Published: 8 October 2024
Last updated: 8 October 2024
I grew up in a very tightly-knit Jewish expat community overseas, followed by three years in a boarding house at a non-Jewish school in Australia, with girls who mostly came from rural and regional Victoria and New South Wales.
In Australia, I didn’t attend youth groups or any synagogue regularly, or have much involvement with the community beyond the year I spent working at the Australian Jewish News when I was 18.
In meeting non-Jewish people from all over the world, especially in Australia, there was a common theme and it was usually posed as a question, along the lines of, “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met, can I ask you a question about...”.
The questions tended to be asking something along the lines of, for instance, why religious Jewish women cover their hair. Or why Jewish families were always walking around Caulfield on Saturday afternoons. Or why the Jewish men wore big fur hats (shtreimels) or little tiny skullcaps (kippot).
Basic questions about our culture that they’d always wanted to ask and never had the opportunity.
The large majority of Australians will never have met a Jew, will never have spoken to a Jew and know nothing about our culture or beliefs.
And the reason they never had that opportunity is that, as sometimes we forget, the Australian Jewish community really is very, very small. It probably sits around the 100-120,000 mark. That’s not the Melbourne or Sydney community, that’s the entire Jewish population in Australia.
For comparative purposes, there are just under one million Aboriginal Australians. There are around 820,000 Muslim Australians. And there are 920,000 Australians who identify as having Italian origins.
