Published: 16 July 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Greenpeace Australia chief David Ritter and human rights academic Melissa Castan have 'an affinity': they can stop a conversation and two weeks later take up where they left off
David Ritter, 50, is the CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Melissa Castan, 55, is an Associate Professor of Law and a Deputy Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University.
DAVID
Paradoxically, Judaism exerted a presence and a gravity in my childhood as a consequence of its absence. My father was a Shoah escapee. He got out in 1939 on the last Kindertransport from Prague. His brother, mother and father also got out by various routes but most of the rest of the family stayed behind and were murdered.
Although my father had experienced quite a liberal Jewish upbringing and education, his family were practising Jews. But after the catastrophe of the war, my father’s atheism and ideology of non-conformism meant he no longer had an interest in practicing Judaism. And my mother was not Jewish.
Yet although Dad rejected the religion, things were always ambiguous in that he was loudly proud of his origins as a Jew and as a refugee.
When, in grade two, a teacher in my state primary school asked the
class about our religion, I put up my hand and said, “Well, I’m half Jewish.”
That night, when I reported this event to my parents, it was a bit of a moment in my household because it forced the contradiction that, “no, we’re not Jewish because we don’t observe but yes, we are Jewish because of the background”.
When your legacy is the story of escape from genocide and the refugee experience, that weighs on you and is lopsided if it does not come with the rest of the identity.
The broader question of Judaism came in my twenties when I worked for Marcus Solomon, an orthodox Rabbi and brilliant lawyer who was a partner at the firm where I was articled.
It was Marcus who asked me straight out, “Have you ever been interested in the wider question of what it means to be Jewish?” I think I was ignorantly dismissive because I’d absorbed a whole lot of the reflexive secularism of our times. He planted a seed.
