SA Jewish stats difficult to come by

ANT KATZ

It has always been hard to come by good statistics on South African Jewry – and it’s about to get much harder.

The SAJBD’s senior researcher and associate director, David Saks, is widely considered to be the “statistician-general” of SA Jewry. He laments StatsSA’s decision to drop the “religion” question in the last census. “I don’t know where we are going to get information from now,” he says, adding that Cape Town has a good database and smaller centres such as Durban, PE and Pretoria know exactly how many Jewish families live in their areas. “Johannesburg is an insurmountable problem,” Saks says.

UOS CEO Darren Sevitz says that the organisation used to collect membership figures of affiliated shuls annually, but no longer does. They do, however, have records of marriages (which he says are down) and on kosher slaughtering (stable).

Studies of South African Jewry were conducted in 1973, 1974 and 1991. After recent censuses, the Kaplan Centre at UCT did large-sample studies of South African Jewry which were published in 1998 and 2005. Saks hopes to raise funds for an updated Kaplan Centre study – but they won’t have the benefit of the census data to work from.

The subject of intermarriage was covered in the two-volume 2005 Kaplan Centre study. In a 7 000-word synopsis of the survey, research leader Shirley Bruk observed that 100 per cent of the “Strictly Orthodox” group had a Jewish spouse/partner. This dropped to 97 per cent for “Traditional Orthodox” and 80 per cent for “Progressive” and “Secular/Just Jewish” groups.

Among South African Jewry in 2005, 76 per cent “always” lit candles on Shabbos and a further 16 per cent “sometimes” did. Pesach Seders were attended by 95 per cent, 90 per cent fasted on Yom Kippur and 87 per cent didn’t work on Rosh Hashanah.

Younger South African Jews were more religious than their parents who had, in turn, been more religious than their grandparents.

 Kaplan 2005 found that acceptance of statements like “the Torah is the actual word of G-d” and “the universe did not come about by chance” became higher as the demographic groups got younger.