Leaving South Africa — Janine Frier

Janine Frier (Photo by Steve Ruark)

Growing up in Port Elizabeth, a large city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, Janine Frier knew she had to emigrate because she disagreed with her country’s political and racial turmoil, and to find a better life. She just didn’t know where she would wind up.

For more than four decades, South Africa’s government practiced apartheid, a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination that inflicted untold amounts of suffering on millions of non-white South Africans and made the country an international pariah. Apartheid remained in effect until 1991. By then, many people, including thousands of Jews, had fled the country.

“A lot of people my age were leaving South Africa,” says Frier, now in her mid-50s and a Chizuk Amuno congregant. “Staying in South Africa meant passively condoning the apartheid system. I didn’t want to bring up a family there.”

Frier already had logged in time on a kibbutz, having spent a year in Israel in 1985. “I had a lot of friends there and I felt very comfortable,” says Frier. “It’s an easy place to get into if you are Jewish.”

Still, Frier felt a strong need to wander and explore. Slinging on a backpack, she came to the U.S. in 1987 to travel and see where adventure and opportunity would take her. It was in her blood. Frier’s grandparents had left Latvia and Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century for South Africa to escape pogroms and find a better life.

Armed with a degree in early childhood education from Johannesburg College of Education, Frier came to Baltimore to visit a childhood friend. By chance, she was offered a job as a preschool teacher in Silver Spring.

“It was a small salary, but I was grateful for the opportunity,” Frier says. “My gratitude outweighed the challenge of moving to a new country. I had to pinch myself that I was living in Washington, D.C.”

But Frier found that the path to citizenship in the U.S. was far from easy. “Even in 1987, the immigration process was difficult,” she says. “It’s stringent, and rightfully so. I had to comply with all the regulations.”

During the two years Frier waited for her citizenship papers to be expedited, she was in a state of flux, unable to leave the U.S. to visit her immediate and extended family in South Africa.

“Leaving is especially hard for South Africans because family is so far away,” says Frier, whose mother and brother now live nearby.

Today, Frier chairs the board of directors at Krieger Schechter Day School and is an active lay leader in the general and Jewish communities. She lives in Owings Mills with her American-born husband, Rob, and has four children.

Frier tries to give her children a strong sense of identification with her homeland. “As each of my children graduate from college, I try to take them back on a special trip to South Africa to have them get that special connection to my friends and family,” she says.

Meanwhile, Frier says she feels a strong sense of identification and empathy with all immigrants.

“What is common to all immigrants is that you are leaving your sense of where you were tethered before,” she says. “The U.S. is my home now. Even though I have a multi-faceted place in the world because of where I came from, I never take being an American for granted.”

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