Operation Outback

PERTH, WA, Australia — Jews in the Australian Outback? It sounds like a Jewish joke, right? Wrong.

Had history turned out differently, there would have been a Jewish colony in the desolate far north of Western Australia, where 75,000 Jews from Nazi Europe would have been resettled with Aborigines as neighbours.

Dubbed the “Kimberley Project”, the little-known plan was quashed by Australian prime minister John Curtin in 1944.

More recently, Australia’s most colourful Orthodox rabbi, Joseph Gutnick, became known in the 1990s as “Diamond Joe” after his mining companies in the desolate desert of Western Australia struck rich veins, which Rabbi Gutnick claims the Lubavitcher Rebbe prophesied with a blessing on a map. But the diamonds have long since dried up, and now the rabbis are digging for diamonds of a different sort.

Chaim Telsner, a visiting yeshivah student from New York, is one of them. When he answers the phone, he is on the road in a camper van, known as the “Mitzvah Tank”, somewhere deep in Western Australia. He is visiting one of the world’s most remote Jewish communities.

He and his fellow yeshivah student Mendel Grossbaum were brought here by Chabad of Rural and Regional Australia (Rara) to cross the continent in search of Outback Jews.

“Most of the places we visit only have one Jew,” says Telsner, the grandson of the chief Lubavitch rabbi in Melbourne. “We’ll drive four to six hours for one Jew.”

He recalls they recently met a 91-year-old Jewish woman originally from the East End of London. She, in turn, mentioned that she knew a 93-year-old person in her village who was half-Jewish.

“Why half?” Telsner asked her.

“Because only her mother is Jewish,” came the reply.

The eyes of the two men in black lit up, Telsner recalls, and the pair set to work, rekindling the smallest flicker of Jewishness.

Saul Spigler founded Rara in 1977, when he and some yeshivah friends from Melbourne hired a makeshift caravan to travel around rural Australia. But it was not until 2000 that Rara became an official Chabad organisation.Today, he estimates there are between 7,000 and 10,000 Jews living outside the main Australian cities, although the census data suggests far fewer.

Operating on a shoestring £110,000-a-year budget, and with only one full-time employee and one mobile home, the project may be low-maintenance, but, says Spigler, it yields high returns.

“We’ve probably got one of the biggest Chabad areas in the world. Ours is a very unusual project. Every Jew has a spark of Judaism, and you’ll be surprised how that spark becomes a burning bush sometimes.”

Spigler, a lawyer, reels off stories from the road — the man living in tropical north Queensland who thought the mezuzah they installed on his door was a menorah; the priest on the island of Tasmania who asked to put on tefillin; the pig farmers in northern New South Wales who turned out to be Jews; an old lady who discovered her Jewish lineage and, after hosting the Rara boys, changed her name from Christina to Rivka; and the 90-year-old man in an old-age home in Western Australia who never had a barmitzvah… until the Rara boys arrived.

It is a laborious process, Spigler says, and thumbing through the local phone book in search of Cohens and Levis is not guaranteed to unearth Outback Jews. “Most Cohens and Levis here aren’t Jewish, and haven’t been for a long time,” he laments. Some of them have ancestors who date back to the first fleet of petty criminals who arrived here in 1788. Fourteen of those on the first ships were believed to be Jews.

But when they do find a Jew in the Outback, it is the beginning, not the end, of the journey, says Spigler. “It can’t be hit and miss. You can’t visit someone for two hours and expect to change their lives.” But he says that most people are amazed that they have travelled so far just to be with them. “When you knock on the door in the middle of nowhere, they welcome you with open arms, they are so grateful. The chance to have some lasting impact is really there.”

Ruthi Urbach is the only Jew living in Scone, a country town in rural New South Wales, best known as the last resting place of Australia’s once-richest man, media tycoon Kerry Packer. She has been visited several times by the Rara boys over the years. “To have them turn up out of the blue just to say hello and bring some Jewish contact into our lives was just lovely,” she says.

The Rara boys found another Jewish family in a nearby village and arranged for joint Hebrew lessons for the children. “It’s important to us that someone out there has come so far just to say we are here,” says Urbach.

Michael Rosenfeld agrees. He was one of the people visited by Spigler back in 1977 when he was a child living in rural Australia.

“I recall they fixed a mezuzah to the door; I still have the material they gave me to this day,” he says. “Growing up I didn’t really have a lot of contact [with other Jews]; I think they were a very important link for me at a critical time in my childhood.

“To know someone is prepared to visit where a few Jews may live is incredible.”

Rabbi Dov Oliver became Chabad of Rara’s first and only full-time employee in 2004. He grew up in Melbourne, the son of a rabbi who travelled as far as Singapore to spread Jewishness.

“The rural aspect is driving around the Outback looking for Jews,” he says. “The regional aspect is different. My wife and I will fly somewhere where there are between 30 and 100 Jews, and set up shop for a couple of weeks for a Seder, or Chanucah or Rosh Hashanah.”

He co-ordinates the Mitzvah Tank, ensuring that it is on the road for eight months of the year, staffed by willing yeshivah students, and fully stocked with kosher food, Jewish books, mezuzahs, and tefillin.

“So far we have uncovered more diamonds than Diamond Joe [Gutnick],” Rabbi Oliver says. Each of his “diamonds” is added to his growing database of about 3,000 Outback Jews.

“A fellow named Joseph in Darwin made a huge impression on me,” he adds. “He is elderly, has had a stroke, is quite poor and his wife left him. He knows little about Yiddishkeit — but he still sits every Friday night and lights candles.”