Keeping the Jewish voice alive

It’s never good news when the non-executive chairperson of a newspaper asks the editor for space on the front page. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, the future of the SA Jewish Report rests in your hands!

For the past 25 years, the SA Jewish Report has created a unifying platform that reflects the unique richness and diversity of our Jewish community and provides credible news about South Africa, Israel, and the Jewish world. We have built the SA Jewish Report into a world-class non-profit media company and one of our community’s greatest assets.

Today, our hard copy newspaper is read by more than 30 000 people each week, our weekly newsletter has more than 36 000 subscribers, our website is visited by more than 120 000 people each month, our webinars have been watched more than six million times, and the Jewish Achiever Awards have grown into one of the most important business events on the country’s calendar.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, against all economic sense, we decided to support our community by continuing to publish with little to no advertising and, at enormous cost, to deliver copies of the newspaper to people’s homes as they struggled under lockdown.

We are enormously proud of how we helped our community through that impossibly difficult time.

We started our JR Live webinar channel. Remember our webinar with Simon Sinek; or Red Notice author Bill Browder; or the story of Silvia the Mossad spy from South Africa; or the Woman in Gold, restoring the Nazi looted Klimt paintings; or The Last Kings of Shanghai with Jonathan Kaufman? Our webinar with Douglas Murray got more than one million views on YouTube.

We used our reach and the generosity of our community to raise millions of rands for Afrika Tikkun; The Angel Network; the Chev; the JNF; and artists struggling under lockdown.

Since 7 October, it’s taken courage to be the voice of our community. We’ve seen a concerted campaign to try shut down any voices that support Israel and the Jewish people. We remain unbowed in the face of the vitriol and rabid anti-Jewish racism that permeates the political establishment and the fourth estate.

When we’ve called out antisemitic racism and the Press Council demanded an apology, we withdrew from the council rather than compromise our dignity and the integrity of our community by apologising to racists.

As the impact of 7 October 2023 became evident, we publicly exposed the barbaric brutality that the Hamas invasion of Israel wrought, and the South Africans murdered and taken hostage. We hosted hostages and their families on our shows, Colonel Richard Kemp, and Colonel Miri Eisin. We have also hosted in-person events for the foreign diplomatic corps to expose them to the plight of the hostages and their families.

Without us, the Jewish community would have no voice.

We think we have really played our part, but we cannot do it alone.

Although the entire board of directors of the SA Jewish Report are volunteers, the cost of printing and distributing the newspaper are enormous. Each month, we pay approximately R350 000 just to print and distribute the newspaper, and that’s before we’ve paid a single journalist, editor, designer, proofreader, website costs, email costs, Zoom costs etc.

As an immediate cost-cutting measure, from next week, we are reducing both our print run and our distribution points, but that will certainly not be enough. We understand that for many the SA Jewish Report is their “Shabbos read”, and for the more elderly in our community, they cannot access the publication online.

Our model is however unsustainable without you.

If you have read our newspaper, or our newsletter, if you have visited our website or seen us on social media, if you have watched our webinars, or the Jewish Achiever Awards, if you have attended any of our events, then we say to you quite frankly, it’s time for you to please play your part.

A voice takes courage. Keeping it takes a courageous community.

Be bold. Be brave. Protect our voice. Donate to the SA Jewish Report today.

Howard Sackstein

Chairperson SA Jewish Report

Click here to donate now: https://bit.ly/sajrdon