My journey to leadership: ‘if I am only for myself, what am I?’

KIM RUBENSTEIN: As borders close, nations and states huddle, exclude and banish strangers, Hillel’s famous words resound to me louder by the day

I AM OFTEN asked what led me to law, academia and, more importantly, to human rights and gender equity advocacy?

There are many drivers but my Jewish identity has always been central. As a sixth generation Jewish Australian, my story is an unusual one.

My ancestor, Henry Cohen, was indicted at the London Old Bailey on March 20, 1833, for receiving stolen “promissory notes.”  His indictment is accessible on the Old Bailey website, as are the Crown’s witness statements, which make for fascinating reading. 

Cohen’s defence is rousing: “Gentlemen, I have taken these notes in my business, and I am entirely innocent of any guilty knowledge.” Naturally, “had [I known they were stolen] I would not have gone to Messrs. Masterman and Co. (the bank) where I must have been well known, having paid at that house monies at different times to a large amount, for bills of exchange accepted by me.”

Only a court with a heart of stone would stand unmoved by his request to be restored “to my wife and ten helpless children.” But no such luck, at least in England. Cohen was found guilty and at the age of 43 was transported (for 14 years), arriving in Sydney on December 18, 1833.

Thanks to Rabbi Dr John S Levi AC, we know Cohen’s wife Elizabeth and 10 children (and two of their servants) travelled to Australia on a separate ship, arriving three days after the convict ship that transported Cohen.

Cohen was sent to Port Macquarie, about 400km north of Sydney. He was “assigned” to Major Archibald Clunes Innes, in whose “service” he remained for six years. In June 1839, Cohen requested a pardon, supported by Clunes Innes, and by the following February he was given a “leave ticket” but had to remain in Port Macquarie.

His service did not prevent him having two more children in Port Macquarie, in 1834 and 1837, and Elizabeth kept a clothing store in the centre of town. 

Cohen eventually received a conditional pardon and by 1845 the Sydney Morning Herald reported him thanking the “settlers for their support” and resigning the management of the store to his sons.  He was pardoned fully in 1847.

Knowing I am part of a small group of Cohen’s descendants still living a Jewish life has been significant to me and relevant to my continuing interest in legal and social questions about membership and citizenship.

My lengthy Australian heritage spared me and my direct family from the Holocaust. But what Jew living anywhere has gone unaffected by the murderous events that so decimated European Jewry and placed a haunting yellow star in the psychology of Jews everywhere?

I knew that if I had been born in Europe it would have been me and mine, and that realisation profoundly shaped my commitment to the role of law as a means of protecting human rights and promoting social inclusion.

Added to my Australian Jewish heritage, my experience as a Jewish school captain of Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne in the 1980s was formative in my journey. Indeed, reflecting on that period has been part of my life for the past 28 years, as I have been writing the biography of Joan Montgomery, my school principal and an inspiring leader. The book was launched on her 96th birthday.

My experience as a Jewish girl in a non-Jewish school environment not only framed my own sense of place in Australia, and the sense that as a woman there should be no barriers to what I use my skills towards, but the fight over her role as principal soon after I finished high school was my first experience of power trumping reason. That, too, is another influence on my desire to resist improper exercises of power in all that I do.

Hillel’s statement: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” speaks to me and my drive to be an active citizen and to encourage others to be so as well. How can each of us make the communities in which we live stronger and more inclusive is a question that lives with me always.

This has been heightened over the past 18 months in our Covid world and I draw on my Jewish experiences when discussing these public policy issues. In the Sydney Morning Herald, I recalled being a law student and writing to a Russian refusenik. The freedom to leave was such a touchstone of democratic liberty. But without any apparent irony, our government is now preventing Australians leaving the country.

Equally, Australian citizens are stranded overseas, their passports of little value as their country of citizenship has effectively closed its borders to them. My work on dual citizenship (including section 44 of the Constitution and its implications for Jewish members of Parliament) has also been spurred by my devotion to active citizenship.

While being solely an Australian citizen myself, I recognise and cherish the cosmopolitan world in which we are all members, no matter whether solely an Australian citizen like me or a Jewish person with multiple citizenships.

As borders close, xenophobia rises, nations and states huddle, exclude and banish strangers, Hillel’s words resound to me louder by the day: “If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”