invited Jews from across the world to keep shabbos for the 12th year of the Shabbos Project as, in his words, Zionists “have seen, through God’s blessings and promises, how the state of Israel has fought back, achieving great victories: the complete defeat of Hamas in Gaza, the crippling of Hezbollah in Lebanon”.
Chief Rabbi Goldstein and the SAZF would like Jews to unite in war and hatred. This week we, as SAJFP, gather not in hatred but in collective mourning.
We strongly believe in the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, “Repairing the World” which embodies social action and the pursuit of social justice.
We join together in a Kaddish ceremony, to memorialise and sanctify the lives lost, while also being cognizant of the ways our collective mourning as Jewish people have been misused to cause suffering to the Palestinian people.
Rather than centering our Judaism in some far away place, we centre it in doykeit, meaning ‘hereness’. According to Doykeit, we must make home diasporically and as nomads, as Jews have done for centuries. We aim to heal the spaces we find ourselves in by opposing exploitation and oppression and working to build a better, more equal society, for all.
As Jews whose history is marked by discrimination and fear, we refuse to be implicated in the persecution of, and horrendous crimes committed against, the Palestinians, and hope that young Jewish South Africans can see beyond the propaganda pushed by community leaders. We are part of a Jewish awakening here and globally, that has come to recognise the insidious propaganda project – the hasbarah – pushed by community leaders.
Members of SAJFP thus gather outside Beyachad to relay the one simple message that anti-zionist Jews across the world have been chanting: “not in our name, never again for anyone”.
Organisations like the SAZF and JNF do not talk for us. We will not allow our history to be twisted and turned into an elaborate justification of genocide for genocide. Furthermore, we refuse to remain idle while our religion is perverted in an attempt to justify crimes against humanity. Never Again is Never Again for anyone!
