Friday nights, Covid and Caulfield: the thoughts of president Daniel

Daniel Aghion, the new head of the JCCV, speaks candidly with Julie Szego about his unusual background, school fees and other challenges facing Victoria’s Jewish community

FOR A GOOD CHUNK of his childhood, the newly appointed de-facto head of Melbourne’s 52,000-strong Jewish community lived somewhat un-Jewishly.

“We didn’t do anything for Friday nights,” explains Daniel Aghion, 48, who in March became president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the roof body for  major community organisations.

“We’d have a bacon fry-up Sunday morning and this being the 80s, when mum and dad went out for a flash dinner, it would lobster.”

His parents ran an insurance brokerage in suburban Moorabbin. They had migrated to Australia in the 1950s as children — his father was born in Alexandria, Egypt, his mother, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, in Ramat Gan. 

While the couple encouraged the boys to engage with the community — Aghion attended Bentleigh Progressive Synagogue (he’s still “proudly Reform”) Jewish scouts and dabbled in youth movements — they enrolled Aghion and brother Gab at private school Haileybury, figuring the sooner their children grappled with the reality of belonging to a minority comprising less than one per cent of the population, the better.

And the Aghions’ home life was short on Jewish rituals. 

All this changed when Aghion was about 11, and his maternal grandparents moved from their home in Sydney to Melbourne so they could be closer to their only daughter in retirement. Then his parents made a conscious decision to start Shabbat dinners as a way of cementing family bonds.

Aghion’s parents have long since divorced and remarried. But were it not for the Shabbat dinners, and the intergenerational bonds they cemented, perhaps Aghion’s maternal grandfather, Arthur Lehner, would not have said what he said the day his grandson, by then a young man, drove him, and wife Eva, to Spencer Street train station.