‘Search for light in darkest times’: A Melbourne rabbi’s Passover wish in the shadow of war
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In this series, explore how Victoria’s religious communities are attracting worshippers in an increasingly secular Australia.See all 5 stories.
What Rabbanit Ellyse Borghi loves most about Passover is how it can transcend the Jewish experience through the ages in a ritual that unfolds at the dinner table.
When Passover begins in late April this year, observant Jews like Borghi will forgo bread and instead eat a large, flat, crispy cracker known as matzo.
The unleavened bread is a symbolic reminder of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. They fled so quickly that they had no time to let their bread rise.
Rabbanit Ellyse Borghi.Credit: Jason South
Food is at the heart of Jewish culture, occupying a place between the secular and the sacred.
“You can hear a story, or you can taste a story,” explains Borghi, the first woman appointed to a rabbinic role at an inclusive Orthodox community in Melbourne.
“Food is an element of creating a lived experience in your body and creating a much deeper understanding of a narrative.”
The Age has analysed a decade’s worth of census data for a series exploring how Victoria’s religious communities are keeping the faith in an increasingly secular Australia.
While Judaism remains a minority religion in Australia, the country has one of the largest numbers of Holocaust survivors in the world, besides Israel.
Victoria is home to more Jews than any other Australian state. There are nearly 100,000 people who identify as Jewish, and almost 46,650 live in Victoria, according to the latest census data.
These figures do not account for thousands of Jewish people who do not identify as religious in an increasingly secular Australia.
‘It’s not just about religious practice’
But unlike other religions, which are either soaring quickly or fast declining, the number of Australians whose religion is Judaism remains largely unchanged.
In Victoria, the Jewish population has increased by only a little more than 5500 in the past decade.
It is a trend Andrew Singleton, a religion expert at Deakin University, attributes to dwindling migration of Jews and conversions to the faith.
“The vast majority of Jewish people are born into that community and there’s almost no conversion to Judaism in Australia, except for the purposes of marriage,” says the professor of sociology and social research.
“That’s how you grow a religion. You either convert people, or you import them from overseas, like other religions.”
There has been a Jewish community in Australia since the late 1700s, but it boomed during migration after World War II.
Despite the fact the number of Jewish worshippers has not soared like that of other minority religions in Australia, including Islam and Hinduism, Singleton says the Jews’ strong cultural identity is flourishing.
“To be Jewish is not just about religious practice, it’s also about cultural identity,” he says. “It’s to be counted and understood as Jewish.”
‘Focus on the blessings each day’
In mid-September 2023, on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, all the lights in Rabbi Noam Sendor’s house were switched off, except for the dining area, where candles burnt and lamps glowed in soft gold.
Outside his Caulfield home, in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland, the neighbourhoods were shrouded in darkness for shabbat, a time of rest when work is forbidden and families come together.
Rabbi Noam Sendor at home in Caulfield.Credit: Wayne Taylor
But the streets were full of life as Jewish New Year began.
There were young boys in kippah caps, ultra-Orthodox bearded Jewish men in mink fur hats, and mothers holding their children’s hands as they walked between synagogues and the homes of their loved ones.
They smiled and nodded as they passed each other and said shanah tovah u’metukah: a wish for a good and sweet year ahead.
Rosh Hashanah, which falls in September or October depending on the Jewish calendar, and dates back thousands of years.
It marks not just the creation of the world, but the start of Jewish New Year, and a 10-day period of penitence.
In Melbourne, Jewish bakeries sell out of cakes, sweets and loaves of round challah, an egg-rich braided bread, as lines of people snake down streets in Ripponlea and Balaclava.
During shabbat (Jewish sabbath) no phones, cooking, driving, technology or electricity are allowed.
The 25-hour weekly ritual, (a reminder that God created the world and rested on the seventh day) begins at sunset on Friday, and ends at nightfall on Saturday, or when three stars illuminate the sky.
Since he is unable to drive after sunset on shabbat, Sendor and I walked almost two kilometres from the Blake Street Synagogue, where the rabbi had led a sabbath service to a backdrop of a choir of South African Jewish men singing ancient prayers in Hebrew, to his house.
As we walked, he told me Rosh Hashanah was a time of reflection, repentance and renewal. When the piercing sounds of the shofar, a ram’s horn trumpet, fill synagogues during Rosh Hashanah, they act as a spiritual alarm clock, compelling Jews to look inwards and better themselves for the year ahead.
Rabbi Noam Sendor and wife Sara.Credit: Wayne Taylor
“It’s a blessing that it gives us an opportunity to think about what we want our year to be like and think about what were the successes of the past year and situations we missed,” said Sendor, a Boston-born high school teacher and jazz musician who moved to Australia 13 years ago.
“We do all these ceremonies and rituals around creating this fresh start and a beautiful beginning to this new year.”
The core beliefs of Orthodox Jews have remained the same for centuries. Jews believe that there is a single God who not only created the universe, but with whom every Jew can have an individual relationship.
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“The idea is that this world is good and that there’s goodness here, but we have to elevate it,” Sendor says. “So we engage in the world in a thoughtful and mindful way.”
Sendor’s faith enriches his life. “It’s a beautiful way of living, of seeing meaning in every day and trying to focus on the good, on the blessings,” he says.
When we arrived inside Sendor’s house, the kitchen bench was overflowing with food. A round loaf of freshly baked bread with walnuts symbolised the cyclical nature of life. A plate of glazed carrots was there for protection, baked salmon for entering the new year with strength, dates for sweetness, and plump, red pomegranate seeds – so good deeds multiply like the fruit’s many seeds.
But perhaps the best-known ancient custom is the consumption of honey for a sweet new year. Sendor’s wife, Sara, had sourced three kinds: creamed honey, honeycomb and pure syrup from Israel.
We sat at the dining room table, surrounded by ancient holy books known as sefarim, which filled timber bookshelves, and walls full of artwork by Jewish artists, including an artist and Hebrew scribe called Tunni Kraus who had joined us for dinner. Sendor’s four young children and five Jewish friends were also at the table.
Sendor conducted a Kiddush, a blessing to sanctify the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, over a glass of red kosher wine and said a prayer to start the new year with “sweetness and goodness.” Bread and honey was passed around the table first, and then honey-dipped apples.
Sendor said the diversity of Melbourne’s Jewish community was one of its greatest beauties and strengths. There are those in the modern Orthodox community, like him, and the ultra-Orthodox Haredi and Hasidic communities.
There is also a growing humanistic Jewish community in Melbourne, for those drawn to a secular congregation style of Judaism, emphasising music and singing.
Descendants of Holocaust survivors in Melbourne are also leading the way in preserving the roughly thousand-year-old Yiddish language.
“The vast majority, I would say, are people who are Jewish but, not religious or traditional Jews,” Sendor said. “So people who drive on a Saturday, but often still they belong to the Orthodox shules [synagogues].”
A ram’s horn, or shofar; a Jewish prayer shawl, or talit; and an apple symbolise Rosh Hashanah.Credit: iStock
For many secular Jews in Victoria, lively Friday night family dinners remain a lifelong tradition.
At the rabbi’s home, we spent hours talking and eating. Sendor shared a folktale about a pious Jewish man who after many years of great poverty, dreamt he was travelling to Vienna to dig for treasure, only to be told that the treasure lay beneath his stove at home.
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“Sometimes what we are looking for is within us already,” Sendor said.
We went around the table and each shared our reflections of the past year, our dreams for the next one, pledging to be more creative, more compassionate, or spend more time with loved ones.
A wish for peace
Days later, war was declared between Hamas and Israel, dashing any hopes of a sweet new year.
It followed the Hamas attack on Israel in the early hours of October 7, which occurred during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.
It is a time when Jews celebrate another year of reading and studying the Torah. One the most joyous holidays of the Jewish year became a day sorrow and mourning.
About 1200 Israelis were killed, mostly civilians, while more than 250 were taken hostage.
More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war that followed, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza.
The Hamas attack happened also happened just days after Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism, when Jews fast for 25 hours and spend the day in synagogues, reflecting on the fragility of life.
Months later, Sendor, whose parents and sister live in Israel, said there was a surreal feeling to Rosh Hashanah last year. Vignettes from that time are like an alternative reality, the weeks that followed a bad dream.
“It almost feels like that dinner we had, which was so beautiful, never happened, because our lives changed so dramatically, so quickly,” he said. “People are hurting and scared. This is as bad as it gets.”
Initially, Jews flocked to his synagogue each day to grieve the October 7 atrocities. Now, Sendor holds a weekly meditation group with local musicians and artists to support his community.
“We have come into a new year full of hope to a year that nobody ever could have ever imagined,” he says. “It’s tried and it has tested us. There are still dark days ahead, but the Jewish people have seen a lot and been through a lot, and there is strength and resilience in that.”
Like Rosh Hashanah, Pesach (or Passover) is a celebration of life, commemorating the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. Symbolic foods represent the bitterness of bondage, suffering and hardship, but also the capacity for redemption.
Against the backdrop of a war, every Jewish holiday has taken on a deeper meaning, says Rabbanit Ellyse Borghi.
During Passover this year, she will preach to her congregation about finding room in their lives to grieve and searching for the light in the darkest of times.
“There is so much grief, so much mourning, so much loss and so much suffering,” she says. “To deny those feelings will mean it will manifest in different ways.”
But amid the sorrow, Borghi says, is an opportunity to use pain for a redemptive purpose and commit to building a better world.
“A world of love, a world of cohesion, a world of support of understanding, and please God, a world of peace,” she says.
It is a sentiment shared by Sendor. Late last year, Jews came together for Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of light, in the shadow of the war. The nightly lighting of the menorah, the multi-branched candelabrum, re-enacts an ancient ritual.
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It celebrates the victory of a small group of Jews, the Maccabees, in their struggle to freely practise their faith, after they retook Jerusalem from the Assyrian Greeks and found a candelabrum in the city’s temple. They lit an oil lamp to mark the victory, but had only enough oil to last one day. Instead, the lamp miraculously burnt for eight days.
Each day, Sendor prays three times a day for another miracle; for peace, for understanding and the eradication of evil and radical ideology.
“I’m a person who believes in peace deeply,” Sendor says.
“I believe in the goodness of humanity. I pray that maybe within my lifetime there’s the possibility of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians to live alongside each other, and that dignity can be restored for everyone. It might seem impossible right now, but my faith inspires me to believe that one day peace is possible for everyone.”
