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In Australia’s remote Tasmania, Jews welcome a rare visit from a former Israeli chief rabbi
MELBOURNE, Australia (JTA) — Tasmania, Australia’s smallest state in both population and size, is home to about half a million people. It is best known for its rugged terrain, its breathtaking natural beauty and its unique animal species — including the Tasmanian devil and the now extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
But Tasmania has also always had a Jewish population in its capital city of Hobart, which was set up in 1804 as a penal colony for exiled British convicts. Eight Jews were tallied among the original 270 convicts who settled there.
The state is also home to Australia’s two oldest continuously operating synagogues: Hobart Hebrew Congregation, built in 1845, and the Launceston Synagogue, built one year later.
On Wednesday morning, Israel’s former chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, paid a rare visit to the Launceston Synagogue. The event attracted around 50 people, including government ministers, representatives of Australia’s National Trust conservation group and members of Tasmania’s Jewish community.
“It’s very nice that you can be at the extremities and antipodes and still be part of the Jewish people,” said Betz Allen, a Tasmanian Jew who has lived in Launceston for 25 years. “Having Rabbi Lau here in person and taking the time and trouble to come [to Tasmania] was significant.”
“Even in the context of Australia, it’s a long way from anything,” he added.
Receiving a visit from a chief rabbi from any country in Launceston is a rare event. The last one took place 72 years ago, in 1951, when Rabbi Israel Brodie, Great Britain’s chief rabbi at the time, came to visit during his tour of Australia. Lau, a child survivor of the Holocaust and former chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, is an in-demand guest of honor at Jewish communities around the world. (His son David is now Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi.)
Lau was a guest of Joseph Gutnick, a well-known Australian mining magnate originally from Melbourne. Worth close to half a billion dollars — and a power broker in the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement — Gutnick now lives in Tasmania. Gutnick is funding renovations of the synagogue with the approval of Australia’s National Trust, which administers the heritage-listed building.
“I thought it was appropriate to do something,” said Gutnick, who has a longstanding interest in Tasmania, which has included building the island’s only mikvah, or ritual bath, in Hobart more than 30 years ago. “I wanted to fix up the shul. Make it more usable. If we make it nice, more people will come.”
Launceston’s Synagogue is built in the Egyptian Revival style, which incorporates motifs from ancient Egypt — an unusual look for a synagogue.
“It’s an interesting place at the edge of the world. It’s a very long way from everything but it’s still very much connected to world history,” Allen said. “This synagogue is a relic of a time when history wasn’t settled yet, but it’s still in use today, and that gives a tremendous sense of continuity and belonging.”
The history of Jews in Tasmania is long and checkered. In the 1940s, before the state of Israel was established, an explorer looking for a potential Jewish homeland scouted out the island’s coast but died on his mission. Over time, the number of Jewish people living in Tasmania has also ebbed and flowed; increases in immigration occurred during World War II, as European Jews fled Nazism, and in the 1980s, as a wave of Jews emigrated from South Africa.
Today, Tasmania’s Jewish community is once again growing. The 2021 Australian census showing a growth of almost 50% increase of Jews from 248 people in 2016 to 376 in 2021. No one has studied the reasons behind the increase, but housing in Tasmania is significantly cheaper than in other major cities, such as Melbourne and Sydney. Tasmania is also known across Australia as a retiree hotspot, especially for those fond of a quiet life and hiking.
Rabbi Yochanan Gordon and his wife Rebbetzin Rochel Gordon are Chabad emissaries on the island. He is confident that there are more Jews than officially recorded in the census, claiming to personally know more than the 376 recorded. He estimates that there are 250 Jews in Launceston and 1,200-1,300 throughout Tasmania.
His family has a long-term interest in Tasmania, as his father, Rabbi Yossi Gordon, a Melbourne-based rabbi, was sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in the 1980s to conduct intermittent visits to the Jewish people of the island state.
For a tiny community like Tasmania, welcoming Lau and other dignitaries to Launceston Synagogue was an exciting event and a rare chance to fill the pews.
“We don’t usually get a minyan [prayer quorum of 10 men]. Every Sunday in the synagogue we also have a tefillin club with coffee, and a number of Jews come for tefillin club,” Yochanan Gordon said.
Despite living in Ulverstone, a mining town around a 90-minute drive from Launceston, Gutnick is invested in the success of the Launceston Synagogue. “I like supporting far flung places,” he said, referring to some of his work supporting Jewish life across the world, including in Antarctica.
And the importance of hosting an esteemed rabbi in one of the oldest synagogues in Australia is not lost on him.
“It’s such a historical place. The first convicts came and built the shul. People who were expelled and thrown out to one of the furthest places in the world, they built a shul. It’s quite a thrill,” he said.
In addition to paying for new carpets and a new bimah, or raised platform at the front of a synagogue, Gutnick hopes to pay for concrete patches to the Egyptian architecture on the front of the building, and a fresh paint job. Plans are also in the works to increase the scarce kosher options for people living in Tasmania, by creating a room at the back of the synagogue dedicated to preparing food.
Gutnick hopes the synagogue will eventually attract tourists, too.
Allan also felt that history was made this week with the rabbi’s visit.
“I think it’s amazing. This synagogue was built at a time when Judaism was nowhere near as well accepted by the general community. It was difficult for the community to get approval to build it. It’s a tiny postage stamp- size piece of land,” he said. “We are here, we have been here a long time, and we belong here.”
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The post In Australia’s remote Tasmania, Jews welcome a rare visit from a former Israeli chief rabbi appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The 21st-Century’s Great Flood
JNS.org – Believe it or not, the hero of this week’s Torah portion, Noah, needed a not-so-gentle push to get him into the Ark that he himself had built!
“And Noah, his sons, his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark because of the flood waters,” (Genesis 7:7).
Interpreting this verse, the great commentator Rashi says that Noah only went into the ark because the floodwaters pushed him inside. He himself wasn’t quite sure this flood thing was really going to happen, but eventually, when he was getting rather wet, he decided to seek refuge in the ark.
There’s a very serious and sobering message here for our times. There’s a flood out there, no question about it. A deluge of disinformation and degeneracy, and it’s leading to the ruination of society as we have always known it. I can handle and even admire “disrupters,” but what we are witnessing now is destruction, a sea of moral sickness and chaos amid the collapse of our traditional values. To even use the term “traditional family values” these days is to incur the wrath of every alternative movement on earth. “How dare you!”
All around us, we see a flood of family breakdowns, a deluge of drugs, crime, and the havoc and devastation it wreaks. Never before have we experienced a tidal wave of mass shootings in schools, shopping malls and theaters. I’m not getting into the gun-control issue; this is a mind-control issue. What possesses the minds of these lonely, troubled young men who go out and shoot up the town? And what insanity warps the minds of young Westerners who become influenced by radical terrorist groups to go and join the Jihadi revolutionaries?
This is clearly a societal problem. The Hebrew word for the great flood in Noah’s time is mabul. Indeed, this a mabul of madness!
But if we enter the ark, we discover a new reality. The holy ark inside every synagogue is a symbol of sanctity, refuge and moral clarity. It is a sanctuary that protects us from the ravaging, raging waters outside. Herein lies the sacred treasure of our people, the holy Torah, the eternal wisdom of our Jewish history and heritage. Here, we find a Godly manual for living, one that is far removed from our contemporary craziness. And, yes, it is a repository of traditional values, our faith in God, our commitment to family, to elders and to respect and decency in all our relationships.
We have a choice. Do we pick the torrents of turbulence outside or the haven of tranquility and the anchor of the ark inside?
There have always been religious and non-religious Jews. And we have always argued. And many religious Jews have debated passionately with their non-religious brothers and sisters to embrace a more traditional Jewish way of life. But today, I would humbly suggest that the flood waters of a society out of control should force any objective, reasonable, upstanding person into the arms of the holy ark.
Even if it is not out of religious conviction, and even if it is not from our faithful childhood memories, the wild waters of a world gone berserk should be pushing us to explore the values represented by the holy ark. We should be doing it for our own family’s safety, security and sanity. We need to save our skin, never mind our soul.
Once upon a time, society and people were “normal” and honorable, more or less. Some were religious, others not. But today, with all the insane ideologies out there, we should be lining up to get into the ark. To ignore the calming refuge of the Almighty’s Ark in our current situation is like Noah standing up to his knees in the floodwaters and whistling in the rain while the ark takes off without him.
Our Jewish way of life offers us a lifeboat of survival in these wild floodwaters. Do we want to be swamped by the woke ideologists who seem completely disengaged from reality? If you can be anything you want, well, with that naturally comes an “anything goes” philosophy of life. And what nachas will we have when we discover that our son or daughter at an Ivy League campus has become a flag-waving member of Jews for Palestine?
My dear friends, as a rabbi, I invite you, nay, I appeal to you to take advantage of the great, trusted, traditional Jewish lifeboat. You’ll find it at the synagogue of your choice. Call a rabbi. Send your kids to a good Jewish day school. Enroll in a Jewish adult-education course. Study some Torah online. Volunteer for Israel or help kids with special needs in your community. Visit a senior center. Do a mitzvah. Do something to save yourself and your family from this disastrous deluge.
In the ark of your people, you will find security, serenity, wisdom and knowledge to help you chart your own way in a world that has become a labyrinth masking morality, honor and plain common sense.
The post The 21st-Century’s Great Flood first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Over 900 Civilians Killed in Israel Since War’s Start
JNS.org – A total of 902 civilians have been killed by terrorism in Israel since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, the country’s National Insurance Institute announced Sunday.
The figure includes all war fronts since the Hamas-led cross-border massacre almost 400 days ago, according to the NII, which supports victims and their families.
The NII did not state how many civilians had been wounded since the start of the war, though an Oct. 29 notice said that the agency provided assistance to over 70,000 victims of hostilities.
On Thursday, seven civilians were killed and one was seriously wounded in two separate Hezbollah rocket assaults on Israel’s north, marking one of the deadliest days since the Iranian-backed terror organization joined the war in support of Hamas on Oct. 8, 2023.
Also on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that a soldier was killed the previous day by a grenade in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing the total number of troops killed in action on all fronts to 780.
The IDF death toll in Gaza since the start of the ground invasion there on Oct. 27, 2023, stands at 368. Additionally, Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, of the Border Police’s Yamam National Counter-Terrorism Unit, was fatally wounded during a hostage rescue mission, and defense contractor Liron Yitzhak was mortally wounded in the Strip in May.
Some 12,000 wounded IDF soldiers and security personnel have entered physical rehabilitation programs since the start of the war, including 900 wounded over the past month in Lebanon, according to data published last week by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Rehabilitation Department.
The IDF has been fighting to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah since the former terror group led the invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 people, mainly Jewish civilians, wounding thousands more and kidnapping 251 people to Gaza, where 101 remain.
The post Over 900 Civilians Killed in Israel Since War’s Start first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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What Would Matt Baldacci Do? The Collaborator Mentality Returns
JNS.org – Like many Jews of my generation, born during a period when antisemitism was largely depicted as a historical phenomenon and any manifestations were seen as an unfortunate aberration, I would occasionally wonder how the non-Jews in my midst would have behaved during the Holocaust. Would they have stood up to the Nazis, acquiesced to them or even supported them? Would they have expressed disgust at Nazi propaganda or dutifully nodded in agreement? Would they have protected me and my family from deportation, or would they have betrayed us?
Those were, I mused, speculative thought experiments that, thankfully, I would never have to test in the real world. But in 2024, one year after the bestial pogrom wreaked by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, those same questions belong firmly in the real world. And my suspicion is that many, indeed most, non-Jews would fail these tests of moral and physical courage.
Earlier this month, Melanie Notkin, an author and communications consultant, had the foresight to record a conversation she held with Matt Baldacci, the publisher of Shelf Awareness, a trade title for the bookstore and publishing industry that reaches more than 600,000 readers weekly. Notkin had been helping to promote Israel Alone, the latest book by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, which I recently reviewed for this column, and duly purchased an ad in Baldacci’s newsletter for $2,300. But then Baldacci sent her an email informing her that he was canceling the ad, so Notkin scheduled a phone call with him to find out more.
Their conversation was endlessly fascinating and incredibly disturbing. As he told Notkin that the ad had been pulled because the book contains the word “Israel” in the title—potentially triggering bookstore staff or customers with what he would call “pro-Palestinian” but what we properly call pro-Hamas sympathies—Baldacci traversed the spectrum of vocal tones with aplomb, sounding by turns friendly, then unctuous, then impatient, then irritated. At one point, he even indulged in a bit of “mansplaining,” telling Notkin “that’s not actually true or relevant” when she noted that the CEO of his company is Jewish. “Listen, Melanie, Melanie, I hear you,” he interjected, sounding determined to end the conversation as quickly as possible. “I respect everything you’re saying. And as you say, I think that’s all there is to say.”
I don’t know Notkin, but I admired her dignity in carefully listening to Baldacci and eloquently pushing back against his cloying, disingenuous arguments. I don’t know Baldacci either, at least not personally, but I know his type very well.
It’s probably true that most of those who collaborated with the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe did not do so primarily for ideological reasons but because resistance would have made their daily lives much tougher. I was always taught not to judge these people for not doing the right thing because they feared imprisonment or death, after all. And in the postwar period, there was a discreet acknowledgement among the occupied populations that this had been the case and that history had been kinder to them than was perhaps warranted; in the Netherlands, for example, people would joke that “most Dutch were in the resistance—they just joined after the war.” But that explanation doesn’t serve for someone like Baldacci, who exhibits the telltale traits of a collaborator without the specter of a totalitarian state operating concentration camps hanging over him.
Baldacci is a coward: Someone who, when faced with injustice or rank hypocrisy, rationalizes it and plays its worst aspects down. Someone who doesn’t like to rock the boat. In other words, he is the perfect fit for a collaborator. And so we are forced to ask: If America was suddenly in the grip of totalitarianism, if we had a government that was rounding up Jews in a bid to stop the Jewish conspiracy, if we had a government that criminalized the word “Israel”—a word that is always in the consciousness of Jews and their aspirations and prayers—what would Baldacci do? I know the answer, and I expect readers do, too.
It is the Matt Baldaccis of this world—women and men who are followers and not leaders, who consent to antisemitic agitation without explicitly endorsing it, who stay silent when they need to speak up—who have enabled the current wave of eliminationist antisemitism gripping our country and much of the Western world. Their simpering silence and pathetic fear of angering the mob are precisely what empowers the thugs who shoot at Jews going to synagogue in Chicago or at a Jewish school in Toronto, who gather outside a London conference where the Arab head of the anti-Zionist Communist Party of Israel is speaking to verbally abuse the peace activist Jews in attendance, who push petitions seeking to banish Jews from the worlds of literature, art and music—fields of endeavor that would be indelibly poorer without our contribution!
It is the Matt Baldaccis who have forced Jews, myself among them, to ask whether we grew up in some kind of an illusion, given the routine normalcy with which we historically interacted with non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Because if such people can’t stand up for a Jewish writer like Lévy in a democracy where free speech is part of our national ethos, how should we expect them to behave if the stakes and the costs are much graver? If their fear of the disapproval of the pro-Hamas media and street chorus is so great now, how much greater would it be if this chorus exercised direct political control of our republic?
I hope we never have to find out.
The post What Would Matt Baldacci Do? The Collaborator Mentality Returns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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