Melbourne - Jewish Synagogue

This photograph is not particularly interesting. What is interesting, on the other hand, is the history of the Australian Jewish community.

The community consists of about 100,000 people, out of which 50,000 live in Melbourne. I've heard an opinion that the atmosphere in the main Melbourne's Jewish Quarter - Caulfield - is more Jewish than the atmosphere in Israel (which I can't judge since I haven't been to Israel).

I found a list of famous Jews in the Jewish museum (4 out of the Top 10 listed were born in Bohemia or Moravia: Sigmund Freud, Gregor Mendel, Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler).

Most Jews living in Melbourne come from Poland or Russia (their ancestors spoke Yiddish). The Sydney community consists mainly of Jews from Britain or Hungary (their ancestors didn't speak Yiddish).

In 1933, Isaac Steinberg – the former Commissar for Justice in Lenin's Cabinet – started an initiative known as the Kimberley Plan that tried to purchase agricultural land near Kimberley in West Australia where 75,000 Jewish refugees from Europe could resettleHis idea fell through when Australia joined the war and was possessed by paranoia that German Jews may be potential German spies. (All Germans, including the third generation of German settlers, was suspected of collaboration – and after the war, many places named originally by the Germans were given new English or indigenous names.)