Zacharia Bergner (1893-1976), pen name Melech Ravitch, was a Yiddish poet, journalist and cultural activist. He translated the works of his loved fellow-writer Franz Kafka. In 1933, as Fascism spread across Europe, Melech waved to his family and left for Australia, with three goals. Firstly he wanted to raise fund for Yiddish schools in Poland, and later to create a Yiddish school in Melbourne. Secondly he was responsible to look for empty land in Australia, in order to resettle German Jews under imminent threat from Nazism. Thirdly he wanted to get his family out of Europe, quickly.
After living in Melbourne, and visiting Sydney and Brisbane, Melech Ravitch crossed the Australian outback from Adelaide to Darwin. He set out for the Northern Territory, armed with a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, journals to write in and a Box Brownie. Across the Central Australian deserts he took 90 Box Brownie photographs, annotated in Yiddish. Of course he travelled across the Australian outback wearing smartish clothes and shoes, complete with bow tie - perhaps because he wrote Yiddish articles describing Australia for a Warsaw newspaper.
With raging anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation formed in London in 1935. Its mission was to search for a homeland, if The Holy Land dream failed. An Australian pastoral firm even offered vast tracts of land for settlement in the Kimberleys, extending from North Western Australia. Melech Ravitch was involved in a serious investigation of the Kimberley Plan which had seemed promising. It ended up not going any further, just as other possible remote Jewish homelands (eg Ecuador, Uganda, Madagascar) had done. In any case Prime Minister Curtin, with bipartisan political support, formally rejected the Jewish Kimberley Proposal in 1944.
Ravitch's attitude to Aboriginal communities was mixed. In the huge Northern lands there lived only 25,000 people, a small minority white. Yet when asked how the Aboriginal Problem would be resolved if a Jewish settlement was successfully created, he said “The blacks cannot be regarded as the owners of the land. A crazy idea! They are on the lowest rung of civilisation. They could be allotted a few thousand square miles of land and be taught to work the land.”
Yes his words matched horrid colonial attitudes of the time, but look at the sensitive photos Melech had taken on his trip, and the caring Yiddish he wrote. The look of dispossession in his Aboriginal subjects' eyes reminded Ravitch of the plight of the Jews back in Poland. Both were dispossessed peoples, linked in their dream of a better world.
Melech’s wife and his children, Yosl and Ruth (born in Vienna and raised in Warsaw), moved to Melbourne in 1937. 17-year-old Yosl was with his best friend Yosl Birstein. The teenagers travelled to Australia, arriving when this country had not yet recovered from the Depression. Like many others, Yosl belonged to the generation of people uprooted from home and forced to create a new home elsewhere.
With his family altogether, Melech Ravitch helped establish Melbourne’s first Yiddish school, Peretz, in 1937 and became its first principal. In 1938 Melech travelled to Argentina, Mexico and New York before settling in Montreal in 1941, where he became involved Yiddish literature, education and cultural activities. Melech seemed a poor husband/father, but he left a meticulously recorded legacy of his life here.
Yosl worked in unskilled jobs in Carlton factories, while studying painting at Melbourne’s National Gallery Art School.. until the outbreak of WW2. Then he joined the Australian Labour Co. because he was ineligible for the regular army. He was stationed at Tocumwal, on the Murray River. Later, at the important Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition in Melbourne (1942), he presented emotional paintings titled Tocumwal, Aboriginal Man and Two Women.
After the war, Yosl once again worked in Melbourne. Yosl and his art friends focused on social realism with a fight for liberty and justice. He befriended Judah Waten, the novelist and short story writer who had come to Australia from Odessa in WW1. Waten’s story collection, Alien Son, became a classic in Australian literature. Waten influenced Bergner on many issues, possibly on Aboriginal matters, but his stories shared the experiences of Jewish migrant families in Australia. NB I needed an index, Anna!
Yosl Bergner,
The Alice Springs to Kimberley trip in 1937
Ravitch's attitude to Aboriginal communities was mixed. In the huge Northern lands there lived only 25,000 people, a small minority white. Yet when asked how the Aboriginal Problem would be resolved if a Jewish settlement was successfully created, he said “The blacks cannot be regarded as the owners of the land. A crazy idea! They are on the lowest rung of civilisation. They could be allotted a few thousand square miles of land and be taught to work the land.”
Melech Ravitch in the outback with his Italian driver and Aboriginal assistant
Photo dated 1937
Photo dated 1937
Monash University
Melech Ravitch with a young Aboriginal woman in the outback
Photo dated 1937
Monash UniversityYes his words matched horrid colonial attitudes of the time, but look at the sensitive photos Melech had taken on his trip, and the caring Yiddish he wrote. The look of dispossession in his Aboriginal subjects' eyes reminded Ravitch of the plight of the Jews back in Poland. Both were dispossessed peoples, linked in their dream of a better world.
Melech’s wife and his children, Yosl and Ruth (born in Vienna and raised in Warsaw), moved to Melbourne in 1937. 17-year-old Yosl was with his best friend Yosl Birstein. The teenagers travelled to Australia, arriving when this country had not yet recovered from the Depression. Like many others, Yosl belonged to the generation of people uprooted from home and forced to create a new home elsewhere.
With his family altogether, Melech Ravitch helped establish Melbourne’s first Yiddish school, Peretz, in 1937 and became its first principal. In 1938 Melech travelled to Argentina, Mexico and New York before settling in Montreal in 1941, where he became involved Yiddish literature, education and cultural activities. Melech seemed a poor husband/father, but he left a meticulously recorded legacy of his life here.
Yosl worked in unskilled jobs in Carlton factories, while studying painting at Melbourne’s National Gallery Art School.. until the outbreak of WW2. Then he joined the Australian Labour Co. because he was ineligible for the regular army. He was stationed at Tocumwal, on the Murray River. Later, at the important Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition in Melbourne (1942), he presented emotional paintings titled Tocumwal, Aboriginal Man and Two Women.
After the war, Yosl once again worked in Melbourne. Yosl and his art friends focused on social realism with a fight for liberty and justice. He befriended Judah Waten, the novelist and short story writer who had come to Australia from Odessa in WW1. Waten’s story collection, Alien Son, became a classic in Australian literature. Waten influenced Bergner on many issues, possibly on Aboriginal matters, but his stories shared the experiences of Jewish migrant families in Australia. NB I needed an index, Anna!
The Alice Springs to Kimberley trip in 1937
120 x 139 cm
painted in 1990
Book cover
Yosl Bergner, The Dedicated Photographer, 1990,
100 x 91cm
from Melekh Ravitsh in the Kimberleys
Did Yosl paint Aboriginal scenes against a background of oppression in Poland? His canvases called Village on Fire, Over the Ghetto Wall and Fathers and Sons, were clearly Polish. But the tacky clothes, depression, dark environment and hunger could have just as easily represented Aboriginals in Fitzroy 1941. A great discovery for me.
painted in 1990
Yosl Bergner, The Dedicated Photographer, 1990,
100 x 91cm
from Melekh Ravitsh in the Kimberleys
Did Yosl paint Aboriginal scenes against a background of oppression in Poland? His canvases called Village on Fire, Over the Ghetto Wall and Fathers and Sons, were clearly Polish. But the tacky clothes, depression, dark environment and hunger could have just as easily represented Aboriginals in Fitzroy 1941. A great discovery for me.
Meantime, Yosl's sister Ruth had a successful career as a modern dancer, and a life relationship with Australian artist James Wigley. Wigley continued to paint, exhibiting at the Kadimah Cultural Centre along with Yosl Bergner, Vic O’Connor and Noel Counihan and associating with the Social Realist group. He contributed three paintings to the Anti-Fascist Exhibition in 1942.
Anna's book is available at Readings St Kilda, Carlton and online; The Avenue in Elsternwick; Thesaurus in Brighton; Jewish Museum and Heide.
Anna's book is available at Readings St Kilda, Carlton and online; The Avenue in Elsternwick; Thesaurus in Brighton; Jewish Museum and Heide.
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10 comments:
Anh
Thank you. But I don't accept advertising.
Well done on the book Anna. The idea of a Jewish settlement in Australia arose from two quite separate ideas. Firstly Eastern Europe Jews were suffering from oppression. Also Australia’s fear that the country’s empty north had to be settled and developed by Europeans, to prevent Asians from invading. Yet I have lived here most of my life and had never heard of plans being drawn up to purchase a large amount of land in the north. Neither did I know that our prime minister Alfred Deakin vetoed the scheme.
Hello Hels, It would have been interesting to see what the Jews could have done with a large tract of land in Australia, and how they ultimately would have treated the aboriginal and British populations. Bergner seems very respectful of and interested in what he found, and that added to his prior situation makes this one more book I am adding to my list.
--Jim
Joseph
The Jewish Colonisation Association understood that if there was to be mass emigration of Jews from Eastern European countries, they would have to find remote and largely empty agricultural colonies on lands bought by the Association, with the approval of the relevant national government. I suppose if Israel failed, the alternative we knew best was Uganda, proposed by the British Cabinet. Then Argentina, Ukraine, Birobidzhan etc. But you are right...I don't think many people knew about the Kimberley Plan.
Parnassus
I think it would have been very difficult for people used to the rich agricultural lands in, eg Ukraine, to move to blazing hot, dry, rocky territory, a very long way from cities and towns. I would not have liked it at all. But even Israel was covered in the north with swamps and malaria when the first pioneers arrived; they had to get away from oppression so they adapted. You will find the book fascinating.
I gave a copy of this document to my students. Your readers might want to share it.
Just before the outbreak of the war, a bold plan was proposed by Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg, a man with a most interesting past: he was a Russian lawyer, and had been a Socialist Revolutionary, politician. He was still a leader of the Jewish Territorialist movement and a writer – and subsequently in exile. In 1939 the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, formed in the United States in July 1935 to search for a potential Jewish homeland and haven, identified the Kimberley in Western Australia as a place to resettle 75,000 European Jews fleeing rampant anti-Semitism.
By Dr George Venturini
The Kimberley Plan
October 16, 2019
Thank you Fellow Teacher :)
This is very interesting!
Under the plan, the initial pioneers would construct basic necessities for the settlement eg homes, irrigation works and a power station, followed by the arrival of the immigrants. Ravitch in his report to the League promoted a very large number, suggesting that the area could accommodate a million Jewish refugees. The League sent Dr Isaac Steinberg to lobby the Australian Government to accept the scheme. He arrived in Perth on 23 May 1939. An indefatigable publicist for the Kimberley scheme, he based his campaign on the officially declared need by Australia to populate northern Australia.
Thank you all for your comments and to Hels especially for the review. Since publication I have made a podcast of an interview I did with Moshe Lang, Melbourne/Israeli psychotherapist and great friend of Yosl Bergner. Moshe talks about Yosl's personality, his art in both Australia and Israel, his preoccupations and his obsessions, and most particularly of interest to me, his life-long obsession with his famous father Melekh Ravitsh. This is the link to the podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-185111418/moshe-lang-on-yosl-bergner
Best wishes
Anna Epstein
Anna
Last year there was a speech by Yosl Bergner’s friend Moshe Lang, so it will be very interesting to hear the podcast url you provided. Many thanks!
Any opportunity over the years to see Bergner’s fascinating paintings has been a real pleasure.
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