Re-enactment of the Lighthorse charge on Beer Sheva on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Beer Sheva

The Australians were bronzed, handsome heroes who had served in the Middle East during the war. My own cousins, who were toddlers at the time, cherished the legends about Aussies who always had coins, sweets and a grin for children. No-one could ever cut the Australians down to size.

Australia and Israel became firm friends in those far-off days and our two nations remain close and warm. Other places, other people don’t know the Israelis and can’t find a good word for them, but there has never been a divide between Australia and Israel and never will be.

Here you find evidence of Australia everywhere. All over Israel there are Australian eucalypts and Australian accents. Here in Beer Sheva there is this park, created by the Pratt Foundation for the benefit of every age-group of Israelis, but especially the young and especially the disadvantaged.

It would shock the sourpusses to find Arabs and Jews mixing freely in the Park of the Australian Soldier, as they do throughout Israeli society. Anyone who accuses Israel of apartheid doesn’t know what apartheid is, what Israel is, what the reality of life is.

We Australian Israelis – or is the phrase Israeli Australians? – are proud of the bonds that bind our two countries.

After World War II there was a neon sign in London, “Australia sends her best to Britain”. Food was short; the taste of Australia was in all the shops.

Let me borrow that idea and say, “Australia sends its best to Israel”. Australian Olim are a success story. Australian Zionist youth are a great chapter in the story. They may make Aliyah; they might stay in Australia. Whatever happens, their lives will have changed for ever because of Israel, this land that is small in size but a giant in achievement and inspiration.

The great period of choral development came in mid-19th century. By the time the Great Synagogue, Sydney, came into being it was taken for granted that there should be westernised music following a regular pattern, with a choir adding body and quality to the music. There was no chazan as such until the time of Rabbi Wolinski, though the first chazan chosen as such was Rev Marcus Einfeld.

There were attempts to form a choir from 1852 or even earlier, at the time when the York Street Synagogue was consecrated in 1844 and the musical arrangements were in the hands of Isaac Nathan, the father of Australian music. The membership of the choir fluctuated between men and boys and mixed male-female voices. Eventually, from about 1870 the choir settled down as a mixed choir and remained such until 1974.

The consecration of the Synagogue in 1878 had an impressive musical flavour, including a number of original compositions by Sydney Moss, the first choirmaster, who was the leading figure in the musical life of Sydney. Instrumental music accompanied the service of consecration which was held on a weekday. Moss wanted to use an organ for Shabbat services, but this was vetoed by Rev Davis. Rabbi Cohen supported the use of organ music on Shabbat, but the board would not agree. However, on special occasions held on weekdays there was often a band, for example at the military Chanukah services held from 1907 until World War I and then as recently as 1988 when the Bi-Centenary Chanukah service was accompanied by a brass band arranged by Dr David Schwartz, the then choirmaster.

Over the years there were a number of highly accomplished professional musicians appointed as choirmasters including Alfred Hill (the ‘Beethoven of Australia’) who, though not Jewish, had a Jewish wife Mirrie, herself an eminent musician and a descendant of Phillip Cohen, founder of Australian Jewish community.

Other early choirmasters included W Arundel Orchard, who became director of the NSW Conservatorium and members of the musical Mote family including WIB Mote, Livingstone C Mote and Arnold R Mote. Jewish choirmasters included leading figures such as Louis Shifreen, Ralph Levy, who held office off and on for 40 years, Werner Baer, head of music at the ABC, and Henry Adler. Later choirmasters were Leo Grouse, David Hatfield, James Altman, David Schwartz, Joseph Toltz, Bob Borowsky and Robert Teicher.

For many years the majority of choristers gave voluntary service though more recently almost all have been paid. At times the choir appeared on concert platforms, took part in radio and TV broadcasts, and contributed to special services at other synagogues. Until about the 1970s choristers were garbed in academic caps and gowns; when the mixed choir gave way to a male choir, the board frequently attempted to impose a dress code but without noticeable success. Not all choristers could read music; indeed, very few could read Hebrew. The musical scores therefore required the words to be transliterated into English letters, which created problems with the adoption of the Israeli pronunciation in 1973. The preparation of new transliterations was largely the work of James Altman, choirmaster from 1979 to 1988.

The choir originally sang in the centre block of the gallery but when alterations were made to the Synagogue early in the 20th century, a special choir gallery was built over the Ministers’ Room. In recent years the choir has occasionally sung in the body of the Synagogue, which some congregants prefer for acoustical reasons.

The senior choir has always sung on Sabbath and festival mornings and occasionally on a Friday evening. However, from 1933 there was a junior choir to which girls were admitted from 1936. For many years the training and conducting of the junior choir was in the hands of the Hatfield and Fine family, until a series of teenage boys who had themselves grown up in the junior choir took over. At its peak the junior choir would bring 30-40 youngsters to the Synagogue on Friday evening – not that they were all great singers but their enthusiasm made up for their musical deficiencies. During the 1980s the junior choir underwent reorganisation and older girls were no longer admitted as members. Despite a number of attempts to repopulate the choir in the 1990s, it no longer exists.

The chazanim of the Great have always upheld high highest standards of dignity and musical quality. Rabbi Wolinski, appointed in 1883, is said to have had ‘a sweet tenor voice’; his son, the artist Joseph Wolinski, was the leading tenor in the choir for many years. Rev Marcus Einfeld, chazan from 1909, was described by W Arundel Orchard as ‘suggestive of Caruso’. Rev Aaron Kezelman, scion of a chazanic family who came to the Great in 1938, had a clear voice of pathos and emotion.

Rev Isidor Gluck, chazan from 1964, brought to Sydney a world class chazanic style, vocal texture and spiritual passion. He enriched the repertoire with Eastern European melody and style. Rabbi Edward Belfer joined the Synagogue in 1988 and became chazzan in 1989. His sweet voice and deep piety worthily maintained the musical tradition. Cantor Sloman enlivened the musical life of the Synagogue and introduced new melodies.

Over the years there were a number of long-term chazanic locums, especially Abraham Rothfield, and Willy Link, Mrs Porush’s brother, who assisted on many occasions. In addition, outside officiants were employed for the High Holyday overflow services, whether at the Maccabean Hall or in the Israel Green Auditorium of the Synagogue.

In the early period the musical influences were Anglo-Jewish, relying on the stately compositions of Sulzer, Lewandowski, Mombach and Hast. Marcus Hast, chazan of the Great Synagogue in London, was the father of Rabbi Cohen’s wife and Julius Mombach was choirmaster there when Rabbi Cohen was growing up. Cohen himself did not have a great voice but was an expert on and contributor to Jewish liturgical music; he was music editor of the Jewish Encyclopaedia, published at the beginning of the 20th century. The Synagogue repertoire still uses ‘the Blue Book’ (The Voice of Prayer and Praise) jointly edited by him.

The Synagogue uses a few Sephardi influences, for example such as the De Sola Adon Olam and the congregational chanting of Shirat HaYam, ‘The Song of the Red Sea’. An Eastern European flavour shows itself in compositions such as Tal (the Prayer for Dew), V’chol Ma’aminim (‘And All Believe’) and the popular Chassidic Kaddish. There are Israeli influences in some of the tunes used for Hallel, Kedushah and Adon Olam; Australian influence are reflected in the work of Alfred Hill and Arundel Orchard and local compositions for Alenu and Adon Olam. Occasionally one discerns a Carlebach melody introduced in the style of the popular rabbi–chazan Shlomo Carlebach.

Some congregants love sing-along melodies, especially for Adon Olam, whilst others object to what they deem ‘drunken sailor’ tunes.

Leading choristers

ZORACH BALKIND

Zorach Balkind, one of the more orthodox members of the congregation, served in the choir from 1911 to 1935. The choir’s leading bass and soloist, with a powerful bass voice likened to the big brass drums behind an orchestra, he became a close friend of Professor Arundel Orchard. Balkind had the knowledge of a chazan musically and Hebraically and rendered invaluable assistance to Arundel Orchard, giving him an insight into Jewish liturgy and synagogue music.

This collaboration continued through Livingstone C Mote’s term as choirmaster. Marcus Einfeld, Zorach Balkind and the choirmaster pored over and rehearsed the liturgical works of all the famous composers, incorporating and adapting them for use in the services. Their work sessions and rehearsals occupied many nights of the week.

In this group the names of Harry Ratner, a fine tenor, and Abraham Rothfield, better known as headmaster of the NSW Board of Jewish Education, should be included.

Some of Balkind’s own compositions, such as Uv’nucho Yomar, continue to be sung by the choir on High Holydays and Sabbaths.

The consensus was that the choir reached its zenith when Einfeld, Balkind and Ratner sang together. Balkind’s musical library was given to the Synagogue by his family.

JOSEPH WOLINSKI

Son of Rabbi and Mrs Wolinski, Joseph Wolinski was an artist and singer, and achieved fame in both areas. A newspaper report in 1922 wrote that in him ‘Sydney Jewry has produced a painter whose name looms largely amongst the artists of Australia. Visitors to the Sydney Art Gallery cannot fail to be struck by the intense feeling, the solemn power, and the force of expression of that pathetic painting, After Life’s Fever He Sleeps Well’.

As a boy, Wolinski showed a strong talent for painting, but did not make a real start until he was 17. He then studied under Julian Ashton and Frank Mahoney. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, and the National Academy of Design, New York. Prior to this he gained, as a student, prizes for antique painting and the President’s prize for composition. Two heads drawn in charcoal and a painting entitled An Interlude, were purchased by the National Gallery.

For a time Wolinski abandoned painting for singing and besides being a leading tenor in the Synagogue choir, he sang at many concerts. Proceeding to Europe to continue his musical studies, he received instruction in Paris from Senor Sbriglia, teacher of the eminent singer Jean De Reski. At the same time he renewed his studies in painting at a well-known art school. For some time he sang at concerts in London and the English provinces and also toured with Ada Crossley.

After experience abroad, especially in America, where his art gained wide appreciation, Wolinski returned to Australia in 1911. A comparison of his Summer, a landscape, which was purchased by the National Gallery, with After Life’s Fitful Fever, showed the wide range and versatility of the artist.

Amongst his portraits are those of Chief Rabbi Hertz, Rabbi Cohen, Rabbi Wolinski (the artist’s father), and Moritz Gotthelf, many times president of the Synagogue.

MIRIAM SOLOMON

One of the most ardent female choristers during the days of the mixed choir, Miriam Solomon had a lifelong relationship with the Great Synagogue.

Born in 1925, her association with the Great began in early childhood, when she accompanied her father to High Holyday services at the Maccabean Hall and was fascinated as a five year old with Rabbi Falk and his Lithuanian accent.

Sabbath attendance was a weekly feature of her life before World War II and continued up to her death. She was ‘confirmed’ in the Sabbath School in 1938, and her first ‘service’ for the Shule occurred at the age of 12 when she joined the junior choir in which her older sister Emily also sang. At 17 she graduated to the senior choir and remained a dedicated chorister until 1974. As a chorister she sang the alto part and described herself as ‘a low woman’. She was honorary secretary of the choir for many years, starting as assistant secretary under Norman Goldberg during World War II. Miriam saw her association with the choir as her greatest joy. She said ‘I loved that choir’!

The list of her activities in the Synagogue was prodigious. Her first job after graduating from the Metropolitan Business College in 1942 was as junior book-keeper/clerical assistant in the Synagogue office. She stayed eight years, becoming a senior in the office in 1948. She left to gain wider commercial experience with Hi-Lite Pty Ltd before a trip overseas in 1952. She was employed in London by the Federation of Synagogues in a position similar to her earlier one at the Great.

She was in GSY from its inception in the 1940s, holding various offices until she went to England; member of the Journal Committee for several years; minutes secretary for the Services Committee; treasurer of the Parents’ Association during the 1970s; member of the Women’s Auxiliary most of her married life (and treasurer for two years); a Synagogue tour guide; and honorary treasurer of the Australian Jewish Historical Society for 20 years from 1983. She also undertook voluntary clerical work for Rabbi Falk and Rabbi Porush. The Great was her second home.

Outside of the Great she took Scripture classes at Clovelly Primary School when her children attended there. She was also Secretary of the Kingsford-Maroubra Synagogue for some time and was Executive Secretary of the Sydney Beth Din during the 1980s.

She was introduced to David Solomon by his cousin Ralph Levy; the Synagogue choirmaster. They were married at the Great Synagogue in 1962, both aged 37. Their children respectively had their Bar- and Bat-Mitzvahs in the Great. David died in 1996; an instrument-maker and craftsman, the Synagogue possesses many artefacts he designed and crafted including the mezuzot for the Education Centre.

ROBERT TEICHER

The present choirmaster, Robert Teicher, has performed as a solo classical pianist and singer for over 30 years with a repertoire of Yiddish, Hebrew and English songs. He trained for many years with Raymond Myers, Werner Baer, Donald Shanks and Florence Taylor.

Robert has been with the Synagogue choir as bass soloist since 1985 and has been choirmaster and organist since 1995, re-arranging some choral pieces and composing new works specifically for the choir, as well as resurrecting ‘old favourites’. His mentors in developing choral arrangements and conducting skills were Werner Baer and Tommy Tycho, giants in Australian music history.

Robert has sung in several Sydney Opera House productions. His main musical influence was his father, Dan Tudor (David Teicher), an opera star and leading bass soloist with the Israeli National Opera (1951-1995), the Rumanian National Opera (1949-1951) and Russia’s Kiev Opera House (1947-1949); in Israel, he made several recordings for Kol Israel Radio.

In 1999, Robert sang in the Capitol Theatre’s production of My Fair Lady, which starred Anthony Warlow. ‘Doing eight shows a week for several months,’ Robert says, ‘ and watching Anthony from the wings and on stage was a great experience.’

Robert conducted the Waverley-Randwick Philharmonic for five years and for 14 presented The Jewish Week on 89.7 Eastside radio, interviewing many famous international and local personalities including Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Victor Borge, Tommy Tycho, Simon Wiesenthal, Gottfried Wagner and Alan Dershowitz.
He also dabbles in film directing and one of his short films won second prize at a Fox Studios film competition in 2003. One of the key ‘actors’ in this film was Shlomo Weinstein, an excellent chazan and tenor, who sang at the Great for over 30 years and who originally inspired Robert to join the Synagogue choir.

This article is excerpted from Rabbi Apple’s “The Great Synagogue: A History of Sydney’s Big Shule”.

The wandering Jew is a well-known character in history and literature. At times his wanderings have been involuntary: at times he has travelled for a deliberate purpose. Elkan Adler, in the Introduction to his Jewish Travellers [1], describes in this way the various reasons that have motivated the historic wandering Jew: “He has travelled as nomad and settler, as fugitive and conqueror, as exile and colonist, as merchant and scholar, as mendicant and pilgrim, as collector and as ambassador.” His international travels were frequently of far-reaching importance both to Jewish history and to geographical discovery in general. By the seventeenth century, however, Adler suggests, the whole world had become familiar to most people, and now the experiences of the Jewish traveller “could hardly be of general interest or importance. The wandering Jew becomes less the diplomatist or scientist and more of the bagman and beggar”.[2] Some would object that this is far too sweeping a statement, and certainly if Adler had included Jacob Levi Saphir in his roll of great travellers he might well have had to modify his remark about “the bagman and beggar”. A bagman Saphir certainly was not, and as a beggar he was not much of a success, but in other directions he has an importance, albeit not of the same first rank as Benjamin of Tudela and Petahiah of Ratisbon. (It is only fair to Elkan Adler to point out that neither he nor JD Eisenstein, on whose Otzar Massaot [3] he based himself, pursued the tale of Jewish travellers beyond 1839, and that is why nothing of Saphir is to be found in their books).

Saphir is briefly dealt with in some of the standard histories of Jewish literature [4] and in the main Jewish encyclopaedias [5], though the article on him in the Jewish Encyclopaedia is erroneous in several respects. Some parts of Saphir’s itinerary, called Even Saphir, have been reprinted, in Hebrew or Yiddish [6] and selections from the chapters dealing with Australia and New Zealand were translated into English by the late Rabbi LA Falk of Sydney.[7] There has been only one systematic attempt at a study of Saphir’s life and importance, namely, an article in two parts by Professor Joseph Joel Rivlin in the Hebrew literary periodical Moznayim.[8] Saphir himself gives a summary of his childhood at the beginning of the first volume of Even Saphir, but he does not describe the course of his life between the ages of 14 and 36 – a silence which, as we shall see, is intriguing.

He was horn in Oshmiany, near Vilna, in 1822, the son of Rabbi Nathan Levi Saphir, a shochet, and his wife, Tova. In 1832 the family went to live in Palestine, arriving on Hoshana Rabba of that year. They settled in Safed, one of the four “holy cities” of Palestine (the others were Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias). At this time Safed had the largest Jewish population of any part of Palestine and was not only a centre of the mystics but also a centre of the disciples of the Gaon of Vilna. A group of seventy of the Gaon’s disciples had established themselves there in 1808, and other Jews from Vilna had followed them in fulfilment of a lifelong dream of the Gaon. Their leader was Rabbi Israel of Shklov. [9] Within months of the Saphir family joining them, Nathan Levi Saphir died (on 13th Mar-Cheshvan, 1833) and soon afterwards (on 10th Kislev, 1834) his wife also died. Responsibility for their son was assumed by the rabbinic authorities of the city, though who took charge of the boy’s only sister I have not been able to discover. On the day after Shavuot, 1835, the peace of Safed was rudely disturbed. The local Arab inhabitants fomented an uprising against Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt, who ruled Palestine from 1832 until 1840, when it reverted to the Turks. In the course of the riots Jewish lives were lost, property was damaged and the maintenance of the Jewish settlement in Safed became precarious. The young Saphir and others found refuge for a short period in neighbouring villages, but eventually they made their way to Jerusalem, arriving there on Rosh Chodesh Ellul, 1836, when Saphir was fourteen years old. This in fact was one of several emigrations of Jews from Safed, and because of repeated disasters, which included an epidemic and an earthquake, the city lost its pre-eminence. By 1839, for example, there were 5,500 Jews in Jerusalem, which was now the largest Jewish centre, and only 1,500 in Safed [10] (though other estimates give smaller figures all round, these proportions seem correct). Until this period the dominant section in the community in Jerusalem had been the Sephardim, but with the influx from Safed and other places the Ashkenazim assumed greater importance, and in due course Saphir became a leading figure in the new Ashkenazi community.

Soon after his arrival in Jerusalem Saphir married Feige Leah, the daughter of Rabbi Zalman Cohen and his wife, Elka.[11] Feige Leah must have been a remarkable woman. She is referred to as wise and pious.[12] She must also have been long-suffering considering the long periods when her husband was away on his travels, and the poverty in which she brought up her family of two sons and three daughters, all of whom became personalities in their own right.[13] Having brought his Even Saphir to the point at which he was married, Saphir now suspended the story of his life for a period of nearly 22 years. He simply states, “I cannot recount the things that happened to me from that day to this” and hints at trials and tribulations. What did actually happen to him in those 22 years that elapsed before he set off on his journeys? If we had to go on his book alone we would miss a fascinating chapter in the history of the old yishuv. We would also possibly never know that Saphir had another side to him apart from that of being a renowned traveller. Fortunately, we can piece the story together reasonably well from a variety of contemporary sources.[14]

We learn that at the age of sixteen he gained the rabbinical diploma, and became a teacher in a Talmud Torah of the Ashkenazi community, but his education was not just in rabbinic subjects alone. Living among disciples of the Vilna Gaon, he was introduced to the Gaon’s method of combining traditional learning with secular studies; the Gaon himself had written on algebra, trigonometry, astronomy and grammar, though he regarded secular disciplines not as ends in themselves but as aids to understanding the Torah. It was in the literary and linguistic field that Saphir showed ability. He eventually became reasonably fluent in quite a number of languages: an Australian newspaper described him as “a man of considerable attainments as a linguist, speaking fluently not only Hebrew, but German, Spanish, Italian and Arabic, besides being sufficiently acquainted with English to make himself understood”.[15] It goes without saying that he spoke Yiddish, and he probably knew Russian too. In contrast to some rabbinic figures, he took Jewish history and Hebrew grammar seriously, though he cannot be regarded as a competent scholar in the fields with which the Judische Wissenschaft was concerned.[16] Yet his insatiable curiosity led him to investigate everything, and when he was away on his travels he would send home to his children a variety of literature, including secularist haskalah material.[17]

He began to become known in the Ashkenazi community of Jerusalem as a sopher. By sopher it is likely that “secretary” is meant, and it must be in this capacity that he served the Ashkenazi chevra kadisha.[18] The largest group of Ashkenazim were known as the Perushim, who were non-Chassidic, and according to a visitor to Jerusalem Saphir was communal secretary of the Perushim. This visitor was Ludwig August Frankl, an Austrian poet and writer, who went to Jerusalem in 1856 to establish a school in the name of Frau Elise von Herz Lamel. In his book Nach Jerusalem [19] he describes some colourful visitors who carne to meet him. One of them was Jacob Saphir, whom he describes not only as the communal secretary but also as a poet. I quote his account of his meeting with Saphir at length, because it is one of the most revealing contemporary descriptions of Saphir:

“I had no idea that my first visitor would be an associate of the immortals, a descendant of the Prophetic singers, a companion of the royal harpist… a poet.

“A small, pale, sickly-looking man with bloodshot eyes came in to me. From both sides of his torn, filthy cap hung down the long locks of his peyoth, for which any comb would have been alien. His silk mantle, the smartness of which had long since vanished, was unmentionable; his shoes, which he took off on entering, seemed to be carrying on their riddled surface all the dust of the valley of Jehoshaphat from time immemorial.

“This man Saphir came as a ten-year-old boy from Russia to Jerusalem, and has been here for twenty-five years. He is secretary of the community of Perushim, with an annual salary of 1000 piastres (about 100 silver florins). After a few days he brought me a poem, which I have attached to these pages.”[20]

It seems that Saphir must have been developing a reputation as the poet of Jerusalem. To him the community must have turned for a suitable ode to mark all State occasions. And what would be more of a State occasion to inspire Saphir’s lyrical talent than the arrival of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore on one of their many visits to the Holy Land? Whenever the Montefiores approached Jerusalem they were ceremoniously welcomed[21] and Saphir produced several long poems in their honour. They include Kenaph Renanim (undated), Shemesh Tzedakah (1849) and Gei Chizayon (1855).[22] He also composed a poem to mark the visit of Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia in 1870 [23] and poems from his pen also appeared in the Hebrew periodical, HaLebanon, and in pamphlet form.

Like most of the Jerusalem Jews, Saphir found life a struggle and in his Kenaph Renanim he appealed to Montefiore for assistance: not, he added, that he wanted charity, but he asked for employment in one of the institutions which Montefiore was setting up. In an indirect way, the activities of the Montefiores in Jerusalem did lead to a turning-point in Saphir’s life. There was a hallowed site in the Holy City on which the great Nachmanides had established a Synagogue in 1268. A succession of tribulations had befallen this Synagogue in the intervening centuries and it was closed down several times. In 1690, a group of Chassidirn, led by Rabbi Judah HeChasid (the Pious) from Shidliz, near Grodno, arrived in Jerusalem and settled in the area around the Nachmanides Synagogue. The area became known in due course as the Churvah (Ruin) of Rabbi Judah HeChasid [24] and by the 1830s there developed a movement to rebuild the Churvah Synagogue. For a time there was a split within the movement when some members used a donation from an Amsterdam Jew to erect an independent bet hamidrash but the supporters of the Churvah succeeded in enlisting influential figures in their cause. In 1855 when the Montefiores again visited Palestine, Sir Moses (according to the Montefiore diaries edited by Dr Louis Loewe)[25] showed James Finn, the British Consul in Jerusalem, ‘the firman he had obtained, by the intercession of Lord Napier, for the rebuilding of an ancient synagogue belonging to the German Hebrew congregation.” In her book of reminiscences Mrs Finn, the consul’s wife, wrote: “The Ashkenazim had no synagogue of their own, but by 1854 they were a sufficiently large congregation to want one. So they applied to Mr Finn for permission to repair a building which had probably been the synagogue of Rabbi Judah Halevi, the Khorbah Synagogue. Our ambassador furthered this scheme and the synagogue eventually became the biggest and finest in Jerusalem”.[26] (Mrs Finn erred in identifying the Synagogue with Judah HaLevi, but so do others in regarding the Judah HeChasid after whom it was named as the author of the Sepher Chasidim, who died in 1217). It seems that the Churvah Synagogue was rebuilt in or about 1856, but additional funds were needed to complete the project. So a common method was resorted to. It was decided to send a meshullach or emissary abroad to raise money, both for the Churvah scheme and also for the general support of the Jews of Jerusalem. The man who was chosen as the meshullach was Jacob Levi Saphir. He was supplied with letters of recommendation from leading rabbis of all sections of the community in .Jerusalem, both of the Ashkenazim and of the Sephardim and even of the Karaites, and he set off on 13th Tammuz, 1858, on a journey that was to last altogether four years and nine months.

He did not direct his steps along the well-worn paths of the European Jewish communities but, perhaps in imitation of Benjamin of Tudela, towards the lands of the East.[27] Within the first few weeks he had lost his luggage and been taken in by a confidence trickster in Egypt. The result was that now, for lack of money, he could not proceed directly to India as he had planned. Instead he turned to the Yemen, and in fact became in due course an authority on the history and customs of the Yemenites. His complete itinerary covered Egypt, North Africa, and the Yemen (described in the first part of Even Saphir) and then Aden, India, Malabar, Cochin, Colombo, Singapore, Java, Batavia, Australia and New Zealand. In each place he spent a lengthy period, but for the purposes of this paper I shall confine myself to his activities in Australia and New Zealand, where he spent sixteen months between September, 1861 and January, 1863.

He must have raised some money there, though his comment on this aspect of the journey was that “the toil and labour exceeded the reward”.[28] His schnorrbuch, formerly owned by Mr Jacob Sarna,[29] might indicate the extent of his financial success, but it is now in the central archives of the World Zionist Organisation in Jerusalem and I have not yet had an opportunity to peruse it. Saphir informed the board of management of the York Street Synagogue, Sydney, that his method was to retain for himself one-third of what he collected[30] but by the time he came to Melbourne he did not even have enough for his fare home and the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation had to come to his rescue.[31] Wherever he went he studied avidly the history, social life and religious traditions of the Jews, and was also a shrewd observer of the way of life of the general population. Thus, for example, he writes about the Australian aborigines and describes the way the European settlers treated them;[32] the Maoris of New Zealand also intrigued him and he suggested that they had originally come from India (though it is now accepted that they are a Polynesian people originally from the islands of the Pacific).[33] His impressions of Jewish life in other countries have considerable value, though Geiger criticised him for dealing in an amateurish way with questions which scholars had already investigated thoroughly.[34] When it comes to his Australian activities, however, he has a unique importance because he is the first contemporary observer to write at length about the emergent communities of the Australian continent. There had been other rabbinic visitors, such as Rabbi Aaron Levy of the London Beth Din [35] and other emissaries from Palestine,[36] but they left no extensive written record of their impressions. From his book, we get a further picture of Saphir the man. He was a man of determination: he arrived at Dunedin, New Zealand, on a Wednesday, discovered that the congregation had no megillah, and by Friday he had one written out in time for the festival of Purim on the Saturday night.[37] His curiosity led him to become involved in local controversies time after time. In Melbourne, for instance, the Rev Moses Rintel accused him of interference and reported his actions to Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in London; Saphir responded with a long, learned reply defending himself.[38] In both Melbourne and Sydney he had violent arguments with congregational boards of management, and in Melbourne he was ordered out of the committee room.[39]

Before examining the historical information about Australian and New Zealand Jewry which his book preserves, we should first briefly trace the beginnings of Jewish life in Australia. The continent had been settled in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts who included some Jews. Up to 1817 there is no reference to any organised community, but in that year a chevra kadisha was set up by the twenty Jews in Sydney, For a decade the only times they came together were the four or five occasions when a death occurred. But by 1830 the small community had grown to a total of 345. Some were emancipated convicts, following occupations such as those of dealers, merchants, artisans, innkeepers and auctioneers; a number had come as free immigrants.[40] The 1845 report of the Synagogue in Sydney states that “The influx of respectable merchants during those years coupled with other circumstances had raised the Hebrews in the estimation of their fellow colonists, and it was then thought advisable meetings for prayers should be held regularly”.[41] Thereafter services were held at a private house in Sydney, and the establishment of the community on a formal basis came with the visit in 1830 of Rabbi Aaron Levy. Rabbi Levy was sent to finalise a divorce between a woman in England and her husband in Australia, which took him only a short while to do, but under his influence Jewish life took on new vigour. In Tasmania, also originally a convict settlement, emancipated Jewish convicts established congregations in Hobart and Launceston in the 1840s. The foundation of South Australia, however, was not associated with the convicts, and instead it arose out of a scheme for systematic colonisation by free settlers. A Synagogue was founded there in the 1840s. In Victoria the first white settlement was set up in the 1830s by farmers from Tasmania. The first Jewish services there took place in 1841. Now there came the 1850s: a decade known in Australian history as the “Golden Fifties”. They were the years that brought Australia’s first real wave of immigrants, all in search of the gold that had been discovered in 1851. The gold-rushes were centred in Victoria, which advanced within a very short time from a small pastoral settlement to a prosperous, self-governing colony. Victoria’s population multiplied again and again. The Jewish population jumped from 56 in 1841 to 364 in 1851 and to 2,903 in 1861. Where did the Jewish immigrants come from? What did they do on the mining settlements? How did their gentile fellows react to them? What were their religious and social problems? It is in answers to questions such as these that Saphir’s contemporary observations begin to be of value.

He left Batavia on 3rd Ellul, 1861, as the only passenger on a small two-masted Scottish cargo boat bound for Sydney. On 28th Tishri the ship arrived there after a difficult voyage. Saphir soon learnt what manner of land this was in which he found himself. He equipped himself with the main facts of Australian history, though he tends to over-romanticise the convict period and says that the convicts were so pleasantly surprised by the land that their chastisement was hardly a burden any more.[42] He does, however, add correctly that many of the former convicts had now become the most prominent and respected citizens, though he does not state that this applied to some of his fellow-Jews, too. He says that the majority of the Jews had come from England, though some had come from Poland but had lived in England for some time.[43] This seems to accord with the theory that whereas the earlier immigrants had been of Anglo-Dutch-German stock, now with the discovery of gold there was a sizeable minority of Eastern European elements. Saphir’s view that the Eastern European Jews had mostly not arrived directly from their countries of origin, but had come via England, may well be correct and derives some support from studies of Australian naturalisation records carried out by Dr Charles A Price of the Australian National University.[44]

These studies suggest that the proportion of immigrants who were born in countries of continental Europe was about 5% in the 1830s, about 37.5% in the 1840s, and as high as 70% in the 1850s. Dr Price’s figures do not reveal how many emigrated via England at this early period, but between 1881 and 1920 the figures were: 38% emigrated directly to Australia, 33% emigrated via England, and in the earlier period, which we are discussing, I would estimate that the majority of the immigrants had come via England, as Saphir in fact suggested.

Saphir gave an estimate of the Jewish population in each place that he visited though he had no means of checking his figures. We have the advantage of possessing the data supplied by the census of 1861,[45] which obviously is a more reliable source of information. The estimates of Saphir and the census figures compare as follows:
Sydney: Saphir 500 Jews – census 1,072 (609 males, 463 females)
Melbourne: Saphir 1000 – census 1,796 (1,074 males, 722 females)
Ballarat: Saphir 300 – census 241 (163 males, 78 females)
Bendigo: Saphir says “fewer than Ballarat” – census 228 (140 males, 88 females) Adelaide: Saphir 300 – census 420 (estimated, since no religious census was taken in 1861. In 1871 there were 379 Jews).

In addition the census records that there were 867 Jews actually on the goldfields in 1861 – 608 males and 259 females.

What did the Jews do on the goldfields? Saphir informs us that few actually dug for gold: most started as pedlars, an essential economic activity on the mining settlements. “On the whole,” he states [46], “the Jews did not dig in the earth to extract the gold from its bowels, but they supplied all that was necessary for the sustenance of the miners and they also bought the gold from the miners. Their profit was greater than that of the miners.” By 1861, when Saphir arrived, the gold was petering out but many Jews had established themselves so well in commerce that strong communities remained in goldfields towns like Ballarat and Bendigo for many years. The prosperity that gold bought in its wake, Saphir observed, attracted many immigrants. The Emigrants’ Guide [47] stated that “Emigration rages as a national epidemic. The great commercial fleet of Britain is not sufficient for the needs of thousands.” In London the Spanish and Portuguese Board of Guardians [48] and also the Jewish Emigration Loan Society [49] encouraged poorer Jews to emigrate. A number of middle-class English Jews also came and many made fortunes and subsequently returned to England. Saphir refers to the vast immigration: “They continue to come month by month and all who come settle down because it is better for them here than there. Among these Jews are rich and honoured merchants. Some of them are pedlars who go out with their packs on their shoulders or in carts, going round the towns and villages to sell their merchandise, in the same way as the settlers who come to England and America, but here they amass greater wealth because instead of silver they get gold. Some of them have become wealthy and rich.”[50]

Jews were from the outset on terms of equality with their neighhours. Saphir states: “Freedom and equality prevail here in every way… The Jews live in safety and have a share in all the benefits of the land and in government posts and political administration”.[51] But due mainly to two factors the incidence of mixed marriage was high. One factor was this very freedom of association; the other, common to all pioneering societies, was the predominance of males over females. We have already seen in the 186l census statistics how in every case the males considerably outnumbered the females, and Saphir also draws attention to the fact.[52] In fact an Australian Jew had written to the Jewish Chronicle in 1852 [53]: “Our leading men would be doing a great service to the Jewish young men here by sending out a few respectable single girls, for it would save many a young man from marrying a Christian.” One attempt was made to send out a party of Jewish young women in the care of Caroline Chisholm, but the experiment was never repeated and the problem remained.[54] Many Christian wives offered to enter Judaism and to rear their children as Jews. This gave rise time after time to controversies over the admission of proselytes and the circumcision of the sons of gentile mothers. Saphir complains that “many acts were done in this connection which were not in accordance with the law of the holy Torah.[55] In Bendigo, a goldfields town in Victoria, he was implored to help personally with a case of this kind. A Jew living there had married a gentile woman who had originally entered his house as a domestic servant. She had borne him two sons, who had been circumcised and given Hebrew names. In Melbourne she could have been converted – Saphir says that the Rev. Moses Rintel of Melbourne derived a livelihood from this source – but the Jew of Bendigo was a pedlar who could not afford the expense of travelling to Melbourne. After considerable deliberation Saphir agreed to admit the woman and her children into Judaism. He set up an ad hoc Beth Din which, apart from himself, comprised the chazan-shochet of the town, an old man named Gedaliah Isaac Friedman,[56] who had studied in yeshivot in Hungary in his youth, and another learned and pious Jew from Liadi in Poland. The traditional ritual of conversion was carried out, and Saphir is at pains to stress that he took no fee for the ceremony apart from a donation from the congregation towards his cause in Jerusalem.[57] On his return to Melbourne he informed Moses Rintel of what he had done and was accused of interfering with the latter’s livelihood and of acting contrary to the din. Rintel wrote to Nathan Marcus Adler complaining about Saphir. Adler replied that Saphir’s actions were null and void and that any converts he purported to make could not be considered as Jews. Saphir replied to Adler at length, going into the classical rabbinic authorities to show that he had acted lawfully. This reply is printed in full in an appendix to the second part of the Even Saphir.[58]

It was not only in matters of proselytisation, however, that Saphir criticised the religious situation he found in Australia. He remarks bitterly that wherever he went religious observance was lax. Many of the early settlers had broken the dietary laws because no religious facilities were available, but they had continued to do so even after such facilities had been established. In Melbourne there were Jews who attended synagogue morning and evening but bought meat from gentile butchers, though some of them soaked and salted it according to Jewish custom.[59] This and similar instances had their origin, he stated, in the lack of an ordained rabbi. If there were such a man “they would all listen to his words and observe the law of Moses and Israel completely”. He blamed the British Chief Rabbi, whose jurisdiction was accepted in Australia, for allowing this state of affairs. In other places where there was no shochet he remonstrated with the communities in no uncertain terms. In Adelaide he had a meeting with the board of management about which he wrote: “I rebuked them for not having a shochet and for eating forbidden foods, and they apologised as usual. But one of them who was wise in his own eyes answered arrogantly, ‘In the Ten Commandments there is no reference to having a shochet!’ This is the result when a community has no teacher and guide, and every man goes his own way and does what is right in his own eyes”.[60]

Throughout Saphir’s chapters on Australia and New Zealand (as elsewhere) he records the names of the leading figures in each congregation, though on the whole this information is not known to us. In some cases, it is interesting to note, it was a renewal of acquaintance made in other countries. An example is his meeting in Ballarat with Newman Frederick (Nacham Friedel) Spielvogel, whom he had known in India. Spielvogel, who was born in Austria, lived in Ballarat for many years and was president of the congregation. His son, Nathan F Spielvogel, was the historian of Ballarat and a short-story writer on Jewish themes. Saphir had been asked by the rabbinic authorities of Jerusalem to perform several missions on his travels, mostly in order to find husbands who had deserted their wives and to persuade them to permit the wives to remarry by means of granting them get, and in at least one case Saphir was successful, finding in Melbourne under an assumed named a man who had left his wife in Russia about eight years previously.[61]

On 15th Tevet, 1863, Saphir left Melbourne on a large British steamer, with his passage paid to Aden. His account of the return voyage is entertaining in itself [62] but for reasons of time I cannot go into it at this moment. On the minor festival of Pesach Sheni, 14th Iyyar, 1863, Saphir arrived back in Palestine. He composed a poem in the style of the Zionides read on the fast of Av, expressing his joy as he approached closer and closer to the Holy City.[63] He does not tell us what kind of reception he got from his family but immediately says that he began sorting the material and reminiscences he had gathered on his travels. His son, Benjamin Ze’ev Saphir, assisted him in perusing various manuscripts such as those yielding variant readings of Biblical texts, but it was a slow job and Saphir complains that it overtaxed his health and his eyesight.[64] His first publication was the Sepher HaGoralot of Chayyim Vital (1543-1620), printed in Jerusalem in l863 from a manuscript he had acquired in Yemen.[65] Nine months after his return home he was off on his journeys again, this time making his first trip to Europe, to find a publisher for his Even Saphir.[66] At last in 1866 the first part of the book appeared in Lyck under the imprint of the Society of Mekitzei Nirdamim, which had been established in 1864 for the publication and dissemination of works of Hebrew literature. The Society mostly issued classical works but some newer writers such as Saphir were also published. Many of the reviews of Saphir’s book were complimentary: some, such as Geiger,[67] criticising him on points of scholarship but admitting that the book was a contribution to Jewish travel literature. Strangely, strong criticism came from the Hebrew periodical HaMaggid, produced by Eliezer Lipman Silbermann, who was also the editor of the Mekitzei Nirdamim publications.[68] The fact that Saphir’s own publisher turned against him may have been due to disagreements over financial matters and over Saphir’s complaints about typographical errors in the printed book.[69] The inevitable result was that for the second volume, which was written at about the same time as the first, he had to find a different publisher. He must have hawked it from publisher to publisher until in 1874 it eventually appeared in Mainz under the imprint of Yehiel Brill, his son-in-law.[70] This volume includes an appendix giving extracts from some of the manuscripts he had acquired, and he repeatedly appeals to his well-wishers to assist him with funds to print more of this material, presumably in a third volume, but this never appeared.[71] Nor did his proposed English and German translations of the first two volumes.[72] For financial reasons he sold some of his manuscripts: one went to the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon IV of France[73] and another to Baron Naphtali Herz (Horace) Gunzburg of St Petersburg.[74]

He went to Europe in Ellul, 1865, as an emissary on behalf of the Bikkur Cholim hospital in Jerusalem, and was away more than two years. He visited France, Germany and Russia, sending impressions of each place to Brill’s periodical HaLebanon. He went to Russia once more in 1873, again on behalf of the hospital.

He produced no other major writings though one can find references to smaller works, which include:
Iggeret Teman HaShenit (Vilna, 1868), on the appearance in Yemen of a pseudo-Messiah, Judah ben Shalman;
Iqqeret HaPeridah, addressed to the rabbis of Italy;
Eldad U-Medad
Mayim Chayyim
Edut Bih’yoseph, a responsum.

He and his sons were frequent contributors to HaLebanon, which Yehiel Brill had established in Jerusalem in 1863 and which was subsequently transferred to Paris and then to Mainz. If Saphir was a wandering Jew, his son-in-law’s periodical was a wandering Jewish journal. Brill’s son, Moshe, was later a well-known Yiddish writer, translator and printer in the East End of London.[75]

Saphir spent the rest of his days in Jerusalem. He would certainly have had many reminiscences with which to regale his associates in the Churvah, He died on 10th Tammuz, 1885, at the age of 63, and his wife died three years later. They left five children. The elder son, Zalman Nathan Saphir, ran by day the first coffee-grindery in Jerusalem and by night studied and wrote for HaLebanon. He died before his parents. The second son, Benjamin Ze’ev Saphir, was an acknowledged scholar and for a time taught in a Talmud Torah before going into the woven-goods business. I understand, though I have not yet been able to confirm, that he was later the first manager of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. His son Eliyahu Saphir was the proprietor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Jacob Saphir’s three daughters all married distinguished husbands. One was Yehiel Brill, whom we have mentioned; the second, Eliyahu Godel, was active in communal and agricultural administration; the third, Samuel Baruch, was a rabbi from an old Sephardic family in Jerusalem.[76]

My last comment is to say how surprised I have born that Saphir and his family have remained so little known and that so little has so far been written about them. In a small way I hope this paper will begin to fill the gap.

NOTES
1. London, Routledge, 1930, p. xi; reprinted by Hermion Press, NY, 1966. Cf. Israel Abrahams, Chapters in Jewish Literature, Phila., 1899, ch. XX; “Travellers’ Tales”.
2. Adler, loc. cit., p. xxiv.
3. NY, 1926.
4. e.g. Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, NY, 1945, vol. 3, pp. 632-6; Meyer Waxman, “Modern Hebrew Literature”,
in The Jewish People, Past and Present, vol. 3, p. 122.
5. e.g. Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. XI, p. 51; Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia vol. IX, p. 365; Otzar Yisrael, ed. JD Eisenstein, vol. VII, p. 243.
6. Kol Kitve R. Yaakov Saphir Halevi beShir uProza, ed. P Grayevsky, Jerusalem, 1934; Sepher Massa Teman al yede Yakov Saphir, Jerusalem, 1945; Yaakov Saphir un seine Nesios, ed. Hirsch Munz (with photostats of some pages of the Hebrew original), Melbourne, YIVO (n.d.).
7. Journal and Proceedings of the Australian Jewish Historical Society, vol. I, pp. 19, 43, 86, 116, 153, 192. See also the brief
extracts translated by LM Goldman, Australian Jewish Herald, 18th March, 1949.
8. vol. II, pp. 74-81, 385-399 (Tel Aviv, 1940).
9. MM Yoshor, “Eliyahu of Vilna”, in Jewish Leaders (1750-1940), ed. Leo Jung, NY, 1953, pp. 27-50, esp. pp. 48-9.
10. Report by WT. Young, first British consul in Jerusalem, to Viscount Palmerston, on 25th May, 1839; in The British. Consulate in Jerusalem. in relation to the Jews of Palestine, ed. AM Hyamson, London, 1939: part II (1838-1861), pp. 4-7. This report gives a comprehensive, colourful picture of the conditions of the Jews in Palestine at the time. See also James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 AD to Modern Times, London, 1949, and the standard works on the history of Palestine and Zionism.
11. Details of Saphir’s family connections are given by Rivlin, loc. cit., pp. 75-7.
12. Even Saphir, part I, chapter 1.
13. See Rivlin, loc. cit., and the final paragraphs of this paper.
14. JE, vol. VII, S.V. “Jerusalem”; Norman Bentwich, “Anglo-
Jewish Travellers to Palestine in the Nineteenth Century”, Miscellanies of the Jewish Historical Society of England, part
IV (1942), p. 9; Reminiscences of Mrs Finn, London, 1929;
works on the Monteflores such as Paul Goodman, Moses Montefiore, Phila., 1925 (esp. “Bibliography of Montefioriana”, on
pp. 231-250); Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, ed.
Louis Loewe, 2 vols., London, 1890; (Lady Monteflore), Notes
from a Private Journal, London, 1885; Lucien Wolf, Sir Moses
Montefiore: a Centennial Biography, London, 1884.
15. South Australian Register, 23rd June, 1862 (cited by MZ Forbes, “Palestine Appeals in the Fifties and Sixties”, AJHS Journal, vol. III, p. 326); LM Goldman, The Jews in Victoria in the Nineteenth Century, Melbourne, 1954, p. 157, etc., same author, The History of the Jews in New Zealand, Wellington, 1958, p. 94, etc. From Even Saphir, part II, ch. 52, we get an impression of Saphir as a conversationalist in English.
16. A Geiger in Judische Zeitschrift, vol. XI, pp. 263-70, in a review of part II of Even Saphir.
17. Rivlin, loc. cit., pp. 76, 70.
18. Ibid., p. 77.
19. 2 vols., Leipzig, 1858; vol. II “Palastina”. The Perushim are described on pp. 48-49. Translations into other languages were also published, e.g. Yerushalayma!, trans. into Hebrew by Mendel E Stern, Vienna, 1860.
20. German ed., vol. II, pp. 23-25, Hebrew ed., pp.161-2.
21. See the descriptions in the works listed in note 14 above.
22. Items 400 and 520 (6) (fol. 37) of mss. in Montefiore Library; see “Bibliography of Montefiorana” in Goodman, loc. cit., pp. 239-40.
23. Even Saphir, part II, p. 235.
24. JE, vol. VIII, s.v. “Jerusalem”. On the Churvah generally: Frankl, loc. cit., vol. II, p. 52, “Korot Chatzer R. Yehudah HeChasid”, in Luach Eretz Yisrael, ed. Luncz, 5664-1904. Judah HeChasid’s pilgrimage is described in Shaalu Shalom Yerushalayim, by Gedaliah Semiatitsch, Berlin, 1716 (see JE, vol. XI, s.v. “Semiatitsch”).
25. at pp. 45-6.
26. Reminiscences of Mrs Finn, p. 132; also pp.134-5, 155-6, 243. On Sir Moses’ firman: p. 137.
27. Even Saphir, part I, early chapters.
28. Ibid., part II, p. 144.
29. Mr Sarna was for many years a renowned book collector and literary figure in London. He is now living in Israel.
30. AJHS Journal, vol. III, p.325.
31. Goldman, Jews in Victoria, p. 159.
32. Even Saphir, part II, chs. 47 et seq..
33. Ibid., ch. 51; Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. XIV, s.v. “Maoris”.
34. Judische Zeitschrift, vol, XI, pp. 263-70.
35. AJHS Journal, vol. II, p. 475, etc.; vol. III, pp. 1-5, etc.
36. MZ Forbes, loc. cit., pp. 313-333; Goldman, Jews in Victoria, passim.
37. Even Saphir, part II, p. 141.
38. Ibid., p. 167.
39. Goldman, Jews in Victoria, p. 159.
40. See references to the early Jewish settlers in Sydney in AJHS Journal, passim.
41. The 1845 report was reprinted by the AJHS in 1944.
42. Even Saphir, part II, p. 131.
43. Ibid., p. 132, 135, etc.
44. “Jewish settlers in Australia” in AJHS Journal, vol. V, pp. 357-412, and statistical appendices.
45. Ibid., Saphir’s figures are derived from Even Saphir, part II, chapters on the towns concerned.
46. Even Saphir, part II, p. 131.
47. by D Mackenzie, London, 1852.
48. AM Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, London, 1951, pp. 251, 322.
49. Goldman, Jews in Victoria, pp. 124-5.
50. Even Saphir, part II, p. 132.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., p. 136, et. seq.
53. Jewish Chronicle, 26 November, 1852. The writer was HL Ansell of Geelong, Victoria, who wrote in the first instance to his brother, Moss Ansell, asking him to urge “Mr Mitchell, the proprietor, etc., of the only Jewish journal in England… to impress on our Jewish brethren the great field for emigration there is open for our poor brethren for these parts.” As well as referring to the need for “respectable single girls”, Ansell also describes economic conditions in Australia: “Carpenters, shoemakers, cabinet-makers, and all such mechanics are getting here from 15s. to 25s. per day, whereas in England if they get one-third that sum they consider themselves well off… Let not everyone, however, fill themselves with false hopes; for instance, cigar-makers would not get a livelihood here, as it is only mechanics who would make wealth.”
54. Goldman, Jews in Victoria, p. 125; the standard biography of Caroline Chisholm, by Margaret Kiddle, states that when the ship, “Caroline Chisholm”, left England in September, 1853, “an interesting little group” amongst her passengers was made up by “at least twelve Jewish girls, put in Mrs Chisholm’s care by the Jewish Ladies’ Benevolent Loan and Visiting Society. This committee was anxious to assist Jewish families to emigrate to Australia and America, and had the utmost confidence in Caroline Chisholm’s care of the young girls placed in her charge. Many of the leaders of Jewish society of London were among her ardent supporters.” (p. 160)
55. Even Saphir, part II, p. 136.
56. Ibid., p. 139; Goldman, Jews in Victoria, pp. 166-7.
57. Even Saphir, part II, p. 140.
58. Ibid., p.167.
59. Ibid., p.136.
60. Ibid., p. 143.
61. Ibid., p. 144. On Nathan F Spielvogel: AJHS Journal, vol. I, p. 120; vol. IV, pp. 279-80; and Selected Short Stories of Nathan Spielvogel, ed. LE Fredman, Melbourne, 1956.
62. Even Saphir, part II, ch. 52.
63. Ibid., p. 149.
64. Ibid., p. 174.
65. Though this fact is stated by the JE, vol. VII, p. 155 (in a section dealing with typography in Jerusalem), no book of this name is ascribed to Chayyim Vital in the standard bibliographical works.
66. Even Saphir, part II, p. 174.
67. A Geiger, Judische Zeitschrift, vol. XI, pp. 263-70. Other reviews are summarised by Rivlin, loc. cit., pp.392-3.
68. Waxman, loc. cit., vol. III, pp. 335-7; JE, vol. XI, s.v. “Silbermann”.
69. Rivlin, loc. cit., p.393.
70. Waxman, loc. cit., vol. III, pp. 343-5.
71. Rivlin suggests that it was in fact written but was lost after Saphir’s death; loc. cit., notes 176-7.
72. Even Saphir, part II, last page.
73. Ibid., p. 199. The Empress placed the manuscript in the Hebrew section of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, according to Saphir.
74. Ibid.
75. On Moshe Brill: “Printer’s Ink in their Veins”, by Ben-Zion Abrahams, Jewish Chronicle, 22 November, 1963.
76. On Saphir’s family connections see Rivlin, loc. cit., pp. 76-7. A brief obituary of Saphir appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, 31 July 1885.

He might not have liked the comparison, but his Samaritan researches and writings could have earned him the encomium of the Book of Job (29:11):
Unto me men gave ear, and waited,
And kept silence for my counsel;
After my words they spake not again.

Alan’s judgment was sound, but he was no dictator. He appreciated the contributions and views of others, and indeed his encouragement of budding scholars was legendary.

His Dead Sea Scrolls work was partly academic, partly administrative. The Oxford Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew and Jewish Studies, where he spent long periods of time including holding the acting presidency, knew that with him in charge of the Scrolls publication project there would be progress without constant inordinate delays.

As a teacher, professor and thesis supervisor he was admired and loved. A polymath whose knowledge ranged far afield, a communicator almost without peer, a concerned and generous mentor, he was to so many students the embodiment of the long running Reader’s Digest series, “My most unforgettable teacher”. Students learned to live with his coffee drinking and his quirky sense of humour; he could argue with a straight face for preposterous assertions such as “Biblical Israelites were all redheads” and “Lemuel” in the Book of Proverbs was the origin of the shlemiel’.

To me personally he was a wonderful colleague and department head. I taught in the department for over thirty years and felt flattered when he would sometimes say, “I will be away next week – will you take my classes for me?” It all meant much more work, but I could get my own back every now and then when he would substitute in my own classes, though I suspect it was child’s play to him whatever the subject.

Mandelbaum House at Sydney University was his idea. The benefactor, Rachel Lipton, was an early woman graduate who left most of her considerable estate to trustees, who included me as well as Alan, charging them to create a college in memory of her parents. It was amazing how Alan relished the role of dealing with architects, builders and local councils, and how he grasped the financial aspects of building up the estate and then expending the funds wisely. Once the college was open, he was there every day. He and I were joint Masters, though after I retired to Israel he did most of the work. He created Mandelbaum Publishing and knew every publication almost by heart.

He also initiated the establishment of the Archive of Australian Judaica at Fisher Library and appointed Sister Dr Marianne Dacy as the archivist. Her position continues to be supported by Mandelbaum Trust to the present day. Marianne has built a unique documentary collection relating to the history of Australian Jewry, which has been central to research on the community. She also completed her doctorate under Alan’s supervision on the separation of Judaism and Christianity.

He continued to research, write, advise, administer and encourage almost to his last day. Everyone who knew him was his friend. He and Sadie were a loving team and they enjoyed giving and receiving hospitality. Physically a short man, he was a giant in intellectual and personal stature. It is unbelievable that he has gone.

This tribute by Rabbi Raymond Apple appeared in the Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society, June 2011 (vol. XX, part 2).

There is abundant literature on the Australian convict period, but we still know very little about the social history of the time. Some of the best writing on the subject is on its Jewish dimension, thanks to Rabbi John Levi and Dr. George Bergman. Their Australian Genesis, first published in 1974 and now in its second edition, is elegant and scholarly.[1] Nancy Keesing called it the pioneering study of the convict age. In recent years Rabbi Levi has made a further massive contribution to the subject by updating his smallish biographical dictionary, The Forefathers,[2] into a huge tome titled These Are the Names.[3] Now we can more or less identify most of the early Jews and pinpoint their characters and careers, though many questions remain.

One of those questions is addressed and reviewed in the present paper. It considers Mary Connolly, who entered Judaism in Sydney in 1831, and was married in Australia’s first Jewish marriage ceremony. The story is well-known, but we will view it in the light of the theme of this conference, Religion and Politics. The religion aspect is obvious: a Christian girl converts to Judaism and has a Jewish wedding. But the politics? Extend the conventional definition of politics and ask what the government had to say about the events. Which government and where? That’s one of the crucial issues. Now we are ready for the story and for the broader questions it raises.

John Moses, a fruit seller born in London in 1800, had been found guilty of stealing a man’s watch, and was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Arriving in NSW in December, 1820, he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land the following November as a cook and confectioner to Government House. On 5 December, 1826, in a church ceremony in Hobart, he married 16-year-old Mary Connolly, another convict. He had various jobs, mostly as a pastrycook, and in 1830 in Sydney even baked Australia’s first matzot (unleavened bread for Passover). That year Rabbi Aaron Levy, a member of Chief Rabbi Solomon Hirschell’s Beth Din (ecclesiastical court)[4] came to New South Wales to organise a gett (religious divorce), and whilst there converted Mary Connolly to Judaism and gave her the Hebrew name Rebecca. We have to presume that he saw in her enough commitment to Jewish beliefs and practices to warrant her conversion. He was not very fluent in English but must have been capable of conversing with Mary and her husband.

There being no formal mikveh (ritual bath) in Sydney, her immersion may have been at a quiet spot beside the harbour, with the rabbi forming an ad-hoc Beth Din with two local Jewish inhabitants – presumably Phillip Joseph Cohen and either or both of Philip Solomon and Moses Brown. But we wonder how Levy could carry out a conversion in a British colony when it was thought that Menasseh ben Israel and other Jews, when negotiating with Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England, had agreed not to make proselytes amongst Christians: indeed the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue threatened sanctions against “any one who may bathe a foreign woman” (immerse her for the purpose of conversion) “because it is not meet that they be admitted into our congregation”.[5]

Applicants for conversion were, after being instructed in Jewish beliefs and practices, usually sent across to the Continent, often to Holland, to be converted.[6] On their return to England they were sometimes immersed in a mikveh to confirm their new status.[7] Despite this there were still conversions in England itself. Lord George Gordon seems to have been accepted into Birmingham in 1787 after being rebuffed in London by Chief Rabbi David Tevele Schiff. There were conversions in England when a Jew had or expected a child by a Christian woman. Sometimes a Jewish pedlar married a farmer’s daughter and had her converted to Judaism.[8]

Benjamin Artom, Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, claimed in 1876, “No Christian has ever been converted to Judaism here”,[9] but up to 1837 as many as 41 converts (17 women and four men) are named in the marriage records of his own congregation, and we cannot be certain that they all underwent conversion outside England.[10] Moses Cassuto says in his diary that in London in 1735 he saw (or heard of) two Protestant men and two women become proselytes.[11] The story of the “ban” is told in my paper, “The Ban That Never Was”, in a publication of the Australian Jewish Historical Society issued in 1988 (a more extended version of this paper was delivered to the Jewish Historical Society of England, Israel Branch, in 2005).[12]

The London Beth Din minutes for 19 Shevat, 1834, clearly state, Ein reshut bamedinah hazot legayyer shum adam, “It is not permitted in this country to convert any person”. But after Hermann Adler, son and the subsequent successor of the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, discovered no evidence of any formal undertaking made to Cromwell, the British rabbinate as from 1875 openly allowed conversions on British soil.[13] Yet that was nearly half a century after Mary Connolly, and if the policy until the 1870s was not to allow proselytes, surely Mary Connolly should not have been accepted.

A second issue in relation to conversions was the Blasphemy Act of 1698 (the official title is “An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness”) which imposes severe penalties if a Christian repudiates Christianity or if someone induces such repudiation. Denying Christianity was considered blasphemous, and since a convert to Judaism openly or constructively does that, a conversion to Judaism may entail an illegality. In this sense we have to ask whether Mary Connolly may have acted unlawfully in becoming a Jew and whether Rabbi Aaron Levy may also have been guilty of breaking the law in administering the conversion.

That the legislation could have this effect is acknowledged by a number of legal historians, including Henry SQ Henriques in his The Jews and the English Law.[14] He quotes Mr Justice Best in a judgment of the Full Court of King’s Bench in 1819,[15] explaining that the Act had political rather than theological motives. The judge said, “The Legislature, in passing this Act, had not the punishment of blasphemy so much in view as the protecting the government of the country, by preventing infidels from getting into places of trust”.[16] We can take it for granted that Mary Connolly is unlikely to have had any ambition of holding public office, which would in any case have been unthinkable for a woman, especially a Jewish woman. We can likewise assume that Rabbi Levy harboured no ambitions of this kind. But Henriques considers that despite everything the Act “is still nominally in force” [17] even though the matter has not been tested in the courts.

Both issues – the legality of converting Christians to Judaism, and the status of the Blasphemy Act – were clearly relevant in England itself. They could be discounted in NSW if English law did not apply in the colony. But the early governors and administrators had a different idea. They believed they were planting the British flag and system on antipodean soil including British practices and British law. They could exercise some discretion but their own appointment and the policies they were bound to implement were subject to the mother country. These are sweeping statements that are too obvious to require detailed documentation. Eventually the apron strings loosened, but we are talking about 1831.

As a penal colony, NSW was governed from London. As of July, 1828, English law was “received” by the colony if specifically expressed to apply or deemed suitable to the circumstances of the colony. Local conditions were, however, recognised in 1823 when legislation known as The NSW Act established a Legislative Council which passed its first Act in 1824. The movement towards responsible government was furthered by the first NSW Constitution Act passed by the UK parliament in 1842.

Did this mean that in NSW in 1831, Jews were legally bound by an old “undertaking” to Cromwell not to convert gentiles to Judaism? There is no documentary evidence of any such undertaking, but the Whitehall Conference of 1655 had urged one and there was a perception that it existed. Levy must have been aware of this as a member of Solomon Hirschell’s Beth Din and may well have written the minute quoted earlier to the effect that conversions were not lawful in England. If pressed, he might have argued that since English gentiles could undergo conversion on the Continent without technically breaching the presumed undertaking, the Antipodes were certainly far enough away from London to allow a conversion there (presumably more than one, since Mary Connolly’s children must also have been received into Judaism by Levy). But though the Continent was not a British colony, NSW was. However, the conversion probably received no publicity and no-one was likely to report it to the authorities.

The problem of the Blasphemy Act may well be rather different. Despite the official status of the Church of England in Britain itself, it is not certain that NSW had an established Church in the same sense. The colony had a spectrum of sects with a high proportion of Catholics, Presbyterians and other faiths including Jews. There were debates, analysed by Israel Getzler in Neither Toleration Nor Favour: The Australian Chapter of Jewish Emancipation,[18] as to whether this was a Christian country, with the concomitant question of whether State Aid could be extended to Jews. But since the Blasphemy Act defended not just Christianity but its Anglican version, it seemed out of keeping with the new, more tolerant society. It is thus unlikely that legislation protecting the Church of England could be used in NSW to prevent Mary Connolly from becoming Jewish or Rabbi Levy from converting her. The question does not appear to have been litigated.

Still, in 1827 an Act was passed in NSW for “restraining the Abuses arising from the publication of Blasphemous and Seditious Libels”. It did not completely define blasphemy but spoke of any action “tending to excite His Majesty’s subjects to attempt any alteration of any matter in the Church or State as by law established otherwise than by lawful means”. It seems – though there is no court explication – that what it opposed was not so much an individual’s private views but any insulting or inflammatory public attack on Christianity, on God, and/or the authority of the Scriptures. There is no evidence that either Rabbi Levy or Mary Connolly publicly attacked or undermined Christianity, in particular since, as we have said, the conversion was probably unknown and unreported to the general population. Henriques, writing about the situation in England, seems to recognise this point when he says that the Act “might be made use of to prevent conversions from Christianity to Judaism, if these should ever take place upon a large scale, or any active missionary organisation were established among the Jews for this purpose… Hitherto there has been no occasion to attempt to use the statute in this way; should, however, one arise, the bitterness of religious controversy would probably prompt such an attempt.”[19] In other words, if the number of conversions to Judaism were kept low and no public attention were aroused, it is unlikely that anyone would think of invoking the Blasphemy Act.

It would still appear that in the vastly different religious situation in NSW, the Blasphemy Act would not have been regarded as having any applicability and its eventual disappearance from the statute book could be predicted. However it took a long time. In the 1990s there was renewed discussion as to whether NSW needed any anti-blasphemy legislation, even with a broader scope than before and aimed at protecting all religious groups from attack or libel. I was then senior rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney, and was invited to be amongst those who made submissions. I opposed the whole principle of blasphemy legislation, arguing that no citizen should be compelled to submit to any faith or to religious faith in general, that all religions should be able to present their insights and even face robust debate in the market place of ideas, and religious discrimination was already covered by other existing laws. The Law Reform Commission eventually recommended the abolition of the offence of blasphemy.

The second major issue that needs attention is the Jewish marriage ceremony of John Moses and Mary Connolly. The ketubah (marriage document) is extant and for some years was held by the Australian Jewish Historical Society. It was studied by Rabbi Dr Israel Porush.[20] He came to the conclusion that although Rabbi Levy, an expert sofer (scribe), wrote the document, the marriage took place after the rabbi left Sydney, and another hand filled in the date of the ceremony in Hebrew. There is also some confusion as to when Phillip Joseph Cohen affixed his signature, but this is a question for another forum. The main issue is whether it was Cohen who officiated, and why mention of the marriage is totally absent from the early register of the Sydney Synagogue which is now the property of the Great Synagogue. Since there are three signatures, i.e. Phillip Joseph Cohen, Philip Solomon and Moses Brown, when Jewish law requires only two, we may have to conclude that Cohen was the officiant whilst the others were witnesses.

Cohen was a 25-year-old free settler who arrived in May, 1828, bearing the authority of the chief rabbi of England to conduct Jewish weddings. In These Are the Names, Rabbi Levi says that he was also authorised to conduct divorces, but this is not likely since halachic (Jewish legal) divorce procedures require expertise and until 1857 the dissolution of a valid marriage needed an Act of Parliament.[21] The reference to divorces seems to have come from Hyman A. Simons’ book on Solomon Hirschell,[22] but Simons may have read too much into whatever document the chief rabbi gave Cohen. There are claims that the actual document is in the safe of the Great Synagogue, but my searches failed to find it. (In an obituary tribute to Victor Cohen, PJ Cohen’s son, it is claimed that “Letters of authorisation from Chief Rabbi Solomon Hirschell entrusted to Mr PJ Cohen were deposited by him with the Colonial Secretary,”[23] but the Colonial Secretary’s records in Sydney do not bear out this contention.) Cohen must have had some competence in Hebrew (Simons says he had “an elementary knowledge of the laws and customs of Judaism”, which is no great compliment) and amongst other promising young men had received some Hebrew instruction from Hirschell. Simons, followed by Rabbi Levi, claims that Cohen “spent a few months at the Beth Din”. Rabbi Levi inserts “at the office of the Beth Din”, but no formal office existed.

Not entirely aware of the situation in NSW, Hirschell possibly thought that Sydney already had a synagogue and Cohen would become its minister, but the term “minister” was not used. Hirschell himself was known as “high priest of the Jews” and Aaron Levy was called “Jewish priest” in the passenger list of the ship that brought him to Australia. Cohen’s name indicates descent from the ancient priesthood, so why was he was not also called “Jewish priest”? The answer tells us more about Hirschell than about Cohen. It is true that Cohen was not a professional minister and lacked rabbinic knowledge, but others who engaged in business and knew little Hebrew did bear the ministerial title. However, Hirschell was an empire-builder, and London control of Jewish marriages was a decisive mark of authority. Thus when the Sydney register records the marriage of Moses Joseph and Rosetta Nathan in 1832, it says that Cohen officiated by Hirschell’s authority.

Control over marriages was not merely a halachic precaution. Neither England nor NSW had a government procedure whereby marriages were centrally recorded by an official registrar. In England the law merely required that a marriage be celebrated in a church by an ordained clergyman, with the records being kept in the parish register. There were exceptions for Quakers and Jews, and as far as the Jews were concerned a marriage was recognised if conducted according to Jewish usage. This meant that any marriage of two Jews required to be conducted by Hirschell or his delegate. It was taken for granted that his writ extended to every British colony.

Compared with today’s highly structured system, marriages were conducted in NSW in a rather haphazard way. The government was satisfied that if entered in the registers of a parish, a marriage was valid. Likewise, if a marriage between two Jews was conducted according to Jewish usages, it was a valid marriage. There was a “Permission to Marry” book, but it applied only to convicts, who often represented themselves as single and did not admit that they had a spouse in England. A convict could not marry without the governor’s approval: hence Moses Joseph needed permission to marry Rosetta Nathan, making theirs the first union listed in the Sydney Synagogue register. The authorities did not interfere with the marriage of free settlers, though there was an assumption that a valid marriage requires an “episcopally ordained” minister. The term “episcopally ordained” seems to have been interpreted rather broadly to allow marriages by Catholic priests and Presbyterian ministers. Since Quakers and Jews could conduct their own marriages, the Jews could be married by PJ Cohen or others without official permission.

However, the Sydney Synagogue register is rather unreliable. The first decade or so seems to have been written up long after the event, presumably relying on notes kept over the years. Perhaps it was rewritten from an untidy original. However, it lists the marriage of John Barnett and Sarah Francis in 1833 though they had arrived in the colony already married. It makes mistakes in some of the dates and the names of the parties. It omits at least one marriage of two Jews (Solomon Lyons and Phoebe Benjamin) solemnised in 1826 by Rev. Samuel Marsden, though this omission is explained by it being a Christian ceremony.

More importantly, the list omits the marriage of John Moses and Mary Connolly, maybe because it was known that they had already had a (Christian) marriage ceremony in Hobart a few years earlier. (Recent usage at the Great Synagogue is that when a religious ceremony follows an earlier civil marriage the details are still entered in the official register for the sake of the record). Animus may also have been involved, as Rabbi Levy could have declined to conduct other conversions during his Sydney stay. Most of the married members of the congregation, certainly Abraham Polack, who had made the application for the Jews to have their own place of worship in Sydney, had Christian wives, and there were controversies about whether their children could be regarded as Jews. The rabbi might have kept a diary, but I found no such document in the archives of the Chief Rabbi or the London Beth Din, which are today in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Cohen for his part must have kept his own registers and trained others in the required procedures – notably Moses Brown, Michael Phillips, Isaac Friedman and Solomon Phillips, who was for a time the congregation’s ba’al tefillah (prayer leader) and later became minister of the Macquarie Street Synagogue. All were deemed agents for the chief rabbi. This would certainly have been the case when Michael Phillips conducted Cohen’s own marriage in 1833 to Annette Abigail Levien. By this stage Cohen conducted few marriages because he was spending most of his time in Maitland. The first minister, Rev. Michael E Rose, arrived in 1835 as a free settler (the ship’s list called him a dealer) with credentials from Hirschell enabling him to serve as reader, shochet (meat slaughterer) and mohel (circumciser). In the three years he was in Sydney Rose conducted six weddings with the sanction of the congregational president, who himself had a non-Jewish wife.

By the 1840s the solemnisation of marriages was regularised. The government now required formal notice and instituted official registration of marriages. The ad-hoc days were gone, and neither inefficiency nor communal politics could affect the records. What did not change was that the validity of Jewish marriages was, at least since 1753, judged by whether they conformed to the usages of the Jews. In 1798 in Goldsmid v Bromer,[24] an English court refused to recognise a Jewish marriage because of rabbinical testimony that both witnesses were disqualified in the light of Jewish law: one witness had profaned the Sabbath, eaten non-kosher meat and declared himself to be only a nominal Jew.

NSW marriages were now governed locally. The chief rabbi still recommended ministers for antipodean congregations but in conducting marriages such ministers did not act as the chief rabbi’s agents but by authority of the colonial government. The Marriage Act 1899 admitted that Jews could not be compelled to marry by Jewish rites, but the Act did not recognise any other form of marriage between two parties both of whom were Jews. In a legal Opinion of 6 August, 1929, the barrister Alroy Maitland Cohen stated, “In my opinion a Jew and Jewess, who in NSW go through the form of marriage before a Registrar only, are not legally married”. Many things have changed since then including the law on this point.

THANKS: I am grateful for information from the late MZ Forbes, Joe Kensell, Rabbi John Levi, Andrew Samuel, Edgar Samuel and Professor Prue Vines.

ENDNOTES
1. 1st ed. Adelaide, Rigby, 1974; 2nd ed. Melbourne, Melb. Univ. Press, 2002.
2. Sydney, Australian Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), 1976.
3. Melbourne, Miegunyah, 2006.
4. He was also known as Reb Oran or, from his place of origin, Aaron Lissa or Lisser. He was the Beth Din scribe and drew up its gittin (divorce documents): see the Beth Din minute book for 1833-1845, held in the Elkan Adler collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
5. Lionel D. Barnett (ed.), El Libro de los Acuerdos, Being the Records and Accompts of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of London from 1663 to 1681, Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1931, pp. 11, 13.
6. The Beth Din minute book (see note 4) records conversions in a number of parts of Holland including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Elburg. Though Elburg had only a tiny Jewish community its rabbi might have been specially trusted by the London Beth Din. It seems from the minute book that females who had children went to Holland on their own and the children were converted in London.
7. The Beth Din minute book generally states in Hebrew that it was necessary “for confidential reasons” (ta’am kamus) to repeat the immersion; maybe there was a doubt as to whether correct procedures had been followed.
8. Vivian D. Lipman, “Trends in Anglo-Jewish Occupations”, Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 202-218.
9. Sermons, London, 1876, p. 375, note.
10. Lionel D. Barnett (ed.), Bevis Marks Records, part 2, London, Jewish Historical Society of England (JHSE), 1949.
11. Richard D. Barnett, “The Travels of Moses Cassuto”, in John M. Shaftesley (ed.), Remember the Days, London, JHSE, 1966, p. 104.
12. Yismach Yisrael: Historical Essays to Honour Rabbi Dr. Israel Porush, O.B.E., on his Eightieth Birthday (ed. Raymond Apple), Sydney, AJHS, 1988.
13. Hermann Adler, “A Survey of Anglo-Jewish History”, JHSE Transactions, vol. 3, 1899, pp. 13-14.
14. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1908 (reprinted from Jewish Quarterly Review).
15. Ibid., p. 14. See also Henry SQ Henriques, Jewish Marriages and the English Law, London: JHSE, 1909 (reprinted from Jewish Quartery Review).
16. HSQ Henriques, Jews and the English Law, p. 14.
17 Ibid., p. 15.
18. Melbourne, Melb. Univ. Press, 1970.
19. Henriques, Op. cit., p. 277.
20. “The Earliest Australian Jewish Marriage Document, 1831”, AJHS Journal, vol. 8, pages 404-409.
21. P.153.
22. Hyman A Simons, Forty Years a Chief Rabbi: The Life and Times of Solomon Hirschell, London, Robson, 1980, p. 79.
23. Obituary, Victor Cohen, AJHS Journal, vol. 1, part 6, 1941.
24. Haggard’s Consistory Reports, 1798, p. 324.

3. The Chevra Midrash[1]

The only Sydney institution dedicated to Jewish learning in the interwar period was the Chevra Midrash (Study Society), which met weekly at the Maccabean Hall on Sabbath afternoons. It was the nearest thing Sydney had to the traditional Bet Midrash (House of Study), which was an established feature of traditionally-minded Jewish communities all over the world. An offshoot of the Great Synagogue, whose chief minister was the official or unofficial director of studies, it attracted mostly Great Synagogue members, though a few members of the Central and other congregations also attended.

Before the Great Synagogue was consecrated in 1878, there were two city congregations, York Street and its breakaway in Macquarie Street. Each synagogue presumably had a Shabbat afternoon service with the ministers, shammas and a few religiously observant congregants in attendance. The members of both synagogues mostly lived in the city, though some had their homes in Ultimo, Newtown, Moore Park and Paddington. After the reunification of the community in the 1870s the Great Synagogue must have attempted to hold similar services, but there was probably very little support. As time went on the community dispersed towards the suburbs and very few people were willing to come back into the city on a Saturday afternoon. A further consideration may have been the sheer size of the ‘cathedral’ synagogue and the lack of a minor synagogue or Bet Midrash which would have provided a more intimate setting for a small number of worshippers.

After the Sir Moses Montefiore Jewish Home opened in South Dowling Street, Moore Park, in 1889, the Synagogue had its Shabbat afternoon service there. The location was more convenient for congregants, and the Home had enough male inmates to augment the nucleus of the minyan. Rev Alexander Barnard Davis, chief minister of the Great Synagogue, had raised considerable sums to create the Home and was pleased to see it providing religious facilities, which also included the Synagogue sukkah and communal Seder. However, the Sabbath afternoon service did not emphasise Jewish learning as such. Raymond Joseph (I think) Rosenberg, who later became president of the Home, said that “the building acted as a communal centre, and as a boy I myself attended for Havdalah (at the end of Shabbat) and at the sukkah“.[2]

It is not certain when the name Chevra Midrash was first used. Writing about the Sydney visit of Chief Rabbi JH Hertz in 1921, the Great Synagogue Journal said in January 1952, that he had given “addresses to learned Jewish bodies such as the Chevra Midrash“.[3] Perhaps the writer meant to say that the chief rabbi spoke to the group that was later called Chevra Midrash. The name seems to have come with the group’s move to the Maccabean Hall, opened on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Burton Street in 1923. The “Macc” offered Sydney Jewry a venue for many community events and had a library to which the Sabbath afternoon services were transferred in about 1925.

As Chevra director, Rabbi Francis Lyon Cohen gave well-attended lectures, which, like his sermons, were often published in the Hebrew Standard. The handwritten notes of some of his sermons and discourses are in the Synagogue files. Though his preaching followed the style and pattern that was by now characteristic of the Anglo-Jewish ministry, he was also capable on occasion of giving an address which “took the form of a drosho (exposition) by an old-fashioned maggid (expositor), and the novel interpretation of the text and frequent Tamudical references were much appreciated”.[4] Presumably the other Great Synagogue ministers also supported the Chevra, since all lived within easy walking distance. The congregation had several Judaic scholars amongst its membership, and the Chevra became the Sydney version of what the rabbinic sages called bet va’ad lachachamim, “a gathering place for the wise”.[5]

As we would expect, Aaron Blashki found the Chevra a congenial meeting place. As discussed in Part I of this article, he was a well read orthodox Jew whose father, Phillip Blashki, had brought him up on the weekly Torah portion with the commentary of Rashi. As previously noted, Blashki prepared an English translation of Rashi with another Chevra Midrash figure, Louis Joseph, whose real name was Joseph Abovy Louwisch, and about whom more is said later in this paper. The Blashki/Joseph manuscript was eventually merged with a translation made in London by Dr AM Silbermann and Rev Morris Rosenbaum and the published work was dedicated to Blashki’s parents. The story is told in the first article in the present series.[6] Blashki’s learned relatives included his brothers-in-law Lazar Slutzkin, who lived in Australia before settling in Israel, and Shaul Chune Kook. In old age Blashki went to London, where he died in 1938.

Elias Green was another regular attendee at the Chevra Midrash. Patriarch of a religiously-minded family, he was a pioneer of the Central Synagogue, which began in 1912 in Dowling Street, close to Oxford Street and convenient for Jewish families who were part of the migration to the eastern suburbs. The “Macc”, opened in 1923, was very close to the original Paddington location of the Central Synagogue, which moved to Bondi Junction in the 1920s. Hyman Lenzer, a Great Synagogue shohet, was another enthusiastic member, as was one of his successors, Morris Snyder, who often led the study sessions of the Chevra.

The Chevra was faithfully supported by Hyam Sholom Himmelferb, a scholarly Jew from Eastern Europe, and his son Morris Zion (later Forbes), who acquired a wide knowledge of rabbinic texts and even in old age criticised his fellow congregants for their lack of interest in Jewish study. Himmelferb senior frequently conducted the Chevra’s study sessions. In the late 1950s Morris Forbes, a lawyer who eventually became Deputy Crown Solicitor of NSW, was the Chevra’s chairman. Forbes was also a mainstay of the Australian Jewish Historical Society from its inception, already contributing articles from the 1950s and later serving as president and editor of the Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society.

The discussions at the Chevra were generally on the Torah portion of the week and were accompanied by the afternoon and evening services. Between Pesach and Rosh HaShanah the Chevra frequently focussed on the reading of Pir’kei Avot, the six chapters of the Mishnaic tractate known as Ethics of the Fathers. The discourses were sometimes given by the ministers but frequently by scholarly laymen whose learning would surprise today’s orthodox community. Not all were strictly observant in their private lives and a number were not too particular about not travelling on the Sabbath. Many came by tram from the eastern suburbs; some salved their consciences by arriving in a car driven by a non-Jew. Most members of the Great Synagogue were quite indifferent towards the Chevra, but the Synagogue was generally represented by at least one of its board members apart from the ministers; the board defrayed the expenses of the meetings, and a Torah scroll owned by the Great Synagogue was used each week. The Ark was donated by Morris Symonds, a former president of the Synagogue. The havdalah set was given by Aaron Blashki.

In 1939 Edmund Van Cleef, from a German orthodox family, arrived in Sydney and joined the Chevra Midrash as well as the Chevra Kadisha. Van Cleef, who became chairman of the Chevra Midrash, was sometimes accompanied on Shabbat afternoon by his grandson Clive Kessler, later a professor at the University of New South Wales. Other regulars included the Synagogue shammas, George Heyman, as well as Arthur D Robb, Solomon Berglas, Jacob Diamond, Henry Golomb, Lewis Shaw, Abraham Isaac Ellitt and David Levitus. Much assistance was given at a difficult time by Sydney B Glass, a solicitor who was a founder of the Australian Jewish Historical Society and its first honorary secretary. In the 1950s, Elias Green’s son Israel, congregational president for many terms, took a keen interest in the Chevra.

Expositions were often given by Louis Joseph (his real name, as was mentioned above, was Joseph Abovy Louwisch), a teacher and linguist who gave spell-binding addresses, though some called him “Meshuggener Joseph”. A versatile but sometimes volatile figure, his tombstone at Rookwood Cemetery (he died 12 February 1962, aged 71) calls him “an outstanding Talmudic scholar and linguist, a great personality and character”. As Captain JA Louwisch, he was on Defence Force headquarters staff as an interpreter and in this capacity was posted to Japan after the war. He reported on Jewish services in Japan in the Great Synagogue Journal in June 1946. Another Louis Joseph, grandfather of Rabbi Aryeh Leib Solomon, school rabbi of Moriah College, also attended the Chevra; he was not related to Louwisch.

Rabbi Dr Israel Porush, chief minister of the Great Synagogue from 1940 to 1972, often came and gave addresses, though to relatively small numbers. The rabbi frequently criticised the community’s apathy towards Jewish learning,[8] but he apparently never complained when his discourses failed to attract the crowds. During his incumbency other regulars at the Chevra Midrash included Martin Lapin, who had lived in Bathurst for many years but retained his enthusiasm for Jewish learning, Mordechai Eisen, a teacher and bookseller who had previously been the minister in Broken Hill, and Selig Horwitz, manager of the Chevra Kadisha, who was also the Synagogue’s ba’al teki’ah (shofar blower). Some regulars attended for many years whilst others tended to come and go. Attendances ranged between 20 and 24 people. One of the attractions of the Chevra was the opportunity for mourners to say Kaddish with a minyan.

The only extensive article that the Great Synagogue Journal published about the Chevra Midrash was in the September 1954, issue, with a heading, “The Synagogue and the Beth Hamidrash”. The author is not identified, but it may have been David J Benjamin, one of the community’s few Jewish intellectuals, who was a major figure in Australian Jewish leadership and for a period was secretary of the Great Synagogue. Calling the Chevra Midrash a “less-known Synagogue subsidiary”, the article says: “At one time or another the Chevra Midrash included in its circle almost every outstanding orthodox Jew in Sydney. Today there are barely any survivors in our community of this type of ‘old school’ Jew.”[9]

Nearly five decades later, however, things have changed, and the community can boast many study circles and shi’urim (rabbinic lessons) and a good sprinkling of orthodox families.

By 1957 the Chevra Midrash was finding it difficult to assemble a minyan and a short piece in the Great Synagogue Journal in July that year (presumably also by David Benjamin) appealed for support. There was very little response, even when Benjamin undertook arrangements for lecturers and tried to involve significant personalities such as Mordekhai Nurock, Minister of Israel to Australia. Around the same time a group of young adults, mostly recent arrivals, began to come to Rabbi Porush’s home at Potts Point on Shabbat afternoons to study Mishnah or Maimonides and to daven Minchah, but this was independent of the Chevra.

Though the Chevra faded away it left an offshoot in the She’arith Yisra’el congregation that met on Shabbat morning at the Maccabean Hall with the involvement of Rev Aaron Kezelman after his retirement from the Great Synagogue. She’arith Yisra’el had occasional discourses, but the group seemed more interested in a short, relatively informal service than in becoming a centre of learning. In the 1970s one of its members told others that they could attend the Shabbat afternoon shi’urim of the then rabbi of the Great, but he himself would not because the shi’urim were not in Yiddish. She’arith Yisra’el attracted some of the postwar Jewish migrants who lived around Kings Cross and found the Great too English, pompous and unfriendly, though some of the group’s members also belonged to the Great and attended there on Friday nights and weekdays. Most of She’arith Yisra’el’s religious appurtenances were on loan from the Great Synagogue, though some were “inherited” from the Chevra Midrash.

The Great had no regular Shabbat afternoon services from the late 1950s until early 1973, when Rabbi and Mrs Apple and Rev and Mrs Isidor Gluck opened their homes for Minchah services with songs and refreshments. Up to 60 people came, children as well as adults. Some youngsters walked long distances in order to be present. Morris Forbes generally conducted the Minchah service and sometimes gave expositions in the rabbi’s absence. Distinguished visitors to Sydney attended these services from time to time including Chief Rabbis Immanuel Jakobovits and Jonathan Sacks as well as Rabbi Porush, who after his retirement had moved to Melbourne. One of the regulars named the services “the armchair congregation”. The ministers themselves tended to call the gathering “the Oneg“, a reference to Isaiah 58:13, “you shall call the Sabbath a delight (oneg)” as developed by the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik who inaugurated a weekly cultural event in Tel Aviv on Sabbath afternoons close to the end of the day.

4. Abraham Rothfield[10]

Another key personality in the world of Jewish learning in the interwar period was Abraham Rothfield, whose educational career influenced generations of Sydney Jewish children. The Reader’s Digest used to run a series entitled “My Most Unforgettable Teacher”. The popularity of the series proved that regardless of what one learns from books and formal study, more of a person’s principles and attitudes derive from the personality of a memorable teacher. In Judaism this is second nature, beginning with Moses, whom tradition wisely dubbed Moshe Rabbenu – “Moses our Teacher”, proceeding through the many influential teachers in the Talmud, and continuing up to our own day. Australian Jewry is part of the story, with its long record of effective and sometimes individualistic teachers, amongst whom Abraham Rothfield (“Roth” or “Rothy”), headmaster of the New South Wales Board of Jewish Education from 1924-64, holds a special place of honour. Like his predecessors Louis Pulver and MA Cohen, Rothy was a beloved institution in the community.

The Board of Education probably produced very few really literate Jews. The times were not ripe for a learned community. Rothy’s lessons, however, trained countless youngsters to be fluent in the prayers and in many cases to conduct all or part of a synagogue service. He gave a firm grounding in Hebrew reading to many who would have otherwise struggled with the language. He made Jewish history live for a large number who might have thought of it as an ancient irrelevancy. He made the festivals an exciting experience for many whose home life was far from being governed by the Jewish calendar. He probably saved generations of young people from brushing their Jewishness aside and abandoning it. They all remember his foibles even if the details of his lessons have become vague and uncertain in their minds.

Born in 1890 to a pious family in Gateshead in the north of England, he moved to Sunderland as a small child. He gained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Durham University and began teaching. His life – and much of his subsequent teaching – was changed forever by his gallant military service as an officer in the 14th Durham Light Infantry in France in World War I. He was awarded the Military Cross (MC) and then a Bar to it, the equivalent of a second MC. Some even say that he was worthy of a Victoria Cross. He was not only brave but thoughtful. If he found a soldier asleep whilst on guard duty, Rothy would let the man sleep and take over his duty.

According to the British Jewry Book of Honour, the citation for his MC reads: “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. Although exhausted by illness he successfully led a daylight raid into the enemy trenches, inspiring everyone by his unexpected presence, and taking all his objectives with the greatest skill and gallantry. He has previously done very fine work of the same description.”[11]

The citation for the Bar to his MC reads: “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty when in command of a company which was heavily attacked three times. During the bombardment he walked along the top of the trench to reorganise the men. He was badly wounded, but continued to direct operations until unable to do so through loss of blood.”[12]

When exchanging reminiscences with one of his Sydney friends who fought (aged 18) in the Boer War, he used to say: “You won the Boer War and I won World War II.” It was of course a joke; he was not one to brag.

His decorations were given to NAJEX (the NSW Association of Jewish Ex-Service Men and Women) by his second wife, Olive, but somehow ended up in a shop in the United Kingdom that specialised in military memorabilia, and NAJEX did not succeed in re-acquiring them for the ex-service display at the Sydney Jewish Museum. As a teacher in the Jewish educational system in Sydney his pupils loved trying to distract him by asking him for army stories and he often complied. The evidence of his patriotism and exploits fitted well into the climate of thought in Australia of those interwar years and later.

Rothy’s stories were not limited to wartime subjects. He embellished all his teaching with reminiscences of the way Shabbat and the festivals were observed in his childhood. Even youngsters in other parts of Australia such as my childhood self in Melbourne read and enjoyed his stories in Ittoni (“My Newspaper”), produced by the New South Wales Board of Jewish Education and supplied to children in other states. One of the disappointments of my early days in Sydney was that Rothy was no longer alive. Meeting the great man in the flesh would have been an experience, though I did hear stories of “The Guv’nor” from Olive, who became a dear friend. After his war service Rothy taught for the London County Council in its secular schools. In 1924, after the death of the previous incumbent, MA Cohen, (who held office from 1897-1923), he came to Australia to be headmaster of the NSW Board of Jewish Education. He officially retired in 1957 but after an overseas trip returned to the Education Board teaching staff until his second retirement in 1964, when the Board named him Headmaster Emeritus in recognition of forty years of loyal service.

His work entailed not only teaching but also organising and supervising education throughout the community, applying to education the skills of strategy and tactics he had learned during the war. Finding teachers was a constant problem and Rothy constantly encouraged his best pupils to accept teaching responsibilities, which entailed providing training courses and teaching aids (often created from scratch by Rothy himself, generally in consultation with the incumbent chief minister of the Great Synagogue – first Rabbi Cohen, then Rabbi Levy, and then Rabbi Porush).

Those who attended his children’s service at the Great Synagogue were fascinated by the imaginative teaching aids he developed in regard to the Shabbat Scriptural readings. He trained his Bar-Mitzvah boys in the cantillation notes from yet further teaching aids, which enabled them to handle any given Torah portion and haftarah (the reading from the Prophets), not just the passages they needed for their own Bar-Mitzvah. Some veteran congregants of the Great Synagogue can still chant a haftarah on sight because of the effectiveness of Rothy’s teaching.

In theory Rothy’s supervisory responsibilities as headmaster remained the same over the years, but the task became more and more onerous and complex with the changes in the community. His first decade in office coincided with a period of accelerated geographical dispersal from the inner city, requiring new centres to be opened and staffed, right-of-entry classes to be established at new schools, and some of the older venues to be reduced or closed down altogether. Then came the Depression, when Jewish education was unable to hold its own financially against the stringencies affecting many families. Enrolments rose with the arrival of the refugees, but there was no increase in funding as communal facilities (notably the Australian Jewish Welfare Society) needed to be created to assist integration of the newcomers. It was a constant battle to maintain educational standards, and Rothy and the Education Board needed unceasing flexibility… and faith.

During the war the absence of men on active service affected their children’s schooling, religious as well as secular. The arrival of postwar immigrants meant that still further centres needed to be opened up, in many cases providing the basis for the establishment of a suburban congregation.

Throughout these years much of Rothy’s time was devoted to the Great Synagogue, which was still the largest congregation, the centre of the community. In the 1940s the Education Board appointed an additional headmaster in Rev Caesar Steinhof (Stanton), a German refugee, who concentrated on the management of synagogue Hebrew classes and brought new ideas to curriculum development, while Rothy devoted most of his energies to the Board’s other major area of activity, the right-of-entry classes at state primary and high schools. Stanton was particularly associated with the Central Synagogue whilst Rothy focussed on the Great.

Both were enterprising educators who tried to make up for the lack of textbooks and teaching aids by producing their own, though it was a time when the Education Board was financially strapped. Rothfield presented Jewish beliefs and practices in a 45-page booklet entitled An Outline of Jewish Religious Knowledge, produced for children in senior primary classes. The material, generally in note form, is an extension of duplicated notes, which the author had long been producing for teachers and pupils.

Stanton spearheaded a local version of a Hebrew textbook, Dan and Gad, by Ze’ev Neier, published before the war for use on the Continent. It follows a year’s experiences of Dan and Gad as they learn Hebrew phrases. Stanton did not alter the text but added a vocabulary and preface, indicating how skilfully the author had integrated the Land of Israel as well as Jewish religious life into the two boys’ daily lives. This book, aimed at pupils aged 8 to 10, was also used in other States. My own first acquaintance with spoken Hebrew was sentences from Dan and Gad such as Dan, red min hagader – “Dan, get down from the fence”. Presumably some of the children who used Dan and Gad eventually made Aliyah and found that their Hebrew textbook in Sydney laid some basic foundations for life in modern Israel.

Though both textbooks were introduced after the period to which this paper is dedicated, they reflect needs, which had already become evident before the war. The postwar spirit of reconstruction inspired these books as well as the innovative Ittoni, to which reference has already been made. The first Ittoni was published in 1949 and the magazine continued until financial considerations forced its closure in 1953. Edited by MH Cohen, son of Rothy’s immediate predecessor, it relied greatly on Rothy’s skill as a writer and his ability to seize and hold his pupils’ interest.

Despite the fact that he generally taught primary-aged classes, he had the expertise in Biblical Hebrew and its grammar to teach up to matriculation level, which was beyond most other teachers at the time with the exception of Rabbi Porush and some of the other ministers.

The establishment of Israel brought a number of new emphases to the Board’s work, and Israelis who sought teaching appointments in Sydney had to be judiciously integrated into the system, though it was not possible to employ everyone who announced: “I am Israelian – I will teach Hebrew!”

The Great Synagogue Journal paid tribute to Rothy in an article in July-August 1964 – probably written by David J Benjamin – which said: “As a teacher, besides wide learning and a deep love of Judaism, he has a number of rare gifts – enthusiasm, sincerity, humanity, humour and the ability to gain the confidence of the young. He never talks down to his pupils, and his approach is that of a friend rather than a superior. Countless pupils owe their religious knowledge and interest to his inspiration. By all these he is regarded with the warmest affection.”[13]

His Bar-Mitzvah boys had especial admiration for him, but if it was a Great Synagogue Bar-Mitzvah he did not stand on the bimah with the boy nor even sit in the Synagogue beside him. Because of disappointed hopes described in the next paragraph the most he would do – at least from the late 1930s to the early 1960s – would be to stand just inside the Synagogue door and then return to his children’s service elsewhere in the building. What he told some of the boys was that they should have learned their portion well enough to manage on their own.

He did come into the Synagogue and officiate from time to time – when the chazzan was away. He was a capable officiant, though he was not a trained professional musician. He trained cantors for several synagogues and endeavoured to spread a love for sacred music throughout the community. He expected that after the death in 1937 of Rev Marcus Einfeld, chazzan at the Great since 1909, he would be given the position, but the board thought otherwise and appointed Rev Aaron Kezelman, who held office until his retirement shortly before the 1964 arrival of Rev Isidor Gluck, with whom Rothy had a close and friendly relationship. Any annoyance which Rothy felt was with the Synagogue board, not with Kezelman personally.

Rothy was proud to claim that he had officiated and/or read the Torah in every synagogue in New South Wales. At the Great Synagogue he acted as chazzanic locum, conducted overflow services at the Maccabean Hall, and trained boys to conduct parts of the Sabbath and holyday services. He was not a great cantor with the sensational, dramatic passionate quality of the world-renowned chazzanim, but a representative of the Anglo-Jewish tradition as enshrined in The Voice of Prayer and Praise (the “Blue Book”) edited by Rabbi Cohen together with a London choirmaster, David M Davis. He was a fine exponent of Torah cantillation. Ba’alei K’ri’ah (Torah readers) need more than the ability to memorise the notes and understand the text. They need to be Hebrew scholars with an insight into the patterns of Hebrew grammar and linguistics, and this was second nature to Rothy.

As we have seen, he had his own methods of training Bar-Mitzvah boys in chanting their Torah portions and haftarot (prophetical readings). He had no time for mere rote learning, and other Bar-Mitzvah teachers were judged against his standard. With the support of the Education Board, Rothy emphasised the social side of the school community. As Maurice H (Harry) Kellerman writes in his history of the Board, Rothy “encouraged activities that gave pupils opportunities to work and play together as Jewish children, hence choirs and singing, dramatisation and plays, children’s Synagogue Services, camping, scouting, were fostered, and in all of these he was very successful”.[14]

Sport was not neglected. As a youth, Rothy was a good soccer player and “not too bad at cricket”, though he claimed no special sporting expertise and felt he had more enthusiasm than skill. In Britain he was sports master at the Norwood Orphanage and at Bermondsey Central School, and in his early days in Sydney he would take Great Synagogue boys to play football or cricket at Moore Park on a Sunday afternoon. He was highly supportive of GSY – Great Synagogue Youth – from its formation in the 1940s and trained officiants for its youth services. A further adjunct to formal education came with the arrival of Jewish scouting. Rothy was founding scoutmaster of the First Sydney Judean Troop in 1926. A second troop began in 1927, followed by a Wolf Cub pack and a Rover Scout troop. Scout camps were run on Jewish lines with Sabbath observance and kosher food. A Girl Guide company was inaugurated by Rothy’s first wife Anne, who, like her husband, was also a teacher.

From about 1930 onwards celebrations such as the demonstration Seder, Purim picnic and Sukkot party became exciting events for children and their families, and the regular children’s services introduced pupils to Sabbath and festival worship on a child-friendly level. Rothy was in his element and utilised the many educational possibilities of these occasions.

He and the Board wanted to provide advanced classes for high school students, and though worthwhile attempts were made in this direction by the rabbis together with the more scholarly teachers such as Rothy himself and Louis Joseph, who had collaborated with Aaron Blashki in producing a Chumash with Rashi’s commentary translated into English (see the first part of this series), it was always a struggle to attract and keep the senior students. Mid-week classes for the primary school age were never particularly successful, though the few children who did attend attained much higher levels than the Sunday-only pupils. At this stage the Board was still the major dispenser of Jewish education; the day school movement in its modern form only began in Sydney during World War II, and did not develop substantially until the 1970s.

In 1951 Rothy, by now a widower with two adult sons, married Olive Jacobs, a widow with a son and daughter. Olive had worked sporadically for the Education Board in the 1930s when her children were growing up. When they went overseas after Rothy’s first retirement in 1957, they met his former pupils all over the world. He died on 18 August 1968, aged 78, and Harry Kellerman paid tribute to him in an obituary in the September-October Great Synagogue Journal, praising his “fund of knowledge and… real love for his religion and its practices” as well as “his human qualities as a man”.

In a series on Jewish scholarship there may be room to question whether Rothy could be considered a scholar. That he was well-read and had considerable Jewish and general knowledge was obvious, and he certainly had the ability to find an apt text or explanation, but did it raise him to the level of a scholar?

The answer is suggested by a comment attributed to the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik at a time in his life when he put creative writing aside and turned anthologist. Bialik is said to have declared, borrowing the language of Kohelet chapter 3, that there was a time to create and a time to conserve. In that sense Rothy was less of a creator than a conserver. By means of his teaching he ensured that Jewish commitment and experience, and to some extent Jewish knowledge also, would be preserved in a community that was then very largely apathetic towards its treasures and heritage. If one can posit a distinction between pure and applied scholarship, Rothy was a master of the second category.

CONCLUSION

Great achievements often emanate from unexpected sources. Hardly anyone would have thought in the period before 1939 when Australian Jewry was an almost insignificant corner of the Jewish world, that high-quality books, institutions and personalities would emerge from the Antipodes. The material in this series of articles is evidence of the belief, lo alman yisra’el – “Israel is never entirely bereft”[15] – from far-off Australia. It must be remembered, too, that though these articles deal with the interwar era, there was Jewish scholarship here in an earlier period – and recent decades have seen solid development in the field.

ENDNOTES
1. I appreciate the assistance I have received from Helen Bersten, Joe Kensell, Clive Kessler, Gary Luke, Daniel Rossing and Andrew Samuel.
2. “Guest of Honour: RJ Rosenberg”, Great Synagogue Journal, May 1955.
3. “Dr Hertz in Sydney – Memories of 1921″ (author not named), Great Synagogue Journal, January 1952.
4. Hebrew Standard, 28 September 1906.
5. Avot 1:4.
6. Raymond Apple, “Jewish Scholarship, Part I“, AJHS Journal, vol. 19 part 4, 2010.
7. Naomi Kronenberg, “Clive Kessler: Some Biographical Reflections”, in Virginia Hooker & Norani Othman (Eds.), Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics, Essays presented to Clive S. Kessler, (ISEAS: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2003), pp.1-15, esp. pp.2-4.
8. See, for example, Great Synagogue Journal, January/February, 1947.
9. “The Synagogue and the Beth Hamidrash”, Great Synagogue Journal, September 1954.
10. I appreciate the assistance of some of Rothy’s former pupils, especially Wesley Browne, Joan and Sam Fisher, Joe Kensell, Rodney I Rosenblum and Antony D Robb.
11. “Abraham Rothfield”, Michael Adler (ed), British Jewry Book of Honour, 1914-1918, (London, Caxton Publishing Ltd, 1922), p.144.
12. Ibid.
13. Tribute to Abraham Rothfield, Great Synagogue Journal, 1964.
14. MH Kellerman, New South Wales Board of Jewish Education: History 1909-1979 with Background Summary 1863-1909, Sydney, NSW Board of Jewish Education, 1979, pp. 22-23.
15. Jeremiah, Ch 51, V 5. The literal translation is “Israel is not widowed”, reflecting a common Biblical metaphor of God as Israel’s “husband”.

This report sums up my stewardship of the office of Senior Rabbi to the Australian Defence Force over the past 18 years. I had only two predecessors – Rabbi Jacob Danglow, CMG OBE VD, Senior Jewish Chaplain for 20 years after a long chaplaincy career dating from 1908, and Rabbi Dr Alfred Fabian, OBE ED RFD, who was Senior Jewish Chaplain and then Senior Rabbi to the ADF for 26 years after prior service as an army reserve chaplain. When Rabbi Fabian became ill in 1988 I succeeded him in his Canberra and national responsibilities. I had been an army reserve chaplain for 15 years.

In Rabbi Fabian’s time Defence chaplaincy was totally re-organised. A Religious Advisory Committee to the Services was created, comprising five Christian clergy and a Jewish representative. All were to be non-uniformed but with the status of two-star generals. All were also to be equal in rank and role, with the chairmanship of the committee rotating amongst them. Committee responsibilities were to include oversight of chaplaincy work in the three services as well as providing advice to the Chief of the Defence Force on spiritual and ethical matters. This structure has worked well and has uniquely contributed towards inter-religious harmony. As the only non-Christian I found myself handling queries concerning all non-Christian faiths ranging from Aboriginal spirituality to Islam. Because I ended up as the longest-serving member of the committee I had two two-year terms as chairman. Often the issues on the agenda did not directly affect Jewish concerns and I was able to suggest a way forward to help the Christians. It was I, for instance, who found a formula for women to become chaplains in the Air Force. I also had the privilege of drafting the wording for some matters of record. Working with my RACS colleagues was one of the great experiences of my life.

In the army we have a handful of Jewish reserve chaplains: in navy and air force none. As a result, navy and air force matters have been handled directly by me with help from the army chaplains. In leaving my posting I record my thanks to Rabbi Fabian, as well as to Rabbis Edward Belfer, Mordechai Gutnick, Jeffrey Kamins, John Levi, Yossi Segelman and Ernest Wolff, MBE, and also Rabbis Meir Kluwgant and Moshe Serebryanski who give honorary assistance. My successor, Rabbi Ralph Genende, is certain to be a worthy Jewish presence at Defence Force headquarters. I express my appreciation to ECAJ and FAJEX (especially Wesley Browne) and the State ex-service bodies for their constant support.

People ask how many Jews there are in the Defence Force; no-one knows. Almost always the people who seek our help are not officially recorded as Jewish. We have no records at all of Jewish members of the reserve forces. We get data on the grapevine, including names of Jews who are posted overseas, but all we can usually do is to refer them to Christian chaplains and/or local Jewish communities, with the request that they keep in touch with us in Australia. The Christian chaplains are always helpful; amongst my proudest memories are the chaplaincy conferences which I have attended and addressed, thus reinforcing the links between chaplains of all faiths, and the opportunity of getting to know successive Chiefs of the Defence Force and the top echelons of the Defence community.

It would certainly have given pride of place to his work with children. He had begun his career as a teacher. After studying at the Yeshivah Etz Chaim in London he had come out to Australia at the age of 21 to be headmaster of the St Kilda Hebrew School, transferring two years later to the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation as assistant minister. He later became principal of the United Jewish Education Board, under whose auspices I received my early Hebrew education. In the classroom it was evident that he was a born teacher, able to put over a subject clearly and gifted with the ability to establish an immediate bond of friendship with his pupils. I well remember him joining in the fun at extra-mural activities like the annual Hebrew School picnic, the model Seder, the, Chanukah party and the rest, spreading human warmth everywhere.

His book would have dealt at length with his long period of war service. He enlisted at the outbreak of the Second World War and served in the Middle East, the north of Australia, New Guinea, the South-West Pacific and elsewhere for six-and-a-half years, ministering to Jewish servicemen of many nations with tremendous energy and zest. His tenacity was unrivalled. No obstacle could stand in the way of his making and keeping up contact with the Jewish servicemen and women. His popularity among the forces was unrivalled and he wore himself out in their service.

During the War he obtained semichah in the Holy Land. It was somehow fitting, for the love of Zion was always one of his burning passions. When others were wavering in the tense years preceding 1948, he was unequivocal in his advocacy of Zionism, and on this as on other subjects on which he felt deeply and strongly he was consistently outspoken, even though he knew his forceful candour would not always bring him popularity. Through his efforts, thousands of pounds of revenue were brought to Zionist causes. After the war he enrolled in the new Semitic Studies department at Melbourne University and eventually gained a Master’s degree for a pioneering thesis in the field of Australian Jewish history. He published several important works, the result of thorough research: a history of the Jews of Victoria in the nineteenth century, a history of New Zealand Jewry, and a monograph on the early Jewish settlers in Victoria and their problems. These were to be followed by a full history of Australian Jewry, but this he was not destined to complete. He left several unpublished works, including one in Hebrew on Moses Montefiore and several stories and short studies.

His “Diary of a Rabbi” would, I suppose, have had to be reticent concerning his and his wife’s many quiet acts of hospitality and kindness, but it would have been obvious that this was a man who enjoyed the company of others and was staunchly loyal to friends. Not only adult congregants, but especially young people, and I was one of them, came to him with a variety of problems and worries, and found in him a sympathetic listener and a shrewd guide.

Life was not easy for Rabbi Goldman. He had more than his share of bitter disappointments. He could not take the line of least resistance when he felt that justice and truth demanded that he speak out. He could not stand humbug, nor could he tolerate Jews who gave less than full-throated allegiance to their people in times of crisis, and certainly his 52 years covered some of the most critical in the whole of recorded Jewish history. All this embroiled him in communal controversy, and took an inexorable toll on his health.

If there is any consolation in the very early age at which he died, it is that he as a soldier would have thought it fitting to die with his boots on, in the midst of serving God and man. His strong, forceful personality and deep Jewish loyalty had served God and man well.

This article was originally published in 1978.

Jacob Danglow was born in London in 1880. Entering Jews’ College in the ’90′s, he had a brilliant scholastic career. He was president of the Jews’ College Union Society and introduced boxing into the College, knowing the importance of a healthy body to contain an active mind. He loved to describe his student days – how, for instance, he would go to College on a ha’penny horse-drawn bus, and the varied ways in which he had to make ends meet.

When the St Kilda Synagogue sent representatives to London in 1904 to find a Minister, the tall, dark and handsome Jacob Danglow was recommended to them by Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, and he arrived in Australia in September, 1905.

The first years of Danglow’s ministry showed the Melbourne community that a new force had come amongst them. He had the energy and the initiative to bring into being a number of important communal organisations, ranging from the Jewish Young People’s Association to the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha, and at the same time he continued his studies and took academic degrees at Melbourne University.

The First World War broke out while Rabbi and Mrs Danglow were on their way back to Australia from holiday in England; later in the war he returned to Europe as Jewish chaplain to the Australian forces. (He had held a commission in the Australian army since 1908.) His senior chaplain wrote of him: “Somebody, referring to his handsome appearance and intellectual ability, jokingly referred to him as ‘the Rolls-Royce parson’, but I have known him on occasion travel in a Ford and frequently ride hard on shanks’ pony in his peregrinations for the purpose of helping the boys.”

As the years went by, Danglow became more and more firmly entrenched in the love of his congregation and of the community. He was in the best sense of the word an ambassador for Jewry. It was said of him, “He was regarded by many people as the man in whose hands could be placed the entire responsibility, if necessary, for the Jewish community in military, vice-regal, church, rotarian, masonic, political and ordinary civic affairs. For he was liked and respected everywhere”.

Even that is not the whole story. His other public activities included work for deaf children, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, hospitals and many other institutions. In 1929 he was awarded the VD decoration, in 1950 the OBE and in 1956 the CMG.

In 1942 he was made Senior Hebrew Chaplain, and during the Second World War, though he was over 60, he went on active service. In post-War years he carried out several special missions to Japan and elsewhere for Australian army headquarters, and on his periodic visits to the UK he was treated as a VJP by the War Office.

After his death in 1962, the Australian chaplains-general stated in a resolution of condolence: “In each generation there are those who stand out in any company: choice spirits whose gifts of heart and mind attract confidence, trust and deep affection. Jacob Danglow was such a man… We salute him as a good soldier”.

It was in his Synagogue, so representative of the Anglo-Jewish tradition, that I was brought up. Week by week I listened to his addresses from the pulpit, and I must have gained from him many things which influenced my approach to my task and my faith, for sometimes I smile at finding myself doing things the way I remember Rabbi Danglow doing them when I was a boy. I certainly recall how he was almost the only member of the rabbinical profession who, unsoured by bitterness or frustration, wholeheartedly encouraged me to enter the Ministry.

A man of wisdom and tolerance, he was never a headline-seeker, but at times he felt impelled to state a forceful (though still tactfully-expressed) point of view. On many occasions he served as the spokesman of Jewry to the outside world when the continuance of Shechitah was at stake. Within the Jewish community his views sometimes occasioned controversy. For many years, for instance, he was an opponent of political Zionism and of the Jewish day school movement, but eventually there came to him a deeper understanding of the outlook of those whom he had opposed, and he was able to admit with all dignity that he had been wrong.

As a preacher, his manner of speaking was as eloquent as his words themselves: for his quiet, gentlemanly sincerity showed clearly that here was a man who spoke the truth in his heart and with his lips; he spoke a polished English in rounded sentences that told of an ordered mind and a power of clear thinking. Many years ago, Col. J Waley-Cohen wrote in the “Jewish Chronicle” that Rabbi Danglow had succeeded more nearly in reaching the ideal for a minister “than almost any other Jewish Minister I have had the pleasure of meeting”.

He was a personal friend of many of the great of his day, and at the same time extended his wisdom, patience and humour to the most humble of his fellow-men. He came to be regarded as a synthesis of all that was best in Jewish and in British culture.

He might disagree with another man’s views, but would never stoop to petty politics or fanatic bigotry. He was proud to admit that more than once he held the cross before a dying Christian soldier when no other chaplain was available.

It was fitting that when he died he was given a full military funeral, and that amongst the many tributes to his memory, Sir Robert Menzies stated: “I knew Rabbi Danglow very well and admired him very much. He made an outstanding contribution to our community life”.

This article was originally published in 1978.

Yet there are some who remain unmoved by Anzac Day. Young people, especially, are impatient with this day and its events. They rarely have time for the retrospect and reminiscence, the exchange of anecdote and the stirring of memories, which come instinctively on days such as this. To them such activities are embarrassing if not rather ridiculous. They of course did not live through the experiences which Anzac Day commemorates and they cannot be expected to feel with their fathers’ hearts or reflect with their fathers’ minds. But their impatience with Anzac Day it not just a reflection of the generation gap. Their criticism goes deeper.

They know, as we do, that war is no social excursion embarked upon light-heartedly and light-headedly. War is the most serious, the most tragic, the most shameful invention of the human race. It is only when men come sadly and reluctantly to the conclusion that there is no other alternative, that they contemplate war, with trembling awareness of its potential consequences, in order to defend hallowed principles, cherished standards, and inalienable human rights. But sensible men realise that winning a war is not in itself adequate. It can become a ghastly mockery if it is not followed by building a new and better society.

The Biblical Noah faced a challenge that was remarkably similar. He was charged with rebuilding civilisation after a period of devastation. But what happened? His good intentions died almost at their very birth. He drank himself into a stupor and forgot he had a task to do.

Young people accuse us too of having failed in the responsibility of reconstructing our world in the postwar decades. Not a day has passed in all those years without a threat, great or small, to the principles of individual conscience, human brotherhood, social justice and universal freedom. But so often we have retreated, as did Noah, into a stupor of selfishness, and have failed to raise our voices and to rouse others to exercise compassion, conscience and courage. If our youthful critics are right, it would appear that, facing a post-war future in circumstances of unique opportunity, we have, with moral negligence, let the opportunity lightly slip through our fingers and because of our default, allowed evil to spread almost unchecked.

No wonder a contemporary writer has said:
“Everything modern man has touched has turned to ashes; every achievement of his has been transformed before his very eyes into a demonic force of destruction. His marvels of organisation have taken form in organised despotism, organised slavery, organised mass-murder; his visions of permanent peace, in a succession of world wars; his fervent hopes of freedom, in universal regimentation and totalitarian dictatorship; his dreams of brotherhood and social justice, in the reign of terror, naked and unashamed…”

What should man have been doing, what should he have begun to achieve? He should have been striving to construct a very different picture, in which: “Everything modern man has touched has turned to blessing; everything that could bring destruction has been turned to peaceful ends. His marvels of organisation have ensured that all men equally enjoy rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; his visions of permanent peace that wars are banished from the minds of men; his fervent hopes of freedom, that freedom of speech and worship, freedom from fear and want, prevail everywhere; his dreams of brotherhood and social justice, that tolerance and understanding are universal.”

This is still far from the reality of the human situation. We have achieved something but not nearly enough. We have wasted many a crucial opportunity. But time has not yet run out. With effort, much can yet be achieved. We who live safely must learn to feel for others. When blood is spilt and innocent lives are menaced and destroyed, when some regimes discriminate against and victimise those who seek only to claim basic human rights, when acts of defiant violence are carried out by lawless terrorists, we must stir ourselves and learn to respond with concern and moral courage. We must overcome the tendency to harden our hearts so that we cannot feel the pain of those who suffer. We must overcome the tendency to want to sit back and make no protest other than a squeak and a silent prayer that the scourge may not come near our part of the world.

We must learn to build up human relationships so strongly and firmly that war becomes unthinkable. And you achieve this by developing understanding, trust and concern between nations; between every group in society; and on the most basic level of all, in daily life, between one individual and his fellow.

Anzac Day reminds us that men who go through war together develop a fierce stubborn sense of comradeship, and a good-humoured easy tolerance of others. A comrade is a comrade no matter what his background, his religion or his politics. In peacetime we need to recapture this sense of comradeship. We need to learn to say, in the moving words found in the books of Jewish ethical wisdom:

“I am a creature of God, and my neighbour is also His creature.
My work is in the city, and his is in the field.
I rise early to my work, and he rises early to his.
As he cannot excel in my work, so I cannot excel in his work.
But perhaps you say: I do great things, but he does small things?
We have learnt that it matters not that a man does much or little,
If only he directs his heart to Heaven.”

What is Anzac Day – to be-hollow pageantry, platitudinous piety, and army anecdotage, or honest soul-searching, firm dedication, and courageous acceptance of challenge?

Are we to say that the moral courage of the past, the willing readiness even to sacrifice, and the ability to dream dreams and see visions, have vanished with the passing of the years?

Are we to say that our nerve has deserted us, and we would prefer to be like Noah and forget our responsibility to our children and our children’s children?

Are we to say that the motto of Anzac Day has become “Lest we remember” – and that we now neither wish to, or can, remember the good intentions with which we once thought we would reconstruct man and his world?

Cannot this Anzac Day redirect us to the path of life, that we may live, and our world’ may live, and everything we touch may turn to blessing?