Reviewed by Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple
Emeritus Rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney

One of the best known Jewish photos of the 20th century shows a little boy of eight wearing a beret and a grin. The boy is Lulek, the son of a Polish rabbi, Moshe Chaim Lau. Against all odds, Lulek survived the Holocaust under the protection of his older brother Naphtali (Tulek), who brought him to mandatory Palestine and saw him rise to greatness as Israel’s chief rabbi.

Lulek had little enough to grin about in 1945 – no parents, no home, no idea of what the future would bring. He could not read or write. The Bible says, “And the child was a child”. Lulek was a little boy who had hardly had a chance to be a child. To this day he is scared of trains, boots and dogs, and of anyone screaming “Schnell! Faster!”

There was a Russian prisoner called Feodor who made earmuffs for the little boy in the camps, stole potatoes and made soup for him. Not till 2008 did Rabbi Lau discover that Feodor’s two daughters were still alive in Russia; the rabbi arranged for them to visit him in Israel and he nominated the Russian as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Rabbi Lau is now one of the greatest exemplars of the long roll-call of Jewish genius. Those who knew his father testify that his son shares his amazing gift of eloquence. Australia has vivid memories of Rabbi Lau’s spellbinding addresses in its midst and can hardly believe that his mastery of English came out of his efforts as an adult to learn the language. In Israel of course he is admired as a lucid, inspiring expositor in Hebrew.

The harrowing wartime story of Lulek cannot be encapsulated in a few sentences for the purpose of a review. One has to read the book, sometimes over and over again, and to stop trying to hold the tears back. The early days in Eretz Yisra’el also cannot be encapsulated, though this time the rabbi has re-evoked his eight-year-old grin as he recalls learning to be a child and recounts episodes that are not without their droll humour.

Rabbi Lau disarmingly assures us that the book is not an autobiography and does not attempt to document his distinguished rabbinical career, starting in a poor district of Tel Aviv and reaching its inexorable culmination as Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, chairman of Yad VaShem, and holder of the Israel Prize and the French Legion of Honour.

It is not only Shimon Peres and Elie Wiesel, distinguished friends who have written forewords to the book, who have met and been influenced by the author. His path has crossed those of monarchs, popes and presidents, and played a sometimes crucial role in the events of modern history. Israelis – even those who have no time for God, the Bible or Jewish observance – secretly or openly admit that they respect Judaism more because of Rav Lau.

Lulek has come home.

Everyone should read his book.

Interior of the former Bayswater Synagogue

You will forgive me on this occasion for being personal in much of what I say. This is a day of very mixed feelings for me. Five years I have spent here – not a long time by any means, in an old congregation dating back a century and more. I came as a young man, and I leave scarcely less young. Certainly, most of what I know of the practical work of the Ministry I learnt here, and for that I shall always be grateful to Bayswater, and my wife and I have felt privileged to grow into your midst, to join in your joys and share your sorrows, and to develop with many of you friendships based on mutual regard – friendships which we hope to maintain and strengthen.

I have stood here conscious that it is a pulpit made great by distinguished predecesors from Adler and Gollancz onwards. Even so I believe I too have made my humble contribution to Bayswater and am not ashamed of it. I was brought up in a synagogue where demanding standards were expected of the minister, and I have tried to place those standards before me at all times. I believe that if the minister is to be successful as a spiritual leader he must never be a mere functionary bribed to leave the congregation’s consciences unruffled and undisturbed. He must create work for himself and maintain the self-confidence, tenacity, sense of humour and patience to pursue what he believes in and never make the mistake of being deflected by those who belittle, carp and denigrate, who take the petty view. He must try to take no notice of those who speak contemptuously of him and deliberately misinterpret his work – and I cannot pretend that there are none such in Bayswater.

Some people are satisfied to have a synagogue to pray in – once or twice a year; to gossip about – continually; and to bury them – eventually. That is a short-sighted and bankrupt concept of the synagogue. The historic concept is that of a Bet Am, a “house of the people”, which brings together people of all kinds, of different backgrounds, of diverse interests, all united by their common Jewishness, to have Jewish experiences and be inspired intellectually and emotionally to carry the values and teachings of Judaism into daily life.

That is the concept of the synagogue that I believe in. And that is the type of synagogue that I have tried to mould in Bayswater. All those pleasant and arduous activities of the past few years may have seemed spontaneous but were deliberately planned towards that end. The daily shiur in the midst of the fellowship of the morning minyan, the Oneg Shabbat on summer Sabbath afternoons, the Tuesday evening meetings in private houses, the synagogue magazine, the GCE Class, the Breakfast Club, the social and cultural evenings, the festival parties for children, the interfaith activities, the communal seder, the Monday evening Hebrew classes for adults – all made this old building ring with life and joy, and I want to thank all those who worked with me in organising this.

I love the historic spirit of Bayswater but I had to try to make this a place of living faith, not a mere sleepy museum of Jewish antiquities. I am not convinced the attempt has fully succeeded. The highlight and central occasion of recent years was undoubtedly the centenary celebration of 1963. I will not conceal my disappointment that the occasion made little difference and did not inspire that renewal and rededication which we so ardently hoped for. The faithful few remained faithful and enthusiastic; but amongst the many there spread still further a horrible, corrosive apathy. And then unfounded rumours began to spread that we were closing down. Rumours can be cruel and no doubt they too exacted a toll on the morale of the congregation.

Geography has been against Bayswater, also, not only in recent years, but for generations. This building is not well sited for present day needs and this has often contributed to a mood of depression.

But with all its drawbacks, there is not another synagogue anywhere which can rival it for atmosphere once you step inside and pause to meditate and pray. More, this building is now one of the last physical links with the London Jewish scene of a century ago. But soon it will be no more. The bulldozers are creeping closer and closer.* Chichester Place, with its mellow charm and historic memories will have vanished… I hope a special service will be held in farewell to this building, and that those formerly associated with the congregation, ministers, chazanim, and members, as well as the wider community, will be given the opportunity of taking part.

One question is in all our minds. Will the transplanting bring new life? Will the traditions of Bayswater blossom forth again?

The answer depends on whether we understand tradition correctly. Superficially, synagogue tradition means the mode of service that has long been carried on in a particular synagogue. This kind of tradition has its value, and it can and must be respected in the new Bayswater, for it enables worshippers to feel at home in the service and discourages impudent tempering with sacred things to tailor them to every passing whim of an ignorant individual. But if this is all that tradition means, it may cease to be a virtue and may become a convenient cloak for staleness, obstinacy, impatience of new ideas, and worst of all, it may be clung to stubbornly whilst it is becoming daily more and more irrelevant to the real business of religious faith and spiritual needs.

Somewhere there has to be a more lively idea of what faith really requires and how it may be interpreted and presented in the age we live in. This is the kind of tradition, the deeper kind, which is much more inspiring and relevant – the commitment to an ideal and belief that that ideal can bring meaning and challenge into personal and national life.

Our sidra expresses it perfectly: the will to holiness. In all that we do in the synagogue and beyond we should ask ourselves, does this conduce to holiness?

“You shall be holy people unto Me,” says God, “for I, the Lord, am holy.” How are we to imitate God and achieve holiness? “For I have separated you from the peoples, to be Mine,” goes on our text – holiness is the ability to separate, to know how to discriminate between false gods and true gods, false values and true values, false ideals and true ideals. Surely an ability which is vitally necessary today. This is a mass age; man follows unthinkingly the habits and values of the crowd, and his distinctions are blurred. There is no longer a clear line between right and wrong.

In the Sabbath night Havdalah we bless God for dividing between four opposites:

“Between holy and profane.” We too need to know what is holy and what is not yet holy. We need to cultivate a sense of reverence and respect – for thoughts, for people, for ideas, for values, even for places and activities which have the power to inspire. Everything is dragged down to the level of the gutter today – marriage and the family are old-fashioned concepts, just as much as honesty and integrity; even human life has become so cynically cheap that the exploitation and mass destruction of it is not greatly deplored.

“Between light and darkness.” What will bring light to the world, and what will darken it? There too we must learn to discriminate. We must know where to draw the line between justice and injustice, between peace and co-existence, between tolerance and contempt, between human relations and racial discrimination, between what is ethical and what is not, between what will bring honour to him that does it and that which will bring him only shame.

“Between Israel and the nations.” We are Jews, and we are not the same as the other peoples of the world. There is a difference between us, a difference based on history and on deep conviction. It helps no-one to slink away and try to erase his Jewishness or to eradicate all that is distinctive in Jewish tradition and teaching. And particularly when rapprochement between Jew and Christian is in the air, let us learn once and for all that mutual understanding is only possible between those who have a strong and intelligent grounding in their own faith and are not eternal adolescents, who still don’t know where they belong.

“Between the Sabbath day and the six working days.” The Sabbath day stands for all those time-hallowed values of prayer, study and observance in love of the mitzvot of the Torah. But these we so often tend to neglect and spurn and we turn the six working days into seven days barren of every smallest spiritual influence. Without the Sabbath there is no Judaism, without Torah there is no Judaism, without God there is no Judaism. Without Judaism, we Jews live as twilight people, never knowing or tasting the joy of spiritual illumination, without ever being aware of the daylight that God and Torah can shed on the life and the problems of man.

“For the commandment is a lamp, and the Torah is a light.” True religion sheds light and guides the perplexed out of the twilight of uncertainty and indecision towards confidence and holiness.

This is what the motivation of the historic Bayswater always was, as from its walls radiated the illumination of Jewish faith, Jewish knowledge and Jewish loyalty. That is what will guarantee the effectiveness of the new Bayswater too – if only it will stand for these things, and teach, preach, practise, live and exemplify them, and if all personal differences and aggrandisement will cease and all will be united in the service of high and holy aims. Then the eternal light, the Ner Tamid, which has burnt here for a century will be rekindled in more than physical form, and then can there be justified the prayer with which I farewell you, my congregation, today:

“When shall thy light break forth as the morning,
and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee -
the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.”
(Isaiah 58:8)

God bless you all, and keep you in life and health. To each of you I say in the words of David, king of Israel: “All hail! and peace – shalom - be both unto thee and be to thy house, and unto all that thou hast.”

* In 1965, the Bayswater Synagogue in Chichester Place, Harrow Road, London W2, was acquired by the Greater London Council and demolished to make way for a motorway.

“Yesterday, Rabbi Raymond Apple met the Pope. Here he explains why the word ‘Israel’ was not mentioned.”

Yesterday’s meeting in Sydney between the Pope and Jewish community leaders is significant mostly because it happened. Centuries of Church contempt for Jews and Judaism have given way to an increasing desire on both sides to be on speaking terms.

The Catholic Church has firmly repudiated anti-Semitism, proclaimed that “The Jews should not be represented as rejected by God or accursed”, and acknowledged that its own roots are in the Hebrew Bible. In Australia, as elsewhere, cordial contacts between Catholic and Jewish leaders and laymen have built up, and there is solid cooperation between the two communities on many levels.

But there remains a major bone of contention – the strange Vatican attitude to Israel. At yesterday’s meeting between Jewish leaders and the Pope the word “Israel” did not occur once in the Pope’s carefully prepared statement. He did speak about the Holocaust and its trauma, was eloquent about the Catholic and Jewish concern for human rights, the sanctity of life and religious education, but there was not a word about the historic Jewish attachment to the Holy Land and the almost messianic sense of fulfilment that Jews everywhere feel to see Biblical prophecy come true.

The first modern attempt to gain Vatican support for the Jews’ return to Zion occurred in 1904. Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, was received in that year by Pope Pius X. As recorded in Herzl’s diaries, the Pope said: “We are unable to favour the movement. We cannot prevent the Jews going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the Head of the Church I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish People.”

Since then there have been three major Church proclamations concerning Catholic-Jewish relations – at 10-year intervals, in 1965, 1975 and 1985. Each in its own way has been a massive step forward in the development of Church thinking about the Jews and Judaism. Increasingly, the Church found itself able to view Judaism in positive terms and say so; echoing these formulations, the Pope in Sydney yesterday spoke of God’s “irrevocable” covenant with Abraham.

But not until 1985 did these documents really begin to recognise Jews and Judaism in terms of Jewish self-understanding, without constricting them into the straitjacket of Christian preconceived notions. The earlier formulations failed to give adequate recognition to the reality that Jewish identity is more than theological and it has elements of community and peoplehood and a historic attachment to the old-new homeland, that cannot be denied if it is a real and not a partly imaginary Jewish people with whom understanding is on the agenda.

Jews and Judaism always understood history as a having a goal – the messianic redemption of mankind, towards which the restoration of the Land and the rebuilding of Jerusalem were preconditions.

It may be that the Church viewed with some uneasiness the idea of Jews being restored to Israel. The theory that Jews were destined, as a mark of Divine disapproval, to go for ever wandering until they accepted Jesus, seemed to be dislocated by the facts of history which saw modern Jewry very much alive, finally coming back and rebuilding the Holy Land in literal fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.

There are enough references in recent statements by Pope John Paul II to “State of Israel” to make nonsense of the suggestion that the Vatican pretends Israel does not exist. Indeed, on Tuesday morning in Canberra the Pope asked the Ambassador of Israel to convey greetings to the Government and people of Israel, and in a de facto sense there are already diplomatic connections between the two States.

The recognition of Israel is there on so many levels already – what is wanting is the coup de grace. If the Pope was not disposed to make any such official announcement in Sydney yesterday, this is no ground for surprise. Rome or Jerusalem – indeed, Rome and Jerusalem simultaneously – are far more appropriate for this historic act. There can be no doubt that it will come. The world is watching: in a symbolic sense, the official rapprochement between Rome and Jerusalem would truly be the Pope’s longest journey and dramatically encourage the coming of peace.

Rabbi Apple is Senior Minister of the Great Synagogue, Sydney.

When we began our weekly OzTorah emails years ago we did not realise how popular they would become, not only in Australia but worldwide. The pattern has remained the same – divrei Torah on the weekly sidra and the festivals as they fall, plus an “Ask the Rabbi” feature dealing with a huge range of Jewish and global issues – but the readership and response have grown amazingly.

The material is syndicated and used in journals as diverse as “The Australian Jewish News” and “Torah Tidbits”, the weekly publication of the Israel Center of the American Orthodox Union. Rabbis in various communities quote us from the pulpit and in their synagogue bulletins, not always with acknowledgement. One rabbi even lost his job because his president complained that he had no ideas of his own and had to use mine!

People constantly asked when I was going to make a book out of selections from OzTorah – and finally I have done it: over 300 pages of “Ask the Rabbi” answers listed from A (“Abortion”) to Z (“Zionism”).

I think it’s a good piece of writing, but then I’m biased. I believe it’s a moral voice in an uncertain society, bringing Jewish wisdom to bear on dozens of issues of current concern.

Readers often ask, “Are they real questions you deal with in OzTorah, or do you make them up?” The answer is, “Some of each”. But all are real questions in the sense that they show what has exercised thinking minds over these two decades – climate change, cloning, politics, whistleblowing and many more.

None of the answers are pontifications from a papal chair. They arise out of real problems and though I do my best to apply my Jewish and general knowledge and experience, I am still agonising over many issues and am not always able to find definitive answers.

How good I am as a spiritual and ethical guide, others will have to judge. (A Christian journalist once told me he wished I was an archbishop!) Readers of “Let’s Ask the Rabbi” will decide for themselves whether I have brought them help, comfort and inspiration.

To obtain the book:
The Book Depository (free worldwide shipping)
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
AuthorHouse

Sir:

No-one can object to your Easter Saturday issue (April 2) carrying an article on the trial of Jesus. But when responsible scholarship on the subject is available, it is surprising that you reprint material by Gordon Thomas that is careless, unobjective and tendentious, and that you apparently endorse his provocative views in your introductory note.

One could of course treat, and dismiss, Thomas as a novelist, short on scholarship and long on adjectives and imagination. But the subject is far too delicate for that easy way out. It is an insult to Christianity for him to portray its origins with the use of material which scholars have largely repudiated. It is offensive to Jews to regurgitate slogans and stereotypes which have been condemned by the Vatican and all the Protestant churches in clear terms rejecting Jewish culpability for the crucifixion of Jesus. It is a grave disservice to the cause of inter-religious and inter-community harmony to stir up again the old exploded prejudices that made oceans of innocent blood flow.

The only time in his whole article that Thomas quotes a source he gets it wrong. The tractate Pesahim does not record a Jewish custom of releasing a prisoner at Passover time. There is no evidence that such a custom existed. Even if it did, Pilate would not have dared to release Barabbas, who seems to have been a political prisoner. Nor indeed is modern scholarship satisfied to paint Pilate as a compassionate official who would really have preferred to let Jesus go, or to regard Jesus’ fellow-Jews as vicious and brutalized. The stories were mostly written after the event and the facts were recast to accommodate the prejudices of a later age.

The vast literature of ancient Jewish law totally rules out the possibility of judges assaulting an accused person, instituting proceedings without witnesses, and deciding in advance on a show trial that would be a travesty of all the principles of justice.

The most we can say is that Jesus’ interrogation was not a formal trial by a regular court of law, but an encounter with an ad-hoc political body (the term Sanhedrin can be used in this sense too). Probably the high priest, responsible to the Romans for the good behavior of the populace, regarded Jesus as a dangerous insurrectionist and, with a council of other collaborators with Rome, officially declared him as such. Neither the regular courts, the official religious authorities, nor the populace had any hand in events.

But even if the high priest and his associates were determined to denounce Jesus, there is no evidence of their manhandling him with the brutality which Thomas delights to describe, nor would Jewish ethics have permitted them to go totally beserk in the last stages before the crucifixion at all.

The tragedy of your Easter Saturday article is that, compared with the real scholars, Gordon Thomas has not helped us at all to find any of the answers to the Roman procurator’s own words – “’What is truth?’ asked jesting Pilate”.

(Rabbi) Raymond Apple
The Great Synagogue,
Castlereagh Street,
Sydney

“Jews and Zion”

Sir:

Some of the recent contributors to your letters page have touched on the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

The historical fact is that Zionism has always been an intrinsic dimension of Judaism. The Bible clearly accorded Zion what James Parkes, in his “Whose Land – A History of the Peoples of Palestine”, called “an all-pervading religious centrality”.

Even Jews who lived in other lands looked up to Zion for their inspiration, and yearned and dreamed and prayed and worked for the Biblically foretold restoration to the Holy Land.

Every Jew feels for Israel, and some of us have faith enough to see it as the beginning of messianic visions of the ages.

This does not mean to say that Israel has yet succeeded in being a completely model society, but it is a healthy sign that, as a recent visit reminded me, Israelis are frequently aroused to internal debate about national policies and purposes – a manifestation of democracy which the surrounding nations would do well to emulate.

(Rabbi) Raymond Apple
Senior Minister,
The Great Synagogue,
Castlereagh Street,
Sydney

Madam:

September marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, which left such a trail of havoc and horror all over Europe, and traumatically influenced the whole of modern history.

For Jews, World War II has come to be known by the additional name of the Holocaust because of the searing suffering caused by the Nazis’ brutal smashing of millions of lives, and the wanton destruction of peaceful communities whose only wish was to serve God unmolested in the way that their conscience dictated.

Yet many years have now passed. Even the most decent and fair-minded of people might surely become impatient and ask: “Surely this Holocaust occurred a long time ago; why can’t you forgive and forget and free yourselves from your obsession with it all?”

The answer is that the experience has left such a permanent mark on the Jewish psyche, such a searing pain in the Jewish soul, that to suggest it be erased is to ask the impossible, the unthinkable.

Never has there been such a catastrophe. Never has there been such a deliberate, cold-blooded campaign to eradicate an entire people – without exception, escape, exoneration, immunity, compassion, appeal or redress.

Countless families are still inconsolably grief-stricken and bereft. Many of the survivors still suffer the nightmares; with some the pain is getting worse and not better.

Even those fortunate enough to be less personally involved continue to be outraged at the jungle-like ferocity that brought to a sudden end over a thousand years of proud, dignified Jewish history and culture on the continent of Europe, wiping scholars, sages and saints, and great centres of piety and learning, off the face of the earth.

“Jewish history and consciousness,” declares Abba Eban, “will be dominated for many generations by the traumatic memories of the Holocaust. No people in history has undergone an experience of such violence and depth.

“Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality; a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall; a mystic belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews grown up under its shadow.”

If you ask me, I readily admit to having an obsession with the Holocaust. And that obsession – someone inelegantly called it “Holocaustomania” – has hold of Jews everywhere and will not let them go.

But the Holocaust is not just a Jewish concern. Its dimensions are universal.

The Very Reverend James Parks Morton of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, in New York, said: “Auschwitz was the single most important event of the 20th century, paradigm of the advanced, intellectual, industrial, technological society gone to hell.”

Never was there such a confrontation between the two diametrically opposed world views; as Jacob Talman expresses it: “Between morality and paganism; between the sanctity of life and the cult of warfare; between the equality of all men and the supremacy of the selected few; between the search for truth and the discharge of instinctive impulses; between the vision of a genuine society of equals and the prospect of a society of masters lording it over slaves.”

A review of Walter Laquer’s book, The Terrible Secret, posed this question: “From where, if not from the Holocaust, a premonition of the death rattle of the thermonuclear age, can come the testimony and warning that man is capable of the worst as he is capable of the best, that through madness or blindness, he may transform the planet into a crematorium?”

The Holocaust starkly confronts our generation with the paradigm of what can happen if man does not see in his fellow the face of a brother man; if, instead of using the new means of communication as media for dialogue, man blatantly or subliminally peddles lies and distorts the truth; if man would rather see the whole world destroyed than rejoice to see other people peacefully inhabit their own little corner in the sun…

That is why human beings everywhere should develop an obsession with the Holocaust if they value their future. That is why there should not be less Holocaustomania but more. That is why, as it has been said: “We are compelled to ask not only ourselves, but those around us, ‘What do you think of the Holocaust?’ In our answers will be found the ultimate fate of the human race.”

Rabbi Raymond Apple
Senior Minister,
The Great Synagogue,
Sydney

A. I’m going to answer the question in a rather personal way. Let me confess that whether people liked it or not, I weighed in to countless national debates during the course of my rabbinic career.

Should society allow abortion? Should Australia keep the Queen? Should politicians take training courses? Should the unemployed have to do voluntary work in order to get the dole? Should the media peddle smut? Should sports people pray to God for success? Should homosexuals parade in the streets? Should immigration be controlled?

These and a sheaf of other issues got me involved. When I took up a position about Aboriginal welfare in Australia one of my congregation refused to come to shul unless I kept quiet. Of course some of the politicians and others whose vested interests I attacked said that clergy should stick to teaching the Bible. I retorted that this is precisely what the Bible is about – justice, peace and truth. This is precisely what the Biblical prophets spoke and wrote about, and they constantly risked becoming ostracised and even imprisoned because they would not hold their tongues.

When people said I should stick to Jewish issues and not risk creating antisemitism, I said everything was a Jewish issue. When film stars and swimmers made public statements on education and the economy I objected that they had no special qualifications in these areas – but when it comes to the quality of society this is precisely where the clergy do have special qualifications. Clergy are right to refuse to be muzzled.

See also Rabbi Apple’s article, “Religion & Politics“.

30 years on when he was Governor General and I was senior rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney, I told him the story; he grinned and said, “I hope I may be forgiven!”

He became Vice-Chancellor of New England and Queensland Universities and succeeded in stabilising both campuses at a time of student unrest. His was an inspired choice as Governor-General after the difficulties of the Sir John Kerr period and he brought what he called “A Touch of Healing” to the office.

He came to several important events at the Great Synagogue during his incumbency and impressed and charmed us all. He and Lady Cowen hosted Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, the president of the ECAJ, the shul president and me and our wives at a luncheon at Government House after Lady Cowen had worked out the kashrut with my wife.

He did a fine job as Governor-General, though we suspected that he was sometimes a little bored after the turbulence of the university campus. He returned to academic life with a few years in Oxford and then returned to Australia as an elder statesman (at a function in Perth when he was 69 he told me, “Next year I reach the age of statutory senility!”).

Australian Jewry was immensely proud of him as our leading citizen and we appreciated his constant constructive support for Israel.

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.