Effectively by the beginning of the twenty first century, the accommodators had become irrelevant. It is unlikely this was due solely to external competition. The influence that the innovators and the traditionalists, including Goldfein’s graduates, exerted on their respective congregations and on the community as a whole certainly played a role in the marginalization of this position. Already by the 1980s, however, very few rabbis with accommodationist views occupied any position of significance in the Orthodox community owing primarily to death, emigration, and retirement, With the notable exception of Chief
62 Harris, For Heaven’s Sake, 119-120.
63 See chapter 3.
64 WhatsApp conversation with Liebenberg. It should be noted that unlike the innovators, the Yeshiva Gedolah did recite a weekly prayer for the Israel Defence Forces.
65 Goldfein, “Can South African Jewry Face the Challenges?”
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Rabbi Cyril Harris, it does not appear anyone with an inclusive outlook was brought in from abroad to occupy a key pulpit. The question remains why this was so: why within the space of a few decades did the accommodationist view, so predominant leading up to the 1960s, lose its currency? Undoubtedly the Johannesburg community was becoming less receptive to the accommodationist message. This may have reflected changes within the broader political climate. As confrontational opposition to apartheid grew at home and abroad, as white South Africa was increasingly ostracised, and as the government promoted a laager mentality, a more inward-looking orientation may have gained additional traction. Similarly, the ethos of separate development and ethnic particularism that was intrinsic to apartheid may have also favoured a turn to particularism. Equally important was a growing sense of insecurity and siege. In such a climate, those who promised an inward looking approach and intense religious experience may have been at an advantage. Of course, developments in Jewish Johannesburg also reflected broader processes in the Jewish world in these same decades.
Elsewhere, revivalist and fervent religious movements gained ground in this same period.
For those in Johannesburg feeling under siege, the traditionalist zeal within the Mizrachi party and its Bnei Akiva affiliate, which gathered steam from the mid-1960s would probably have been much more attractive. Perhaps the successes of Kollel and Chabad in the early 1970s were signs that many in the community preferred to relate to their Judaism in a parochial fashion. After all, the political and social climate in Johannesburg was geared towards a segregationist impulse which may have become amplified over the decades. While the innovators emphasised differences within humanity and were unashamedly proud of their spiritual superiority vis-a-vis the gentiles, the accommodators would have been repelled by such notions, so that not only would they have not agreed to immigrate to South Africa, some of those already in South Africa would have been prompted to leave.
Fashions changed too. Over time, more sought an intimate religious experience. For that reason, the Bnei Akiva model of a small community-run synagogue that had been unique to the fifties and sixties was becoming more popular and ubiquitous in the seventies and eighties.66 Typically, these smaller establishments were led by rabbis more interested in teaching the minutiae of Jewish law than wide-ranging ethical principles, and more focused on their small congregation than on the broader community. This trend, and the declining popularity of the big synagogue, obviated the need to seek a rabbi with an inclusive mind-set,
66 The phenomenon of the Shtiebl has been briefly discussed in chapter 5.
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who in turn saw it his duty to take care of all segments: the observant as well as the non- observant. As synagogues became smaller and more like-minded, it became less necessary for congregational rabbis to tailor their teaching and rulings to suit a broader and more diverse constituency. Instead, traditionalist rabbis, well versed in Jewish law, became the favoured option in many shtieblach. In the South African context this trend of favouring small sized congregations where the preacher is immersed in religious teachings to the exclusion of broader society has its parallel, as mentioned above, in the “house church”
movement, and its “politically neutral gospel”. 67
The move away from accommodation towards parochialism during the last decades of the twentieth century was not unique to Johannesburg. It had precedent in the Jewish world, especially in English-speaking countries. Historians and sociologists have noted a rightward shift among the modern Orthodox in the United States, with one labelling this trend the
“Haredization” of American Orthodoxy.68 Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century various factors contributed to this shift. This included the failure of moderates at Yeshiva University in New York to encourage candidate rabbis to embrace modern scholarship and the subsequent retreat from serious intellectualism.69 This came to the fore in the increased hiring of personable but unscholarly Chabad rabbis for mainstream synagogues, and the decreasing publication of Orthodox academic journals.70 Concurrently, many graduates of Modern Orthodox institutions uncritically accepted the authority and rulings of Haredi decisors. This has resulted in the adoption of purportedly unnecessary stringencies.71 In a seminal lecture, the noted sociologist Samuel Heilman attributed the right-wing shift to the failure of Modern Orthodox parents to encourage their children to enter the teaching profession. This resulted in a dearth of modern teachers qualified in Jewish studies and a concomitant increased reliance on Haredi educators at Modern Orthodox day schools. This reliance has produced a generation of students heavily impacted by a Haredi approach to
67 See Domeris, "Revivalist Movements in South African Churches," 19; Goodhew, “Growth and Decline in South Africa's Churches, 1960-91,” 361
68 Chaim I. Waxman, “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry,” Jerusalem Letter / Viewpoints, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 15 February 1998, https://jcpa.org/article/the-haredization-of-american-orthodox- jewry/, accessed on 14 December 2021. Interestingly, the trend in the United States towards Haredization may have been arrested at the beginning of the 21st century, with the popularity of the Open Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevey Torah. Writing in 2011, Waxman reversed course suggesting there may have been a leftward shift, (see Yehuda Turetsky and Chaim I. Waxman, “Sliding to the Left? Contemporary American Modern Orthodoxy,”
Modern Judaism, 31(2), May 2011: 119-141, https://academic.oup.com/mj/article-abstract/31/2/119/1202838 .
69 Zev Eleff, “From Teacher to Scholar to Pastor: The Evolving Postwar Modern Orthodox Rabbinate,”
American Jewish History, 98(4), October 2014: 307.
70 Zev Eleff, “The Orthodox Rabbinate and its Chabad Revolution” Looking Forward, 2014: 42, https://www.academia.edu/12270128/_The_Orthodox_Rabbinate_and_its_Chabad_Revolution.,
71 Waxman, “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry”, 1.
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Judaism.72 On a congregational level, the commonplace practice until the 1950s for non- observant synagogue-goers to affiliate themselves to Orthodox congregations has gradually declined. Certainly, the availability of Conservative synagogues has caused some non- observant members to switch denominations. Yet an increasing “rigidity” on the part of congregational rabbis, and their tendency to “patrol the borders of Orthodoxy” has also accounted for the exclusion of the non-observant Orthodox from the broad tent of Orthodoxy.73
In her article on the transformation of Orthodoxy in Britain, Miri Freud-Kendal notes that up until 1967 the mainstream United Synagogue practiced Minhag Anglia (literally: English custom), a modus vivendi that allowed congregants, most of whom were lax in their religious observance, to affiliate with Orthodoxy while maintaining their dual Jewish and British identities.74 This changed upon the accession of Immanuel Jakobovits to the Chief Rabbinate; he sought to undermine this philosophy, improve religiosity, and “push Anglo-Jewry to the right of the religious scale of values.”75 He did this fully cognizant of the fact that he risked alienating those to the left of him, and yet he decided the inevitable fallout was worth the gains of a more religiously committed Anglo Jewry. This narrow approach, which resulted in a declining membership of the United Synagogue, was a matter of concern to the lay leadership. As with South Africa’s choice of Cyril Harris, the British laity
appointed Jonathan Sacks to succeed Jakobovits in 1992 in an attempt to stem the tide of religious extremism and in the hope that he would succeed in fostering inclusivism.76 Though Sacks’ leadership witnessed a renewal of Jewish identity, it is a matter of debate whether British Jewry became more inclusive as a result; the preponderance of the evidence suggests inclusivism did not take hold.77 It appears that the experience in the United States
72 See Samuel C. Heilman, “How Did Fundamentalism Manage to Infiltrate Contemporary Orthodoxy? The Marshall Sklare Lecture,” Contemporary Jewry 25, 2005:258-272; Heilman, Sliding to the Right:
The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2006.
73 Zev Eleff, “The Vanishing Non-Observant Orthodox Jew,” Lehrhaus, 8 June 2017, https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/the-vanishing-non-observant-orthodox-jew, accessed on 14 December 2021. Eleff also cites Jeffrey Gurock, “The winnowing of American Orthodoxy,” in Marc Lee Raphael (editor) Approaches to Modern Judaism. Vol. II. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984, 41-53.
74 Miri Freud-Kendal, “Minhag Anglia: The Transition of Orthodox Judaism in Britain,” Pardes, 2012: 39.
75 Ibid. at 44.
76 For all Jonathan Sacks’ success as a Jewish public intellectual, his efforts to introduce an inclusive agenda was hampered by his surrender to the right wing Beth Din, and his deference to that body, which saw him refuse to attend Limmud’s conferences (see Gary Rosenblatt, “Why the Chief Rabbi isn’t at Limmud UK,” New York Jewish Week, 29 December 2010. https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/why-the-chief-rabbi-isnt-at-limmuduk).
77See “Freud-Kandel on Persoff, 'Another Way, Another Time: Religious Inclusivism and the Sacks Chief Rabbinate,” (book review) H-Judaic, May 2011 https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/30791/freud- kandel-persoff-another-way-another-time-religious-inclusivism-and, accessed on 14 December 2021, where
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and United Kingdom confirms that the pattern seen in Johannesburg was part of a global rightward trend.
While Johannesburg was directly impacted by innovators educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, there are important differences between these two countries and South Africa. In the western world, broader society, especially the urban sector with which Jewish communities primarily mingle, tend to be liberal minded. Moreover, from at least the post Second World War period, Jews in those countries have enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Though the Jewish community in South Africa has for the most part not been discriminated against, and in the contemporary period has not suffered from overt antisemitism, it has undergone crises that have impacted its religious revival. Its experience with violence, economic uncertainty and mass emigration has made it defensive, which may have diminished the universalistic impulses seen in its peer communities. In such a situation, retreating to small sheltered religious congregations is particularly attractive. Moreover, the general population in South Africa tends to be far more religious than in the urban centres in the United States and the United Kingdom where most Jews live, thus the choice of many Jews to seek religious intensification is in line with trends in the general populace.
5. The Ascension of Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein and the traditionalist takeover of the