Large Exile Community : South African Jews Find Safe Haven in Irvine

The Turtle Rock section of Irvine, Calif., is over 10,000 miles from Wendywood, one of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.

But people walking into the Chabad Center of the Irvine Jewish Center one recent night could be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into that suburb favored by Jews living in the South African city.

More than 100 people, most of them Jews who have emigrated from South Africa to Irvine, crowded into the Chabad sanctuary to hear a lecture by Rabbi Mendel Lipskar of Johannesburg.

The evening had a slightly surreal aspect: Lipskar, a Canadian who was sent to South Africa 15 years ago by the Hasidic Lubavitch movement, speaking to a room full of native-born South African exiles on the topic “Judaism in South Africa; Is There a Future?”

While Lipskar’s answer was an emphatic “yes,” the vast majority of his audience had already voted with their feet.

“The word has got out that Irvine is a good place to come to,” said David Hirson, an attorney and a leading member of the South African Jewish community in Orange County.

South African Jews have settled in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta. Yet for a number of reasons, Irvine, a city of 80,000, exerts a disproportionate pull.

“The environment is very comfortable for Jewish living,” said Melanie Solomon, who lives with her husband and children in Woodbridge. “Our social life is virtually the same” as it was in South Africa, she said, and even the family furniture made an easy transition from Johannesburg to Irvine.

Numerically, the Irvine contingent is small--between 300 and 500. But because the Jewish community remaining in South Africa numbers only about 115,000, news of a receptive environment travels fast.

The Orange County climate is also similar to Johannesburg, Capetown and Durban, where most of South Africa’s Jews live, Solomon said, but there was something else that convinced the Solomons to settle in Irvine a year ago.

Support System

“We have a support system,” she said. “This is what makes Irvine attractive to South African Jews.”

Charles Dlach left South Africa in 1979--”I was concerned about the political future of the country,”--and with his wife, moved to the San Fernando Valley. In 1984, he joined a Costa Mesa property management firm and moved to Irvine, where he knew that other South African Jews had settled.

He found the contrasts striking.

“In the Valley,” he said, South African Jews tended to “remain apart (from each other). There wasn’t the sense of camaraderie, the same togetherness” as there is in Irvine.

On the one visit he has made to South Africa since emigrating, Dlach said that he felt uncomfortable.

“I’ve changed my way of thinking,” he said. “People’s respect for other people’s rights is better here.”

The Jewish community of South Africa ranges from industrialists to revolutionaries, but the bulk of the working population is concentrated in business and the professions, a situation mirrored by those who have left the country in the past 10 years to settle in Irvine.

Similar Surroundings

One recently arrived immigrant, who asked that his name not be used, said his family chose Irvine because it was a “similar surrounding to what we were used to back home.”

The man said that he retained his business interests in South Africa. His greatest concern, he said, apart from the family and friends he left behind, was that his daughter had no other Jews in her class at public school. The possibility of assimilation, he said, “worries me a lot.”

Because the overwhelming majority of Jews in South Africa are Orthodox, many have affiliated with Chabad of Irvine and a new Orthodox congregation now being formed.

Looking out at what he said were “a great many familiar faces,” Lipskar insisted that those remaining in South Africa were there to stay. For those who elect to remain, he said, there are profound problems and “the moral issues are painful. . . . We all want to see a just, equitable society.”

Some Anti-Semitism

There is also some anti-Semitism within extreme right wing and neo-Nazi groups in South Africa, Lipskar said, but not enough to cause people to pack up and leave.

Solomon is sympathetic to those who stay on, perhaps to care for elderly parents or for other reasons, acknowledging that “not everyone can leave. Those who are comfortable and cannot bring their comfort with them,” she said, are resistant.

In some respects, Solomon said, those who stay in South Africa “are ostriches, like the Jews of Germany” before World War II. A major conflagration could carry them away with the rest of the country’s minority white community, she said.

A major factor for those planning to depart can be money. In the past five years, because of lessening international confidence in the South African economy, the value of the currency people leaving South Africa are permitted to take with them has plummeted.

“It’s very, very difficult when you get here,” Hirson said. “Often after six or seven years people haven’t reached the same status they had in South Africa.”

His Johannesburg law partner, he said, “wouldn’t consider leaving now.”

Long Time Deciding

Unlike Solomon, Hirson spent a long time before deciding on Irvine. In the 1970s, he looked into emigration to Australia, England and Israel. He chose California because the state allowed foreign attorneys to take the bar examination without first returning to law school.

Hirson’s motives for leaving, he said, were a mixture of “fear of what could come in the future and the hope of finding a better life for my children.”

His concerns, he said, involved both business and politics.

“I perceived a situation that was unacceptable,” he said, and felt that because of his feelings he ran the risk of being branded a subversive by the apartheid government.

At first he practiced in Beverly Hills and lived with his family in Santa Monica, but on the recommendation of a cousin in Glendale, he visited Irvine and in 1980 moved his home and practice, specializing in immigration law, to Orange County. At the same time, he retained his interest in his Johannesburg practice, returning to work and visit family on a regular basis.

Brothers Joined Him

Two of Hirson’s brothers have joined him in Irvine, as has his wife’s sister. Hirson has become active in a group called SAJAC--the South African Jewish American Community--which is affiliated with the Jewish Federations of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

The purpose of the group, as outlined in its newsletter, “is to assist South African Jewish Americans to assimilate into the fabric of American Jewish life and in doing so, make them active participants in the community.” Still, cutting the ties with a distant homeland can be difficult.

“America becomes home,” Hirson said. “It’s a past situation. You know you come from there, but it is yesterday.”