Less is much more at Goulburn’s Jewish cemetery

Published: 23 July 2020

Last updated: 28 May 2024

When MICHAEL VISONTAY chanced on the site, south of Sydney, he uncovered a little-known story about how a thriving community played a role in the origins of Moriah College

IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU see a Jewish cemetery in Australia without an obvious European character, and no sense at all of the Holocaust.

But when The Jewish Independent visited the small Jewish cemetery at Goulburn, a few hours south of Sydney, the site had much more in common with its regional environs than the densely filled necropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. Instead of rows of marble headstones with poignant inscriptions, small stone blocks lay on the ground, dwarfed by mighty gum trees outside the perimeter.

Tucked away off a modest lane, but proudly signposted, in the shadow of Goulburn’s excellent war memorial, the cemetery offers a rewarding window into the life of regional Jewish communities which have dwindled over the years.

The sparsely populated cemetery has some 30 graves in total, one of which was graced with a fresh bouquet of flowers when The Jewish Independent visited last week. Two of them, right at the end (and seen in the photo with the tree) were Holocaust period refugees from Germany, I later discovered from Gary Luke, a trustee of the cemetery, who is active in the Jewish Historical Society, and also a member of the National Trust’s Cemeteries Advisory Committee.

The Goulburn cemetery was used from 1843 to 1943 and it was re-consecrated in 1987, according to a report in J-Wire in 2017. The large gaps between headstones, some of them now hard to read, can’t convey the optimism and energy of the Jewish community that flourished in the town in the 1840s.

This was reflected by the fact that Goulburn and Maitland, in the Hunter region (also a strong trading centre in the 1840s-50s), are the only two private Jewish cemeteries in NSW, and are run by the local communities, says Gary Luke. All others are in the Jewish part of crown cemeteries.

“In the 1840s Goulburn had a rich and active Jewish community associated with gold mining in the region. The 1851 census reported that there were 75 Jews in Goulburn,” said J-Wire.

They were mainly gold buyers, jewellery makers and traders. Their success led to three Jewish members representing Goulburn in the NSW Legislative Assembly between 1861 and 1881. However, by the 1880s, a decade of boom, the majority of the community had left Goulburn.

During its heyday in the 1850s, however, the local Jewish community received a grant of land from the town to build a synagogue and school, according to Luke. The grant was never used, it was returned and incorporated into a local school.

Compensation from the handing back of the land was about half the funding used to establish the first Jewish school in Bondi that became Moriah College.

The last known Jewish burial in Goulburn was in 2013 – but it was at the general cemetery. Rabbi Shmueli Feldman, from Canberra, told J-Wire he was called to officiate at the funeral of a local Jewish man who wanted to be buried in Goulburn.

Rabbi Feldman told J-Wire “the [Jewish] cemetery has not been used for 70 years and is unfortunately not in a condition to enable more burials to take place there. I approached Goulburn council to dedicate a new Jewish section in their general cemetery. Goulburn council subsequently voted in favour of gazetting a new section for Jewish burials.”