The Chief Rabbi Hits It Out of the Park — Again

Rabbi Warren Goldstein did not step into an auspicious situation when he became chief rabbi of South Africa in 2005, in his early thirties. The South African Jewish community, which had once numbered 120,000, had shrunk to 75,000.

And the ever-present specter of violent crime was sending more and more Jews fleeing. Glenhazel, the Johannesburg neighborhood with the highest concentration of Jews, reported 20 crimes involving lethal weapons a month, and the actual number was likely close to twice that.

But the perpetually ebullient and optimistic new chief rabbi hardly seemed to notice the difficult situation into which he had been thrust, and he quickly discovered strengths of the South African community upon which to draw. Most prominent among them being the natural respect for authentic Torah and rabbanim held by the vast majority of South African Jews, almost all of whom are descendants of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.

As Rabbi Akiva Tatz once explained to me: When the late Rabbi Mordechai Shakovitsky first walked onto Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand campus in search of Jewish souls, he did not seem out of place in his black frock and rabbinic garb. Virtually every student had a photo on the mantel of a recent ancestor who looked very similar.