Gutman ‘respected and loved’
Communal leaders have paid tribute to Margaret Gutman, who served in several top roles in the Jewish community and died at the age of 87 last week.
COMMUNAL leaders have paid tribute to Margaret Gutman, who served in several top roles in the Jewish community and died at the age of 87 last week.
Gutman was the executive director of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBOD) from 1983 to 2001, a former journalist at the Sydney Jewish News and was a Sydney Jewish Museum board member.
In 1993, she was given a Medal of the Order of Australia for her service to the Jewish community, particularly through the JBOD.
“Margaret Gutman was synonymous with the Board for 18 years – a thoroughly dependable pair of hands who was dedicated to the wellbeing of the community and to advancing its interests,” current JBOD CEO Vic Alhadeff said.
“Her commitment to the Board of Deputies, to the community, to Indigenous rights and to the cause of intercultural bridge-building was peerless, and NSW Jewry is all the poorer for her passing.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) executive director Peter Wertheim reflected on his close working relationship with Gutman in the late 1990s.
“Margaret was the consummate communal professional,” Wertheim said. “She was blessed with an abundance of intelligence, energy, tact and empathy, and she deployed these strengths over many years for the benefit of the Jewish community.”
He noted that in her youth she worked in New York with the United Nations and during her time at JBOD she organised countless events and projects which were a source of pride and joy for the Jewish community and won the community many friends from all walks of life in the wider community.
“In 1998 Margaret was instrumental in helping to organise an exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney featuring more than 300 Judaica exhibits, rare illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, richly embroidered synagogue textiles and ceremonial silver objects from the Jewish Museum of Prague.
“Within the Jewish community and beyond, Margaret was widely respected, admired and loved. Her passing is a sad loss not only for her family but also for the Jewish community and for Australia.”
Her son Sandy Gutman, better known in the community as comedian Austen Tayshus, said his mother was extremely youthful and flamboyant.
“The amount of strangers who have approached me in the past few days saying how surprised they were to hear of her ‘true’ age is remarkable,” he said.
“She was always doing something, guiding at the Holocaust museum, or preparing a new exhibition like Dressing Sydney, playing bridge with her friends, travelling the world, entertaining her grandchildren, swimming and exercising at Wolper, walking at high speed around the Eastern Suburbs, at the Israeli Film Festival or the Polish Film Festival.
“Now that she is gone it becomes even more obvious just how much a part of all our lives she was.”
JOSHUA LEVI
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