TRIBUTE: Helen Light, Founding Director, Jewish Museum of Australia

HELEN LIGHT, who died on Sunday, was the driving force behind the establishment and growth of the Jewish Museum for almost three decades, writes REBECCA FORGASZ.

Last Sunday, 7 August 2022, our community lost one of its treasures – Dr Helen Light AM.

Helen was best known to many of us as the inaugural Director of the Jewish Museum of Australia, a role she held for almost three decades. It was in that capacity that I first met her twenty-five years ago. I knew her almost all of my adult life.

Helen had the uncanny ability to see in you the potential for things you never imagined you could do. She took great leaps of faith in people, bestowing tremendous opportunity on the untrained and the uninitiated. She would tend to you and encourage you with just as much as you needed, and then she would stand back and proudly watch you take flight.

One day, some time after I had started working part-time at the Museum as Assistant Schools Programs Coordinator, Helen asked me if I would like to curate an exhibition. I remember literally having no idea what that involved, but decided that if Helen thought I could do it, I was willing to give it a go.

And the rest, as they say, is history. That invitation, that opportunity, changed my life’s trajectory. It opened up a whole world to me – a world of art and artefacts, of intellectual adventure and creative expression. It was the beginning of my career in museums, which culminated in my being granted the huge honour of succeeding Helen when she stepped down from her role as Director after 27 years at the helm.

As I said many times when I took over that position, Helen may have been much shorter than me, but she had enormous shoes that I could only hope to fill.

Helen built the Jewish Museum from the ground up, establishing it as one of Australia’s leading small museums. As explained in the Museum’s tribute to Helen, published on their website earlier this week: “Starting with the Jewish Museum in its original location, at the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation in 1983, she was responsible for developing its significant collection and motivated a community to believe in the dreaming of a new and more ambitious home, a place where the Museum could reach beyond its original aims, to something more aspirational. By 1995, that ambition was reached, when she moved a now substantial and noteworthy collection, growing staff and passionate volunteers, into the Museum’s current place, at 26 Alma Road, St Kilda. Curating over 100 exhibitions … Dr Light helped to define the Jewish Museum as the shining example of what a true community museum can be.”

The importance of community was a value that coursed through Helen’s veins. As I came to know Helen over the years, I also learned about her family – an inspiring assemblage of legendary community figures. There was Kurt, her beloved father, a gentle man who co-founded the community-spirited accounting firm Lowe Lippmann; Walter, her uncle, an avid proponent of multiculturalism from the 1960s who helped to establish the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria; Marion, her stepmother, who was the head social worker at Jewish Care for many years; and her stepsister, Timmy Rubin, who runs the Mikveh Chaya Moushka and was a chaplain at Port Phillip Prison.

In their eulogy at her funeral, Helen’s children, Anna and Marc, observed: “Mum’s leadership of the Jewish Museum for so many years was characterised by a unique mix of being a visionary, community builder, professional and an incredibly hard worker. The fruits of her labour were a revered reputation for both her and the Museum and many collegial relationships that developed into lifelong friendships. She led the Museum with intelligence and integrity and was widely respected and indeed loved for both what she achieved and for how she achieved it.”

For so many of us who worked with Helen, these words ring profoundly true. We were all awe-struck by her intellect, her unswerving passion and commitment, her ability to both devise grand ideas and to undertake the humble task of encasing an historical document in a protective mylar sleeve. Helen was a giant in the museum profession, her accomplishments recognised by her peers who elected her President of Museums Australia (Victoria) for many years, and through being awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2005.

Alongside her own prodigious talents, Helen had exceptional humility and generosity. She brought people in, giving them space to contribute their ideas and their capabilities, whether as volunteers, committee members or staff. For so many of us, she created an intellectual, creative and even spiritual home, where we could engage with and express our Jewishness in an open, exploratory way.

But more prosaically yet so importantly, Helen was kind. Her door was always open to every staff member and volunteer. She cherished each and every person she encountered, finding in everyone their unique attributes and gifts. As the son of one of the Museum’s long-standing, now retired, volunteer guides wrote in a Facebook post, “Helen treated Mum (and I’m sure all the volunteers) so caringly and with such kavod, respect”.

After leaving the Museum in 2010, Helen worked as a consultant to museums and in the area of multicultural heritage. She became an Executive Member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) and sat on the boards of the Jewish Christian Muslim Association, the Faith Communities Council of Victoria and the Advisory Board for the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) at Monash University.

To me, both professionally and personally, Helen was a role model and a mentor: a fierce intellect, refreshingly and courageously progressive, a font of endless ideas with the most magnificent collection of glasses and shoes that set the yardstick for arty-yet-professional style at work! Of course, like everyone, she had her failings and her foibles. I remember laughing, incredulous, when she shared with me that one of her guilty pleasures was watching Home & Away!  

Helen was mother to Anna and Marc; grandmother to Luca, Mila, Daniel, Layla, and Raphy; beloved “Little Big Sister” to John; adoring and adored wife of Larry; a friend, a colleague and an inspiration to countless others. She was, as Rabbi John Levi said at her funeral, quite simply an extraordinary human being.

During her life, Helen bestowed blessings on me and on so many of us. In her passing, may her memory continue to do the same. Zichrona livracha.