BOOK REVIEW: BERNARD RECHTER
My Dear Friends: The Life Of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger, By Rabbi Dr John Levi

WHEN, in 1936, Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger arrived in Melbourne, he found himself conducting services for a small group of non-Orthodox worshippers in the hired Parish Hall of Christ Church, St Kilda.

It was an inauspicious beginning to a significant phenomenon in Australian Judaism.

In writing the biography of a man who became a much-admired public figure, Rabbi Dr John Levi has undertaken a challenging task, not least because he became the subject’s rabbinic successor.

He has produced an absorbing and frank insider’s account of a rabbi who proved to be a catalyst in fashioning a miniscule congregation of breakaways from Orthodox Judaism, into a major element of Australia’s Jewish religious and communal life.

The new arrival possessed the personal, intellectual, moral and oratorical skills much needed by the community in times of Nazism, war and the Holocaust.

Rabbi Sanger’s success was all the more notable given the often mean-spirited opposition and obstruction from significant figures in the Orthodox rabbinic establishments in Sydney and Melbourne, including Rabbis Israel Porush and Isaac Rapaport.

Herman Sanger was the scion of a rabbinic family (Orthodox, later Reform) from Breslau, Germany, who decided to follow his father’s calling. In the German-Jewish tradition, he was highly educated, not only professionally, but also in the secular humanities. He held a doctorate from the University of Wurzburg and had spent time at Cambridge University.

The times, however, were out of joint. He had not completed his training when the Nazis took power in Germany. Rabbinic jobs outside the country were scarce and Rabbi Sanger found himself, rather reluctantly, in Melbourne, heading a small congregation of Reform Jews with previous experience of unsuitable leaders and an uncertain future.

Rabbi Levi details his subject’s formative experiences before leaving Europe, including a visit to Palestine, which made him a committed Zionist. His personal experience of the German embrace of Nazism made him very reluctant to revisit Germany, and when German migrants began to be admitted into Australia after the war, he joined those opposed to these arrivals.

Rabbi Sanger’s first experiences with his congregation were disheartening. In fact, Rabbi Jacob Danglow of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation ascribed the defection of some of his members to Reform as due to their “Jewish illiteracy”. Yet, the very horrors of Nazi persecution and war brought German-speaking Jews to Melbourne who were not so illiterate and had an interest in Reform Judaism.

Under Rabbi Sanger’s charismatic leadership, Temple Beth Israel (TBI) grew and prospered. The original site was abandoned and eventually a permanent home was built and even satellite congregations began to appear.

Rabbi Sanger immersed himself in a range of campaigns urging the government to allow Jews to settle in Australia. He also reached out to Jews beyond his congregation and to non-Jews, addressing many church and union groups, the KYS in Carlton and the Australian Council for Civil Liberties.

Relations with some of the lay members of the congregation were, according to Rabbi Levi, not always amicable. Ada Phillips, “the founder”, took umbrage at one of the rabbi’s speeches and complained to their mutual friend in London, Lily Montague, who smoothed frayed tempers.

The British government’s negative response to Jews desperately seeking a haven in mandated Palestine angered and frustrated many, including Reform Rabbi Max Schenck, who gave public voice to his feelings.

In the recriminations that followed, Rabbi Sanger expressed his support for Rabbi Schenck, whereupon Sir Archie Michaelis, a parliamentarian and devoted British patriot, resigned from the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board, which had supported the rabbis.

Rabbi Sanger was not deterred from taking unpopular political positions when he felt it necessary. He condemned former prime minister Robert Menzies’ Bill to ban the Communist Party, seeing it as an undemocratic act.

He also joined with the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism on issues of mutual interest, but severed that connection when the council failed to condemn Soviet anti-Semitism sufficiently. Interestingly, he remained an unequivocal monarchist.

Relations with Melbourne’s Orthodox rabbinate were frequently difficult, although Rabbi Levi notes a friendly link with Carlton’s ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Lipman Gurewicz. Orthodox congregations south of the Yarra were often less encouraging.

Rabbi Israel Brodie, in particular, was quite frosty to Rabbi Sanger when he revisited Melbourne as chief rabbi of Great Britain and was generally unaccommodating in his dealings with Reform Jewry. Relations with Orthodoxy only improved when Rabbis Sholem and Chaim Gutnick called for “a sense of shared Jewish responsibility”.

TBI board’s initial response to the establishment of what became Mount Scopus Memorial College was equivocal before it came out in support of the project. But the establishment of TBI’s own King David School was a major problem for Rabbi Sanger. It is probable that the experience of German Jewry before the Nazi era, which focused powerfully on integration into German society without loss of Jewish identity, may have coloured his views.

The president of TBI, Alfred Ruskin, opposed the founding of the school and Rabbi Sanger supported this view. When the school was eventually established, Rabbi Levi writes that “[Rabbi] Sanger could not accept the decision … and never set foot in its gates”.

Rabbi Sanger’s close relationship with the Nathan family and household of which “he had been part of for at least 10 years”, as well as his marriage to Winnie Nathan following the death of her husband, was the subject of much comment in the congregation. Rabbi Levi sets down the known facts and wisely avoids speculation.

The rabbi was so focused on a vision of an Australian-Jewish faith community that even his lifelong support for Zionism seems to have applied only to those Jews who really had nowhere else to go. Much of his work reflected a view of Judaism well integrated within the broader Australian society – a view not dissimilar to that of Jewry in pre-Nazi Germany.

Rabbi Levi also shows how the rabbi harnessed the energies and religious aspirations not only of arrivals from overseas, but kept within the Jewish fold many “Anglo-Jews” alienated from the Orthodox traditions of unfamiliar Jewish cultures.

The book clearly reflects Rabbi Sanger’s tumultuous times. While one may quibble about over-long quotations from sermons and speeches that interrupt the narrative and an occasionally over-reverential tone, Rabbi Levi has done a splendid job in setting down the story of a significant figure in troubled times.