Less is much more at Goulburn’s Jewish cemetery

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.