Durban, South Africa - South Africa's Jewish community, the largest in Africa, is in an uproar over pressure brought to bear on one of its most eminent members by Zionists upset over his involvement in a United Nations investigation suggesting that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza.
In a report in this week's issue of the South African Jewish Report, the experienced South African journalist Moira Schneider writes that Justice Richard Goldstone has been effectively barred from attending the celebration of his grandson's bar mitzvah - the religious coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish boys in their early teens.
Although South Africa's Zionist Federation (SAZF) and Jewish Board of Deputies both vigorously denied that Goldstone had been "barred" or "banned" from the ceremony, the judge was reported by the Associated Press on Saturday as saying in an e-mailed comment that "In the interests of my grandson I will not be attending the bar mitzvah ceremony."
He added: "At this time I am not prepared to say more than that, after consultation with the rabbi and leaders of the congregation at the Sandton Synagogue, to which the South African Zionist Federation was a party." The federation said in its statement that "agreement was reached between the parties that no comments would be made until after the celebration."
Goldstone has been excoriated by pro-Israel activists since heading a UN Human Rights Council probe which reported last September that both the Israeli army and the Palestinian militants of Hamas committed war crimes during Israel's assault on Gaza nine months earlier.
When the report went before the UN General Assembly, the South African Zionist Federation said it was "inherently flawed and biased." It called on the South African government to "reject the Goldstone Report with the contempt it deserves." South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, has written that "the Goldstone Mission is a disgrace to the most basic notions of justice, equality and the rule of law."
Schneider reported Rabbi Moshe Kurtstag of Johannesburg as saying that "there was a very strong feeling in the shul, a lot of anger" over Goldstone's attendance at his grandson's bar mitzvah. ""I heard also that the SAZF wanted to organise a protest outside the shul - (there were) all kinds of plans. But I think reason prevailed."
The rabbi reportedly said Goldstone had done "a tremendous disservice not only to Israel but to the Jewish world. His name is used by hostile elements in the world against Israel and this can increase anti-Semitic waves."
Arthur Chaskalson, a former chief justice and member of the defence team which represented Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders at their treason trial in 1973, was reported as saying it was "disgraceful" to put pressure on a grandfather not to attend his grandson's barmitzvah. Another Jewish judge still serving, Dennis Davis, asked: "Have we now got to the point that because we don't like what somebody says or does, we place a 'cherem' [equivalent to excommunication] on them? What right do we have to do that?"
Goldstone made South African legal history in the 1980s when he refused to implement a key apartheid law imposing residential segregation on the grounds that people living illegally in central Johannesburg had no alternative accommodation available in the overcrowded areas set aside for their race group.
He was subsequently appointed, with the joint consent of the African National Congress and the apartheid government, to probe the violence of the transition to democracy between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and South Africa's liberation in 1994.
He later served as the first chief prosecutor for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and as a judge of South Africa's Constitutional Court.