Yeshivah College Completes $6 Million Building

Chabad Youth and Yeshivah College in Melbourne, Australia recently completed a four story, $6 million state-of-the-art building locatedin East S. Kilda.

The building, six years in the making, “will finally provide a home for our programs, and a heightened sense of belonging and identity for Jewish youth,” says Rabbi Moshe Kahn, Director of Chabad Youth.

Jewish life in Melbourne appears strong and vibrant today. Melbourne’s Jewish population of 60,000 pick the low hanging fruit planted by early Australian Jewry who integrated into society so cohesively. At the end of the 19th century, Jewish Australians were present in every facet of social, economic and civic life – most notably, Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir Zelman Cowen served as Governors General in 1930 and 1977 respectively.

Jewish people enjoy high visibility in an open society largely free of anti-Semitism. Schools, synagogues and a variety of Jewish social services complete the picture of the storied Jewish community in Melbourne.

And yet, Rabbi Kahn is quick to point out that “we have the same challenges for Jewish youth like anywhere else, like assimilation and intermarriage.” Cultural diversity and religious tolerance has also lead to an erosion of Jewish identity among thousands of Jewish youth.

To that end, Rabbi Moshe and Dina Kahn have spearheaded a full slate of programs since taking the helm of Chabad Youth in 1999. Today, hundreds of students at the Yeshiva College participate in after-school educational clubs, Shabbos meet-ups and holiday based events. During midterm break, hundreds of boys and girls camps attend winter camp, and over 1,000 kids attended Camp Gan Israel during last summer’s camping season in Australia.

While Chabad Youth is headquartered at East St. Kilda and focuses heavily on schoolchildren the Kahn’s have grown their network to include children, teens university students and young adults across the wider Jewish community.

Timmy Rubin, who runs the Mikvah Chaya Mushka for women points to a recent encounter at Bialik College — a Jewish day school in Melbourne — as an example of the outreach at Chabad Youth.

“A few weeks ago, a close friend of mine told me that her son was now putting on Tefilin every day, after having met some Chabad boys at the school,” she explains. The boys were part of the outreach program, or Mivtzoim, where young students visit schools, homes and businesses located outside their local Jewish communities.

In 2009, Kahn again raised the bar in the Jewish identity-building project with the introduction of Chabad Campus. Friday night dinners, weekly classes and host of events have now moved permanently to the new building and showing promising signs of growth.

Because Melbourne has a strong Jewish community, “people think these students are involved in a lot of Jewish life, because they live in a very strong Jewish community,” explains Rabbi Daniel Rabin, director of Chabad Campus. The vast majority of the 3,000 students at the universities he works with live in the St Kilda and Caulfield area — the center of the Jewish community and where the Chabad Youth Center is located.

It is important, he says, to be cognizant of the fact that for the most part, “students have little or no connection with anything Jewish.”

The Chabad Youth Center also includes a performing arts hall, a games room, administrative offices, multi-purpose rooms and a cafeteria and entertaining area. For the most part, Chabad Youth caters to the specific needs of the schoolchildren during their out of school hours, while the school uses the building during school hours.

The past several years saw a push to reach out to the wider Jewish community. In addition to administrative staff working in the new building and some 100 volunteers, Rabbi Kahn employs three young Shluchim couples that run educational programs in and beyond the local community. According to Kahn, Chabad Youth staff “comes into contact with 2,000 kids on a weekly basis.”

Inreach is also an important part of the Kahns’ activities. A unique synagogue tailored the needs of the school’s alumni draws a diverse crowd of 100 people aged 20-35 to Shabbos services and weekly classes at Daminyan, founded by Rabbi Kahn in 2007.

“Many graduates of our schools in this community often lose that connection they had when they were in school, but they gain that connection at Daminyan,” says Robin Aron, 33, one of the first members of Daminyan.

One of the most outstanding features has been “the normalcy of Jewish life,” writes the historian William D. Rubinstein. Indeed, since the first eight Jewish convicts waded ashore in 1788, Jewish life has flourished in a tolerant and welcoming society.

And at Chabad Youth in Melbourne, says Kahn, “we’re filling in the gaps.”