Choni Davidowitz
But I feel that those words are the diametric opposite of what our children should know about living in a land which can never be called their own. They certainly cannot ever be free in any country but their own, and that country is certainly not South Africa, or any other place outside Israel.
The editorial states that our children are part of a fascinating tribe of people who have thrived wherever they have settled. This might have been true before the rebirth of Israel under Jewish sovereignty after 2 000 years of cruel exile. Since then, however, the Diaspora has become Jewry’s graveyard.
Demographers have asserted that Diaspora Jewry has lost a million of its sons and daughters in intermarriage and assimilation in the last two decades. Presently we are losing 60 000 young men and women every year. As we remember the physical Shoah which claimed the lives of six million in the death camps, we state with confidence that Hashem would never permit another Shoah to befall His people. But we were wrong.
The Shoah of “Aisav” lasted six years, and ceased with the Allied victory in Europe, but the Shoah of assimilation through assimilation and intermarriage is gaining in strength every day. From a Jewish population of six million in the United States at the end of the Second World War, 70 years later the number has dwindled to less than five million, and falling at a rate of 65 per cent.
At a normal birthrate the United States Jewish population should be over 30 million.
Throughout the Diaspora (even in “democratic” South Africa) Jewry is doomed, albeit at a slower rate here than in other countries.
It is fatal to deceive ourselves by assuming that Jewish day schools can preserve us; they can only postpone assimilation but not cancel it; they can only delay it, but not prevent it.
The Jewish house in the Diaspora is burning while the inhabitants are asleep. Our leaders, especially the religious ones, are silent. Lay leaders’ reluctance to encourage aliyah is understandable, but tragically many “positive” Jews and certain Chassidic sects, even affirm and justify the exile.
Young Jews in South Africa, and all of the Diaspora, are not thriving in foreign lands. They have not been meant to thrive in exile for the last 67 years. They are meant to follow the Talmudic rule that the precept of living in the Land of Israel is equivalent to the observance of all biblical precepts.
The ship of Diaspora Jewry is sinking, and the spiritual leaders are going around with their ordinary rabbinic ministrations instead of trying to save the passengers. The only way to survive from the present Shoah is to return to Eretz Yisrael, where we can truly thrive in our own land.
Golden Acres, Johannesburg
