Montclair's Bnai Keshet To Host Talk About 'Jewishness' And Apartheid

From Bnai Keshet Reconstructionist Synagogue: Steve Ellmann will speak about South Africa’s late Chief Justice, Arthur Chaskalson, and what role his Jewishness may have played in his opposition to apartheid at Bnai Keshet’s Kaplan Minyan on Saturday morning, June 3. The Kaplan Minyan, which meets in the Red Gables historic house across the parking lot from the synagogue’s main building, begins at 10:30 a.m. with selected songs and readings.

Ellmann is the Martin Professor of Law at New York Law School, where he has taught since 1992. In addition to writing and teaching about lawyers’ ethics and practical lawyering skills here in the US, he has been studying and writing about South African law since the late 1980s, before the fall of apartheid. Ellmann taught with Chaskalson in 1987 at Columbia Law School and visited him in South Africa in 1988. After Chaskalson’s death in 2012, the family invited Ellmann write his biography, to be titled, For Justice: The Life of Arthur Chaskalson.

Ellmann’s topic for the Kaplan Minyan is the role of Jewishness in Chaskalson’s lifetime opposition to apartheid: “Did he act as he did because he was Jewish, despite the fact that he was Jewish or for reasons that simply had nothing to do with Jewishness? How did he fit into the larger South African (and world) Jewish community?”

Bnai Keshet, an inclusive Reconstructionist synagogue serving the Greater Essex area, is located at 99 So. Fullerton Ave., Montclair. For more information, visit www.bnaikeshet.org/event/kaplanminyans.

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