Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the Americans on 1 May 1945. The ‘camp’, as my mother always referred to it, is disturbingly close to the centre of Munich. You can hail a tram with that destination written on the front and be whisked away to a pleasant suburb. The camp is still there, a common tourist destination.

My mother didn’t return home to where my father’s family hail from in the south-west of the Netherlands until the middle of 1946. She walked most of the way, carrying a cardboard suitcase given to her by the Americans. There was nothing in the suitcase, but it stayed with her for the rest of her life. On that long walk home, mother developed a lasting gratitude to the US troops who had given her lifts, food, and chocolate.

Primo Levi said: ‘At Auschwitz I became a Jew.’² At Dachau, my mother misplaced her religion and her sanity, and never truly regained either. Our historic city of Middelburg on the island of Walcheren had been destroyed in the same blitzkrieg that had engulfed Rotterdam. Of the two long-established communities of Sephardim and Ashkenazim, nothing remained except two cemeteries and street names such as Jodengang (Jews’ Alley). One of my earliest memories is of visiting the cemetery in the Jodengang with my mother and throwing stones at sarcophagi. These days, cats lie on the graves sunning themselves on the bones of Sephardim expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century.

My mother was sent to a sanatorium several times during my childhood. Whenever she was ‘away’,  I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. They were part of a remnant community of Sephardi Jews who lived in a no man’s land on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium in a tiny village that also sheltered Lutherans. During the war, Germans whizzed through the village, noted the Lutherans and didn’t realise there were Jews tilling the soil of their small holdings as they had done for some hundreds of years.

Mother’s parents prayed many times during the day – on rising, going to bed, before and after meals. I recall sitting in the middle of a circle of adults who were praying on the beach. They stood, heads bowed, protecting me with their legs. The wind blowing off the North Sea was so strong they were afraid I would be blown away. When the adults had finished praying they built a bonfire from driftwood and roasted potatoes or chestnuts and fish of some kind.

My paternal grandparents were Calvinists, a religion which was bound up with class and aristocracy and the consuming grief of losing three sons to the war. I, Elisabeth Miriam Esther, was the first of both families to be born after the war – and the last.

Dachau Concentration Camp memorial site of the former barracks with a watchtower in the background, 2014 (photograph by Jörg Padberg)

Having survived a near-death experience in 2012, I went looking for a way to express a deeper involvement with Judaism. But not too much. After all, I hadn’t followed the traditional paths of learning Hebrew or growing up within a congregation. During my childhood on our wind-swept island, there were three registered Jews: my mother, her close friend Anne Frank (no relation to the girl in Amsterdam), and me. My maternal grandparents were the only Jews I knew who practised their religion. Without a rabbi and little contact with the outside world, their faith had become beautiful, pious, and idiosyncratic.

I am a progressive Jew. I demand of Judaism that women and men are recognised equally in the life of a synagogue as clergy, office bearers, and lay leaders. I want to sit where I want in the shul and not to be segregated. As with men, I want to be able to wear a kippah (headgear) and a tallit (prayer shawl), if I so choose. Inclusiveness, and the recognition that human sexuality and gender identification have many forms of expression, is for me just part of life, and I expect it to be regarded thus in the synagogue.

I need to feel free to regard the Torah (the Hebrew Bible) as the evolutionary thought of men and women over a period of a thousand years and not the literal word of God. Accordingly, I look for an interpretation of biblical tract and Jewish law that is modern, relevant and willing to embrace change.

The World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), headquartered in Jerusalem, is the umbrella organisation representing Progressive, Reform, Liberal, and Reconstructionist Jews. It does not represent the Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox streams. With a membership of two million, the WUPJ is the largest Jewish religious movement in the world.

The United States has the largest share of Progressive (known as Reform) Jews in the world with a membership of 1.8 million and more than 900 congregations. Interestingly, eighty-five per cent of America’s six million Jews identify as progressive in attitude. One in five, or twenty-two percent of all American Jews describe themselves as secular or cultural Jews.³

 

TuBishvat. Malmsbury Botanic Gardens, February 2017

I live with my husband on the edge of a hamlet (population 147) in the high country of Victoria’s north-east two hours from the nearest Melbourne synagogue. Last year, I found Kehillat S’dot Zahav (KSZ), the Goldfields Community, a synagogue without walls, centred in the Bendigo area. TuBishvat is a minor feast on the Jewish calendar to celebrate nature. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘birthday of trees’. As an interfaith initiative, people identifying with Judaism; Islam; the Presbyterian, Catholic, and Uniting churches have been invited to attend. Under a hundred-year-old oak, on a late summer day, we follow Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black from the Leo Baeck Centre (LBC) in East Kew as he leads us through the service. He notes the places where the three Abrahamic faiths coincide and accompanies us on a battered guitar as we sing.

Keren-Black, who adapted Pete Tobias’s A Judaism for the Twenty-First Century (2007) for the Southern hemisphere, is the Australasian editor of the WUPJ edition of the siddur, the prayer book known as the Mishkan T’filah⁴ used in Progressive synagogues. He is also the founder of several organisations that have an ecological and environmental emphasis within a Judaic framework. Generally acknowledged as one of the most progressive rabbinical figures in Australia – too much so for some – Keren-Black is a deeply spiritual man. I introduce myself and tell him I’m a Dutch Jew. ‘Sephardi,’ he says knowingly. I wonder how he knows.

Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black at a Stop Adani vigil (photograph by Julian Meehan)

At the kiddush (social meal) after the service, Rabbi Keren-Black asks me where I attend shul. I tell him that for the moment KSZ is enough. KSZ struggles to meet eight times a year. ‘That won’t be enough for you in six months,’ he predicts. A few weeks later, I decide to attend a service at LBC, convinced that I don’t need another synagogue in my life. All I need to do is waltz in and out of shuls here and there to fulfil my need to become a slightly more observant Jew. Six months later, almost to the day, I became a member of the Leo Baeck shul and attend services when I can. My husband, who is not Jewish, loves going with me – ‘for the music’.

 

Sunday, 25 June 2017

A startling item from The Times of Israel Daily Edition headed ‘Bowing to ultra-Orthodox Pressure’ arrives in my inbox. After years of discussions with interested parties⁵, the Israeli parliament has suspended a 2016 government-initiated compromise to establish a pluralistic prayer pavilion at the Kotel, or Western Wall, the potent reminder of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Since the Six Day War of 1967, effective control of the Kotel has been the preserve of the ultra-Orthodox. The parliament’s decision to freeze the Kotel deal has coincided with a High Court of Justice deadline for the state to respond to petitions on its failure to implement the 2016 agreement.

North of Robinson’s Arch, south of the arch, at the arch; these are all possible areas where leaders of diaspora Jewry had sought a place for mixed gender worship, where men and women could wear the tallit and yarmulkes together and chant from a Torah scroll.⁶

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s creaky coalition government rules with the support of parties who represent the ultra-Orthodox point of view, despite the statistical and incontrovertible fact that the Haredi are a minority in Israel. The government has bowed to pressure from the ultra-Orthodox parties in this matter. Anat Hoffman, chair of Women of the Wall, and executive director of the Israel Religious Action Centre (IRAC), both organisations affiliated with the Israeli Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ), responded: ‘The fact that the prime minister, who himself initiated and led the [2016] agreement, is retreating from that historic decision is shameful to the government and the women ministers who were exposed using their vote against women.’⁷ Hoffman, a fearless critic of the Netanyahu government, was arrested in 2012 for praying with a Torah scroll at the Western Wall. Also on 25 June, cabinet ministers voted to advance a bill granting the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate a de facto monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel – that is, the power to decide who is and who is not Jewish. This affects Jews from countries where they are no longer recognised, exercising what is known as the ‘right of return’ to Israel.

Condemnation from within Israel and around the world was swift. Rabbi Gilad Kariv, president of the IMPJ noted: ‘The government has acceded to the demands of the ultra-Orthodox parties and delegitimised the government decision that was passed in 2016.’⁸

Women of the Wall reading from the Torah at Robinson's Arch (Women of the Wall / Wikimedia Commons)

The powerful Union of Reform Judaism (URJ) of North America is headed by its charismatic president, Rabbi Rick Jacobs. He has the ear of Netanyahu and visits with Mahmoud Abbas. The relationship between the URJ and the Israeli Reform/Progressive Movement is close, providing a viable alternative for Jewish life and worship beyond the strictures of ultra-Orthodoxy. In a Jewish Telegraph Agency report on 28 June, Rabbi Jacobs expressed the fear that these bills could in time affect the validity of conversions throughout the Jewish world and further erode laws to do with the right of return.

Rabbi Elyse Frishman, editor of the Mishkan T’filah, said on 5 July:

Last week, as I joined with a contingent from Women of the Wall to pray and sing at the Kotel to celebrate Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (the beginning of the Hebrew month of Tummuz), Jewish fundamentalists – men and women – screamed and blew whistles to drown out our sweet, joyful song and prayer. In months past, we had been kicked and punched by these men and women.⁹

On 10 July the Chief Rabbinate of Israel responded to widespread condemnation by blacklisting 160 rabbis around the world. The list included three Australians: Rabbi Aron Moss (Chabad – Orthodox), Rabbi Ralph Genende (Modern Orthodox), and Rabbi Fred Morgan, Movement Rabbi of the Union of Progressive Judaism in Australasia. I interviewed Rabbi Morgan the day after the blacklist made headlines around the world, and congratulated him on being so honoured.

Rabbi Morgan, ‘Rabbi Fred’ to many, is a former senior rabbi of Temple Beth Israel, the largest progressive congregation in Melbourne, a man who has devoted his life to promoting a Judaism that is both accessible and modern. An urbane New Yorker, he was ordained at the Leo Baeck College in the United Kingdom and held a pulpit in Surrey for fourteen years. Rabbi Morgan is a respected figure within the community. As a progressive rabbi, he has no dealings with the Israeli chief Rabbinate.

Another name on that risible list caught my eye: Rabbi Menno ten Brink of the Liberaal Joodse Gemeente (Liberal Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam). Dutch Jewry paid a heavy price during the war. Before the war, the Netherlands had around 170,000 Dutch Jews and an unknown number of Jewish refugees. Three quarters perished during the war. Postwar migration to Palestine and a high incidence of suicide greatly reduced the remaining population.

In the seventy years since the war, Dutch Jewish figures have recovered to 29,000. There are now 3,700 progressive (Liberaal) Jews spread over ten congregations. Rabbi ten Brink leads the largest congregation. He is also the dean of the Levisson Institute, a rabbinical college closely allied to the Leo Baeck College in the United Kingdom.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the American URJ, was not blacklisted, but several deceased rabbis were. No female rabbis made it to the Chief Rabbinate’s blacklist. The ultra-Orthodox do not recognise the possibility of female rabbis.

One ultra-Orthodox rabbi, in an interview with The Times of Israel, articulated why his community are so opposed to the non-Orthodox strands of Judaism. Nachum Eisenstein, chief rabbi of eastern Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Ma’alot Dafna neighbourhood believes progressive Judaism: ‘threatens to undermine the survival of the Jewish people’. He added: ‘Who gave you, the Reform [progressives], the authority to make up a new religion?’¹⁰

On the same day I met with Rabbi Fred Morgan, I had afternoon tea with novelist Andrea Goldsmith. She asked me if I thought Judaism might be on the brink of a schism as great as the split that affected Christianity in the sixteenth century. Several months later, that question remains pertinent and unanswered.

 

The Jewish religion has been developing for well over three millennia; predating Christianity by at least 1,000 years and Islam by 1,500. None of the polytheist religions present at the time of the early Israelites survive. The adoption of a monotheistic belief system is the most radical step taken by any civilisation in the ancient world. There is no exact verifiable date or moment when the Israelites, the people we first meet in the Torah, became Jews. The term possibly arose from the Roman word Judea. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, suggests that the Torah evolved over a thousand years, in tandem with the people who came to be known as Jews. In that sense, Jews have always been progressive, forward-looking but with constant glances to the past. They had to be to survive various dispersions; the Babylonian exile, the Roman diaspora, expulsion from England in 1290 and the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s, and waves of anti-Semitism that continue to the present day.

One Dutch Jew, descended from ‘conversos’ – Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal – shook the Jewish world. Born in Amsterdam in 1632, Baruch de Spinoza, also known Benedictus Spinoza or more simply as Spinoza, was a contemporary of Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt’s House in JodenBreeStraat (Jewish wide street) was around the corner from the Portuguese Synagogue (the Esnoga) and the Spinoza family home.

For the Jews invited to the Netherlands following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, finding themselves in a country without a monarch or sultan, ruled by a princely family of stadholders answerable to a republic comprised of seven squabbling Calvinist provinces prepared to guarantee the Jews religious freedom, must have been heady stuff. Over a period of eighty years, from 1568 to 1648, an era called the Opstand (uprising), the Dutch threw out the Spanish masters of the Low Countries and established the republic. They themselves became colonisers and inaugurated the Dutch Golden Age.

Spinoza, whose Sephardic family had arrived in Amsterdam around 1620, was considered brilliant from an early age. He came under the influence of Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel from the Portuguese Synagogue, who knew Rembrandt intimately. Manasseh established the first Hebrew printing press in the Netherlands. He noticed inconsistencies while printing the Hebrew Bible, which he communicated to the jurist and biblical scholar Hugo Grotius, and doubtless to his brilliant pupil, Spinoza.

From the age of twenty, Spinoza began associating with radical free thinkers. He considered what we mean when we use the term ‘God’ and questioned the divine origin of the Torah. Three years later, while Manasseh was away negotiating with Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England, the Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Spinoza for heresy.

Spinoza spent the rest of his life outside Amsterdam; he worked as a lens grinder and became a noted philosopher. Seeing clearly is a metaphor that crops up again and again in his writings. Spinoza harnessed mathematical calculations for the grinding of high-quality spectacle lenses and telescopes and to prove the strength of his philosophical propositions. ‘I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly set down.’¹¹

Spinoza did not reject God and was not an atheist. But he did reject the notion that the Torah was divinely revealed. Consider these statements from Spinoza’s greatest work, Ethics:¹²

God I understand to be a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence. God acts merely according to his own laws, and is compelled by no one. He who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so he understands himself and his emotions.

The man who emerges in Ethics has struggled with his beliefs. He offers asides for those who are confused. ‘Proceed gently with me and form no judgment concerning these things until [you] have read all.’ Spinoza pokes fun at Descartes, with whom he often disagreed, and laughed at his own austere life. Until his death at forty-four, Spinoza studied endlessly to determine the nature of the Jewish God. Nineteenth-century pioneers of Progressive Judaism such as Rabbi Abraham Geiger in Germany and theologian Kaufmann Kohler (Germany and America) acknowledged that the systematic critical investigation of the Hebrew Bible began with Spinoza. Modern Jewish writers such as Amos Oz (Israel) and Bernard-Henri Levy¹³ in France are anxious to accommodate Spinoza. In their book Jews and Words (2012) Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger assert: ‘Baruch Spinoza [says] out loud that the biblical texts are fully and fallibly historical ... contain mistakes and contradictions, and should be read with a scientific eye, with a philologist’s magnifying glass.’

If Spinoza provided the fuse for a Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), a German Jew, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), lit the match. Born in Prussia, Mendelssohn is credited with encouraging Jews to look beyond the streets surrounding the synagogues and to engage with secular society. The Jews of his milieu spoke Yiddish, had enough Hebrew to partake of synagogue life, but did not usually speak German. Largely self-taught, conversant with Spinoza’s works, Mendelssohn translated the Torah into German written in Hebrew letters to help Jews learn the vernacular language and to better understand the Bible. He used his wealth as a textile merchant to campaign for the emancipation of the Jews and opened the gates to a flowering of nineteenth-century Jewish/German culture.

 

Seesen, Lower Saxony, Germany, 1810

A line of rabbis, Christian ministers, political dignitaries, congregants, and the curious walk into the sanctuary of a new synagogue accompanied by an adult choir singing hymns in German and Hebrew while an organ plays in the background. There is no requirement for women and men to sit separately. In the pulpit stands the philanthropist who has provided the money for this building; he has previously established an egalitarian, religiously pluralistic boarding school for Jewish and Christian children. Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) has a message: ‘On all sides enlightenment opens up new areas for religious development. Why should we Jews be left behind?’

That seminal moment in Seesen occurred when the Napoleonic era still had a few years left to run. Like Mendelssohn, Napoleon had encouraged the Jews of Europe to emerge from the ghettos. With our modern memories still clouded by the Holocaust, the sheer vibrancy of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Germany is poignant and tragic for Jew and Gentile alike. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, were both influenced by the German–Jewish enlightenment.

The theologian, scholar, and rabbi Leo Baeck came to prominence toward the end of this period. Baeck was born in 1873 in the German province of Posen (now Poland). The subject of his doctorate was Spinoza’s first impact on Germany. Well into the Nazi period, Baeck still taught at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin and attracted other precocious talents, such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, who went on to influence American Judaism.

As president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (1933–38), Rabbi Baeck was the most powerful advocate for Jews. In 1939 Baeck became the second president of the World Union of Progressive Judaism, then headquartered in London. Baeck was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 and became the titular head of the Council of Elders (Judenrat).

The Theresienstadt period of Baeck’s life has attracted controversy, notably from Hannah Arendt, who accused Baeck of cooperating with the Nazis by withholding the truth of the extermination facilities from the community. Baeck believed that living in the expectation of death by gassing would make both living and dying harder to bear. He was supported in this view by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a significant figure when I was studying clinical psychology in the 1970s and 80s. His famous postwar book, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), wherein he posited that even in the most inhumane, absurd situations human beings can survive if they locate a tiny spark of meaning, was based on research he conducted at Theresienstadt. Personally, I found that Frankl’s therapeutic method known as logotherapy didn’t work for the veterans I dealt with. On the contrary, in my experience those who feel powerless, not in charge of their destiny, are more likely to commit suicide.

There is a postscript to the Baeck–Frankl story. Until 1991 the first female rabbi in the world was thought to have been the American Sally Priesand, who was ordained in 1972 at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. In 1991 a researcher discovered a cache of documents deposited in the Berlin archives in the 1940s. The documents changed the historical account. They included a certificate of rabbinical ordination which belonged to Regina Jonas (1902–44). A Berliner and a qualified teacher, Jonas enrolled in the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the academic seminary for liberal rabbis and educators, where Rabbi Baeck taught. She graduated in 1930, having written a treatise entitled, ‘Can Women Serve as Rabbis?’ Leo Baeck refused her ordination, citing possible differences with the German Orthodox Rabbinate, which he did not wish to antagonise. Jonas was not ordained until 1935, just after the Nazi Nuremberg Laws revoked her rights as a Jew. She was ordained privately by the liberal rabbi of Frankfurt am Main.

Jonas was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. In the Nazi’s model ghetto, the museum for the doomed Jewish race, Jonas worked with Frankl, the psychiatrist in charge of ‘psychic hygiene’. He assigned her to comfort the traumatised passengers arriving by train and to keep suicide watch in the psychic hygiene ward. Baeck encouraged her to give lectures on Judaism. In 1944 Rabbi Jonas and her mother were sent to Auschwitz and murdered upon arrival. Frankl spent the last months of the war at Dachau in the hard labour section. After the war, neither Leo Baeck or Viktor Frankl ever mentioned Regina Jonas. The postwar years were crowded with ghosts and the living dead who were unspeakably traumatised. Somehow, Regina Jonas slipped from history for half a century. As a former intelligence officer and clinical psychologist, I believe there is more to know and to find about Rabbi Regina Jonas.

 

According the 2016 census report, 91,022 Jews call Australia home, 6,000 fewer than in 2011. The average age of Australian Jews is sixty-nine. The Union of Progressive Judaism in Australasia (UPJ) has a membership of 12,000.

We Progressives are a small yet influential group within a declining cohort. All the more amazing and wonderful that there are so many female rabbis serving across the twenty-seven congregations affiliated with the UPJ.

Nicole Roberts is the first senior female rabbi in Australasia. She was appointed to Sydney’s North Shore Temple Emmanuel in March 2017. NSTE, as the congregation is known, is in Chatswood. I interviewed Rabbi Roberts in April. Rabbi Fred Morgan also happened to be there. Built in the 1970s, the synagogue, set behind gates and security fencing on a quiet street, belongs to the brutalist style of architecture. The two rabbis, both New Yorkers, met me in a rundown building at the edge of the site.

Rabbi Roberts – petite, reflective, sometimes intense – is a graduate of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her family was not observant apart from attending synagogue during the High Holy Days and for life-cycle events such as Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Roberts graduated from Vanderbilt with degrees in Anthropo logy and a Masters of Accountancy. Marriage to a non-Jew who chose to become Jewish changed both partners. In their search for a satisfying spiritual life, Roberts and her husband visited many synagogues in the Nashville area and established the Nashville Jewish Organisation for Young Adults (NJOY). Then Roberts decided to pursue rabbinical studies.

At Hebrew Union College, Roberts encountered Rabbi Lawrence (Larry) Hoffman, a scholar of liturgy, gifted speaker, and prolific author. A visionary, he dared to imagine what synagogue life might be like in the future. Hoffman was seeking promising rabbinical talent and prepared to think creatively about religious practice. Nicole Roberts was awarded a valuable Tisch Fellowship, given to the most outstanding candidates. She remains connected to Hoffman. Indeed, two of his recent books include essays from Rabbi Roberts.

Larry Hoffman may well be the Spinoza of our age. In a recent work, All the World: Universalism, Particularism and the High Holy Days (2014), this questioning, pragmatic rabbi contends that when he looks around a synagogue at High Holy Day time, when Jews are most likely to attend, he sees people who have little Hebrew and don’t really know what’s going on. He is keen to explain, to embrace, to accept reality, and to do something about it.

The day I visited NSTE was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The forbidding exterior of the synagogue hides a gem: the sanctuary. The windows are set high to prevent distraction, the space is oval-shaped to heighten inclusivity, the acute acoustic picks up the slightest whisper. First, girls and boys read vignettes about what life was like for Jewish youngsters in Nazi times. Then a man, born in 1939, spoke about his wartime experiences. His Polish family escaped incarceration in a concentration camp by making their way to Siberia – exchanging one sort of prison for another. When the family returned to their town, they found they were the only survivors. The gentleman came to Australia in the 1950s, worked hard, married a Jewish woman, and had a family. But he carried a constant burden. He had never learnt Hebrew, had never had a Bar Mitzvah ceremony, and always felt embarrassed when he went to shul, believing that he wasn’t a proper Jew. On his seventieth birthday, the man’s children sent their parents to Europe and Israel. He visited the village of his childhood. At the Kotel, the man was handed an English transliteration from the Hebrew. He spoke the words from the Torah assigned to him, and became Bar Mitzvah. He described his delight when he and his wife were raised up in chairs above the heads of the crowd so that they could come close to the wall.

After his affecting speech, everyone present with a personal connection to the Holocaust was invited to come to the bimah to witness the opening of the Ark, the niche where the Torah scrolls are kept. I considered remaining in my seat. I was not part of this congregation. I had never taken part in Holocaust remembrance events. My husband urged me to go up. For the first time in my life, I stood with others to bear witness. The survivor and I were the oldest of the group by many decades – before and after bookends of the Shoah.

 

My parents and I arrived in Melbourne in December 1959 at the tail end of the postwar migration boom. We hadn’t yet heard the term ‘Holocaust’.  I still meet people, Jews and non-Jews, who date their awareness of the Nazi Final Solution to the Eichmann trial of 1961.

Horrible, banal, little Adolf Eichmann had managed to hide himself in Argentina after the war. At his trial he claimed that he was just ‘following orders’ when all along he had been the architect of the ghettoes and the master plan to exterminate Europe’s Jewry. His face, his voice, the glass booth that kept him safe from possible assassins, dominated television broadcasts during 1961. My father was still alive then. I think it was the first time he became aware of the extent of the death toll. (We owe David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, a considerable debt; he insisted that the Eichmann trial be televised, providing the cathartic moment that allowed survivors to find a voice. Eichmann was found guilty, hanged, and cremated, his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean.)

An Italian Jew of Sephardic descent was one of the earliest voices to emerge from the Holocaust. Primo Levis’s If This Is a Man was first published in Italy in 1947 and initially sold in modest numbers. In 1958 there was a new edition followed by English, French, and German translations. Levi (1919–87) writes in the preface:

It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, because of the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it allowed noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals. ¹⁴

Irony, cool rage, and incisive prose pick apart the horror with the skill of a scientist and the qualities of a sublime humanist and troubled human being. In another work, The Truce (1963), there is humour as Levi recounts his adventures after Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. To those individuals who constantly asked him if forgiveness was possible, he said as late as 1986, one year before his suicide: ‘Indiscriminate forgiveness, as some have asked of me, is not acceptable to me.’

 

We had no idea when we arrived in Melbourne that Australia had a Jewish history dating back to European settlement. Between 1788 and 1852, approximately one thousand Jewish convicts were transported; there was also a trickle of free settlers. For Jews, a burial plot usually precedes the building of a synagogue. In 1817 a Jewish burial society managed to have set aside a section of the Sydney general cemetery.¹⁵ An example of a burial society preceding the erection of a synagogue may be seen at Goulburn. The cemetery was dedicated in 1848, when Goulburn had the third largest Jewish population in Australia. The synagogue was never built.

Rabbi John Levi, Australia’s first native-born rabbi, has written many works concerning the early Jewish story of this country. The culmination of all this scholarship was the mammoth These Are the Names: Jewish lives in Australia 1788–1850 (2006), an exhaustive trawl through scanty transportation records. Depending on the available records some entries are a brief paragraph, others several pages. Here is one example: ‘Nathan, Miriam b. London, 1825–1882, 1840 (arrived); Free. Single; 17 children ... married Solomon Benjamin in Sydney on 11 August 1841 and set up her household in Melbourne.’ John Levi tells us ‘She was the great great grandmother of the author of this book.’¹⁶

When we came to Australia, it was easy to think that most of the Jews we encountered were postwar migrants and refugees. The first intimation of an earlier different history came at MacRobertson Girls’ High School in the 1960s. One of our texts was Alien Son (1952), by Judah Waten; his daughter Alice, a brilliant violinist, was at the school. Once he came to speak to us. I don’t remember much of what he said, other than that he was a proud migrant – a Russian bear of a man with a deep voice. His book describes the life of Jewish migrants who arrived before World War I. The tug of war between alternating desires to fit in and at the same time to remember where you came from, the increasing distance from your parents as you begin to identify with the new country, read like a personal message. Waten’s word pictures are finely honed gems: ‘Mr Segal ... knew the Rabbi quite well. A very distinguished man from London, but a little weak in the scriptures and piety. Still – good enough for this country.’ Often the Jews who emerge from the pages of Alien Son are illiterate, or nearly so. As with my maternal grandparents, Hebrew was a language spoken by the rabbis, not by ordinary people.

When we returned to class, the English teacher told us that Waten was a communist. We were supposed to be shocked, but this news made him seem even more glamorous.

Since early colonial times, Judaism in Australia has had a moderate orthodox flavour. Despite the migration of Germans to South Australia from the 1840s onward, there was no nineteenth-century Seesen moment. The oldest synagogue is the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation dating from 1850. The only progressive synagogue, Beit Shalom, was established in 1963.

Anecdotally, progressive Judaism in Australia occupies about fifteen per cent of the space. Confusingly, other than the small ultra-Orthodox sector, many Australian Jews consider themselves to be progressive in attitude. Again and again, I have spoken to Jews who tell me: ‘I’m orthodox, but not orthodox orthodox.’ Or, ‘I’m orthodox, I never go to shul, but when I do it’s an orthodox one.’ And, ‘I’m orthodox, but I’m progressive, really.’

When I asked intellectual property specialist and philanthropist Colin Golvan QC for an interview, he told me he was not observant; that he came from an orthodox background, but that he considers himself progressive in attitude. Golvan’s parents were married in the Warsaw ghetto. After the war they made it to Paris. His parents worked hard in the rag trade, made a success of their lives, brought their orthodox observance with them, but sent Colin to a Presbyterian school to get exposure beyond the Jewish community. When I asked about his level of observance he said that he and his wife enjoy the great Jewish tradition of Friday nights with the family. He celebrates the High Holy days, visits Israel – Tel Aviv is a favourite haunt – and attends shul from time to time, but retains a non-observant disposition. He strongly identifies with what he calls 'Jewish secular culture'. He admires the Progressive Jewish movement, but does not engage with it as it does not reflect his own traditional upbringing.

 

Progressive Judaism acknowledges that children are the cultural and genetic inheritors of both parents and treats the children of mixed-marriages as Jewish if so brought up, regardless of whether the mother or father is the Jewish Parent.

Angela Buchdahl is the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, New York City. Like me, Rabbi Buchdahl is the child of a mixed marriage. Rabbi Buchdahl was born in South Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother. She is the first female rabbi of ‘Central’. The first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi, she heads a team of eight permanent clergy and a floating population of internee rabbis and cantors. Buchdahl’s thrilling rendition of Kol Nidre is available on YouTube.

Central Synagogue has a proud 175-year history. ‘We encourage participation from all who seek a connection to Jewish life and want to be part of our sacred community regardless of religious background, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity. We welcome ... all people, including those who have been historically and institutionally marginalized or excluded from the Jewish community.’¹⁷

Shabbat eve and Shabbat morning services – with a grand piano, choir, orchestra, terrific camerawork that pans around the interior of this gigantic shul, close-ups of clergy or congregants reading from the Torah – are broadcast live to one hundred countries. If I can’t get to a synagogue on Shabbat, I follow one of these services.

Some months ago, at the end of the service, a lady pushing a trolley emerged from the front rows and wandered down the aisle in full view of the camera. Things were poking from her trolley, and she was unkempt. No one had prevented her from entering in the first place or from sitting in the front row. A few people greeted her with the traditional ‘Shabbat Shalom’. She kept her head down and did not respond. Central Synagogue feeds many thousands of homeless people every week, and young members are encouraged to contribute as part of their social justice commitment.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is an Orthodox man, yet he is one of the most progressive voices within Judaism. In a 2015 broadcast called ‘Why I am a Jew’, Sacks said: ‘I am proud to be part of a people, who though scarred and traumatised, never lost their humour or their faith, their ability to laugh at present troubles and still believe in ultimate redemption, who saw history as a journey, and never stopped travelling and searching.’

Sacks speaks often of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world, or social justice. Think for a moment of the many Australian Jews who are generous philanthropists or of the donations from ordinary congregants who give as much as they can to aid the refugees spread across the world. Then consider where they came from, the sometimes astonishingly sad backgrounds.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks speaks at TED2017 (photograph by Marla Aufmuth, TED, Flickr)

If Australia can be said to own a ‘Seesen’ moment it belongs to Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne. Two women – Lily Montagu and Ada Phillips – initiated important conversations during the 1920s that impacted on the rise of Progressive Judaism in Australia. The war to end all wars had claimed the lives of many young people and robbed others of any religious belief. As late as 1938 there were 77,000 incapacitated veterans¹⁸. The Jewish community was not exempt and suffered commensurately. During the 1920s the magnificent Bendigo synagogue was forced to close due to a lack of numbers. Judaism was in serious decline. Ada Phillips, the widow of a wealthy solicitor, decided to do something about it.

In 1928 she visited London and attended services at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue (LJS) in St Johns Wood, founded in 1911. Claude Montefiore was president of the congregation and of the World Union of Progressive Judaism (WUPJ). Lily Montagu, secretary of the WUPJ, was a lay leader who often led the services at LJS. Since 1915, LJS had dispensed with separate seating for men and women.

Attending this liberal synagogue and meeting Montefiore and Montagu made a huge impression on Ada Phillips. On her return to Melbourne, Phillips began efforts toward forming a progressive congregation. In 1930, with a subsidy from the WUPJ, and much direct encouragement from Montagu, a fledgling congregation did indeed meet in a private house on the Esplanade in St Kilda.

In 1936, again with the intervention of Montagu, seventh-generation Rabbi Doctor Herman Sanger arrived from Berlin to lead the congregants. In 1937, Sir Isaac Isaacs, Australia’s first Jewish governor-general, former attorney-general, and High Court Justice, laid the foundation stone for an eventual synagogue, to be known as Temple Beth Israel.

Rabbi Sanger (1908–80) had a revolutionary impact on Judaism in Australia. Sanger was a pre-war Zionist in an era when the wider Jewish world (including American Reform) had no great love for the idea. Sanger led the way in interfaith dialogue with Christians. Temple Beth Israel, which has seeded progressive congregations thoughout Australia and New Zealand, continues Rabbi Sanger’s example of continuing interfaith dialogue to promote social justice for all.

 

During this year’s High Holy Days, my husband and I hosted a feast of audacious hospitality. In attendance were three Jews, a friend to Judaism, three Muslims, a Buddhist, two Catholics, and several Christians who are not regular churchgoers. As so often happens when Jews and Muslims get together, we ended up discussing what unites us rather than what divides us. One of the young boys, a budding muezzin, honoured us at sundown with the evening call to prayer. There was much laughter and reflection that evening as we welcomed the new Jewish year of 5778.

The bitterness and division caused by the ultra- Orthodox in Israel continues. The Progressive movement in Israel stands firm and through IRAC, the religious action centre, has won some important battles in the courts. A September 2017 survey¹⁹ of Modern Orthodox Jews in the United States shows a sharp drift towards wanting an expanded role for females in the clergy, engaging with the modern world, being open to sexual diversity, and a growing distance from rather than attachment to Israel. Progressive and Modern Orthodoxy are edging closer and closer together. We can thank the ultra-Orthodox for providing an added impetus. Will it end in a schism? The Progressive movement around the world is now so far removed from the strictures of ultra-Orthodox Judaism that we may be already there.

Rabbi Sally Priesand, America’s first female rabbi, said recently: ‘When I was growing up, rabbis were the ultimate authority, often maintaining complete control over the congregation and making whatever decisions needed to be made. Women rabbis made room for empowerment, networking and partnership ... Female rabbis also influenced theology, I grew up with the image of God as King, omnipotent, and clearly male ... For many years now, whenever liturgy is created, its language is gender neutral.’²⁰

Rabbi Priesand went on to honour the memory of the first female rabbi, Regina Jonas, to whom this essay is dedicated.

 

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Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to Rabbi Nicole Roberts, Rabbi Fred Morgan, and Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black; to the lay leaders: Dr David Kram, Dr Jonathan Taft, Michael Taft, and Albert Isaacs; to Peter Kohn of the Australian Jewish News for his invaluable advice; to all those congregants who gave of their time and knowledge. I am indebted to Australian Book Review and the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust for giving me the time and space to write this essay.

Australian Book Review warmly thanks the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust, which has funded this $7,500 Fellowship. It follows the first ABR RAFT Fellowship essay: Alan Atkinson’s ‘How Do We Live with Ourselves?: The Australian National Conscience’, published in our September 2016 issue.

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Endnotes

1. Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, ‘The Frontiers of Anxious Identity’, www.eJewishphilanthropy.com, May 2017

2. Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Liveright Publishing, 2015.

3. Pew Research Center, ‘Religion and Public Life, A Portrait of Jewish Americans’, 2013

4. Mishkan T’filah, CCAR Press, 2010

5. The Jewish Agency for Israel, non-Orthodox leaders, The Israeli Government and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) management of the Western Wall

6. The Conservatives have had a spot to the south of Robinson’s Arch for twenty years.

7. Anat Hoffman quoted in The Times of Israel article by Amanda Borschel-Dan and Alexander Fulbright, June 25, 2017

8. The Times of Israel, June 25, 2017

9. Rabbi Elyse Frishman: ‘Applying Lessons from the Talmud to the Kotel’ on ReformJudaism.org, July 5, 2017

10. Nachum Eisenstein interview with The Times of Israel, July 4, 2017.

11. Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, translated by R.H. Monro Elwes,George Bell and Sons, 1891

12. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, Heron Books, 1969

13. Bernard-Henri Levy, The Genius of Judaism, translated by Steven B. Kennedy, Random House, 2017

14. See Endnote 2

15. W. D. Rubinstein The Jews in Australia, Australasian Educa Press, 1986

16. Ibid. p 663.

17. Central Synagogue

18. Australian War Memorial

19. The Times of Israel, ‘5 key takeaways, some surprising, from new survey of US Modern Orthodox Jews’, September 30, 2017

20. Rabbi Sally Priesand in interview with Aron Hirt-Manheimer, www.ReformJudaism.org, September 14, 2017