Is Johannesburg’s Jewish future living overseas?

There is a remarkable paradox at the heart of South African Jewish life.

Over the past half-century, our community has lost more than half its population, largely through emigration.

Yet Jewish communal life in Johannesburg remains vibrant, remarkably well organised and deeply committed to it’s ideals.

How does a community sustain the institutions and responsibilities accumulated over generations when the population supporting them has diminished so dramatically? And what does its future look like?

A recently published academic study offers valuable insights.

In The Paradox of South African Jewish Emigration in the Post-Apartheid Era, published by Oxford University

Press in 2026, researchers Reviva Hasson and David Graham examine the transformation of South African Jewry.

From approximately 118,000 Jews in the 1970s, South Africa’s Jewish population had declined to an estimated 52,300 by 2019, including approximately 30,000 in Johannesburg.

To put this into perspective, while approximately 30,000 Jews live in Johannesburg, more than 61,000 are buried in our Jewish cemeteries. It is an extraordinary reflection of the generations who built this community and the legacy we have inherited.

The researchers also estimate that nearly 60,000 South African-born Jews now live in just five countries: the United States, Australia, Israel, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Our community has become both smaller and global.

Over the past few months, my work has taken me to Sydney, London, Israel, New York, California, Miami and Chicago. In each place, I have connected with South African Jews who have built lives far from home.

What always strikes me is how strong their connection to Johannesburg remains, whether through family and friends who still live here, or the legacy parents and grandparents buried here.

Even when an entire family has emigrated, their connection often remains, quite literally, rooted in the ground.

While municipal cemetery maintenance has suffered significant neglect, our Jewish cemeteries continue to be maintained through private communal funding. It is a responsibility that preserves the dignity of those who came before us, even when their descendants live thousands of kilometres away.

The challenge is not limited to the size of the community

There is a tendency to think about communal decline primarily in terms of population numbers. But the more consequential issue may be the changing relationship between those who require support and those who have the capacity to provide it.

Emigration is not economically neutral. Those with the financial means, professional qualifications or earning potential to relocate are often among the people who would otherwise contribute to the local economy and philanthropic base.

Their departure usually does not reduce the community’s welfare obligations in equal proportion.

At the same time, we are living longer. Longevity is one of the great achievements of modern medicine, but it also brings increasingly complex and expensive care requirements.

There is another economic reality that is not always fully appreciated by those who have made their lives abroad.

Perceptions of life in Johannesburg are often shaped by the relatively affluent South Africans they encounter socially or who are able to travel internationally. This can create a misleading impression of widespread prosperity, obscuring the very real financial hardship experienced by many within our community.

In South Africa, even people who have worked diligently, earned reasonable salaries and saved throughout their lives can find themselves financially vulnerable in retirement.

Decades of inflation steadily erode purchasing power, while the costs of healthcare, residential care and specialised support can rise beyond what retirement savings were ever intended to accommodate.

For many South Africans, their home represents their single largest asset and an important source of financial security in later life. Yet prolonged periods of weak property appreciation, particularly relative to inflation, have meant that this asset has not always provided the financial cushion homeowners might reasonably have anticipated.

The result is that people who were comfortably middle class throughout their working lives can find themselves struggling to finance the final decades of their lives.

It’s important to note this. Welfare dependency is not always the consequence of lifelong poverty. Increasingly, it can be the result of financial independence gradually eroded by circumstances beyond an individual’s control.

Compounding these pressures is the declining reliability of state welfare and essential public services.

Responsibilities that communities elsewhere might reasonably expect government to fulfil increasingly fall to families and charitable institutions.

The challenges ahead are equally real.

Although the pace of emigration appears to have moderated, current communal figures suggest that deaths materially exceed births in Johannesburg’s Jewish community.

Even without significant further emigration, this imbalance points towards continued population decline.

And because emigration disproportionately involves those with the means or professional mobility to relocate,

the economic consequences can be greater than the population numbers alone suggest.

The result is a growing risk that the proportion of people requiring assistance will increase relative to the number able to fund it.

This is an argument for adaption. Not for pessimism.

Consolidation as a strategy for sustainability

One of the most important lessons from Johannesburg’s experience is that a smaller community cannot necessarily sustain every institution and administrative structure in the form it existed when the population was considerably larger.

Over the past three decades, the Jewish welfare sector in Johannesburg has undergone extensive, responsible consolidation, with previously independent organisations and services brought together under the umbrella of the Johannesburg Jewish Helping Hand, commonly known as the Chev.

Consolidation creates economies of scale, reduces duplication, strengthens governance and enables higher levels of professional expertise. It also creates something particularly important for the long-term health of communal institutions: the ability to attract, develop and retain talented people.

We are beginning to see similar pressures and responses in the Jewish education sector. As demographic realities continue to evolve, I believe further consolidation across communal infrastructure will become increasingly important.

The challenge is not to preserve every structure we have inherited, but to preserve the purpose for which those structures were created.

An extraordinary communal evolution

Established in 1888 as a burial society, the Chev now directs 97% of its expenditure towards caring for the living.

This is frequently misunderstood internationally. In most Jewish communities, a Chevrah Kadisha is associated primarily with burial. Johannesburg’s Chev has evolved into an unusually comprehensive welfare institution, providing care from cradle to grave.

Its services encompass aged care, disability support, mental health, child and family welfare, financial assistance and home-based care, among others.

Operating with an annual budget approaching R400 million, approximately 70% of which must be raised

philanthropically, it represents a substantial communal undertaking for a population of Johannesburg’s size.

No charitable institution can fully replace the responsibilities of the state. But Johannesburg’s experience demonstrates that communities can develop sophisticated, professionally governed systems of care in response to challenges that might otherwise overwhelm individual families.

Our community has become global. So must our responsibility.

The research by Hasson and Graham found that, by 2019, three out of five South African Jews had close family

members living abroad.

For generations, Jewish Johannesburg’s welfare institutions were sustained predominantly by those who lived here.

As the community has become more geographically dispersed, that funding model must evolve.

The difference in purchasing power between international currencies and the rand presents a significant opportunity. Contributions in dollars, pounds or shekels can have an extraordinary impact on the lives of those in need in Johannesburg.

The goal isn’t to make those who emigrated feel guilty, but to recognise that our connection to one another does not end at the departure gate.

The institutions that helped shape the lives of South African Jews now living around the world continue to serve their parents, relatives, friends and the generations that followed.

It is precisely this understanding that lies behind the Chev’s One Tribe international fundraising campaign, an invitation to South African Jews worldwide to remain part of the communal legacy that helped shape so many of our lives.

But the future of Jewish Johannesburg need not be defined solely by the number of people who remain within its borders.

Our ancestors built institutions to ensure that Jewish people in Johannesburg would never face hardship alone.

We have inherited those institutions, strengthened them and adapted them to circumstances their founders could

scarcely have imagined.

It now falls to our generation, both here and abroad, to ensure that they endure.

Our community may have become smaller in Johannesburg, but our extended family has become much larger glocally.

And wherever we live, we remain One Tribe.

Saul Tomson is Group CEO of the Johannesburg Jewish Helping Hand (Chevrah Kadisha), one of Africa’s largest Jewish welfare