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NEWS
Religious Schools in Johannesburg Enjoy Steady Growth
by D. Saks, South Africa
Despite steady losses in the community to emigration,
religious Jewish day schools in Johannesburg continue to
expand, both numerically and in terms of their facilities.
The opening last month of the new Shaarei Torah primary
school in Glenhazel, a suburb with a strong chareidi
presence, underlined this vitality. Shaarei Torah has served
a substantial section of Johannesburg's Torah-observant
community since its founding in 1978 in Yeoville, at the time
the heartland of the city's strictly Orthodox Jewish
community. Following the abolition of racially segregated
areas in the early 1990s, however, there had been a steady
influx of blacks into the area, leading to a sharp upsurge in
violent crime and a corresponding migration of whites,
including most Jews, to the more upmarket northern
suburbs.
Shaarei Torah was one of the last Jewish institutions to
leave the suburb, which at its height boasted nine
synagogues, three Jewish bookshops, three schools and
numerous restaurants, bakeries and delicatessens. Its
impressive new premises are located on the main Ohr Somayach
campus and there has already been a welcome increase in
enrollments.
Shaarei Torah is not the only Orthodox day school to have
upgraded its premises of late. Last year Yeshiva Maharsha
Bais Aharon, situated on the grounds of the thriving Yeshiva
Maharsha community less than a kilometer from Ohr Somayach,
moved into a substantial new building built to accommodate a
growing student body.
The growth and expansion of Johannesburg's religious schools
network contrasts with the progressive decline of the three
King David schools, which fall within the traditional
"National-Traditional" ideological framework that the
majority of the Jewish community adhered to for the past
fifty years. While still encompassing the majority of Jewish
pupils, and regularly leading the field nationally in terms
of scholastic results, the King David schools have lost an
average of 5 percent of their pupils each year, mainly
through emigration. While considerably smaller than the
mainstream schools, the nine religious day schools now
collectively encompass just under 40 percent of the Jewish
pupils within the Jewish day school system.
Cape Town, the second major Jewish population center in South
Africa, by contrast continues to be dominated by its National-
Traditional day-school network Herzlia. Well over 80 percent
of Jewish pupils in the city now attend one or another of
these schools. There is only one religious day school in Cape
Town, Hebrew Academy, which numbers fewer than a hundred
pupils. The recent establishment of Ohr Somayach in the city,
and the enthusiastic response it has so far elicited may,
however, be a harbinger of things to come.
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