South Africa’s chief rabbi supports Donald Trump — but says his refugee program for Afrikaners is a ‘mistake’

When Donald Trump entered his second term as president, he found a full-throated supporter in South Africa’s chief rabbi.

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein said in February that South Africans “should welcome the Trump administration’s interventions” in the country’s affairs, praising the president in a widely distributed video message.

A vocal critic of the South African government, Goldstein backed Trump’s opposition to South Africa for its cooperation with Iran and its new land expropriation law, which Goldstein believes will slow the country’s already sluggish economy.

But since Trump decided to admit some white South Africans into the United States as refugees — the only refugees he is letting in — Goldstein has changed his tone. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he sees the move as a “mistake.”

“It is wrong to think that the problems that saw white South Africans take up residence in the U.S. are unique to the white community,” said Goldstein. He challenged the Trump administration’s contention that the Afrikaners — a minority that arrived in South Africa in the 17th century whose members led the country’s system of apartheid until its end in 1994 — are being singled out for persecution and what Trump called “genocide” because of their identity.

Like Jewish leaders in the United States and elsewhere, Goldstein finds himself walking a tightrope when it comes to a U.S. president whose pro-Israel and philosemitic rhetoric is often matched by policies that many Jews oppose. Some American Jews have welcomed the attention the administration has paid to campus antisemitism, for example, but many have worried that his attack on universities has been too harsh, blunt and undemocratic.

In South Africa, where Jews strongly identify with Israel, Trump’s general pro-Israel stance is welcome. But there too that stance has clashed with local politics.

Milton Shain, an emeritus professor of South African Jewish history at the University of Cape Town, said the overwhelming majority of South Africans — Jews and non-Jews alike — were perplexed by the idea of some Afrikaners receiving refugee status. He called the rhetoric about a genocide against Afrikaners “absurd” and speculated that there could be a connection between Trump’s policy and South Africa’s decision to file genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

“It seems to me that the Trump regime wants to target South Africa for taking Israel to the ICJ,” Shain said. “That is the only reason I can think of for such an odd and sustained initiative.”

But even before the war in Gaza that led to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, both Trump and his South Africa-born advisor Elon Musk hurled accusations of “genocide” and “the large scale killing of farmers” at South Africa. Their claims are based on documented attacks against white farmers and the complaints echo a subset of South African white nationalists. Although the farm attacks have persisted for years, they represent a small percentage of the country’s high violent crime rate, which affects all parts of the population.

Goldstein said Trump has wrongly framed South Africa’s economic, social and political challenges in racial terms. He pointed to a poll by the Social Research Foundation, which found that 67% of Black South Africans wanted their children to live and work abroad for a better future.

The first group of 59 Afrikaner refugees arrived at Dulles International Airport on Monday. They were greeted with fanfare by Trump officials, including the Jewish deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau, who compared their journey to his father’s escape from Nazi-annexed Austria in 1938.

In the United States, some migration aid groups have said they are morally opposed to resettling the newly arrived Afrikaners. The Episcopal Church said on Monday that it was ending its decades-long partnership with the federal government to resettle refugees, citing its “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation” and “historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.”

The U.S.-based Jewish refugee aid organization HIAS said it would support Afrikaners in their new home. But HIAS’ president Mark Hetfield told The New York Times it was “not right” that this group was singled out for admission.

“We are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by DHS months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in,” said Hetfield.

On Monday, Trump said he welcomed Afrikaners despite his anti-migrant stance because they were victims of a “genocide.” He suspended resettlement programs for other refugees around the world almost immediately after taking office.

White South Africans, of whom about half are Afrikaners, comprise some 7% of the country’s population and own about 78% of private farmland. Research shows white South Africans collectively have roughly 20 times the wealth of Black South Africans.

South African Jews are a small minority within the white minority, and their ranks are shrinking — after peaking at 120,000 in 1970, the population has declined to less than 50,000. Many Jews have connections to Israel and feel isolated by the frayed relations between Israel and South Africa. Some, said Shain, worry about being identified by their government as allies to its foreign adversaries.

“I believe Rabbi Goldstein’s supportive comments [of Trump] are problematic,” said Shain. “Jews are rapidly being identified as a fifth column, like the far-right Afrikaners, working against the interests of the country by cozying up to the Trump administration.”

Goldstein’s support for Trump drew criticism from other members of the local community. Journalist Anton Harber wrote an essay in February titled “The Chief Rabbi who lost his soul,” writing, “Something is very wrong when a Chief Rabbi sings the praises of political and business figures without mentioning their neo-Nazi affiliations.” Harber referenced a gesture by Musk that drew comparisons to a Nazi salute and his ringing support for Germany’s far-right AfD party, as well as Trump’s past socializing with antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

However, Shain and Goldstein agreed that Jewish South Africans have the same concerns as most South Africans as a whole — violence, corruption, poverty and high unemployment. Many young Jews are leaving South Africa for opportunities elsewhere.

“The challenges facing the community are the same as those facing the country,” Goldstein said. “The more that South Africa as a country will achieve economic growth and thrive, the more the Jewish community will.”

You might now come back at me, claim that I am a LIAR; however, I'm not a "liar" at all.

I will say you are a loud obnoxious buffoon and dope who can't even copy and paste a link, apparently. Convenient, since you would have to STFU if you had any intellectual honesty. Links proving everything I have been saying, by the way.

And you completely make up stuff and make wild assumptions because I think you get waaaay too emotionally invested in your arguments.

I don't need a history lesson from you. In fact, I don't know WHY I even got one from you. It had nothing to do with my original claim: Jews, mainly leftist marxist jews, had planted the seeds which led to the current situation in South Africa.

Jews, in fact, as you know as a student of history, FOUNDED THE ANC!!!

In 1963 a group of Jews founded the “African” National Congress. The ANC was founded by Lionel Bernstein, Bob Hepple, Dennis Goldberg, Arthur Goldreich, Hazel Goldreich and James Kantor, with a few African front men — Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki (father of Thabo Mbeki), Raymond Mhlaba, and Ahmed Kathrada. In this, the ANC followed the model the Jews established when they founded the NAACP in the United States, with the exception that the ANC was a much more violent and openly communist organization. These Jews and their African National Congress received funding and support from both the Soviet Union and the US CIA.

You are a bigot, uneducated, and incapable of civil debate.

You keep on insulting, smearing, and stupidly berating me, when it is YOU who have less than NO idea at all about what the factual history of RSA and the complete history of the white USSR COMMIES who started the ANC is. I've no doubt know this for far longer than YOU have known the benighted anti-Semite crapola that you keep posting!

True, I have a mental block about and can't cut/copy/paste; I admit that. OTOH, so what? What's far more important, is that I know what I'm talking about and all YOU know is propaganda and hatred!

You have less than NO grasp, at all, re much of anything, keep posting outrageous falsehoods, as "fact", and can't stand it that everyone refuses to accent your INSANE posts.

While it's true that Jewish liberals in South Africa and the US supported the ANC, the state of Israel and particularly the Likud Party (including whatever its predecessor was called) was supportive of the South African government in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, Israel was one of the few US-aligned countries that opposed sanctions against the SA government during Apartheid.

The reason for this is that Jewish liberals in the US cling to a largely imagined identity as an "oppressed minority", and so take up the cause of other alleged "oppressed minorities". Most Jews in Israel don't seem to share the same mentality, which also explains why Netanyahu gets along well with European patriots and nationalists like Orban in Hungary and LePen in France.

Nope, you and another poster are two different people, however, neither of you ( though admittedly most Westerners and specifically FReepers know NOTHING factual of RSA/Afrikaner history ), post blindingly fallacious tripe about that nation and her populace, which, AFTER DECADES of my posting FACTS/HISTORY LESSON about both, civilly, now gets on my last nerve.

You accused me of being an anti-Semite, believing in the "Protocols," and being in the KKK, all because you attributed an anti-Semitic post by another poster to me, who has defended Jews and Israel on this forum for over 25 years. I may be mistaken about Afrikaner history, but I am not an anti-Semite and the fact that you would commit such a rank injustice and not care when it is pointed out to you shows you are not a good person.

I never said Afrikaners lived in communes. I said that over a hundred years ago some of them were political socialists, which I have both read and heard, and if I am mistaken I am sorry and I apologize.

So far as I know, I have never encountered you here before, so you exploding at me over one post and accusing me of being anti-Semitic (because of posts by someone else) is unjust in the extreme.

For someone who claims to be pro-Jewish, your ignorance about Jewish topics, the Noahide movement, and even the Hebrew Bible is really pathetic.

I'm sorry I ever ran into you. I will endeavor not to bother you in the future.

Just because someone is NOT an anti-Semite, nor condemns, out of hand, ALL Jews everywhere, knows the history of the Jews, understands that religion, in most of its permutations/sects, and has always had Jewish friends ( okay, that does sound trite, if not condescending, but it isn't meant that way at all! ), does NOT mean that 1) I can read Hebrew ( re your tagline ) 2) understands the word you used ( never heard nor saw it before!) 3) doesn't know that there are good and bad people in almost every religion.

The things that I DO know, re this discussion, and know it all WELL, are the history of Afrikaners, RSA, what that place was like from the oldest of times through today! Which is WHY I blasted YOU when you made the FALSE claim about socialism and Afrikaners.

I accept your apology, give one on return for verbally eviscerating you over your uneducated remark, and want you to finally believe that no, I did NOT confuse you with the other poster and his patently ridiculous comments.

Maybe now you will refrain from making sweeping, judgemental comments on a topic you don't know, which led me to heap assumptions on you, such as the KKK and THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION on you.

Can we now have a metaphorical hand shake on this?

That was an opinion that didn't effect the actual immigration of those groups during a time of fairly open immigration.

What I'm advocating is same thing the US has done before. Limit immigration to a certain skill set. It was done for a few years during the Mexican Revolution. The US had open borders with Mexico for the reason that the people wanting to immigrate were the business owners and operators and people who knew how to make money.

That's what the South Africans are supposed to be. People who have the skills to operate businesses.

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