The Outback’s Jewish museum

Once it was a synagogue serving Jewish immigrants in a remote Australian mining town. Today, it’s a reminder of a history many have forgotten.

As one of the country’s top mining towns, Broken Hill was put on the map in the late 1800s. Huge deposits of iron ore, silver and zinc were discovered there, which led to a flurry of migration. The town is the ancestral home of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP).

In the mining frenzy, a small group of Jewish settlers, mainly from Europe and Russia, started to make their way there. A Jewish cemetery was consecrated in 1891 and a foundation stone for the Broken Hill Synagogue was placed at 165 Wolfram Street on 30th November, 1910. In its heyday, from the 1910s to the 1960s, the synagogue served some 200 members of the Jewish community.

Today, Broken Hill, with its population of 17,000 remains isolated. It is a threehour drive to the next town of more than 1,000 people. These days, it has no active Jewish community. The synagogue still stands, but in 1991 it was converted to the Synagogue of the Outback Museum, which is owned and maintained by the Broken Hill Historical Society. Behind a stone façade, the building comprises the former rabbi’s residence and the synagogue, which includes the original pews, lectern and ark, as well as a replica Torah. The museum is open three days a week; about 40 people visit each week, including the occasional school or Jewish group. Next month, the museum will hold a special Shabbat service, only the second such service at this location since the 1960s.

“Broken Hill was known around the world as a place where there was opportunity and wealth to be earned from the rich ore deposits discovered in the 1880s,” said Leon Mann, a professor of psychology. He was born in Broken Hill in 1937 and co-authored Jews of the Outback, a history of the Broken Hill community.

Mann’s parents, like many in the community, migrated to Australia from Eastern Europe and British Mandate Palestine. “My parents arrived in Broken Hill in 1929, during the Great Depression,” Mann said. “The entrepreneurial Jewish community who supplied and provisioned the miners fared quite well.”

Armed with the knowledge that Broken Hill was prospering, Jewish immigrants, who were often fleeing pogroms and antisemitism in their home countries, decided to settle in remote outback Australia. Walt Secord, a member of the New South Wales state parliament, who has visited the Broken Hill Synagogue Museum twice, takes an active interest in its well-being. He said since the first transport of convicts to Australia in January 1788 (which included about a dozen Jews), there have always been Jews in Australia.

“I have always been fascinated by Jews in the Australian outback and I was intrigued that a thriving Jewish community existed more than 11,000 kilometres west of Sydney in the middle of the Australian desert,” Secord said.

“When Jews started to arrive in Broken Hill in the 1880s, there was no natural water there and the region was served by Indian and Afghan camel drivers. All supplies, including drinking water, had to be carried to Broken Hill. But within years, Broken Hill had become the third-largest provider of silver in the world,” Secord said. “Living conditions were harsh and Broken Hill has always been gripped by drought. It did not have a stable water supply until recently, that is, more than 130 years later.”

While there are no known Jewish descendants left in Broken Hill in 2023, Secord knows that the synagogue tells the long-forgotten story of Jews in rural, regional and remote Australia. “The synagogue is more than 110 years old. The community was so vibrant and active that it raised money for the Jewish National Fund. A certificate hangs on the wall in the shule. Jews remained in Broken Hill until the 1960s. Today, their descendants are scattered across Australia.”

The synagogue in Broken Hill closed in 1962 and the remaining Jewish men rented the residence adjoining the building to try and maintain it, before it was sold and purchased by the Broken Hill Historical Society in 1990. Today the museum coordinator is 82-year-old volunteer Margaret Price. For the past 16 years, she has curated exhibitions and shepherds through the visitors who come to tour the museum.

“When I started here, there was a table, an 18-inch word processor, two filing cabinets and a cupboard in the office,” Price said. “Now the room is so full of folders, filing cabinets, shelving and cupboards, and I’m still discovering new things about the Broken Hill Jewish community.”

While Price was born and bred in Broken Hill, she has always known Jewish people and went to school with a Jewish girl. “Our life (in Broken Hill) had Jewish people in it,” she said.

“There was a Jewish doctor in Broken Hill. He delivered three of my children and my baby sister. I left school and worked for a Jewish man. I shopped in Jewish shops.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by Judaism, even as a kid,” she said. “Both my grandparents on my dad’s side had Jewish ancestry, but everyone changed their names getting on and off the ships (and) we can’t formally find a link.”

Price fondly remembers 2018, when a group of Jewish visitors came to hold Broken Hill’s first Shabbat services in years. The mission was led by Rabbi Shneur Reti-Waks, a congregational rabbi from Melbourne, who brought a group of 60 Jews from across Australia, many of whom had personal connections to the Broken Hill Jewish community. The group visit made the front page of the Broken Hill newspaper.

“It was one of the most emotional things I’ve been part of,” Rabbi RetiWaks said. “You felt the presence of everyone there – the incredible story, the idea that you had this vibrant, close- knit Jewish community that used to live in Broken Hill.” The group also visited the Broken Hill cemetery, where they saw many of the Jewish gravestones and recited Kaddish. “It had such an intensity – not so much from sadness and grief, but from a feeling of all those that were,” said Rabbi Reti-Waks.

After an extended hiatus in showing visitors through the museum due to the pandemic, Price and Mann are now making plans for next month’s Shabbat service.

In addition, they will hold a naming ceremony for two benches that will be placed outside, in honour of important former members of the Broken Hill Synagogue. One will be in the name of Reverend Abraham Berman (a title used by many Orthodox rabbis in early Australian communities) and his wife, Franziska Berman.

They were the synagogue’s last full-time rabbi and rebbetzin, who left Broken Hill in 1944. The second bench will acknowledge the former synagogue trustee Alwyn Edelman and the former Broken Hill Historical Society president Harold Griff. The pair forged the agreement for the synagogue be maintained in perpetuity as a Jewish building.

This story originally appeared in Tablet Magazine (tabletmag.com) and is reprinted with permission.