Journey’s end for oldest Aussie Jew
ALMOST 100 family members and friends gathered at St Kilda Cemetery last Monday to bid farewell to Violet Movitz, 106, who was laid to rest next to her husband Gotal, who she outlived by more than 50 years.
ALMOST 100 family members and friends gathered at St Kilda Cemetery last Monday to bid farewell to Violet Movitz, 106, who was laid to rest next to her husband Gotal, who she outlived by more than 50 years.
Believed to have been the oldest living Jewish Australian, Violet passed away peacefully at a nursing home in Caulfield South on May 18.
Her son, Ivan Movitz, 84, who had seen her only a day before her death on his daily visit to the Bupa centre on North Road, was reflective. “We’re all on a journey and 106 is a long journey and she just went to sleep.”
The funeral was conducted by Rabbis Dovid Rubinfeld and Avrohom Jacks of Melbourne Hebrew Congregation (MHC), the synagogue with which Violet had a lifetime association.
The great-grandmother of six, born as Violet Cohen in Malvern East in 1905, was interviewed by The AJN just before the Australian Census in July last year. She figured in all 16 census counts conducted by the Commonwealth over a 100-year period since 1911.
Her father sang in the MHC choir. “He had a good voice,” she recalled. “My parents bought beautiful records and we listened to the best artists.”
Violet finished school and, at 18, she married Gotal Movitz, a tailor. The wedding, at MHC’s Bourke Street shul, was conducted by Melbourne rabbinic icon Rabbi Israel Brodie. The synagogue changed to its present location on St Kilda Road in 1930.
The Movitzes moved to Caulfield and in the 1920s and 1930s, had two children, son Ivan and daughter Joy, now 80, who lives in England.
Violet remembered when telephones became commonplace. “It was so good just to be able to lift the phone to your ear and hear someone at the other end.”
In the late 1940s, the family moved to Toorak. Violet was already active in Ezra Melbourne and president of MHC’s ladies auxiliary. An ardent follower of Dr Fanny Reading, pioneer of the National Council of Jewish Women, she was a long-time member of that organisation.
Gotal died in February 1962, a few weeks after becoming a grandfather, and Violet forged on by herself.
Speaking to The AJN last year, she was philosophical about the passage of the years. “I enjoy watching children turn into grandparents.”
Asked for her secret to living well, she said: “I always prayed to the Almighty, giving thanks for a good
life, a good husband, good children, grandchildren and great-grand-children.”
PETER KOHN
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