This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — When she was in sixth grade, Kiara Cohen decided she was going to leave South Africa.
At a Shabbat gathering held by the youth organization Bnei Akiva in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, she was on the way to fill her water bottle when a few adults on the other side of the fence from her campgrounds told her they were going to assault and kill her and her friends because she was Jewish. The scared 12-year-old decided on the spot that she wanted to live somewhere where antisemitism wasn’t tolerated.
Now 16, Cohen still has her marks set on leaving South Africa after university — a move that would make her typical of her country’s Jews. Since 1970, the number of Jews in South Africa, home to the continent’s largest Jewish population, fell by 60%, to 50,000, according to the…
