Hanukkah Down Under is arguably the most public of Jewish
festivals, an eight-day blitz of festivities across the continent.
Cherry pickers hoist rabbis high above the crowds to light
giant Hanukkah menorahs in public spaces; inside the Westfield chain of
shopping malls – founded by Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy – menorahs jostle
alongside Christmas decorations; on the beaches and in the bays, in parks and
even in parliament, Hanukkah is a hive of activity.
But in the Outback, the Festival of Lights would be
consigned to virtual darkness were it not for a bright red-and-yellow Winnebago
emblazoned with the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s face on the back.
This kosher synagogue on wheels – dubbed the “Mitzvah Tank”
– is armed with Hanukkah menorahs, doughnuts and dreidels this week, as Rabbi
Eli Loebenstein and his wife, Goldie, head into far northern Queensland, home
to many more deadly saltwater crocodiles than far-flung Australian Jews.
Married in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New
York, just a month ago, the young couple in their 20s are the latest emissaries
to hit the road on behalf of Chabad of Rural and Regional Australia (RARA), a
unique wing of the outreach organization that sends students into the Outback
to visit the 7,000-10,000 isolated Jews believed to be living beyond the main
centers.
Having spent the third and fourth nights of Hanukkah in
Townsville, a small coastal city renowned as the birthplace of WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange, they headed further north to Cairns, the gateway to the
Great Barrier Reef, for the fifth night.
Now, they’re on the long road back to Melbourne, a
3,000-kilometer trek during which they’ll hopefully unearth lost-lost members
of the tribe.
“We’re carrying mezuzahs, tefillin, Jewish books, kippas,
kosher food, shofars, charity boxes – all the different things you need,” said
Goldie Loebenstein. “We're going to visit different homes to light menorahs in
people’s houses.”
Her husband, Eli, who was born in Melbourne, further
explained their mission, saying that when the Lubavitcher Rebbe was alive, he
"sent out different rabbis to go all over the world to find every single
Jew to make sure they have what they need for every holiday. That’s what we’re
doing.”
The brainchild of Melbournian Saul Spigler, who travelled
Australia in a campervan in 1977 in search of isolated Jews, RARA was founded
in 1999 and has more than 3,000 rural Australian Jews listed in a database.
“One of the cardinal tenets of Judaism is that are all Jews
are one regardless of geographic distance,” Spigler wrote on the RARA website.
“We’ll go anywhere to visit anybody.”
A lawyer and forensic geologist who has reclaimed estates
taken from Jews by the Nazis, Spigler’s students have travelled hundreds of
thousands of kilometers, accruing some remarkably improbable stories: the
priest on the island of Tasmania who asked to put on tefillin; the pig farmers
in northern New South Wales who turned out to be Jews; the elderly man in
Darwin who had no connection to Judaism but lit candles every Friday night; the
man who was smuggled out of Auschwitz as a baby and never had a bar mitzvah
until the RARA rabbis discovered him in the phone book; and, most recently, the
44-year-old son of a Jewish mother and Aboriginal father who donned tefillin in
front of Uluru, the spiritual heart of Australia, to celebrate his bar mitzvah.
The impact that Chabad has had on Outback Jews is
immeasurable, according to George Koulakis, the unofficial coordinator of the
Jews of Townsville.
Koulakis, 44, a former pilot in the Royal Australian Air
Force, was born in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, and has spent most of his
life in remote places that have no formal Jewish community.
“There wouldn’t be a community here in Townsville without
Chabad of RARA. There would not be a coming together of Jews,” said, who hosts
a local Jewish blog that helped promote last Saturday night’s Hanukkah party.
“Of the 105 Jews in Townsville only about 55 participate in
events,” Koulakis said, adding that a local property owned by an affluent
philanthropist doubles as a Chabad house. (The nearest rabbi, kosher shop and
synagogue are in Brisbane, some 1,300 kilometers south.)
“We now have a sense of community,” he told Haaretz. “We are
one of RARA’s success stories.”
Koulakis also maintains the Mitzvah Tank so that the
Chabadniks can drive into the Outback, where they trawl through phone books,
sift through cemeteries, quiz police and cold-call people who may be Jewish.
“They’re like Jewish detectives,” Koulakis said. “They’ve
got a very good formula for finding Jews,” he adds, even if not every Jew
necessarily wants to be identified.
“For every 10 calls they make sometimes only one Jew agrees
to see them,” he said.
That's not stopping Eli Loebenstein and his wife, as they
make their way south this week from tropical Queensland to Melbourne, where
they hope to rekindle the spark of Yiddishkeit among some of Australia’s
Outback Jews.
“Wherever you find Coca-Cola," Loebenstein said,
"you’ll find Chabad."
No comments:
Post a Comment