How the Melbourne Jewish community has changed in five years

Pop-up Judaism, LGBTQI+ inclusion, Orthodox growth: ITTAY FLESCHER returns to Australia and notices significant changes in the community where he grew up and taught.

Five years after leaving my home in Melbourne for Jerusalem, I was privileged to make my first visit back to Australia as a guest of Limmud Oz last month. One of the first places I went to meet friends was the statues on the corner of Hawthorn and Balaclava roads, which was the starting point for many a lap of Caulfield Park.

Treading the well-worn jogging track that has heard so many of the stories about Jewish Melbourne, I realised that although so much of the community where I lived and worked looked the same, there have been some significant changes.

The growing strength of Orthodox Judaism

This is by far the fastest growing and most vibrant part of the community, from the daily Torah classes at the Kollel beth Hatalmud educational institution in Balaclava to the many minyanim in the many Chabad shules across the bagel belt. Spanning from the conservative Adass community to the more liberal Shira, JOFA and Hineni, there seems to be a shade of Orthodoxy for almost every Jewish expression.

Particularly notable was the Ohrsom Student program, which brought its version of modern Litvish Haredi Judaism from South Africa to the mostly secular under-25 graduates of Scopus, Bialik and King David.

Its recruiting method is straightforward. Offer a jam-packed, high-quality, two-week Israel program in nice accommodation for only $1000, which is very popular with this demographic, in exchange for the participants attending weekly classes for a year after the trip at the Ohrsom Centre located above Central Shule in Caulfield.

Unlike Chabad, which places a heavy emphasis on the rebbe, mashiach, tefillin and Shabbat candles, the Ohrsom strategy embraces positive psychology - describing its purpose as "offering a framework which equips participants with knowledge, understanding and tools for life". Many of the classes focus on life skills such as managing anger, finding meaning and meditation, rather than the traditional Talmud study in Chevruta (pairs) more commonly associated with other streams of Orthodoxy.

The proliferation of shule choirs in almost all the establishment Orthodox congregations was also noticeable, especially at Caulfield Shule, which brought out the 10 members of Kolot Min Hashamayim troupe from Israel. I heard them sing in Caulfield Park on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, sounding like a very polished barber shop quartet, wowing their fans in the rainy park with traditional prayers such as Adonai Malach to the tune of Queen's We will rock you.

Given the birthrates in this part of the community are much higher than the more modern part, I imagine that within 50 years, most of Melbourne’s Jews will be some shade of Orthodox.

The conversation about LGBTQ+ inclusion

In almost every Jewish organisation I visited, the conversation about LGBTQ+ inclusion was front and centre. Whether it was from the more liberal groups such as the King David School and Habonim that have gender neutral bathrooms, to the more conservative parts of the Chabad community where the threat that breaking down gender binaries poses to their Hasidic way of life was often raised, the conversation was everywhere.

Wealth in the community

There is still an incredible amount of earned and inherited institutional wealth in both the Melbourne and Sydney Jewish communities, although it now appears to be more unevenly distributed.

I was surprised to observe that despite the troubling economic times, almost every Jewish community space I visited had been significantly renovated in the past five years. Yet there seems to be less individual wealth, with more Jews leaving the shtetl for the independent member for Goldstein Zoe Daniel’s territory in Ormond, Bentleigh, McKinnon and even Moorabbin, with enrolments down slightly at most of the Jewish Day Schools.

I noticed the increased popularity of the online fundraising platform CHARIDY, which has allowed many smaller organisations to harness the support of their members through many small donations, together with matching gifts from more established supporters. 

While there seems to be no shortage of donors keen on funding traditional schools and shules to improve their prayer and learning spaces, I was surprised to see that many of the innovative Jewish spaces are having great success, despite little institutional support.

These include Kehilat Kolenu, which brought in more than 600 people to each of its humanist services in the High Holy Days, and the variety of youth movements that do an incredible job engaging school- and university-age students in everything from Jewish values and Yiddish to Zionism and climate action, and that mostly run on miniscule budgets.

Another challenge for these smaller movements is the growing mental health problem facing young people post-lockdown. I have noticed a general feeling that this needs more attention and institutional support than is being offered.

Liberal Zionists in the closet?

With the notable exception of the intervention by former Israeli health minister Yaakov Litzman on behalf of Malka Leifer, there is still rare public criticism from the Jewish community directed towards any ministers in the Israeli government who sometimes represent Judaism and Zionism in ways that don’t accord with the generally democratic and tolerant values held by the majority of the Australian Jewish community.

This has led to a growing number of younger, left-wing Jews who care about the wellbeing of both Israelis and Palestinians feeling there isn’t a space for their voices outside of more liberal corners of the Jewish community such as Limmud Oz, the NIF, or The Jewish Independent.

The growing success of Palestinian boycott movements surrounding Sydney Festival and the University of Melbourne Student Union has also silenced many liberal Zionists, who are wary of publicly voicing their concerns about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine, lest they be seen to be giving succor to groups they don’t support. 

Ultimately, the viability of progressive Zionism in Australia is tied to the viability of the withering prospect of a two-state solution.

Uberfication of Judaism

In the same way that one can get a car on demand through Uber, or an apartment on demand through AirBnb, a growing number of “Judaism on demand” services are popping up across the community. These include the ‘Rabbis without Borders’ initiative from former ARK Centre rabbi Shneur Reti-Waks, which saw over 200 people come to a musical Rosh Hashanah service at the Armadale Bowls Club.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Dandenong Road, in between the wide glass windows of the Caulfield Park bowls club, I visited Rabbi Ralph Genende’s pop-up shule on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Kehilat Kesher allowed those looking for a more open and liberal expression of Orthodoxy to experience a shortened version of the High Holy Day service. It included interactive Melton-style learning about the Akieda (Binding of Isaac story), led by Paul Forgasz, before the expressive Torah reading, with added voices for emphasis by Mark Symons.

While I see these as two wonderful examples of how Melbourne is ripe for Jewish innovation, I wonder whether and how the emergence of these pop-up alternatives to traditional shules will shape the future of Judaism in Australia.

Overall, however, my overwhelming impression was of resilience of the Melbourne Jewish community after the world’s longest lockdown, with many reasons for optimism about the future.

Photo: Informal service through Rabbi Without Borders (Rabbi Without Borders)