The Jewish Community in Australia
The census figures underestimate the size of the Jewish community in Australia.
Professor Sol Encel, of the department of sociology at the University of NSW says that there are well over 120,000 Jews in Australia today, with over 50,000 in Sydney and over 50,000 in Melbourne, and a few thousands in Perth Brisbane Adelaide and other Cities.
An unofficial figures estimate the number of Israeli migrants, that Hebrew is their mother tongue at 15,000 to 20,000
SBS Radio's Hebrew Language Program also broadcasts in English to cater for listeners who have come to Australia from some 60 countries.
Organized Jewish life began in around 1817 with the formation of a Jewish Burial Site in Sydney.
What's believed to be Australia's first synagogue was built in Sydney in 1828, less than 50 years after the arrival of the first Jews on the First Fleet.
The city's Great Synagogue, an elaborate building facing Sydney's Hyde Park was constructed in 1878.
By the late 19th Century there were synagogues in all Australian capital cities of the time.
Many Jews achieved prominence in government and business; people such as Sir John Monash, who became Australia's Commander in Chief during the First World War and Helena Rubinstein, the founder of what was to become a global cosmetics house.
Early Australian Jewish communities were largely Anglo-Orthodox. Around 1910, Polish Jews began to arrive in Australia. In Victoria, they settled in Melbourne's northern and central suburbs.
As with the history of Australian immigration itself, it was the post Second World War period of Jewish arrivals that led to dramatic changes in Australian Jewry.
This wave of migration led to the formation of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies in 1945, the establishment of Jewish high schools, synagogues and welfare services.
In Sydney, many see the culmination of this period of development as the opening in 1992 of the Jewish Museum, dedicated to Holocaust survivors and Australia's Jews.
In Melbourne, the legacy is the city's Jewish schools, a network of institutions that educates an estimated over 5,000 students a year.
VideoNEW
Podcasts
Blogs
