Premier praises Israel
VICTORIAN Premier Daniel Andrews described Israel as “a home for a culture as old as civilisation, a home for the survivors of mankind’s worst crime, a home for a people displaced for so long that just thinking about it breaks the back of time”.
Addressing the Caulfield Hebrew Congregation (CHC) annual Yom Ha’atzmaut fundraising breakfast on Sunday, April 26, Andrews described Israel as “a great, precarious social and economic experiment willed by a brave people.
“And today, 67 years later we rightly regard that experiment as one of history’s most successful, not just because the State of Israel has survived but because she has thrived,” he told a capacity audience at Palladium at Crown.
Andrews, who has visited Sderot, the target of thousands of Hamas rockets, paid tribute to Israeli artists sculpting floral works from the remnants of the rockets. “They turned the crudest instruments of death into the proudest statements of life.
“The people who declared Israel the experiment that was destined to fail forgot to account for one thing – its people are destined to succeed.”
In his address, CHC’s Rabbi Ralph Genende quoted from the eulogy of Rachel Frenkel for her son Naftali Frenkel, one of three Israeli teens abducted and murdered by Hamas last year. She said the boys all shared the qualities of Areivut (looking out for one another), Yisraliyut (Israeliness), Yehadut (Jewishness) and Enoshiyut (humanity).
He said these four qualities also “are elemental to Yom Ha’atzmaut, the meaning of this day, the meaning of the independence of Israel, and they’re also axiomatic to contemporary Jewish identity”.
Ethy Levy, Israel’s trade commissioner in Australia, gave a primer on Israel’s technological prowess,while CHC president Robert Weil emphasised the importance of the shul’s redevelopment program. A new community centre will be the first major refurbishment at CHC in more than 60 years, and will include a library, beit midrash and youth centre.
Full Yom Ha’atzmaut coverage in this week’s AJN.
PETER KOHN
Daniel Andrews addressing the Caulfield Hebrew Congregation’s annual Yom Ha’atzmaut breakfast. Photo: Peter Haskin
comments