3. Traditionalist Response: Synthesis and Counterrevolution
3.1 Yeshiva College and the Yeshiva Gedolah
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among the lay leadership supported Harris’s appointment. At least one person suspected that Kaplan was the main mover.19
The friendship between Kaplan and Lord Jakobovits dated back to at least 1985 when Kaplan and his wife Jill named the Centre of Medical Ethics at Ben Gurion University, Beersheba, in honour of the British Chief Rabbi.20 Consequently one may speculate that Kaplan was at least informed of Jakobovits’s preferences. Even if one discounts any relationship, the views held by Kaplan, one of the foremost Jewish lay leaders in South Africa, certainly influenced the matter.21 As it turned out, the new Chief Rabbi’s activities in the religious and political spheres placed him squarely in the accommodators’ camp.22 His tenure succeeded in staving off challenges by the innovators and traditionalists. It also afforded the latter more time to launch a counteroffensive against the innovators. It is to the traditionalists, and their response, to which we now turn.
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establish their own fulltime Torah institution, or what is known in the Jewish world as a Yeshiva Gedolah [a Senior Yeshiva]. The new Yeshiva open its doors the next year.
Hoping to enlist the services of a renowned Torah scholar, an invitation was extended to Rabbi Azriel Goldfein who had studied together with Rabbi Tanzer at Telshe Yeshiva from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. At the time the approach was made, Goldfein was serving as Rosh Yeshiva of the rabbinical College of St. Louis, Missouri, and was slowly building a reputation as “one of America’s foremost young Talmiday Chachamim.”24 Goldfein accepted the offer, and together with his young family arrived in South Africa in November 1972, eager to begin his new job. Aside from providing a Jewish education at a post high school level for students who would no longer need to travel to Israel to receive a higher education, it also provided a facility for training rabbis. To this end, the Solomon Bronner Rabbinical Academy was opened in November 1973.25 Unlike the Training College, this Academy offered a curriculum closely resembling that of a yeshiva, omitting any
subjects related to practical rabbinics. Instead it was devoted exclusively to Torah at “the highest possible level.”26 Concomitantly, it shared the Training College’s ideal of
producing South African-born rabbis able to relate to the South African community. With the arrival of a traditionally trained scholar devoted to providing a local high-level Yeshiva, a
“solution” of sorts was reached. On the one hand, traditionalists could be trained at an authentic Yeshiva. On the other hand, its location rendered it capable of producing local rabbis loyally serving the community in which they were born and bred and whose customs they respected.27
In theory, the idea of establishing a rabbinical academy under Yeshiva College’s auspices made sense, yet for various apparently non-ideological reasons it did not pan out. At the end of 1977, Goldfein announced he would not be extending his five-year contract with Yeshiva College and resigned from his position as associate Rosh Yeshiva.28 The next year, he established an independent Yeshiva Gedolah. The reasons for leaving the Bnei Akiva- based institution, and failing to renew his contract, are unclear. It has been claimed by the
24 Ibid. Saks does not attribute the quote, but refers to a local press announcement in St. Louis. Soon after Goldfein’s arrival, his scholarship was recognized by all factions of Johannesburg’s Orthodox community. Some of the Kollel Fellows even suggested he was imported to compete with the Kollel. (See Hassan, interview).
25 Ibid.,73.
26 Azriel Goldfein¸ The Yeshivite, 1973, cited in Saks, Yeshiva College, 73.
27 Compare Hayman,” The Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Sectors”, 114, who provides a binary analysis of the situation, viewing the “pro-establishment” Yeshiva Gedolah as the “antithesis” to the ultra-Orthodox movements (which we have referred to as the innovators).
28 See Saks, Yeshiva College, 73-75, 84.
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Goldfein family that the United Communal Fund, which was then supporting Yeshiva College, was no longer willing to finance a tertiary educational institution.29 On the other hand, it appears that Rabbi Tanzer, who had expended considerable resources on importing Goldfein to the country, was taken by surprise by his colleague’s departure and was hurt by his move.30 Tanzer temporarily filled the void with Rabbi Eliezer Chrysler, one of the Kollel’s founding fellows, and in the interim he searched for a permanent replacement.
In August 1979, Tanzer recruited Israeli native, Rabbi Ahron Pfeuffer, then based at London’s Etz Chaim Yeshiva, whom he described as a “thirty-year-old genius by anyone’s standards.”31 Pfeuffer served as head of the Yeshiva Gedolah for two years between 1980 and 1981 and proved very popular with his students.32 In 1982, he decided, like his predecessor, to leave the school and found his own institution, which would eventually morph into an independent strictly Orthodox congregation where high level Torah was taught to educated lay persons.33 In March that year, together with the internationally renowned Jerusalem based Harry Fischel Centre, Pfeuffer ordained five rabbis, including Isadore Rubenstein who would go on to serve as chief army chaplain for Jewish soldiers in the SADF and head of the South African Board of Jewish Education.34 This, however, was to be the only ordination he would oversee, as he reached the conclusion that South African society was not sufficiently
observant to produce Torah scholars. As Pfeuffer himself put it in an interview: “In
Johannesburg, the atmosphere conducive to the development of G-d fearing human beings is absent. … having full-time students would result in synthetic talmiday chachamim deficient in a level of fear of Heaven which can be attained elsewhere.”35 Over the years his
congregation would establish its own school network, from nursery to high school, under the name Yeshiva Maharsha. Unlike Goldfein’s Yeshiva, its philosophy was closely linked to the innovator movements. In the meantime, as far as Yeshiva College was concerned, with the departures of Goldfein and Pfeuffer it was decided to discontinue the Yeshiva Gedolah on the
29 See Bridging Worlds: The Life and Teachings of Rav Azriel Chaim Goldfein, documentary, directed by David Sassoon, (2014, South Africa). DVD.
30 See Tanzer, interview.
31 Saks, Yeshiva College, 84.
32 Ibid. 85.
33 Ibid. 86. See also Hayman,” Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Sectors” 1988, 116. Unlike Goldfein’s departure at the end of 1977, Pfeuffer left Yeshiva College with the blessing and encouragement of its Rosh Yeshiva, Tanzer, who probably realized Pfeuffer’s ultra-Orthodox outlook did not suit the school’s ethos (see Tanzer, interview).
34 See “'5 to be ordained as rabbis next week,” Jewish Herald, 16 March, 1982.
35 Hayman, “Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Sectors”, 115.
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Yeshiva College campus. Nine years of continuous operation of this higher institution was thereby terminated.36