MY THANKS TO THE Pratt Cultural Fund, chaired by Mr Sam Lipski AO. I am grateful for the sympathetic friendship of Mrs Jeannie Pratt AO. Their support of educational, cultural and charitable projects in Australia and in Israel has no parallel.
I extend my gratitude to the Australian Jewish Historical Society with its branches in Victoria and New South Wales and presidents Dr Howard Freeman and Mrs Helen Bersten respectively. The painstaking work of Ms Jeannette Tsoulos and Ms Rieke Nash of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society in New South Wales was invaluable. My thanks to the enthusiastic support of Mr Lionel Sharpe OAM, President of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society in Victoria and Ms Sophie Caplan OAM, President of the Australian Jewish Historical Society in New South Wales. The Archives of the New South Wales Genealogical Society are housed at Mandelbaum House at the University of Sydney and the help of Ms Naomi Winton is acknowledged together with the support of Mrs Helen Bersten. The archives of the Great Synagogue were generously made available to me and my thanks go to Rabbi Emeritus Raymond Apple AO. I acknowledge the support of the Hyde Park Museum, its curator at the time, Mr John Petersen, and the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. Over the past forty or so years I have studied the records of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation and the Archives of Tasmania, which are now online. This edition is the result of an initiative envisaged by my friend, Mr Peter M Schiftan.
There are dozens of people from around the world who have supplied me with family information. Rather than lose their connection with their family research I have tried to acknowledge them within the body of the notes. I hope I have repaid their trust and done justice to their discoveries.
The first edition of this book was written as part of a requirement for doctoral studies at Monash University.
Melbourne University Press and its Miegunyah division have been tolerant, supportive and enthusiastic. My thanks to the CEO and Publisher of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd, Ms Louise Adler, Publishing Editors Kirsty Manning-Wilcox and Catherine Cradwick. My editor for the first edition was Sally Nicholls who patiently and vigilantly brought order and discipline into the work of this unruly author. The editor of this Second Edition is Diane Leyman, and I am very grateful for her deft expertise.
The Hon. Howard Nathan of the Victorian Supreme Court was eminently qualified to write the Foreword. His family's remarkable story, which begins with the arrival of the Third Fleet in 1791, is embedded in this text.
This book is the result of a lifetime's fascination with Australian history and the Jews of the colonial period. Apart from Israel, there are few, if any, other countries in the world in which Jews have been part of a nation's history from its settlement on its very first day. I will always be grateful for my partnership with the late Dr George Bergman of Sydney who was the scholarly pioneer in this field.
For more than fifty years my wife Robyn has been my partner. She is a woman of valour who, with untiring grace and patience, has been ‘my right hand’ patiently providing literary analysis, reading manuscripts, dealing with dusty documents, trawling through newspapers and exploring snake-infested rural cemeteries to help in the search for the long forgotten and often neglected records of colonial Australia's Jews.
We both dedicate this book to our grandchildren, Joshua Levi Sylvan and Amy Grace Sylvan, and to all the children at Melbourne's King David School.
Rabbi John Simon Levi