Rabbis Take Outreach to Remote Australian Jews

As Jewish communities in major cites celebrate the start of Chanukah this week, one group is heading into country Australia to support Jewish people living in isolated areas without a synagogue or connection to their culture.

The founder of Chabad of Rural and Remote Australia, Saul Spigler, says while the census lists only 3,600 Jews as living in remote areas, the work of his group indicates there could be between 7000 and 10,000 in regional areas.

He says he and his workers are a little like ‘Jewish detectives’, who will go ‘anywhere to visit anybody’.

Trawling the phone books, knocking on the doors of local shops and visiting cemeteries, town halls, police and Jewish doctors, they’ve found 250 new contacts in the past four months.

In the process, they’ve stumbled across some remarkable stories—a man who, as a baby, was smuggled out of Auschwitz, was discovered by Chabad in the telephone book, and eventually made his Bar Mitzvah as a 40-year-old with tears streaming from his eyes.

He turned out to be a direct descendant of the famous founder of Kabbalah, Rabbi Isaac Luria.

There was also a Jewish didgeridoo player they discovered living in a an Aboriginal community at Uluru, where he too, eventually made his Bar Mitzvah. The man’s mother was a Jewess of Moroccan French descent and his father was an indigenous Australian.

Saul Spigler’s son, Rabbi Yossi Spigler, recalls many enjoyable experiences along the way.

‘We had a funny story in Proserpine where the lady in the local Post Office told our group, “I don’t know of any Jews alive but there was a woman who passed away recently here, she was Jewish, and the priest was there and he read out the Jewish prayer”, and it turned out the priest was actually Jewish!’

He also visited a family in Toowoomba where their young daughter took him by the hand to a room where she measured his height and put his name next to it, on an RARA ‘honour wall’.

However, in isolated areas, not everyone is happy to stand out as Jewish.

‘There might be a lot of people who’ve come from overseas and moved to these rural and regional areas and they might not necessarily want to put it out in the open that they’re Jewish… you have a lot of people trying to hide it,’ Rabbi Spigler said.

‘But when you knock on the door and meet them, they just want to talk to you and learn more about their heritage.’

With very few synagogues outside city centres, only in Ballarat, Victoria and Wollongong, NSW, Chabad of RARA has sparked 13 small communities in regional centres such as Townsville, Cairns, Coffs Harbor, Geelong, Alice Springs, Darwin, Newcastle, Wollongong and Bowral.

George Koulakis is a Townsville supporter of the organisation, who describes his house as ‘base camp’ and maintains the motor home the group uses to travel.

As a member of the armed forces, Mr Koulakis used to bump into Jewish people on most of his postings, and had an interesting interaction after stopping to get a drink on one long trip through country New South Wales.

‘I pulled into a one horse town and wanted an iced drink,’ he said.

‘When I came back an old Aboriginal woman was staring at our big yellow motor home and its Hebrew writing, and I said “It’s Hebrew, we’re Jewish”.’

‘She said “You know what? The Jews and the Aboriginal people have a lot in common, we’re both from a very old culture and we’re both still fighting for our land”.’

‘That was such a small but significant exchange.’