Jewish Melbourne

We decided to devote Friday, June 30, 2023, to Jewish Melbourne. We read that Melbourne's Jewish population is concentrated around the suburbs of East St Kilda and North Caulfield, so we took the tram there.

Our guidebook describes St Kilda as a “former seaside resort” with an “air of shabby gentility.” One of the attractions is St Kilda Pier, from which there are good views of the Melbourne skyline.

We stopped for a nosh at the venerable Monarch Cake Shop on Acland Street. According to the shop’s website, “many of the recipes originated from the original shop in Poland and were brought to Australia and have been used here ever since.” The great majority of Australia’s Jewish population (estimated to be about 100,000) now lives in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia’s two largest cities. The Melbourne community (about 50,000) is primarily of Polish background and is considered to be more conservative, while the Sydney community has more Hungarian and German Jews and is considered more liberal.

We had coffee with a slice of cheesecake made from a 100-year-old Polish recipe and a piece of the chocolate kugelhoupf, which (as the food writer Daven Wu attests) is pretty damn tasty.

Afterward we made a visit to the Jewish Museum of Australia, which houses an interesting permanent exhibition on Australian Jewish history. Among the more than 800 convicts on the English First Fleet who began the European settlement of Australia in 1788 were a small number of Jewish convicts, estimated by historians at between eight and fourteen, transported from England to Botany Bay, near Sydney, for relatively petty crimes. The first free Jewish settler came to Australia in 1816. The first Jewish religious society in Australia, a burial society, began in 1817, and the first Jewish religious service took place about the same time. The first permanent Jewish congregation was established in Sydney in the 1830s.

When we visited the Jewish Museum of Australia, it also happened to have a temporary exhibition on one of my favorite artists, the Belorussian-born Jewish painter Marc Chagall (1887–1985). “When [Henri] Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso once said, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color is.”

 Although the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous lines about the angel of history were inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, the painting below by Chagall (Ange du Paradis, 1956) made me think of Benjamin’s words: “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” he wrote. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Stained glass windows by Chagall.

Typewriters brought  by Jewish immigrants with keys in Hebrew...

... and in Russian.

Reproductions of nine of the stained-glass windows created by Chagall for the Abbell Synagogue at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centers, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem. There are twelve windows in all, depicting each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Jewish mystics believed that Jewish prayers enter the twelve gates of heaven, which correspond to the Twelve Tribes, and reach God according to the original tribe of the worshiper.

It’s winter in the southern hemisphere, so after visiting the Jewish Museum of Australia, we stopped at a pub to have a drink by the fireplace.

We ended the evening with a lovely Kabbalat Shabbat service at Kehilat Nitzan, a Masorti (Conservative) Jewish congregation in North Caulfield. It was a small service—not even a minyan, I think—but everyone was wonderfully warm and welcoming.