The Jewish community in Australia was born with the establishment of the first white settlement in 1788. Only in 1788 did Jews constitute more than one per cent of the total colonial community, and this only happened because most of the convicts sent out in the First Fleet were selected from the prisons of London.1 Among the convicts transported were at least eight, and perhaps as many as fourteen Jewish petty criminals, some still in their teens.
It took till 1821 for the first Jewish free settlers to arrive. The sea voyage from England was long and arduous. Some former convicts prospered in the new colony and returned to England but many stayed in Australia and became successful citizens. Others fared less well. By 1828, there were one hundred Jews in the colony. Numbers in the Jewish community continued to grow. The first synagogue was formally established in 1837. By 1841 there were 1,083 free Jewish settlers in the country. The 1841 census shows that at this time, New South Wales Jewry counted for 65.3 % of the total Australian Jewish population, and 0.57% of the total Australian population.2
The Gold Rush of the 1850s had attracted a good number of Jewish immigrants to Australia. Most did not fossick for gold but become storekeepers and hawkers on the goldfields. Census figures show that between 1851 and 1861, the Jewish community almost tripled in size, growing to 5,486 persons.3 Many prominent Australian families, such as that of Sidney Myers, though no longer Jewish, can trace back their ancestry to about these times. By 1901 the Jewish population was over 15,000, the larger majority being from Britain As the social historian Professor William D. Williamstein has commented:
The most judicious verdict by both contemporaries and historians is that antisemitism as a significant force was to be found infrequently in pre-Second World War Australia compared with other European societies or others derived from Europe...Such popular prejuduce as existed against Jews in Australian society never took any official or legal form, and was generally confined to small groups of extremists and unrepresentative fringe groups.4
The experience of Jews in Australian society has been rather different from that of Jews in other parts of the world, for one of its most outstanding features has been the relative normalness of Jewish life, as Jews were among the first whites to arrive in Australia. Many ex convicts such as the first policeman, John Harris became respected citizens. In fact, Jews tended to blend in with the rest of the British born population in colonial Australia and were not regarded as alien or usually subjected to discrimination.
An example of an organisation that grew out of concerns from World War 2 was the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism.
Prior to the end of the 19th century most Jews were either English-speaking convicts or migrants from Britain or their Australian-born descendants. This must certainly have added to the normalcy of their situation for, apart from religion, they were indistinguishable from the general population.
Some of the Jewish convicts themselves who arrived with the First Fleet, such as Esther Abrahams and their descendants (one of whom, David Martin, served as Governor General) were to make important contributions to the colony. Another example is the first Australian born writer of fiction, John George Lang whose grandfather was a First Fleet convict.5 Although a significant number of Jewish convicts arrived after 1788, organised Jewish life did not start until 1817 with the formation of a Jewish Burial Society in Sydney, when Jewish settlers, convicts and emancipists, formed their first minyan 6, indicating the start of an organised religious spirit.
Fredman remarked that it was extraordinary how quickly an organised Jewish community appeared in some of the provincial towns as well as in Sydney and what substantial resources a small group, at no stage more than 0.5% of the population, could find to erect synagogues and maintain its activities.7
After the arrival in 1828 of free English Jewish settlers the first regular services were held in the home of Philip Joseph Cohen. After renting premises in George Street 1831, this was followed by a move to Bridge Street in 1838 and the establishment of the Jewish Philanthropic Society. The congregation moved to the first purpose-built synagogue in York Street, Sydney, in 1844.8 Most of the early settlers were Anglo-Jewish, middle class immigrants who transposed the English pattern of Jewish practice to Australia. In 1878 the Great Synagogue, Sydney, was consecrated with Rev. A .B. Davis as its first minister. Its imposing structure remains an historic feature of the Sydney cityscape, the building being restored for the bicentennial in 1988.
From the 1840s, Jewish settlers were to be found in most of the growing country towns. The oldest synagogue building in Australia is that of Hobart whose foundations were laid in 1943. It was once a flourishing community, but now numbers less than one hundred members.
In Victoria, the real beginnings of Jewish settlement began in 1839, with the arrival of the immigrant ship 'Hope' from England. A community, headed by Asher Hymen Hart , was set up in 1841, later to be known as the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation. Unlike Sydney, where Jewish life from 1880 revolved around the Great Synagogue, the community was less centralised. Three well-established synagogues had emerged in Melbourne by this time, the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation (1844), the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation (founded 1855) and the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation (founded 1871).9
During the 19th century a high proportion of Jews lived in country areas where towns had sprung up at the time of the Gold Rush with flourishing communities in Goulburn, Maitland and Grafton, and later in Newcastle and Broken Hill. Others were built in Kalgoolie and Ballarat and Bendigo, but with the decline of the supply of gold, the towns' Jewish populations moved to the cities. Nowadays nearly all Jewish communities are in the larger coastal cities and the only rural synagogues that continue to function are the Newcastle Synagogue and that of Ballarat.
In this period and to the present day Jews participate in every facet of civic, economic and social life. Prominent figures included Sir Saul Samuels, Sir Julian Salamons and later, Sir Daniel Levy, Justice Henry Emanuel Cohen, Sir Isaac Isaacs, and General Sir John Monash. Many of Australia's prominent doctors, lawyers, musicians and mathematicians are Jewish. Australian Jewry contributed to the war effort during both the First and Second World Wars.
Although the Sydney Jewish community was enriched by small numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms at the turn of the century, and by Polish Jews arriving in the 1920s, these 'foreign Jews' did not have a significant impact on the community. Their names are to be found interspersed in the ledgers of the Hebrew Friendly Society with those of their English compatriots.
The dramatic changes and evolution of Sydney Jewry are largely due to the arrival of Jewish refugees escaping from Nazi Europe in 1938-39. These changes included the formation of communal roof bodies such as Australian Bureau of Jewish Affairs which evolved into the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies in 1945, the Australian Jewish Welfare Society (now the Jewish Community Services), Mt Scopus College, and Temple Emanuel and Moriah College.
The further influx of Holocaust survivors after the war revitalised the community and led to the establishment of a large number of suburban synagogues.
Further waves of immigrants from Hungary in the mid-1950s, South Africa, Russia and Israel in 1970s and 1980s have enriched the NSW community which today has more than 20 Orthodox Synagogues, two Temples and, five Jewish day schools (Masada, Moriah, Mount Sinai, Emanuel and Yeshiva). Melbounre has a population of approximately 25,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union.The schools cater for about 50 per cent of Jewish children in Sydney. This phenomenon was mirrored in Melbourne where a larger proportion of the Holocaust survivors are German.
The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are active in the Associations of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants. The number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling, and measures have been taken to preserve their testimonies. It took till the 1980s for Holocaust survivors to speak of their experiences, so terrible had been the trauma of the war years. The first national gathering of Holocaust survivors was held in Sydney in1985, and led to the establishment of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. In Sydney the Australian Institute of Holocaust Studies was set up to record the testimonies of the survivors. The project, known as the Twelfth Hour Project recorded oral testimonies from 1988 till about 1990, before Steven Spielberg began the project in Australia of making videos of the testimonies of holocaust survivors. The originals of the tapes of some 120 interviews from theTwelfth Hour Project are housed in the State Library of New South Wales, and copies of these 400 tapes plus the written summaries are kept in the Archive of Australian Judaica.
The many organisations in the community include the Australian Friends of the Hebrew University, the Montefiore Homes, the Jewish Communal Appeal (JCA), a strong Zionist structure with United Israel Appeal (UIA), Jewish National Fund (JNF), Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), the State Zionist Councils and the National Council of Jewish Women, which combines support for Israeli, local Jewish and general causes.
Cultural life has also developed with B'nai B'rith, a service organisation, the Folk Centres for Yiddish culture, the Jewish Arts and Culture Council (JACC) and the Hakoah Club with a membership of more than 10,000. The opening in 1992 of the Sydney Jewish Museum, and the earlier Melbounre Jewish museum dedicated to the Holocaust and Australian Jewish history have enriched the community at large.
The Jewish community in Australia currently numbers about 120,000, an estimate made on the basis of the 2001 census. Jews can be found in all parts of the Greater Sydney area, although approximately two-thirds reside in the Eastern Suburbs, from Vaucluse, through Randwick, Bondi and Double Bay, to Darlinghurst-East Sydney, where the Jewish Community Centre, the Sydney Jewish Museum and the B'nai B'rith Centre are located. Most of the remainder live on the north side of the Harbour, predominantly in the suburbs situated between Chatswood and St Ives.
In the other states Melbourne has a large diaspora community which is numerically greater than that of NSW, with strong Jewish areas including Caulfield, Toorak, Elsternwick, Kew and Doncaster. Perth Jews, many of whom reside in the Mount Lawley area number about 6,000, with smaller communities in Adelaide, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Canberra, the South Coast and in Hobart and Launceston in Tasmania.
Jews have lived in the free and open society of Australia for the duration of the two hundred plus years of European settlement. Antisemitism, although not very widespread, is still occasionally in evidence here, especially during times of political tension in Israel. World tensions arising out of September 11th and the War in Iraq also have their repercussions in Australia where the Muslim community is experiencing discrimination as well. Grassroots efforts at interfaith, such as the yearly interfaith event at St Vincent's Redfern, where Muslims, Catholics and some Jews participate, followed on from a gesture of friednship made to a family who had lost a daughter in the Tampa tragedy. Dialogue is also happening between the heads of Christian and Jewish organisations (ECAJ) and Muslim leaders. Fortunately, antisemitism has had a negligible impact on Jewish participation in Australian life.
Individual Jews and the community as a whole have contributed significantly to the larger community, with leaders such as George Judah Cohen, Sydney D Einfeld, Professor Julius Stone, Sir Isaac Isaacs, Professor Peter Baume and Justice Marcus Einfeld coming from its ranks. Australian Jewry continues to contribute to and benefit from the wider community, while enriching the multiculturalism of present-day Australia.
Australian Genesis by John S. Levi & G. F. J. Bergman 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press 2001 (Early history till 1860).
The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History. Volume One. 1788-1945 by Hilary L. Rubinstein. Volume Two. 1945 to the Present by William D. Rubinstein, Melbourne, William Heinemann, 1991.
Edge of the Diaspora by Suzanne Rutland. 2nd rev.edn, Sydney, Brandl & Schlesinger, 1997
See also The Virtual Jewish History Tour-Australia
and short summary by Michael Cohen plus another summary by Hilary and Bill Rubinstein
Brief History. Suzanne Rutland Interview.
Marianne Dacy
University of Sydney
17 September 2007