Book Notes: The Jews of Australia - A Thematic History, Vol. II, 1945 to the Present, W. D. Rubinstein

<plain_text><page sequence="1">The Jews of Australia - A Thematic History, Volume II, 1945 to the Present, W. D. Rubinstein (William Heinemann, Australia, 1991) ISBN 0 8S56i-3S2-i. 616 pp. The second volume continues the thematic format and shows how drastically the Australian Jewish community has altered since the Second World War. Due to the heavy immigration from Central Europe, Russia and South Africa, immig? rants now make up the majority of Australian Jews and have brought in skills, much energy and enterprise. The expansion of Jewish day schools in Melbourne is a remarkable story, including the account of the postwar founding of a non religious anti-Zionist Bundist school with Yiddish as the language of instruction. Another strange tale is how the Jewish community ensured that the immigration forms would require all immigrants to state if they are Jews, with the intention of filtering out the Nazis. This is an important and systematic account of some well-organized and major Jewish communities in a rapidly expanding country. Edgar Samuel 337</page></plain_text>