Jewish Settlement in Australia

Settlers with Jewish religious or cultural backgrounds have been part of Terra Australia since the First Fleet landed in 1788. As early as 1844 the first synagogue was formed in York Street, Sydney using rented space. Since that time, Jewish Australians have become a significant part of multicultural Australia, developing institutions and contributing in ordinary and extraordinary ways. In The Aunt’s Mirrors, Dr Damien Freeman draws together disparate strands to build a picture of his extended family that goes back to the mid 1850s when the first of these ancestors began arriving in Victoria and New South Wales. For Emeritus Professor Suzanne Rutland OAM, with her ground-breaking work Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, the history of Jewish settlement in Australia is a vast canvas. On Tuesday 24 April 2018, to gather together some of the threads of this great story, Damien Freeman and Suzanne Rutland addressed The Sydney Institute.

JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN AUSTRALIA

 SUZANNE D. RUTLAND

Damien’s book The Aunt’s Mirrors and his anecdotes of Australian discrimination against Jews and Catholics (not to talk about our indigenous Australians!) are part of the millennia-old story of the Jewish diaspora.

The word “diaspora” means dispersion. Jews have been dispersed throughout the globe, both voluntarily through trading networks and involuntarily through expulsions and persecution centuries; this was long before the words internationalism, globalisation and transnationalism became the vogue.

In writing about the Jewish diaspora, I have argued that there have been three major Jewish diaspora centres. The first was in Babylonia (Mizrakhim); the second was in Spain (Sephardim); and the last was in Eastern Europe, centred in Poland (Ashkenazim), which ended in 1942, when the fires of Auschwitz started burning.  There are hardly any Jews left in each of these three great centres – today’s Jewish world is concentrated in Israel (44%) and the United States (42%).

Damien Freeman’s memoir is focused mainly on the exodus from the third diaspora – Poland – but one branch is thought to have stemmed from the conversos, the forced converts amongst Sephardi Jews who continued to secretly practise their Judaism, particularly in Portugal. Some escaped from Portugal to England and by the 1590s there was a substantial group of Crypto-Jews living in London.

However, for the Western free world, as Damien’s memoir highlights, it was the East European Jewish exodus that was most impactful. Jews suffered in partitioned Poland from the late eighteenth century onwards. Then, in 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of five radical students, one of whom was Jewish. His successor, Alexander III, exploited anti-Jewish sentiment to provide an outlet for Russian unrest. The tsar introduced anti-Jewish legislation through the May Laws of 1882, with forced expulsions in the Russian part of Poland, known as the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and he encouraged pogroms, or violent attacks on the Jews.

After 1881 those who could escape Eastern Europe did. Indeed, over two million migrated to the United States, the “goldene medina” in the period from 1880 to 1924, when restrictive quotas were introduced. In the same period, the British Jewish population increased four-fold, with London’s population growing from 46,000 to 180,000 until the 1905 Aliens Act was introduced, stopping the flow. Canada also received substantial numbers of East European Jewish migrants, while 40,000 migrated to South Africa, largely from the Baltic countries – they were known as the “Litvaks”. Fewer came to Australia in that period. It was just too far and one had to travel by sailing boat for a longer period of time than by the steamship route from Hamburg to Ellis Island, New York.

In my book, Edge of the Diaspora, I quote from the experiences of one of these victims, John Sackville, illustrating the brutality he had experienced during one pogrom attack in his village near Bialystok in Russian Poland as described my his son:

“They breathed down my neck,” Father said.. “I was just a boy you know, but to them I was a little Jew and they let me have it. They kicked me and thrashed me with leather thongs fixed to a heavy piece of lead.”

And he should know, for by dodging the blows he felt the lead part penetrating his back. His father took him to the Bialystok hospital where they removed it. To this day, John carries the scar of his encounters with the Cossacks…”

John Sackville became a leading retailer in Melbourne, and his family have made significant contributions to Australian life, both within both the general and the Jewish communities, with Justice Ronald Sackville in Sydney being part of that tradition.

In some cases, the migration of family members from Eastern Europe started earlier than the 1880s, due both to seeking a better financial future and persecution. As Damien expresses it, in relation to Polish Jewish migration both during the gold rush era of the 1805s and 1860s and later:

… there was also a good livelihood to be made in servicing the needs of the gold diggers, and, more generally those who were cultivating the hinterland of the early colonial centres.

It was the combination of these mercantile opportunities and political stability that attracted Jews (pp.26-7).

Damien asks: “Why is this migration different from all other migrations? I cannot pretend the departure of these families was a great loss for Poland or Polish Jewry or their arrival a significant boon for Australia” (p.28).

Yet, for some of those Polish Jewish migrants who came in this period, it was a boon for Australia. Easily the two best known names in Australian history are Sir John Monash and Sir Isaac Issacs. Monash’s parents originated in the Prussian part of Poland – he went on to become the commander-in-chief of the Australian Imperial Force in 1918 during World War I. Sir Isaac Isaacs, whose parents also originated from Poland, was appointed as the first Australian born Governor-General in 1930.

As Damien notes, his family did not reach such august heights. However, the stories he tells going back in time for each of his family’s maternal grandparents and previous generations in Australia, shine a light onto the experiences and values common to that wave of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. Many initially settled in country areas, so that in the second half of the nineteenth century 40 per cent of Australian Jews lived outside the large metropolitan centres of Sydney and Melbourne, and this was also true of Damien’s family, the different branches settling initially in areas as dispersed as Grafton in NSW and Beechwood in Victoria.

Grafton had a small but active Jewish community, which, as described in the book, at one stage planned to build its own synagogue – a dream that did not eventuate. As with Damien’s family, these Jews were not farmers, but rather started their lives as hawkers and then became small shopkeepers in these country towns, often making substantial contributions to the development of local institutions. Enjoying the freedom and equality that Australia offered, they wanted to give back to their new homeland.

However, if they wanted to maintain a Jewish lifestyle, in the end they moved back to the larger urban centres, in the case of Damien’s family that was to Sydney. This was a typical settlement pattern for those who stayed within the fold. Others intermarried and assimilated, losing their Jewish connections – a theme touched on when Damien writes about how Esther Dora saved the family’s candle sticks during a pogrom and later brought them to Australia. His grandmother, Joan, attached great significance to them but, Damien notes, “It was a source of sadness to her that, although the candlesticks remained in the family, they were owned by descendants who had left the faith and no longer made shabbas of a Friday night.” (pp.61-62).  This was also true of many of the Jewish migrants of this period, when there was a high rate not only of acculturation and integration but of intermarriage, the barometer of assimilation.

In some ways, the memoir underestimates the roles Damien’s family played in their contributions to Sydney’s Jewish life. Great grandfather Joshua Brukarz, contributed to the founding of Central Synagogue in Surry Hills in 1912 – today the largest Jewish community in Sydney. Here we also see the move of Jews from the city centre, spreading from Surry Hills, Newtown and Paddington, to the eastern suburbs. Indeed, while Bankstown was the first suburban community to build its own synagogue in 1913, this area was soon overshadowed by the move to Bondi. Today there is no community left in Bankstown – whilst 10 per cent of Sydney Jews live in Bondi, still the thriving centre of the city’s Jewish life.

I have written about three other members of Damien’s family. For me Abraham Marcus Lowenthal, known as A.M., stands out. Abraham was an insurance broker who was elected as president of the Maccabean Hall in 1926 – today the location of the Sydney Jewish Museum. It was opened officially in November 1923 by Monash. Initially, the Hall was plagued by considerable debt, but under Loewenthal’s leadership this debt was reduced from £12,000, a huge amount in those days, to £5,000. He was also a staunch supporter of and regular advertiser in the main Sydney Jewish newspaper of the day, the Hebrew Standard which today is the Australian Jewish News.

In Triumph of the Jewish Spirit, I have also written about Damien’s grandfather, Noel Lasker’s contributions to the Jewish Communal Appeal, founded in 1967 and today the financial mainstay of Sydney Jewry. Finally, I have referred to the author and literary personality, Enid Baumberg’s contributions. As we have heard tonight, their lives reflected the saying of the great Jewish Sage, Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Sayings of the Fathers, Chapter 1:14)

In the last chapters of his memoir, Damien writes about the importance of family in terms of providing meaning to life. This section movingly describes the role recipes play in the maintenance of family tradition. He writes:

It is a matter of participating in a form of life in which they participated and which was handed down to them by those who came to Australia from Poland, and which they might hand down to their children and grandchildren, not just as something they can eat, but as something that embodies a form of life that their family has held sacred.(p.147)

These words ring true for me with my mother’s recipes not only for what we call kneilach, but for her gefilte fish, which I always make for Passover and the Jewish New Year.

Thus, anyone reading this book cannot help but reflect on their own family’s trajectory. For me, that has meant reflecting on my own parents’ trajectory – where I am so aware of the huge gaps in our knowledge. My parents were the lucky ones, arriving on Australian shores in January 1939. They belong to what I have described as the watershed years of Australian Jewry, with the arrival of between 31,000 and 34,000 Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors in the years immediately before and then after the war. The Australian Jewish community almost tripled in size from 23,000 in 1933 to 59,000 in 1961. They transformed every aspect of Jewish life here.

However, I don’t have any family mementos from my grandparents and I only know for certain the place of death of one of my blood grandparents, my grandfather Solomon Perlman. He was murdered in concentration camp of Plazsow, Krakow, before it was liquidated, and his death is represented by a single gravestone for all those murdered in that camp. I learnt this from my uncle Monek. He survived Mauthausen and after the war was assisted by my parents to come to Australia, as were the other Perlman survivors, including two uncles saved by Oscar Schindler. The only memorabilia which we possess from what was an extended Jewish family in Poland before the war are the photos in my mother’s album, apparently collected after her marriage to my father, Naftali Benjamin Perlman, in 1933.

So, Damien is lucky that through the reflection of his Aunt Weasle’s mirrors, he was able to document a key period of Jewish history – reflecting the impact of that wave of Eastern European Jews, mainly from Poland, who escaped Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the catastrophe, the Holocaust.

Sadly, the undercurrent of Australian antisemitism, which portrayed Polish Jews as backward and undesirable, prevented more Jews, including my own family, from arriving in this heaven called Australia in the late 1930s and limited the number of Jewish Holocaust survivors who came here after the war. But that is another story.