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139 5 New Frontiers The Bund in Melbourne The Melbourne Bund was perhaps the most successful of all Bund organizations in terms of impact and longevity. It ran a busy calendar of political and cultural events, and operated a children’s movement well into the twenty- first century. As late as the 1990s, it sponsored an annual Jewish cultural festival that attracted, at its peak, up to 15,000 attendees. It was represented on the local Jewish community’s governing body from the 1960s onward. Its members were community leaders from the outset, actively involved in the cultural and social institutions that formed the bedrock of the Jewish community . The Bund in Melbourne was a busy, active, and at times, influential organization in its local context. The Melbourne Bund’s experience was characterized by its attempt to transplant Jewish Eastern Europe into a new setting. Bundists were realistic that they could not hope to rebuild Jewish life as it had once been. They needed to come to terms with the reality that their lives had been completely overhauled first by the Holocaust, and then by the experience of immigration and settlement in a country that was culturally and politically so different from Poland. The postwar generation of Bundists did, however, attempt to fulfill their desire to build a community resembling those so violently destroyed. For its adherents, the Bund became a meeting place in which to link the past, through anniversaries and commemorations; the present, with a steady stream of, both local and international guest speakers; and the future, through its fundraising, youth, and educational endeavors. The Bund came to represent something heymish (homelike), something permanent and safe that bridged their old world with the new lives they were building in Australia. In many ways, the Melbourne Bund was no doubt similar to other Bund organizations, and perhaps even represented a microcosm of Bund 140 T HE INT ER NAT IONA L JE W ISH L A BOR BUND organizations the world over. However, it lasted longer, and had a richer tapestry of activities, than perhaps any of its siblings overseas. There are several possible explanations. Its acute sense of isolation could have acted as a galvanizing force. Isolated geographically from their comrades around the world, and ideologically and culturally from most Jews in their hometown , the Melbourne Bundists approached their task with extraordinary vigor. The Melbourne branch was also part of a community-building project , operating within a fledgling Jewish community where it could carve out its own niche, unlike in other cities with more well-established communal structures. Bundists in Melbourne struggled to adapt to their new circumstances , as well as to deal with the ever-present sense of loss from their Holocaust experiences. Rise of the Melbourne Bund The story of the Melbourne Bund dates back to 1928, when a small group of Bundist immigrants first congregated in a ceremony to mourn the death of Polish Bund theoretician and activist Beynish Michalewicz. After an uneasy alliance with the Jewish Communists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Bundists set up their own fundraising structures to raise money to assist the secular Yiddish school system in Poland. The group was founded partly because its leader Sender Burstin had fallen out with the Communist group, the Gezerd: for his criticism of the Soviet Union, the Gezerd branded Burstin a “social fascist” and expelled him from the group. 1 Bundists at this time participated actively in Melbourne’s Yiddish cultural center, the Kadimah, and were instrumental in the campaign in Australia to boycott Nazi Germany .2 The Bundist group welcomed emissaries from Poland, like Yosef Giligich, who would later settle in Melbourne and become a central figure in the Yiddish schools there. During the war, Bundists continued their opposition to both the Nazi atrocities against European Jews and the Stalinist persecution of Bundists in Russia, most notably the arrest and execution of Bund figures Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter in 1942. Bundists waged a fierce campaign to bring to light the murder of Erlich and Alter, with Australian Minister for Information (and later Minister for Immigration) Arthur Calwell publicizing the tragedy along with the atrocities being committed against Jews in Poland.3 In the postwar years, the landscape of Melbourne Jewry changed dramatically , allowing for significant growth in the Bund. In the years following the Second World War—in which Australian armed forces had been engaged in the Pacific theater and in the Middle...

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