Jewish Museum Australia
A significant and accessible collection of objects and stories that represents the breadth of Jewish culture and Australian Jewish life. The Jewish Museum also offers tours to two local synagogues: the historic and architecturally unique St Kilda Synagogue; and Temple Beth Israel, the principal progressive synagogue in Melbourne.Location: Grandel Centre of Judaica, 26 Alma Road, St Kilda.
Contact: (03) 8534 3600.
The history of the Jews in Australia commenced with the British settlement of Australia in 1788. The first Jews to come to Australia were 8 English convicts transported to Botany Bay in 1788 aboard the First Fleet that established the first European settlement on the continent, on the site of present-day Sydney. There are 97,335 Australians who identified as Jewish in the 2011 census. Jewish citizens make up 0.3 percent of the Australian population. The majority are Ashkenazi Jews, many of them refugees and Holocaust survivors who arrived during and after World War II. Judaism is a minority religion in Australia.
Jews began to assemble in Victoria in the 1840s. The Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, Melbourne, formed in 1841, and the first synagogue building opened in 1847, at 472 Bourke Street, with a seating capacity of 100. With the arrival of large numbers of immigrants in the 1850s, the need for a larger synagogue was felt. Construction of a larger 600 seat synagogue at South Yarra commenced in March 1855. This was followed by St Kilda, Geelong, Bendigo, and Ballarat (1853). By the 1850s, during the time of the Victorian Gold Rush, Melbourne had become the largest Jewish settlement in the country. The East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation split from the Bourke St congregation in 1857. A religious court (Beth Din) was set up in Melbourne in 1866. The St Kilda Hebrew Congregation was formed in 1871, with the first services held in St Kilda Town Hall and the building of a permanent building in Charnwood Road commencing in 1872.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, as Australia was unifying its colonies into a single independent country, a new wave of Jewish immigration began. Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland began arriving in the 1890s, fleeing pogroms in their native lands. This immigration wave led to a divide among urban Jewish communities. Most Jews in Sydney were from Western and Central Europe, and were largely secular. Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled in Melbourne, and were highly Orthodox. In addition, thousands of highly observant Jews immigrated from South Africa and settled in Perth.
By 1901 it is estimated there were over 15,000 Jews in Australia. When Australia was founded as an independent country in 1901, some of the founders were Jewish. From the outset, Jews were treated as equal citizens with freedom to participate in economic and cultural life, and played an important role in their development. Anti-semitism, which was common in contemporary Europe, was very rare in Australia.
Following World War I, another stream of Jewish immigrants came, and when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, many German Jews came to Australia. The Australian government was initially hesitant in permitting entry to the many Jews who wanted to come, but in 1938, it allotted 15,000 visas for "victims of oppression". Some 7,000 Jews took advantage of the visas before the outbreak of World War II.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, large numbers of European Jews arrived in the country from displaced persons camps. A large number of the new immigrants were observant Jews, and day-school attendance rose steadily. A new Sephardic community also emerged in the post-war period. Previously, Sephardi Jews were not permitted to enter due to Australia's White Australia policy. However, following the Suez Crisis in 1956, a number of Egyptian Jews were allowed to enter. Over the following years, overtures from Jewish communities led the government to drop its previous stance on entry of Sephardic Jews. By 1969, when Iraqi Jews were being persecuted, the government granted refugee status to Iraqi Jews who managed to reach Australia.
