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29 Av 5760 - August 30, 2000 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family
Assimilation Rate In South Africa Remains Low
by Yated Ne'eman South African Correspondent

Emigration rather than assimilation poses the most serious threat to the long-term viability of the South African Jewish community according to the most recent surveys.

Available data suggests that the community, whose numbers are estimated at between 80 and 90 000, is declining at a rate of about 2% each year, a net loss of approximately 1800 souls annually. Some 40% of those who emigrate choose to go to Australia, with the remainder opting for the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom and Canada, in that order. Most Torah-observant Jews who emigrate usually go to either Israel or to the United Kingdom.

In contrast to most other Diaspora communities where the intermarriage rate is often over 50% and rising, Jews in South Africa, whether religiously observant or not, tend overwhelmingly to marry within the fold. According to a major 1998 attitudinal survey of the community, which was conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London, fewer than 10% of the 1000 South African Jews interviewed were intermarried. The figures for brissim for the years 1998 to the middle of 2000, in which only 5% of mothers were married to gentiles, confirmed this figure.

However, the survey did not count unions between a Jew and a Reform convert as an intermarriage, suggesting that the true intermarriage rate is probably somewhat higher, although still unlikely to be much over 10%. Although constituting only 12% of Jews country wide, the Reform movement accounted for more than two-thirds of conversions, nearly all of which are undergone for purposes of marriage. In Durban in 1999, for example, all six Reform marriages included a non-Jewish partner who had undergone a Reform conversion.

 

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