Rabbi Gersh Zylberman and Rabbi Rayna Gevurtz. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

TEMPLE Beth Israel’s (TBI) rabbinic couple, Rabbi Gersh Zylberman and Rabbi Rayna Gevurtz, will be leaving the synagogue later this year to pursue professional opportunities in the United States.

In a letter to TBI congregants, the husband-and-wife duo said they made their decision “after a great deal of consideration and … with a mixture of competing feelings”, but view it as “an important step in our life journey”.

Rabbi Zylberman has served the TBI congregation since returning from rabbinic studies at the Progressive movement’s Hebrew Union College (HUC) in the US and Israel in 2005. US-born Rabbi Gevurtz served as the rabbi of The King David School, before joining TBI’s rabbinic team in 2007.

Rabbi Zylberman told The AJN their planned move was initiated by a congregation in California.

“We initially came to TBI for a two-year commitment and renewed for a further two and then a further year,” he said, describing their involvement with young adults and family programs as highlights of their work.
Read the full story

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

THE recent sentencing of five men convicted on terror charges in Sydney shows that Australia’s judicial system is working effectively in helping keep the country secure, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).

The men, aged between 25 and 44 and whose names have been suppressed, were convicted last October after prosecutors alleged they had stockpiled dangerous chemicals, firearms and ammunition, in a plan to wage jihad against the Australian government.

Handing down prison terms of between 23 and 28 years for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, Justice Anthony Whealy of the NSW Supreme Court said the five men were motivated by “intolerant, inflexible religious conviction”.

Some of the material seized from the group praised Osama Bin Laden and depicted graphic images of violence inflicted on hostages.
Read the full story

History buff Trevor Cohen. Photo: Peter Haskin

PETER KOHN

TREVOR Cohen is elated that Mary MacKillop has been canonised. A famous forebear of his had a big impact on the life of Australia’s first saint.

The Melbourne history buff, a former president of the Australian Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), Victoria , has researched the life of his great-great-great uncle, Emanuel Solomon, one of 19th century Adelaide’s most colourful characters.

Solomon, a London-born hawker, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1818 for possession of stolen property. After his emancipation, he became a successful businessman and a colourful member of South Australia’s fledgling Jewish community.

Solomon married three times and entered South Australia’s parliament.

The philanthropist was drawn to MacKillop’s extensive charitable work, and twice took action to help her and her order.
Read the full story

Writer and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

ASKED how a journalist, versed in the here and now by the modern-day vogue of his profession, found himself wandering the byways of 18th and 19th century European-Jewish history, American radio broadcaster Michael Goldfarb speaks about “the story” – and the chase for it.

Eighteen months of research, that hallmark of great journalism, “was a big pleasure” for Goldfarb. “As a journalist, I felt as if I had a story nobody else had,” he says from London.

It was his enthusiasm for digging and discovering, which he sees as a trait common to both reporters and historians, that drove him to research and write Emancipation, the story of how liberating Europe’s Jews from almost 500 years cocooned in the ghettos led to revolution and renaissance.

Goldfarb’s 408-page tome, published by Scribe, traces the epic Jewish journey from the first stirrings of civic reformation in the Age of Reason, through the French Revolution, Napoleonic emancipation, integration and the Enlightenment, to the Holocaust.

It has brought the former London correspondent for US radio network, National Public Radio (NPR), to Australia to give lectures and to take part in two key writers festivals.
Read the full story

Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

ISRAELI Ambassador Yuval Rotem will describe his search for long-lost relatives in Australia when he addresses the second Australian National Conference on Jewish Genealogy next month.

The 50-year-old diplomat, who took up his Canberra post in 2007, has family members living in Melbourne, and found them via his passion for genealogy.

Rotem discussed his family connections in Australia at the first Jewish genealogy conference in 2008, which, at the envoy’s instigation, the Israeli embassy hosted in Canberra.

During a reception at the event, the ambassador spoke of the research he’d conducted into his family tree, attracting a lot of interest from guests.

His anecdotes led to a request from the Australian Jewish Genealogy Society (AJGS) for him to speak at this year’s event.
Read the full story

Organ donation campaigner Dr Ronnie Goldberg. Photo: Peter Haskin

PETER KOHN

A MELBOURNE campaigner is hoping more Jewish Australians will register as organ donors now that new research may have found a way of circumventing halachic restrictions.

Dr Ronnie Goldberg, a dentist, and enthusiastic advocate for organ donation, is thrilled about the latest milestone in world-beating Australian medical research.

It enables vital body organs to be harvested for transplants as late as several hours after life-support systems have been switched off and cardiac death, the final stage of mortality, has occurred.

The new procedure – which so far applies to lungs and kidneys but may eventually be relevant for other body parts – does not require intervention at the earlier “brain dead” stage, said Dr Goldberg.

It skirts the prickly halachic issue of whether brain death constitutes actual death. The “brain death” definition is broadly accepted in the mainstream Orthodox Jewish community, but is still queried in ultra-Orthodox circles, which claim that as long as the heart is pumping, life remains.
Read the full story

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

A DECISION by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to reopen its investigation into the TV channel al-Manar has been welcomed by the Jewish community.

The Lebanese-based network, which is Hezbollah’s media outlet, is available in Australia via satellite, but has been banned in the United States and many parts of Europe.

ACMA chair Chris Chapman said the watchdog will revisit its probe of the channel, with public submissions and wider sampling of content.

The inquiry will once again check whether al-Manar is breaching Australian anti-terrorism laws. It will also look at revamping its regulatory arrangements for future investigations.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) president Robert Goot welcomed the new inquiry and said ECAJ would work with interested organisations to ensure their concerns are addressed.

“It is gratifying that the scope of the investigation, as announced by ACMA, incorporates the breaches of licence conditions by al-Manar that were specified in ECAJ’s formal written submission to the government.”
Read the full story

Professor Naomi Chazan. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

CONTROVERSIAL Israeli academic Professor Naomi Chazan has cancelled an imminent visit to Australia following a political brawl in Israel regarding alleged funding of groups that contributed to the Goldstone report.

The outspoken social rights activist and former Knesset member was targeted by Zionist advocacy group Im Tirtzu, which claimed that the New Israel Fund (NIF) – a fundraising body of which she is president – bankrolled Israeli critics of Operation Cast Lead, whose views contributed to the divisive United Nations report.

Chazan, who has championed equal rights and pluralism in Israel, had been invited to Australia by the Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ). She was supposed to launch the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Progressive Trust appeal.

But UPJ executive director Steve Denenberg told The AJN his organisation was informed Chazan had changed her plans. In a statement, Denenberg said NIF “is currently at the centre of some heated discussion in Israel and she feels the need to be there at this time”.
Read the full story

Rabbi Raymond Apple. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

RABBI Raymond Apple says he is “not a great believer in people writing autobiographies unless they’ve had a very exciting and dramatic life, which I really haven’t”.

So, in shaping his memoir, he resisted the idea of writing a standard autobiography.

“But to amuse myself, I started writing a series of reflective chapters about the involvements and commitments that have been part of my life. And it ended being around 100 such chapters,” said the emeritus rabbi of Sydney’s The Great Synagogue.

Sorted alphabetically, these essays, from Aborigines to Zionism, give a thematic view of the issues that have mattered to him — among them, social justice, Jewish history, the arts, his rabbinic colleagues and sport — rather than a chronology of events.

“If you want to know what I did in a particular year, you won’t find it, but if you want to know the sort of person I am, you’ll get the impression by looking at the book,” the Australian rabbinic doyen, who now makes his home in Israel, told The AJN.
Read the full story

Rabbi Netanel Friedler. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

ADELAIDE Hebrew Congregation has a new spiritual leader, Rabbi Netanel Friedler.

The rabbi was due to arrive in November from Israel, but ran into routine Department of Immigration delays in processing his paperwork.

The 31-year-old’s arrival last week signals the dawn of a new era for the South Australian shul, following a bitter legal row with Rabbi Yossi Engel, who served the congregation for eight years from 1998 and is now facing fraud charges.

AHC has had the temporary services of Melbourne’s Rabbi Avraham Gutnick in recent times, but a new permanent rabbi will prove a shot in the arm for the congregation, according to its president, Eric Edelman.

Rabbi Friedler, his wife Shiri and their two young sons were greeted at a welcome kiddush. He will be formally installed later this year.
Read the full story