Chief Rabbi accorded special honour at SONA

ANT KATZ

As is the case every year, religious leaders are invited to the opening of Parliament and the State President’s annual State of the Nation (SONA) address. This year, however, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein was singled out to sit among the judges and speakers of provincial legislatures, Michael Bagraim, MP, told Jewish Report.

The two sitting Jewish MPs, Bagraim and Darren Bergman, had hosted the Chief Rabbi at their party’s cocktail party just before the SONA by President Jacob Zuma.

“Both Darren Bergman and I were extremely proud to see that the Parliamentary Speakers Office had arranged a VIP seat for the Chief Rabbi on the Parliamentary floor, next to the judges and just five metres from DA leader Mmusi Maimane,” Bagraim told Jewish Report.

RIGHT: Outside Parliament – Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein is flanked by the only two sitting MPs, Darren Bergman, left, and Michael Bagraim

Bagraim said he was “very pleased that the Israel/Palestine issue had not been on the President’s agenda at all,” that “for the first time the President did allude to the business community and to the fact that South Africa has to become more business friendly”.

In an interview on his return from Cape Town, Rabbi Goldstein told SAJR that it was nice that the Jewish community was represented (in Parliament) by such talented people.

About his special seating honour, Rabbi Goldstein said that it gave him “a better perspective” than he was used to from the visitors’ gallery.

“Parliament shows me that we are a free and robust democracy,” he said, whether one agreed with the tactics of the parties or not. “It is a free democracy when members of Parliament and the media can challenge the President in such a bold fashion.”

Rabbi Goldstein says that he was pleased that the constitutional institutions of freedom and democracy have held up so well. He quotes, as an example, that the opening of Parliament occurred in the same week that the Public Protector’s report on Nkandla was before the Constitutional Court.

“We have an independent judiciary, a free press, and working Chapter Nine organisations which are all holding government to account for the people of South Africa,” he said. When a society has strong institutions like these, said Rabbi Goldstein, “it has incredible potential as there is proper accountability.”

He said South Africa had been a “remarkable success story – in the 20 short years since the end of apartheid, where there was no freedom, no accountability and no democracy. We have endured the firing of a deputy president, the recall of a sitting president, the arrest and conviction of a police commissioner and now a Constitutional Court battle over the Nkandla report,” This all went to show that when our country’s institutions have been tested, he said, they come out strong.