A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  I was by then in manufacturing, but I had no cause for concern that the textile industry would go out on strike, for the simple reason that it lacked the national clout to impose its demands on society. Even if all the knitters, spinners, weavers and finishers stopped work, national life would proceed quite successfully, with no-one having to go without clothing. On the other hand, the elite unions – railway employees, electricity workers, tanker drivers, postal staff, among others – could hold society by the throat, defying both national and state governments, even at the cost of the country’s economy and their own reputations for reliability and dependability. Such union politics did not have a homegrown origin. It took its cue and leadership in large part from the mother country, the difference being that in England, the workers’ struggle was for the justified ends of winning improved work and living conditions, even if England’s economy could not sustain them, while in Australia, industrial action seemed more concertedly to be predominantly exercises in strength. Such behaviour, of which union mayhem is but one example, has troubled me. I have long been appalled to see how people can so misuse their freedoms to the detriment of the national interest. Even now, in the mid-eighties, a shadow of self-destructiveness hangs over Australian society. Forces are in operation which defy both logic and common sense, whereby people might step out of their intense parochialism which, in its present form, obscures their vision of the common good and distorts any objective appraisal of the present and consideration of the nation’s possibilities for the future. Education seems not to help. The issues dividing Australia are many, some of these being universal, others being home-grown. But the more educated society becomes and the more articulate the expression of its views, the deeper, not narrower, become the cleavages within it. I remain grateful for the rootedness of the democratic tradition of the country. It is this which is the ultimate bulwark in its preservation and continuity as a free land.

  Alongside the seeming self-destructive behaviour of the many parochial interests, another aspect of Australian life that has had me perplexed has been a peculiarly pervasive negative attitude to learning and to learning institutions. As a European and a Jew, I found difficulty in reconciling myself to it. In the history of European civilisation, the struggles for pre-eminence between France, England, Germany and Italy were based as much on socio-political development and economic strength as on cultural and intellectual sophistication and attainment. Leadership in Europe was predicated upon this very sophistication, whether in literature or science, in philosophy or economic theory, in music or the other arts. Where Germany undoubtedly contributed more to music than England, England could claim to be more advanced in economic theory; but in each, the respect for learning was paramount and a reputation for learning was widely coveted. When I walked along the narrow lanes of the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, hearing the greeting “Guten tag, Herr Doktor” was as natural as its Australian counterpart, “How are you, mate?” The Polish and French conventions of addressing mere high-school teachers as “Professor” bear further testimony to the over-riding respect these societies gave to learning. Meanwhile, within my own Jewish tradition, there is no greater distinction to be had than to be learned and no greater compliment than to be called a “ben Torah”, literally, “a son of Torah, or learning” or a talmid haham, a clever pupil. This latter compliment generally reserved for particularly erudite folk, may, at first glance, seem odd and difficult to comprehend. Such a man would scarcely be a “pupil”. The explanation offered by the sages is that as long as one is willing to be a pupil – that is, as long as one continues to wish to seek knowledge – one is, ipso facto recognised as wise. And it is a well-established precept among Jews that the more learned one is, the more one thirsts for further knowledge. Thus conditioned, I found the widespread scornful attitude to learning in Australia to be enigmatic. The scholarly person was an “egg-head”; the average man distrusted him; in his turn, the learned man was reluctant to display his knowledge. Indeed, such men often went out of their way to camouflage their learning, deliberately suppressing their more educated speech and behaviour in order to become acceptable to their less sophisticated fellows and not to stand out in company like the proverbial sore thumb. The popularity of the Prime Minister at the time of my arrival, Ben Chifley, was largely due to the fact – so I was told – that he had been a train-driver, this giving him the status of a “mate”. Robert Menzies who followed him could stake no such claim, nor did he pretend to; he was the clever lawyer born in Jeparit, in Victoria’s Western District. Nor did the next Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, ever attain a strong personal following, even among his own rank and file; he too was a lawyer and, what was more, the son of a well-placed family. But nothing illustrates my point more tellingly than the instance of Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Bordertown-born, son of a clergyman, educated in an elitist school and a Rhodes scholar, he frequently put up an ingenious front of folksiness, adopting both the Australian drawl in his speech and reverting often to expletives in a seeming bid to conceal his unmistakable superior education and intellect.

  During the brief courtship of my future wife, I had occasion to learn something from her about education in Australia. Laura had been born in Melbourne and educated at Methodist Ladies College. In the senior school years, one had a choice of subjects, but only four were required to matriculate. My suggestion that one could not well consider oneself educated without at least a knowledge of world history was met with an uncomprehending stare. When I said further that for my matriculation I had been tested in six subjects in writing and eleven in orals, it sounded to her as if I had just landed on earth from outer space. I was to be involved with educational matters for a period of 35 years and to see the education system from different angles, in particular in its theoretical-philosophical dimensions and in the more practical aspects of its implementation. I came in time to accept the basic division between the arts and sciences and the notion that students had early to identify their vocational predilections. What I have never been able to accept is the narrowness of the educational system and the relatively little in terms of range that is expected of a student, even in the best of private schools. The notion that a student inclined towards the sciences is exempted (with the exemption of English) from learning non-science subjects is as incomprehensible to me as the converse – that a student tending towards the humanities need have little knowledge of the sciences. In each instance, learning is narrowed to an obligatory minimum.

  Another aspect of the Australian education scene has been its parochial and even political undertones. A number of factors are responsible for this none too rosy state and serve to explain the passions aroused in the ever-ongoing debate on education. The most telling of these is the fact that primary and secondary education are divided between government and private schools. While the greater number of private schools is run by the Catholic Church, the steadily increasing proportion of students attending private schools overall – about 28% at this time – is a sad reflection on, and no compliment to, the government-run tuition-free system. It reached a stage in 1984 when leading educationalists banded together to restore the classic 3-Rs into government schools. In the same year, a review was undertaken by the Victorian Institute of Secondary Education (VISE) of Higher School Certificate standards with the intention of “opening up” the opportunities for matriculation to a wider number of young people who would otherwise have dropped out at Years 10 or 11. It was deemed that the best way to achieve this was to “broaden” subject areas specifically for these. A seminar organised by the private schools organisation was addressed by a representative of the Government Schools Commission who advocated the adoption of the proposed liberalisation. After discussion in committee stages and re-assembly of the delegates to present the outcome of their deliberations, the last word was again allotted to the government representative. She elaborated on her earlier presentation and, as if to clinch her argument, said in effect, though I paraphrase her words:

>   “Look at our boys who went out to fight the Germans during the Second World War. They were, on the whole, simple boys without much education who had been called upon to fight Germans who were well educated. Judge for yourselves, in the light of the outcome of the war and the conduct of the warring parties, about the role that education plays in the formation of the character of a nation.”

  The implications were clear, however difficult I found it to believe that such arguments could be presented to a body of educators by an educationalist herself who represented government education policy in the state. I mention this experience merely to indicate the lop-sided value system by which means education is determined today and the patent tendentiousness and politically-motivated considerations which influence Australian educational policy – all this to the detriment, in my view, of society as a whole and of the individual student in particular. Education has throughout the nation’s history been one of the weakest of the country’s institutions and remains to this day the Achilles heel in terms of the nation’s future.

  No society is so blessed as to have no shadows cast across its face. I have touched here on some of the more disconcerting matters as I have seen them. These notwithstanding, however, the bottom line on the overall balance sheet of Australian society is a very positive one. Australia is a land of freedom and guaranteed human rights. It is a just society, bustling with vitality and opportunity. It is a Western community, with all the revolutionary post-war technological appurtenances and gadgetry of Western communities everywhere. It offers the average person a good life with plenty of sunshine and open spaces, and it gives to each the opportunity “to do his own thing”, even if that opportunity is sometimes misused. Further, it is a society whose people continue to evolve, intermingle and recreate themselves, and a nation open to ingenuity and enterprise no less than to hedonism and parasitism.

  I became an admirer of the country of my adoption very soon after my arrival. I recognised its assets instinctively and made allowances for its deficiencies. When I left Shanghai for Australia, people asked me to write back, to them about it. I had no hesitation in recommending the country to potential immigrants, and a number of these people indeed came and settled in Australia on the basis of my enthusiasm for it. My admiration remains, but, mindful of the problems affecting other societies in the world and noting the developments and advances in those societies closer at hand in the Asia-Pacific region, tomorrow’s Australia will have to exert itself more strenuously if it is to cling to its claim of being “the lucky country”.

  10

  Jews in Australia

  Wherever I stopped during and after the war, I was fascinated by the local culture. Parallel with this general inquisitiveness, I entertained a more specific interest in any manifestation of the Jewish cultural component. Such interest went beyond a mere concern with current issues, but extended to a delving into the origins of the particular Jewry that existed in those places, an examination of the nature of its internal development and organisation, and an appreciation of its motivation and self-awareness. I looked into these Jewish manifestations at two levels: the first, as a subculture in the host community, the second, as one specific entity in relation to Jewish existence world-wide.

  Inevitably, I was keen to study Jewish life in Australia. After all, it was among Jews living in this country that I was to make my home. Given the relatively short history of white settlement – only a little over 150 years at the time –, I expected that the history of its Jewry would be easy to trace, its organisation amenable to ready analysis, and its future direction or orientation not at all difficult to surmise. But throughout, whenever I attempted to draw comparisons with the earlier existence I had known or to make judgements, I had to consciously remind myself precisely of white Australia’s relative youth. Consciousness of this fact, in its turn, made me appreciate Australia all the more for all it had achieved during that short time span. It was within this frame of reference that I also looked at local Jewish life, making allowances, however, for the isolation and distance of the country’s Jewry from its pre-War, mainly European, mainsprings.

  Australian Jewry in 1946 was concentrated predominantly in Sydney and Melbourne, where each community numbered about 15-17,000 souls. Smaller communities existed in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland, mostly in their capital cities, but a relatively smaller number in country towns. These Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, that is, European in origin, and divided into two groups: those originating from England and those hailing from the European continent. In tune with society at large, organised Jewish life followed the British model. The representative body of each community was the Advisory Board which, shortly after my arrival, changed its name to the Board of Deputies, fashioned on the London Board in structure and outlook. The majority of delegates to these Boards were appointed by the different congregations, which, in the Anglo-Jewish model, were regarded as the bricks from which a root communal structure was to be erected – this view reflecting the Anglo-Jewish perception of itself as primarily a religious entity. The members of the Boards were not elected, but delegated by the synagogues, they were themselves very British in outlook, and, at best, tolerant of their non-British brethren. Their expectations from Jewish life was parochial, their interest in world Jewish affairs limited. In very many ways, the system stood in stark contrast to that of the Jewish Kehila structure I had known in pre-War Poland.

  The two “establishment” synagogues were the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation in Toorak Road and the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation in St Kilda’s Charnwood Crescent. Besides these, other Orthodox synagogues then in existence around Melbourne were the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, the Hascolah Synagogue and Stone’s Synagogue, both of which were in Carlton, the Brunswick Talmud Torah, and the up-and-coming synagogues, the Elwood Talmud Torah and Caulfield Congregation. Shortly after my arrival, these latter synagogues invited the Gutnick brothers, Chaim and Sholem respectively, to be their rabbis. The sole Liberal synagogue at the time, Temple Beth Israel, in St Kilda’s Alma Road, was led by and in every way identified with Rabbi Herman Sanger.

  The Boards of Deputies of each state spoke on behalf of its Jews in internal affairs. A roof body incorporating all of these on a national basis was seen as essential, and one man who was instrumental in creating such a body – the Executive Council of Australian Jewry – was Maurice Ashkanasy K.C. of Melbourne. Ashkanasy was an outstanding barrister and a legal adviser to the Victorian Government. He was, contrary to many of his confreres, an unabashed, proud and demonstrative national Jew and a Zionist. He presided over Melbourne’s Jewry with firmness and shared, on an alternating basis, with his Sydney counterpart, Sidney Einfeld, the Presidency of the ECAJ for many years. Though he was an outstanding exception among the local Anglicised Jews, he was by no means the only one. Two others who, through their perceptions and communal work, had helped restore some balance to the existing self-definition of the Jewish mainstream were Dr Jacob Jona and Mr Alec Masel, both of them former Presidents of the Zionist Federation of Australia.

  Other organisations active in Melbourne at the time were the Zionist Movement, the Welfare Society, the Montefiore Homes for the Aged, the Yiddish Cultural Centre and Library “Kadimah”, the Yiddish Theatre, and a number of afternoon and Sunday schools attached mostly to congregations. A number of landsmanshaften sprang up, of which the first and leading one was that of the Bialystoker, all of which were to play a pivotal role in the integration of the post-war immigrants who were then beginning to arrive. So integrated, these migrants were, within ten years, to double the size of Australian Jewry; they were to make a lasting and revolutionary contribution to Jewish self-definition; they were to create a Jewry that was to enjoy a high reputation in the Jewish world at large; and they were to contribute to the progress and development of the adopted country.

  The years 1946-47 were politically difficult times both for world Jewry in general and Australian Jewry in particul
ar. The British Prime Minister Attlee and his Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin were still playing colonial politics on a grand scale, while those who had survived the gas chambers were caught in limbo, waiting for some place to go – in the case of many, to Mandatory Palestine. The obduracy of British policy vis-a-vis Jewish refugees is well-known and scarcely belongs to any of Britain’s finest hours. Its inflexibility outraged not only Jews but decent human beings worldwide; and it was hard to reconcile the earlier beneficence of a nation which had issued a much-cherished Balfour Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish homeland with its insensitivity a mere thirty years later. By then, of course, Britain was trying against all odds to hold together an empire that had all but collapsed, but its manner of doing so grievously compromised its humanity.

  Relations between Britain and world Jewry, then, were strained. Australian Government and public opinion, still being very much attuned to London, by and large sided with the British Government. The rift between United States President Truman and the British over the latter’s refusal to admit 100,000 Jews from the concentration camps into Palestine stirred international opinion against England. Australia’s assimilated Jews, as indeed those of Britain itself, faced a true test of dual loyalty. In its wake, there evolved a situation where certain sections of Anglo-derived Jewry throughout the Empire were pitted against other streams of Jewry. In Australia, the most prominent of the Anglo-oriented Jews was the former Governor-General of Australia Sir Isaac Isaacs who was highly vociferous in declaring his anti-Zionist views, and who was supported by Sir Archie Michaelis, later to become Speaker of the Victorian Parliament, and for a time by Rabbi Jacob Danglow of St Kilda Hebrew Congregation. Tension within Melbourne Jewry ran high, sometimes near to breaking-point. Accusations of disloyalty to the country of adoption were directed at those who spoke against the inhumane policies of the British Government. In turn, those who defended the British were considered as uncaring and obtuse to the sufferings of their brethren at their time of greatest need. Meanwhile, Zionist activities were under scrutiny by security authorities and official Zionist demands stretched the tolerance of both public opinion and government temper.