Jonathan Pollard rallies the right-wing at Caulfield synagogue event

DALIT KAPLAN: The convicted US spy urged an audience in Melbourne on Sunday night to ‘come home’ to Israel, in a video conversation laden with settler nationalism

ON SUNDAY EVENING, the outspoken president of the Mizrachi Organisation, Danny Lamm, stood at a lectern at Caulfield Hebrew Congregation and promised his audience of roughly 300 celebrants of Yom Yerushalayim, (Jerusalem Day), that this event was not about politics. The mood was subdued, yet cheery.

“Tonight, is not intended, and won’t be, a political night.  Tonight, is a night about Tefillah,” he said. It’s about prayer.

It had been a stressful couple of weeks for Lamm, and his counterpart, Caulfield Hebrew Congregation president, David Mond. The two had faced strong criticism from much of the Australian Jewish community for their decision to invite the convicted American Jewish spy, Jonathan Pollard, to present a keynote address to their communities as they commemorated the Israeli conquest of the previously Jordanian controlled parts of Jerusalem in 1967 for Yom Yerushalayim. 

The event was to be co-hosted by other local pillars of mainstream Orthodox Jewish organisations in Melbourne – youth groups Bnei Akiva and Hineni, the Rabbinical Council of Victoria, and the Council of Orthodox Synagogues Victoria. Even though it was designed to have a broad reach, the majority of the roughly 200 men in the men’s section of the synagogue, and 100 women watching from the women’s gallery upstairs, seemed to be north of 50 years old.

The decision to offer Pollard a platform became embroiled in communal politics.  For some, Pollard occupies an almost messianic heroism, lionised as a self-sacrificing warrior for the welfare of the Nation of Israel.

For others, he is seen as a dangerous and remorseless renegade whose reckless actions were deeply damaging to Israel’s relations with the US, and who exposed all Jews in the diaspora to accusations of national disloyalty and anti-Semitism. Alfred Dreyfus’s ghost lurks in the minds of those who subscribe to such a world view.