History of the Jews in New Zealand

A Jewish cemetery in Auckland, founded in the mid-nineteenth century.

The history of the Jews in New Zealand has its origins in Jewish traders which arrived during the 1830s. Before New Zealand became a British Colony in 1840, the Jewish population consisted of fewer than 30 people, including noted early settler Joel Samuel Polack. After 1840, the flood of mostly English and Scottish emigrants, many subsidized by the government and private societies, included Abraham Hort, Jr, and two brothers, Solomon and Benjamin Levy, cabinet makers who were among the first recorded Jewish settlers in the new English colony.

Hort's business and civic leadership were quickly recognised in the new colony and within months of his arrival he was elected one of the two constables for Wellington's fledgling police force. Hort was a promoter of early Wellington civic affairs, Jewish and non-Jewish. Hort's father, Abraham Hort Senior, saw New Zealand, until recently dumping ground for English criminals, as a possible haven for impoverished English Jews and a potential refuge for oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The Jews' Hospital (Neveh zedak) sponsored two Jewish women to emigrate in 1841 on the ship, "the Birman." The women were Elizabeth Levi (or Levy), Benjamin and Solomon's sister, and Esther Solomon, who are also thought to be among the first Jewish emigrants to New Zealand.

Esther Solomon and Benjamin Levy were married on June 1, 1842 in Wellington, New Zealand, according to the document in Hebrew, witnessed by Abraham Hort, Jr. and another early Jewish emigrant, Nathaniel William Levin. The Solomon-Levy wedding marriage contract included a promise (Levirate marriage) that if Benjamin died, his brother Solomon would marry Esther. This wedding, the first Jewish wedding in Wellington, was the second known Jewish wedding in New Zealand (the first took place in Auckland in the fall of 1841)

In 1842, Abraham Hort, Sr. arrived in Wellington with his wife and other children, and set about organizing and promoting the Jewish community, which he documented in a series of letters sent to The Jewish Chronicle (the premier London Jewish newspaper of the time). The 1843 birth of Benjamin and Esther's first child, Henry Emanuel Solomon was the occasion for a brit milah (circumcision ceremony) as fine, he said, as any in an established congregation. The death of their second son at the age of about 8 months in 1845 was, he wrote to the Chronicle, "our first Jewish corpse" and the "first Jewish burial" in the new Jewish cemetery.

Throughout the early 1840s, Hort's letters to the London Jewish Chronicle and the Voice of Jacob reveal not only the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish community that could barely conjure a minyan with the demands of making a living, complaining how few Jewish shopkeepers respected the sabbath by closing their doors, let alone by celebrating Jewish holidays properly.

A Maori massacre, the threat of forced militia service for all, and the extreme difficulty of making a living, took their toll on the small community. Isolation gave way to intermarriage. Solomon Levy, Benjamin's brother, married Jane Harvey, the 14 year old Birman shipmate of Esther and Elizabeth (12 children were born of this union, only 8 of whom lived to adulthood, and only one of whom, a daughter, remained Jewish, although Solomon helped found the first Wellington Synagogue and taught Hebrew to Jewish children for many years). Elizabeth Levy married George William Watson in a civil ceremony in 1843. "Mrs. Watson" and the Levy family are recorded as leaving Wellington for Sydney in 1845 on the ship, "Sisters." When they returned to Wellington in 1848, she had morphed back into "Miss Levy."

By the late 1840s, New Zealand Jews who had first come and gone to the 1840s gold strikes in Australia were now lured from New Zealand by the California Gold Rush. This 1849-1850 exodus of early New Zealand Jewish settlers included Benjamin Levy, Abraham Hort, Jr. and Joel Samuel Pollack.

In addition to this first wave of Jewish immigration from the United Kingdom in the 19th century; the three other main sources of Jewish immigration to New Zealand were European refugees from the 1930s and 1940s; families who emigrated from Britain in the 1950s; and recent immigrants from South Africa, Israel, and the former Soviet Union. Prominent New Zealand Jews include nineteenth century Premier Julius Vogel and at least five Auckland mayors, including Dove-Myer Robinson. The current Prime Minister, John Key of the National Party who succeeded Helen Clark on 19 November 2008 is of part Ashkenazi Jewish descent, although he does not practice Judaism. Francis Bell, who briefly served as Prime Minister between 14 May and 30 May 1925, was a descendant of both Nathaniel Levin and Abraham Hort, although, as noted, most of the family, Bell included, were now practising Christians.

Although the early hope of a strictly Orthodox religious Jewish settlement waned with rapid intermarriage and assimilation, New Zealand's small Jewish population remained free to practice their religion, and interest in British Jewish roots is strong among the Australian and New Zealand descendants of the early emigrants.

In 2004, New Zealand was rocked by several bouts of anti-Jewish vandalism, in which scores of historic Jewish graves were smashed, spray painted with swastikas and other anti-semitic messages.

The Dunedin Synagogue is believed to be the world's southernmost permanent synagogue.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010 the practice of shechita, the ritual slaughter of mammals and birds, attracted controversy when the Minister of Agriculture reversed a decision that had it banned. The issue was about to be heard in the High Court but pressure from the Jewish who wanted to slaughter poultry in the traditional manner promoted the move.

Demographics

Currently, the Jewish population is estimated at around 7,000 out of the total New Zealand population of 4.2 million. The majority of New Zealand Jews reside in Auckland and Wellington, though there is also a strong Jewish community in Dunedin, many of them descended from Lebanese settlers in the late nineteenth century.

New Zealand's relations with Israel

Main article: Israel-New Zealand relations

New Zealand and Israel have had a complex history in their mutual diplomatic relations. The countries clashed over a 2004 Israel-New Zealand spy scandal but have since reconciled their diplomatic connections.

See also

• Old Synagogue (Auckland)
• Dunedin Synagogue
• List of Oceanian Jews
• History of the Jews in Oceania

External links

• The Jewish Virtual History Tour: New Zealand
• Jews in New Zealand in Te Ara: Encyclopedia of New Zealand
• Jews in New Zealand in 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand
• New Zealand Jewish Archives