Our Aussie Day honorees
JEWISH Australians have featured prominently in this year’s Australia Day honours, with major contributions to a vast array of fields being recognised.
Marc Besen, who was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), received the highest recognition and was joined by 29 other Australian Jews including communal leaders, doctors, researchers, philanthropists, long-serving volunteers and historians who received awards.
“The number of recipients of awards in the Australia Day honours list who are Jewish is a testament to the role that members of the Jewish community have played, and doubtless will continue to play, in the life of the nation in so many different and varied walks of life,” Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot said. “We congratulate all of them for having done themselves, the country and us proud.”
Jewish Australians were also represented in the ranks of Australia Day ambassadors at events around the country. For renowned anatomist and Monash University professor Norman Eizenberg, it was a double honour being invited to be an ambassador after being named one of Victoria’s four finalists for Australian of the Year.
Eizenberg said he was delighted to take up the role, which saw him address a crowd of more than 5000 people at an event in Mornington, Victoria.“The important thing was to make it personal, what Australia Day meant for me,” he said. “And also to celebrate Australia being a land where we have the opportunity to fulfil our potential, and celebrate diversity.”
He said it was also an opportunity to acknowledge those who help the community and encourage others to do the same.
In her fifth year as an ambassador, children’s novelist Susanne Gervay travelled to the small NSW country town of Barraba, 90 kilometres north of Tamworth.
“I love being an Australia Day ambassador. It’s my fifth year and I always ask to go out to regional Australia because the country people really want to feel connected to the city. They need to know we love them, and I do,” she enthused.
“I had to give the address … and I basically connected them with my Hungarian refugee background and how Australia connects us all.
“[Australia Day] means so much. My parents, being Hungarian, have a shocking accent and Australia was very different to Europe.
“But they were fierce Australians. And for me, every time I go and speak to these country areas, these salt of the Earth people, I feel this absolute connectedness with my parents’ journey, and this gratitude that I’m an Australian and I can contribute.”
Meanwhile, pianist Simon Tedeschi attended an Australia Day event in the Bellingen Shire, while Todd Greenberg, the Head of Football for the National Rugby League, delivered an address at Drill Hall Common in Mosman in Sydney’s Lower North Shore. Actor Henri Szeps addressed an event at Port Macquarie.
Other ambassadors included OzHarvest founder Ronni Kahn and Melbourne-based Holocaust survivor and chess master Richard Rozen.
Full coverage in this week’s AJN.
GARETH NARUNSKY
Children’s novelist Susanne Gervay.
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