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To one professor, Capetown, South Africa, seemed the perfect city to host an academic conference on "Jewries on the Frontier."

This "very distant place on the tip of Africa" was itself once a pioneer destination for European Jews, says Professor David Biale of the Graduate Theological Seminary's Center for Jewish Studies in Berkeley. Biale recently returned from a three-week trip to South Africa, where he attended the conference and served as visiting professor at the University of Capetown, which houses South Africa's only Jewish studies program.

The trip and his impressions will be fodder for future collaborative research projects with the South African university.

During the conference, lecturers presented papers on Jewish communities in Bolivia, Alaska, Brazil and "any communities that might be considered on the margin of the Jewish world," including South Africa.

The Jewish community there, says Biale, is dramatically different from those in America. Founded by Lithuanian immigrants, it is a "much more cohesive community, well organized in terms of the education system."

Most Jewish children attend Jewish day schools, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Strong Zionist tendencies also mark South African Jews, Biale says. At the beginning of the century, Lithuanian communities — the same ones that relocated to Africa — were staunchly Zionist. Today, South Africans have a higher per capita rate of immigration to Israel than any other Western Jewish country.

In part, that also has to do with the current political system in South Africa, which is of particular concern to Jews. The end of apartheid has resulted in a vigorous affirmative action program, one that has left young adult Jews with few opportunities.

"Every single student of mine that was in their teens and 20s was emigrating," he said. "Every single one. All of these people said they weren't angry or bitter about leaving; they all said this is the way it has to be. This is an unfortunate necessity."

At its peak in 1976, the South African Jewish community numbered 120,000 to 130,000, according to Biale. Today, it numbers 90,000, and the latest wave of emigration could cut the population in half.

Despite the dissolution of much of the Jewish community, "everyone felt [the end of apartheid] is exciting and important. They all welcome the change."

Yet while many Jews individually were against apartheid, Jews did not communally oppose the racist system, he says. As the rest of the country engages in self-reflection over the last chapter in the history of the nation, Jews are looking at themselves with particular intensity.

According to Biale, Jews in South Africa are "soul searching," wondering why the community at large "kept its head down," and whether Jews could have or should have been more outspoken.

For the professor, who recently collaborated on the book "Insider, Outsider, American Jews and Multiculturalism," South Africa was an interesting place to observe Jews and racial issues. In fact, that will be the subject of his upcoming project with the University of Capetown.