Back to its roots
ACCORDING to The AJN's forerunner The Hebrew Standard, on February 14, 1943, when Sir Samuel Cohen officially opened North Bondi Hebrew School and Kindergarten – a modest one-classroom cottage purchased by Abraham Rabinovitch, with just a handful of children enrolled – he said he hoped it "would be such a success that it would be a forerunner of many more such education aids to the progress of the ideals of Jewry".
ACCORDING to The AJN’s forerunner The Hebrew Standard, on February 14, 1943, when Sir Samuel Cohen officially opened North Bondi Hebrew School and Kindergarten – a modest one-classroom cottage purchased by Abraham Rabinovitch, with just a handful of children enrolled – he said he hoped it “would be such a success that it would be a forerunner of many more such education aids to the progress of the ideals of Jewry”.
Cohen was right, and last week, the school which evolved into Moriah College, and now boasts more than 1600 students, started its 75th birthday celebrations at 115 Glenayr Avenue in Bondi, where those first students gathered in 1943.
Five members of the first kindergarten class of ’43 – siblings David Scheinberg and Agnes Ginges, Hanni Chalmers, Gary Marx and Professor Betty Cass – attended the function and enjoyed young pupils singing Hebrew songs while year 10 students performed a re-enactment of the school’s opening day.
Current college president Giora Friede said, “In the early 1940s, when trams were still rattling through Bondi and Jews in Europe were suffering the most horrendous of tragedies, a group of Sydney Jews got together to establish a Jewish school with the mission of trying to ‘make it as happy and atmospheric as possible, so as to create a real beit yeladim – children’s home – we hope, which will lay the foundation for a love of the Jewish people’. Today, more than 7000 Jewish children have graduated at Moriah – what a significant achievement.”
Ginges, whose four children went to the kindy, said, “I still remember my time here very clearly – there was a Hebrew teacher we used to call ‘Captain Jonah’ who’d buy us things if we could recite the Aleph Bet correctly, which was not a bad little perk.”
Marx can’t recall his first day at the kindy in 1943, “but what I do know is that it was a happy place and that I couldn’t speak a word of English – only German,” he said with a grin.
The ceremony was very special for Cass, who attended it with her granddaughter Sarah, a current Moriah school captain.
“There was such a wonderful sense of community,” Bettina said of her kindy years, “and the quality of education was good even back then, because by the time I was four-and-a-half I could already read.”
Moriah Foundation patron Frank Lowy asked the audience to “just imagine what Sydney’s Jewish community would be now without Moriah College? We are very thankful for Moriah College, and we ought to be”.
The kindergarten’s director from 1955 to 1987, Sheila Catteral, flew down from the Gold Coast especially for the event. “It was amazing – I thought I’d cry the whole time, and I did,” Catteral said.
Ilana Joseph, an educator at the kindy for the last 22 years who was enrolled there herself in 1972, told The AJN, “To see past directors like Sheila – who taught me here when I was three – and her successor Rose Fekete, made the day extra special.”
SHANE DESIATNIK
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