A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  Zionist activity went on nonetheless. I recall the enthusiasm that greeted emissary Shimon Hacohen on his first post-war mission to Melbourne and the generous financial response of Melbourne’s Jewry to the Zionist cause. The mood of that Jewry – as indeed of all world Jewry in 1946 – was no longer one of obsequiousness to governments and empires. World Jewry was in no frame of mind to employ the diplomatic niceties, so much a part of international political protocol. It was bad enough that the Allied powers had permitted the tragedy in which one-third of the Jewish people had perished to happen when they could have, with little effort, prevented it from becoming the holocaust it became. Those who survived were in no way going to agree to again becoming helpless impotent pawns in the last rites of British colonialism.

  Myself a victim of the war, albeit a more fortunate one, I, too, choked on my rage against those who resisted Jewish renewal and self-assertion and entered into the fray to help, in some way, to rescue and rehabilitate the camp survivors. This resolve was not so much an obsession as, more simply, a logical and moral imperative – the more so as I had earlier than most been reprieved from my refugee status. Involvement on behalf of the refugees began quite literally from the very day I reached Melbourne. It was, however, not my sole commitment. When my friend Abram Solomon took me with him to Benzion and Hemda Patkin’s home on the occasion of their son’s Bar Mitzvah where I met many leading communal personalities, one of the first questions I asked of them was: how many Jewish day-schools do you have? To my disappointment, the answer was: none. Instantly, I saw what had to be done, given that the highest priority for Jews everywhere was that of survival and continuity. Internationally, every political and financial effort had to be made to resolve the matter of a Jewish state in Palestine, while internally, within the Melbourne Jewish community, the most basic and urgent need was the establishment of Jewish schools. Even with hindsight, I remain as fully persuaded about the correctness of these convictions as I was when they first came to me.

  The agency through which I became communally involved was the Victorian Zionist Organization. Its orientation was that of a general Zionist nature, essentially middle of the road, liberal in outlook, and free of the polarisations I had known in Bialystok and that were, in time, to evolve in Melbourne. Abram Solomon had already introduced me to a number of communal personalities. Through him, I also met Joseph and Lily Solvey, a fateful encounter that was to lead to much interaction and a harvest of communal achievements through our many and diverse common interests. Joseph Solvey, an engineer by profession, was the intellectual as well as nominal leader of the General Zionists in Melbourne. Although he was ten years older than I and had a string of academic degrees to his name, at a personal level, we established instant rapport. We were both “Litvaks”, in that he came from Kovno and I from Bialystok, these being two corners of the “Lithuanian” Jewish triangle, the third of which was Vilna. We also complemented one another, he being a man with an even temper and mathematically logical mind, and I being more emotional and flamboyant. Yet, these personality differences notwithstanding, our values, political persuasions, interpretations of history and of current affairs, and our views about the desired directions for Australian Jewish life were remarkably similar.

  Dr. Chaim Shoskhes, Bialystok landsman, renowed world traveller on a visit to Melbourne in the mid 1950s with the Committe of the Bialystoker Centre.

  Seated l to r; W. Davis, A. Sokol, Dr. Ch. Shoshkes, M. Pitt, A. Zbar, M. Kornan.

  Standing l to r; A. Gibgot, I. Kornan, A. Serry, the author, J. Slonim, Ch. Dorevitch.

  Apart from the broader concerns of Zionism and education, I identified myself with another – albeit, more specifically parochial – body. This was the Bialystoker Landsmanshaft, which was the forerunner of a wide network of successive similar associations which were to become the building-blocks in the post-war structure of Melbourne Jewry. In 1946, the Landsmanshaft was still in its embryonic stage. Of the four personalities associated with its early leadership, three were pre-War immigrants: Abrasha Zbar, Michael Pitt and Velvel Davis; the fourth, Abram Sokol, had come to Australia via Japan during the early stages of the war. The ideologue of the Landsmanshaft movement was Abrasha Zbar. A man of learning who contributed frequently to the Yiddish press and spoke in public with polished eloquence, he ran the affairs of the Landsmanshaft from his office in an old building which stood at the comer of Swanston and Collins Streets, which was in time demolished to be replaced by the City Square. He gave the organisation a great deal of time, often to the detriment of his business concerns, motivated by a dedication that arose from his recognition of an increasing need among Jews as the tragedy of the war years unfolded. His became an address for any person originally from Bialystok who had survived the war. He, himself, was at times feverishly involved in contacts with immigration authorities, accepting responsibility, sight unseen, for many people for whom permits had been obtained. On visiting him one day, and seeing how he freely appended his name as guarantor to the mass of immigration applications that littered his desk, it struck me that Abrasha Zbar had not thought through the consequences of what he was doing. I knew that ships bringing immigrants were beginning to leave Europe and that very soon the first of them would be arriving. But I also knew that their passengers were almost uniformly destitute. Where would they go, I asked Zbar. How were they to be looked after in the first few weeks or months in an alien environment without means, without language, and so on? With nowhere else to turn, might they not with their bundles simply land on his doorstep, his name and address being the only one they knew from their immigration papers? He was placing himself in an unpredictable situation. Recalling the precedent of transitory homes for new arrivals in Palestine, I suggested that the Bialystoker Landsmanshaft establish a similar home as a matter of first priority. A generation older than myself, he looked at me as if to ask why he had not thought of it himself. As a consequence, the idea of an immigrant reception centre was born and a substantial building situated at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, was purchased as a focal-point and transition-home for Bialystok Landsmen coming to Australia. It also served as a centre of co-ordinated immigration activity and became a model for other similar societies which sprang up to help their own kinsmen. (This fraternity or Landsmanshaft idea was neither novel, nor peculiar to Melbourne. It followed a long-established tradition of similar associations elsewhere, most notably in New York, where the Bialystok fraternity, under the leadership of David Sohn, had developed a number of communal institutions).

  Zvi (Grisha) Klementinowski pre-war leader of Bialystok Jewry, postwar World Chairman of Polish Jewry and prominent Israeli personality greeted on arrival in Melbourne by representatives of the Bialystoker Centre and the Zionist Federation.

  L to r; A. Zabar, S. Wynn, Z. Klementinowski, S. Stock, M. Pitt, S. Lewin and the author.

  The Bialystoker Centre came into being just in time. It helped the new arrivals not only with temporary accommodation, but also in individual ways. Interest-free loans were given on request to help people establish themselves in business or to move into private homes. In cases of need, help was discreetly given. The Centre accommodated people of different classes, with different political opinions and with various interests. It also evolved into a cohesive social force and, in time, grew to take on new forms and activities. From the mid-1950s to the end-1960s, the opening function of the United Israel Appeal was organised around the Bialystoker Centre. In this, it became a trend-setter in the community, and the many other Landsmanshaft fraternities that sprang up all followed the Bialystoker example, both in UIA and other communal appeals.

  Because the Landsmanshaft comprised people with a wide range of interests, opinions and political outlooks and leanings, the society’s leadership prudently kept out of direct political – as distinct from humanitarian – involvement in communal affairs. This assured for it a climate of internal tranquillity in which it could carry out its tasks. Only once did the Centre become embroi
led – and then, unwittingly – in an issue with emotive political overtones. This happened around 1949, when the Government, in reviewing its immigration policy, opted for more selective criteria, relating to age, origin and qualifications, in its approval of future migrants. The policy review was communicated to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, then centred in Melbourne and presided over by Maurice Ashkanasy. As the timing of the review coincided with the first waves of immigration of displaced persons into the newly-established State of Israel with all its attendant political, economic and security problems for the fledgling state, the proposed change in policy by Australia carried far-reaching implications for Australian Jewry. What the foreshadowed policy meant was that Australia was being prepared to admit only able-bodied people, it was the old, the sick, the maimed and the less productive Jewish survivors who were, in effect, turned away to go to Israel, there to become an instant social burden on a society struggling for both its physical and its economic survival. The ECAJ called a national Jewish conference to discuss this most sensitive of issues. It was held in the ground floor board room of the Toorak Synagogue and lasted a full day. Sydney was represented by a sizeable delegation, headed by Sidney Einfeld who was then President of the Jewish Welfare Society in that city. The Bialystoker Centre was invited, and I was its delegate. The issue on the agenda was unclear as no particular directives had been given to me by the Centre. However, the concerns became quickly evident and a passionate debate ensued. The Welfare Society representatives, whose spokesman, Leo Fink of Melbourne, advocated the acceptance of, and accommodation to, the Government’s proposed selective immigration procedures. As proponent of the view that opposed such acceptance, Paul Morawetz argued that, from the Jewish point of view, and having regard for the unfolding drama of events in reborn Israel at the time, it was a dis-service to Israel to deny her the creative elements in Jewry and burden her so largely with social cases only, which the country could so ill afford. At times, tempers flared, and Maurice Ashkanasy had to call for an interruption in proceedings to permit the adversaries to recover calm. The dilemma was one for which Jewry had no precedent to call upon. The participants found themselves in a situation of having to make a very far-reaching decision which had real and immediate implications for the migrants who had yet to arrive, for the beleaguered State of Israel, and for Australian Jewry. It was a very difficult situation, the more so as there were patent political undertones in the arguments presented by both sides. Ashkanasy, as Chairman, was in an unenviable position; he was torn between two loyalties. On the one hand, as President of the ECAJ, it was incumbent upon him to champion an Australian Jewish point of view; on the other, as a Zionist, he felt morally uncomfortable in endorsing the Government’s intended policy changes. Debate had already extended into the afternoon with no acceptable resolution on the matter yet in sight. It was then that I asked to speak. I raised issues till then not yet mentioned in the debate. Speaking through the Chair, I asked Sidney Einfeld to elaborate upon the infrastructure he had prepared for the Jews who had already arrived and for those whom he still intended to bring to ensure that they, and their children, should remain Jews in Australia. For example: how many Jewish schools were there to ensure Jewish continuity, not only of future immigrants, but also of the existing population, old settlers and new arrivals alike? What kind of guarantee could he offer that the new arrivals would continue living as Jews in the conditions then existing? If there were no answers in the positive to these questions, how could he advocate the adoption of his position in the matter, that is, the endorsement of the Government’s selective immigration procedures? As I sat down, there was silence in the hall. People looked at me, most of them not knowing who I was or whom I represented, the only thing certain to them being the fact, broadcast by my English, that I was myself a recent newcomer to the country. When directed by Ashkanasy to respond to my questions, Einfeld was lost for an answer. No-one at the conference had thus far approached the matter from this angle, and the questions had the very effect that I had intended. It telescoped the specific issue under discussion to challenge the very assumptions on which Jewish life in Australia was based at the time. They revealed Australian Jewry’s greatest weakness. It became clear that no answer satisfactory to all could be given and people became restless and ill at ease in their seats. The ultimate vote endorsed the Fink-Einfeld line, but all knew that, as communal leaders, they were challenged by questions that, to me, were most simple, obvious and basic.

  I did not make many friends that day, but I did leave the conference buoyed by the fact that I had seized the day to speak to the leading personalities of the ECAJ, whom I should otherwise not have had the opportunity to address and debate with. More than this, however, I felt that I had made a contribution to the debate which went far beyond the specific issues under consideration, and that my questions had touched a very raw and vulnerable spot in the overall communal consciousness, an effect of which might be to galvanise the community into some positive thinking.

  11

  Mount Scopus College

  At about the time of my arrival in Melbourne, the Jewish Advisory Board had invited Mr Abe Feiglin to serve as its full-time education officer with a brief to prepare a report on the advisability and feasibility of opening a Jewish day-school. Abe Feiglin was a member of an extended Jewish pioneering family which, on coming to Australia from Safed in Palestine, settled in Shepparton, there to take up farming and orchard-growing – a clear departure from the more usual Jewish tendency to gravitate towards the cities and to urban occupations and enterprises. The family brought with it a code of Jewish behaviour and observance which it practised uncompromisingly even in the isolation of country life. It was a well-established fact that if Jewish immigrants could not find employment in Melbourne itself, they could count on seasonal work in the Feiglin orchards.

  Abe Feiglin had been educated in Shepparton; he was a teacher by profession; while his attitude to Judaism was, in conformity with the rest of his family, unwaveringly orthodox. He was on all these accounts considered a particularly suitable person to advise on matters of Jewish education. His report, when completed, urged the establishment of a Jewish day-school, but his recommendation did not meet with general acceptance. While many saw in the creation of a Jewish day-school a turning-point in the fortunes of Melbourne Jewry, others – primarily some members of Anglo-Jewry – adamantly opposed the idea, seeing in it a dangerous parochialism and self-imposed ghettoisation. These detractors from a Jewish day-school system feared that its graduates would be a social sub-species, unable to meet their Christian peers on the cricket pitches or football fields with the kind of élan they wished for their sons and daughters. The very notion of voluntary Jewish schooling was abhorrent to them, notwithstanding that the elite schools in the community, to which many sent their own children, were themselves private and attached to one or other Church denomination. Added to this revolutionary concept of a Jewish school in Melbourne was another one, without precedent in any of the denominational schools: that such school as was proposed be co-educational. Between these extreme positions, the majority of the community was ambivalent to the idea. Most surprising of all, however, was the resistance, some of it overt, some covert, that appeared from the least likely quarters. Some leaders of the United Palestine Appeal, as it was then known, were worried that such a major undertaking would drain the capacity of the community to contribute to the funds so urgently needed at the time by the Jewish state in the making.

  I, for one, was an early enthusiast for the establishment of a Jewish day-school, even before Abe Feiglin’s report formally recommended it. At every opportunity, whether at meetings of the State Zionist Council or at Zionist assemblies, I promoted the cause of education as the only viable force that could counteract the pressures that were at the time moving the younger generation towards assimilation. Yet the very notion of a Jewish day-school seemed beyond the comprehension of even some of the most sincere people in the Zionist mo
vement. For instance, on one occasion, when I argued for Zionist initiative and support for the establishment for such an institution, Abe Sicree, a most charming, genuine and generous man, rose and had this to say: “I do not understand what the young man wants. We have Hebrew kindergartens here, and there is talk of a Yeshiva being planned. What do we need a day-school for?” There was neither malice intended nor premeditated opposition. His was the response issuing from innocence and naiveté.

  Nineteen forty-seven was a year of high tension in Melbourne’s Jewish community. The troubled events in Palestine, compounded by the forced return by the British authorities of boat-loads of DP survivors from Palestine’s shores, had shocked not only Jews but Western public opinion as well. With the addition of heated debate and argument over the contentious issue of establishing a Jewish day-school in Melbourne, the earlier staid, almost lethargic life of the community became, as if suddenly, galvanised and highly-charged with emotion and passion in the face of new and vital challenges.

  Rabbi and Mrs. J.L. Zlotnik greeted on arrival in Melbourne from South Africa in November 1947 to conduct the first appeal for Mt. Scopus College.

  L to r; S. Yaffe, G. Rose, the author, Mrs. G. Rose, A. Samuel, Rabbi Zlotnik (obscured) and Mrs. Zlotnik.

  No sooner had the Feiglin report been presented and adopted than Benzion Patkin found a building at 414 St Kilda Road opposite the Toorak Synagogue and paid a deposit for it even before gaining formal communal approval. He had been the moving spirit behind the idea of such a school from the very first. Benzion Patkin was Russian-born and had, in his early youth, gone to Palestine where he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Nes Ziona. A passionate nationalist and lover of Hebrew, he had struggled greatly in those early days of his Palestine interlude. Eventually, he came to Melbourne with the aim of improving his lot financially, and stayed, joining his brother-in-law Zvi Rosenfeld as a partner in the knitting mills Patros. His uncle Dr Aaron Patkin had preceded him to Australia. When I first met him, Benzion Patkin was in his early forties, and was both passionate and stubborn about those things in which he believed. Zionism, Jewish education and Jewish culture were dominant among his concerns and he championed these day and night, often letting his business interests play second fiddle. He knew the kind of school he wished to see; he was totally committed to its establishment; hence it was natural that the task of translating the Feiglin report into reality fell to him. And the task was enormous. The problems to be confronted on all sides were truly daunting. There were considerations of personnel to be faced, and of public opinion, financial resources, aims and directions of such a school, governing structures to run it, and many more. In the end, as Rabbi Dr H. Freedman and Judge Trevor Rapke wrote in their joint Foreword to Patkin’s account of the school’s emergence, “Heritage and Tradition”: