In Their Merit: Australian Jewry and Wwi

By Rodney Gouttman

Australia entered the Great War of 191418 on the coattails of her imperial mother, Great Britain. Some 420,000 of her citizens fought in the islands off New Guinea, Gallipoli, the Western Front, and the Middle East. Among them was a relatively large chunk of the countrys small Jewish population. The precise number remains unknown since many enlisted as Christians.

The Jewish story of World War I is far more complex than the current communal narrative, monopolised, as it is, by the superb military leadership of General Sir John Monash, and the avowals of passionate loyalty of Australian Jewry to king, country, and empire. It is claimed that this was manifest in its relatively large enlistment and war effort on the home front. At all times, an edgy Anglo-Australian Jewish leadership was looking over its shoulder worried by possible accusations of disloyalty.

The sketchy account of the Australian-Jewish involvement in World War I is due to a lack of evidence from that era and little enthusiasm for collecting whatever was available subsequently. Much of what does exist lacks a grassroots Jewish voice, except for a few diaries and letters. Nonetheless, it is most likely that the capacity of Jewish communal leaders to influence the average Australian Jews attitude to enlistment or home front activities was minimal. One matter is certain, and that is that a strong belief in social integration helped prevent the formation of any communal organisation to care for ill and wounded Jewish veterans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503502895

Rodney Gouttman

Rodney Morris Gouttman holds a BA ( University of New England), an MEd ( University of Sydney), a PhD (University of Adelaide), and a teaching certificate (Dept. Education, New South Wales). He is a former high school educator and senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of South Australia, was an adjunct associate of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Monash University in Melbourne, and a past senior political analyst with Australia’s B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission. Rodney was also a former editor of both the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies and the Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal (Victorian Branch). He also served as visiting professor/scholar at the University of Massachusetts in the United States of America and Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Haifa, and twice at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current academic interests include Left, Right, and Islamic anti-Semitism in Australia, general Australian Jewish history, and the Australia-Israel relationship. Rodney is the author of many published articles, such as the seminal First Principles: H. V. Evatt and the Jewish Homeland, and has written two books, Bondi in the Sinai- Australia, the MFO, and the Politics of Participation and An Anzac Zionist Hero- The life of Lt. .Colonel Eliazar Margolin.

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Copyright © 2015 by Rodney Gouttman.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015902546

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-0291-8

                Softcover         978-1-5035-0290-1

                eBook              978-1-5035-0289-5

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Rev. date: 03/03/2015

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Contents

Chapter 1: A Resilient Silence

An Explanation

The Power of Foundation Stories

Lost Faces

Jews and War

Anti-Semitism: An Australian Issue?

Voluntary Enlistment, an Expression of Jewish Loyalty

Pulpit Jingoism

Mirror Image?

Chapter 2: The Traditional Wisdom

Who Was a Jew?

Proportionality

Chapter 3: Australian in every attribute

Women at War

In Their Own Voice

Training in Egypt

Comrades Speak

The Evacuation

On the Western Front

Moments of Fun

A Resounding Silence from the Middle East

Awaiting Return

Chapter 4: Khaki Spirituality

Hebrew Chaplain, Perhaps!

A Drawn-Out Selection

The ANZAC Chaplain

A Second Chance

Chapter 5: The Home Front

The Enemy Within

Conscription—To Be or Not to Be

Jewish Community

Women’s Work

Charity Begins at Home?

Chapter 6: Return to Sender

Endnotes

Bibliography

Books

Articles

Booklets/Documents/Archives

Newspapers

Chapter 1

A Resilient Silence

You must excuse this talk of war, but really it is the only subject one is up on in here.¹

S uch was the plea of Lieutenant Dalbert Isaac Morris Hallenstein, a twenty-one-year-old gunner with the 14 th Battalion, AIF (Australian Imperial Force), on the Western Front in World War One (WW1) which he wrote to his parents, prominent Melbourne Jews, on September 30, 1916. From what has survived of his correspondence home, his letters were usually filled with social chitchat, description of places visited, and of mutual acquaintances met. Like all letters of AIF soldiers, these missives were required to pass the vigilant eye of the censor, so exact details concerning place and military aspects were not disclosed. Perhaps the closest Dalbert came to such details was after the voracious Battle for Pozières in France, which the AIF’s 1 st Division entered on July 23, 1916, resulting in horrendous casualties. ² He wrote his parents as directly as he could:

Since last I wrote we have moved our quarters, stayed at one farm house for a couple of days, and now I am in another, which I have arrived at last night. I have just finished a breakfast of boiled eggs, milk, bread and butter (the latter salted with, of course, rock salt) and on the whole most delicious, as I had not had a mouthful of food or water since early morning before, when two sandwiches had to appease my hunger, so you can quite understand how I enjoyed the meal. However, now everything is settled and the place is very nice. I don’t expect this will be for long, and then into the fray again, but you need not worry, as the lot of the M.G. (machine gun) Corps is quite a good one, and working up from behind all the time we do more strafing than getting strafed. Of course we go up to the front line… we are getting used to the climate. I have seen hundreds of planes go over the enemy’s front line. I don’t think more than a dozen Bosche planes over ours, and they fly very high, as if nervous. We have been relieved by troops who have been in the Great Advance, and it’s wonderful what they say about it. The pro rata casualties have gone down enormously, and they got as many in their three weeks down there as we got in one go in four hours, so you see things are not so bad … Back to the bully beef and biscuits, and then the English parcels will be doubly welcomed if I can get them in the line. Fancy to think we will be in the advance on the next great stronghold, which is to fall in our hands. It is not too bad, is it?.³

Possibly, his letter was as much about settling his own nerves, even nightmares, as trying to ease the anxieties of his parents. Dalbert must have been sensitive to their feelings, and also to their concerns for his welfare. They had already endured his presence on the killing fields of Gallipoli, where a beloved and equally young nephew, Lieutenant Grant Michaelis, had been killed. This loss was undoubtedly on his mind when he wrote, during his first Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) in France on September 28, 1916:

My Dear Parents

To-day is New Year’s Day for us, and the second one I have had on service, though how different for us all from three years ago, and also for me from last year. Then I was in Gallipoli. And you know what that meant …⁴

Unfortunately, it was Dalbert’s fate to follow that of too many of his serving comrades, known and unknown. He was shot dead two and a half years after surviving the Western Front, during one of the preliminary engagements on the slopes of Mont Saint-Quentin, near Péronne, between August 31 and September 4, 1918. Victory there had been planned by another Melbourne Jew, Lieutenant General John Monash, commander of the Australia Corps.⁵ The actual attack was led by Major General Charles Rosenthal, often wrongly identified as Jewish.

One might have left Dalbert’s entreaty to his parents as a mere private exchange had it not inadvertently come to symbolise the silence of successive post-WWI generations of Australian Jewry over the role played by Australian Jews, both in the military and on the home front, during the Great War of 1914–18. This legacy lingers to the present day. It has led to apathy on the part of Australian Jewish communities in acquiring a substantial archive of wartime memorabilia. The largest one to date is the collection that resides at Sydney’s Jewish History and Holocaust Museum.

What follows in this work is neither a study of the morality of WWI nor of Australia’s part in it, whether from a Judaic or other point of view. Nor does it seek to analyse and make judgements about battlefield tactics and strategies, the worthiness of military commanders, or soldier genealogy. Australian researchers have long studied such matters. That does not mean their findings or insights have not been used where pertinent. Rather, the purpose of this book is to open up discussion about Australian Jews’ contribution to their country’s WWI effort, based upon the limited body of evidence available.

In fact, there exists a general ignorance among Australian Jews today of the contribution made by their forebears to this national war effort. This yawning gap in contemporary Jewish knowledge has been masked by a communal wisdom that is rarely challenged, and was set by the attitude of the Anglo-Jewish leaders of the time. This work seeks to provide reasons for the current state of communal ignorance, and to question that traditional wisdom which assumes that the communal spokesmen’s mindset of the day with regards to the war accurately reflected that of the average Australian Jew.

An Explanation

Inevitably, the question arises: why has there been this great reluctance in the past to gather the Australian Jewish story of WWI? The answer is complex, but it appears to be a product of contiguous historical factors that commenced with the psyche of the wartime Jewish generation itself. This reflected the Jewish community’s philosophy of refusing to see itself as holding a different attitude towards the war from that of the general populace. In no way did it want its contribution, whether military or civil, to be seen as anything special or separate. As Australians of the Jewish faith, they wanted their part to be enfolded anonymously and seamlessly into the national war effort. The leaders of the Jewish community considered this a defensive strategy. To have done otherwise would have been an affront to a country which had always accorded its Jews full civic, political, and religious freedom. Such an insult might arouse social estrangement and anti-Semitism. Paradoxically, though, these same leaders, while desiring invisibility, also wished the general populace to recognise and acknowledge that Jews were, in fact, doing their bit for their king, country, and empire, to counter misanthropes who suggested they were not.

The second factor inhibiting a collection of memorabilia of the Jewish contribution to the war effort was a change in the national zeitgeist that followed the war. The social outlook greatly changed from initial loyalty to Great Britain and its empire to the wish to take advantage, as quickly as possible, of the dividends of peace. War veterans too, were forced along this path of silence, if only, as Michael Mackerman says, to try and escape their dark memories and re-establish themselves on civvy street.⁶ They lacked an audience for their war experiences, even within their own families. The same was probably the case within the Jewish community.

In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, when enough time had elapsed for the raw emotions of the war years to subside, Australian Jewry faced two new insurmountable issues. The first was that Australia was profoundly affected by the Great Depression which lasted up to the cusp of WWII. It was an epoch of deep unemployment, business failures, poverty, and unassailable emotional and psychological stress. No detailed study is available concerning how Jews and their communities fared during this economic implosion, but there is no reason to think they suffered differently from Australia’s non-Jewish population. It would not it have been a time when anyone was concerned with the Australian Jewish story of WWI.

The second aspect was essentially Jewish in nature and had to do with the inexorable rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist cronies in Germany. As the 1930s progressed, thousands of requests for asylum poured into Australia from Jews in Germany, Austria, and Poland.⁷ Divisions occurred within Anglo-Australia Jewry over the social viability of Australia’s acceptance of large numbers of foreign Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism. At the 1938 conference on refugees in Évian-les-Bains, France, an Australian representative argued that his country had no racial problem and did not wish to import one.⁸ That statement was possible only because the White Australia Policy had legally deemed Australia’s indigenous population invisible. Under pressure from her allies Great Britain and the United States of America, Australia reluctantly accepted, just before the outbreak of war, some 8.000 refugees, of whom around 5,000 were Jews.⁹

In the immediate post-WWII period, the Australian Jewish military story was further stalled. Australia absorbed many Holocaust survivors, who along with other immigrants, more than doubled the national Jewish population.¹⁰ These newcomers ended the hegemony of Anglo-Jewry over communal life which had already been ebbing during the 1930s.¹¹ No longer did organised Jewish communal life sit comfortably on the shoulders of its Anglo-Australian forebears. For many Holocaust survivors, their understanding of Australian history began at the moment of their arrival Down Under. The Jewish communal understanding of the war years shifted from interest in how Australian Jews had fared to how European Jews had personally experienced the Nazi genocide.

Two narratives of WW11 competed for communal space. The first was the role played by Anglo-Australian Jewry in the war against Nazi Germany and Japan both military and on the home front. Second, were the personal accounts of survivors of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the natural reticence of Australian Jewish veterans to speak of their often horrific war experiences hardened in the face of Holocaust survivors’ need to reveal their tragic personal stories. For them, it was not merely for therapeutic reasons, or to establish family genealogy, but also to provide first-hand evidence to combat Holocaust deniers whose vicious claims were spreading globally. Thus, for demographic and humanistic reasons, the personal stories of Holocaust survivors took precedence over those of Jewish veterans of WW11. Indeed, if there was little communal interests in Australian Jewry’s role in WW11, regarding WW1, there was even less.

Now, with the centenary of WWI upon us, the Australian Jewish war record is found wanting. It is no more apparent than on national remembrance days such as ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Day and Remembrance Day, when the rhetoric — from the Jewish podium or commentary in the Jewish press — is generally simplistic, ritualistic, and predictable. At least two matters take centre stage. The first concerns the assertion that Australian Jews were absolutely loyal to king, country, and the British Empire, proven by their enlistment in the AIF in numbers proportionally greater than the general population. The second is to mention the name of General Sir John Monash, whom most scholars —if not all — regard as Australia’s greatest officer of the Great War. Little space is left for other Australian Jewish soldiers, simply because so little is known about them. Moreover, nothing is recalled, for the same reason, of the Jewish war effort on the home front; or how Jewish soldiers were received by their communities when they returned to Australia, especially those physically, emotionally, or psychologically maimed.

Curated exhibitions to honour Jewish soldiers of the Great War have not helped in this regard because of their lack of resource material. Also, their real intent is not so much to examine the individual Australian Jew’s response to the war, but to argue the propagandist point that Australian Jews really did their military bit when their country called.

The Power of Foundation Stories

The powerful foundation story of Gallipoli and the Western Front has become imprinted on the national psyche and has influenced how Australians have come to regard themselves. Arguably, Australia’s most influential cultural tale is the ‘Australian Legend,’ the military exploits of WW1, popularised by the official historian and AIF war correspondent, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, In this, he was aided by accounts of the exceptionalism of Australian soldiers propagated by General Sir John Monash.¹²

In its own way, the foundation story of the Australian Jewish role in the war, compiled by Corporal Harold Boas, the Jewish representative of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in London, took on the status of communal wisdom. However, while the oeuvres of Bean and Monash have been subjected to intense critical scholarship, the Boas interpretation has been left untouched by historians of Australian Jewry as if it were holy writ.

The Jewish press and synagogue records provide little objective commentary about the war in general, or how individual Australian Jews reacted to it. Each of these agencies was the mouthpiece of the entrenched Anglo-Australian Jewish establishment. The central unit of the Jewish community was the Hebrew congregation, whose leadership, both clerical and lay, tended to remain in place for many years. If individual positions changed, the new leader also tended to be of the ruling oligarchy. Jewish cultural, sporting, and philanthropic groups did exist, but the interlocking boardroom syndrome was prevalent.¹³ On the other side of the coin, however, Australia was an open society, and thus actual membership in a Jewish community was a matter of individual choice. Because they were not appointed in any democratic way, Jewish leaders — beyond doctrinal matters — had only one weapon of influence over those in whose name they spoke, that of moral suasion.

The views of the Jewish press at the time were rarely questioned. The editorialist believed his role was to mould community opinion, not to reflect it. It is unlikely that the tiny band of male owners/editors¹⁴ ever published views different from those prevailing among the elite of Anglo-Australian Jewry. No combative letter-to-the-editor column ever appeared. Little is known of this press’s spread of readership and influence.

Lost Faces

Nancy Keesing, an Australian Jewish author and anthologist of much acclaim, once lamented her inability to find a fictional account of Australian Jewish soldiers in either of the two world wars of the twentieth century.¹⁵ Members of her own family were veterans of the AIF in WWI, and she herself had been a clerk in the Department of the Navy during WWII. However, her own collection, Shalom: A Collection of Australian Jewish Stories, and that of Gale Hammer, Pomegranates: A Century of Jewish Australian Writing,¹⁶ provide us with few gems. Keesing’s compendium includes Lizabeth Rose Cohen’s short story Original Anzac which laments the fact that with the passing of the years, so many faces of the original ANZACS are missing from the annual ANZAC Day march.¹⁷ Today, a century later, those who served in WW1 are all gone, so the scholar cannot ask them about the claims made in their name. Many decades after the Great War, Captain C. H. Leedman, a decorated Jewish doctor from Western Australian who had served on the Western Front, commented:

Time clouds over many memories of war for they were numerous but it fails to blur the worst things that came my way which no length of time could erase …¹⁸

Unlike Leedman, very few Australian Jewish soldiers, wrote of those worst things and their feeling about them. More is the pity,

Angela Thirkell’s novel, Trooper to the Southern Cross, published in 1923, speaks of:

Little Moses Colquhoun—at least his name was really Vernon, not Moses, but his father was Ben Cohen all right, so we used to call him Moses for short -that was hurt in the first landing at Gaba Tepe The old ‘Colne’ was being used as a temporary hospital, and God it stank…..Little Moses had been severely peppered on the seat of his pants while getting over a gunwale of a boat with a landing party, and thought he was going to