Published: 22 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHEN RABBI YAAKOV GLASMAN sat in his St Kilda synagogue on Friday morning, on the eve of the Jewish new year, he felt empty.
He acknowledges the feeling is likely shared by his synagogue’s more than 1,500 congregants, but the emptiness is also physical.
This weekend was the first time since the establishment of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation in 1871, and since Jews first settled in Victoria, that the city’s approximately 60 synagogues will be empty for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
While Jewish communities in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, as well as the US, London and even locked down Israel, were able to attend synagogue services this Rosh Hashanah, Victoria’s current Covid-19 restrictions means Melbourne’s 55,000 Jews will be prohibited, among many activities, from religious gatherings.
As a result, the city’s eastern suburbs played host to a rare sight this weekend: rabbis and Jewish men blowing rams’ horns while standing on suburban street corners.
Ordinarily, the spectacle would attract curious onlookers, and perhaps angry neighbours.
But there weren’t many people out in the streets to stare as rabbi Gabi Kaltmann, from the Ark Centre in Hawthorn East, made his way through his local streets to blow his shofar, an instrument used for more than 3,000 years, to usher in Rosh Hashanah.
FULL STORY ‘Everyone wants to hear the shofar': ringing in Jewish new year in locked-down Melbourne (Guardian)
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Photo: Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann blows the shofar, at a park in East Hawthorn (Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/The Guardian)
