SA Jewry speaks out on wave of xenophobia

ANT KATZ

“I was stateless, didn’t speak the language, and ostracised by other children,” she remembers. “I had nightmares for 35 years,” she says. Now, watching xenophobia playing out on the streets of South Africa, she is taken back to a time when she never thought she would ever feel safe as a Jew.

The resurgence of anti-immigrant violence in Gauteng this month has sparked outrage, not least of all from local Jewry who have been critical of the racism and exploitation of refugees.

As Fainman and many of South Africa’s elderly Jews – who came to South Africa as refugees from Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Poland, among others – are testament, Jews are no strangers to being “strangers in a strange land”. And the people of those lands have not always been welcoming.

The current wave of xenophobia in South Africa has been focused on Pretoria mainly, but also in Johannesburg and other areas around the country. The targets: Undocumented Nigerians, Pakistanis, Zimbabweans, Somalis and others. The perpetrators: Locals who accuse them of perpetuating crime and taking jobs away from them.

Hundreds of these looters – who see it as their “right” to take from foreigners – have been arrested and thousands of refugees have fled their homes and abandoned their businesses.

 “There have been serious incidents of arson and looting targeting immigrants in both Johannesburg and Tshwane, while tensions are being further heightened by an upsurge in inflammatory rhetoric, particularly on social media,” said Durban-based Alana Baranov, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies’ representative on the national Hate Crimes Working Group, in a media statement. “It is crucial that every feasible measure be taken by the authorities to “prevent the situation from spiralling out of control, as has so tragically happened in the past”.

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein said this week: “Xenophobia is like all forms of racism – an affront to the values and principles of the Torah. Our Sages teach in Pirkei Avot, ‘Beloved is the human being created in the Image of G-d’. This is a declaration of the oral Torah enshrining the equality of all human beings before G-d.

“The Mishna also teaches that G-d created all human beings to be descended from one common father and one common mother (Adam and Eve) in order to eradicate racism and remind us that all human beings are brothers and sisters.”

Irene Fainman and her mother – who were sent to the camps – were the only survivors from her family. “When we were liberated on April 20, 1945, we were sent by the Red Cross to Sweden,” she says. The Nazis had revoked their Dutch nationality. After a few weeks at the Red Cross camp, Irene and her mother appeared before a British team tasked with relocation.

Although her mother was a native Briton with nine siblings, she had revoked her UK citizenship for Dutch citizenship. Irene’s mother requested that they be allowed to join her family.

England declined. They wanted to send them to Hungary, a country neither had ever seen, and told Irene’s mom that she “shouldn’t have married a foreigner”. An aunt in England hastily sent a letter to none other than Winston Churchill, says Irene, and they were allowed into England.

Then-nine-year-old Irene Krausz (her maiden name) told of being ostracised as she couldn’t speak any English, only Dutch and some German she’d picked up in the camps. On top of it, when the children discovered she was Jewish, it became worse, forcing her mother to home-school her – until they arrived in South Africa.

And now, after so many years, it looks as if history is repeating itself…