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Ella Dreyfus – Finding Her Place

With her husband and two children, Ella lives apart from the main Jewish population, in a suburb where there are too few Jewish people to warrant a synagogue. Although not orthodox in practice, Ella's connection with Judaism is far from an apathetic one. She identifies strongly, through her family, her art and the Jewish Women's Group of which she is a member. We speak from the first floor of her home, overlooking leafy streets, and surrounded by photographs she has taken and cupboards containing many more.

It's interesting that a lot of people on all sides of my family had a lot to do with building the Jewish community here. My great-grandfather and his brother were cabinet makers and they helped build Bankstown Synagogue; Hannah Hart, my great-great-aunt, was First Secretary of the North Shore Synagogue; my grandmother's brother, Sam Karpin, was a founder of Wolper hospital; and my father was one of the founding parents at Masada College, and he's been President and Vice-President of the North Shore Synagogue, and he's there every week, twice a week.

It's funny because dad's family weren't religious in any way, certainly not in Germany. They were German Jews and not Jewish Germans. Dad said it was actually due to the Loreno home that Judaism was instilled in him. The family was able, through connections and paying for tickets, to get him and his brother on one of the ships and he was sent out here on a kindertransport, in 1939. He lived at the Loreno home which the Jewish Welfare Society set up in Melbourne for the kids. It was run along reasonably religious lines and he was 12 when he got here so they gave him a bar mitzvah and he got involved with Judaism from then onwards and it stayed with him and grew. When I was growing up he was more inclined to live near the shul and was getting more and more religious. My mum had been a pretty assimilated Jew, it hadn't been her thing. I became very religious in my teens. I had a great affiliation with the North Shore Synagogue. It was my home away from home. My grandmother and her friends used to call me 'the rabbi'. I went to synagogue a lot, I wouldn't travel on Shabbat, made a big fuss about who turned the lights on and off, used to pray a lot. It was a wonderful sense of identity, and belonging, and community. Even at Habo camp, where no one was particularly religious, I'd go off after dinner and sing Birchat Hamazon to myself. I became politically active too, going on big marches, demonstrating outside the Bolshoi Ballet outside the Regent Theatre when I was 14, marching up and down: 'Let my people go, save Soviet Jews.'

I went to my tenth year high school reunion ten years ago and a friend was saying to me 'Gee, I'll never forget you, you had such conviction, you were always on about Israel and Zionism.' And I was. It was my identity. And my family were always into it, Mum and Dad were always having UIA functions in the home and I always heard about Israel.

I went to Israel on machno after high school, the four of us did, my brother and two sisters. We loved it and were totally supported by my parents because they had a strong connection with Israel. But I got a huge shock in Israel: the reality of what Israel was. I honestly thought that when I landed - it was such an emotional landing for me, flying into Israel after my upbringing - that there would be dancing on the street like in the posters I'd looked at all my life. And I was really shattered. There were the guns, no one had prepared me for the social conflict, the fear. I went there with quite an open mind about the Arab-Israel conflict and after living there for a year I became terrified of Arabs. I also didn't know it was going to be a Third World as well as a First World country, I had just thought it was going to be clean and beautiful. It was really a shattering of dreams and beliefs and when I came back - I went there with Habonim and the idea was to come back and work in the movement - I couldn't continue. I spent a year in the movement and then left for good.

Plus the whole thing that no one in Israel was particularly observant was a real eye-opener. In my first couple of days there I was at someone's place for dinner and I said 'is this food kosher?' And they said 'no' and there I was, in Israel, what was I supposed to do now? I didn't know what to do. I ate the meat and that was the beginning of a lot of the undoing of my religious convictions. Israel had a big part to play in the undoing of my Jewish practice.

When I came back from Israel I didn't want to be religious any more. I gave a lot of it up and that was really hard. I still went to synagogue on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur because I was expected to but I deliberately went with old clothes and looked really daggy. I was just acting out something which now I understand: I was still in shock from my experience in Israel and was upset about it all, I hadn't worked out what was going on.

There was also another factor affecting me which was that I felt rejected by the institution for being a woman. Up to a certain age as a female in the shul you can run into the men's section and onto the bimah and everyone thinks it's cute. And when you get to another age you aren't welcome any more. Over the years that really took its toll on me.

At high school I met my first serious boyfriend. He wasn't Jewish and that was huge as I was quite religious at that time. He was an Australian boy from Newcastle and my dad went to pieces about it. But I was in love with him and wanted to be with him. When I went to Israel with Habonim, he came six months later and joined us on the kibbutz and was accepted by the group. We were together for seven years.

David, my husband, was born in Santiago and migrated from Chile when he was twelve. We also met in high school and had a secret passion for each other that lasted many years. His parents and my parents were friends from the synagogue. David had a non-Jewish girlfriend for five years as well but when he and I fell in love, it was very meaningful to us that we were both Jewish. I think in our early twenties when we lived with non-Jewish people we probably said it didn't really matter but actually it was part of the attraction, that he was Jewish, that there was an understanding of each other's cultural and historical background. But I certainly wasn't interested any longer in religious practice and either was David.

It's not that I walked away completely from anything Jewish. I've always had a practising Jewish family, which is nice and I feel very fortunate about that, and I still went home on Shabbat and festivals. But as my feminist consciousness grew, I just found it harder and harder to accept a lot of the rules and the behaviour of the tradition. I have had to find out where I belong and what's important to me.

David and I had a child together 10 years ago. When I was pregnant we were hit with what would we do about a brit mila. It was impossible to even have a discussion with either of our parents about should we or shouldn't we circumcise. We were in two minds, because we were not practising Jews, not religious. We also felt it was a horrible thing to do to a child, barbaric, and we struggled with that but luckily, we had girl. It would have been really hard for me to circumcise a child ten years ago but four years ago I had a boy, Axel, and it wasn't quite as hard to make a decision because during the six years since I had my daughter, I did come back to Judaism somewhat.

I sent my daughter, Felix, to local schools and then one Christmas she came home from school and said to me 'Mummy, I love the baby Jesus and Mary.' And David and I just looked at each other and thought, oh well, maybe it's time to do something about her Jewish education, and so she now goes to the Emanuel School. It was big decision for us, to send our daughter to a Jewish school.

I'm glad the Emanuel School exists. It's because there is equality between women and men there. It's somewhere she can go and have a Jewish education and have a sense that she has a right to be there. They have a religious service and I've watched the girls put on a talit and a kippa and everyone is having a turn and that feels so equal to me. She knows that she has a right to participate in Judaism as an equal member.

When Felix went to the Emanuel School, at age six, it was like she was putting on a cloak of identity. It was beautiful. She just flowered into this Jewish being and I was so happy that it meant so much to her.

I also have my Jewish Women's Group. It was started about seven years ago by women who had an interest in being Jewish but didn't want to belong to any of the institutions. It's a closed group, people can't just wander in and out and we don't advertise it. Most of us are about 40, a lot are working in the arts like I am. We have performers, film makers, visual artists, a social worker, lots of creative talent. And some of the people there I've grown up with, two I've known since kindergarten and Habonim days. We meet once a month for eating and drinking, discussion and workshops, writing and drawing, visualisation, dance, movement. We take turns in running our meetings, in having them in people's homes. We've got our own rituals which we've written and performed for each other. We've collected feminist Hagadot from Melbourne and America and have selected readings and constructed our own Seder incorporating traditional and modern elements and bringing women into the picture, acknowledging our presence. The Jewish Women's Group has been fantastic. I feel like it's rekindled in me something very important, it's given me my own Jewish community. It's given me a lot of strength in being Jewish and I love the way we meet as Jews and as women, to support each other, to share experiences.

I think for a lot of us, when we were in our 20s, there were periods when we weren't terribly involved or interested in being active in Jewish life. For me, there were years when I went searching hard for spirituality. I went to Indian gurus, I went to Japan, to monasteries, did that classic search that ex-Catholics and Jews do. But in our 30s and 40s there is a growing sense of wanting to find some spiritual satisfaction in Judaism. We have been quite affected by the many children of Holocaust survivors around the world who are making films and writing books. These things are really important to our group and we do a lot of reading, writing and film watching of works by other people our age, or maybe a bit older, who are addressing this. Most of the women in my group have stories, most are children of people who survived the Holocaust.

I have been to some services at the Temple Emanuel in Chatswood. Janece Cohen, the female cantor, is the drawcard. I was in the Temple two years ago and it was probably the first time I'd been there for a service. Seeing Janece up there on the bimah and seeing her little boy run up and jump on her back and muck around, hearing her sing - her musicality was phenomenal - I was crying. I went to my parents' home that day and I asked my father where I could get a talit from. He said, 'Would you like one? I'll give you one,' and he gave me a talit which meant so much to me because he knew I was going to wear it and he is an observant Jew. I went to the Temple on Yom Kippur, and I put it on and I was crying. For me to put on a talit, all my life it had been a taboo thing, never part of my experience as a Jew, and I loved wearing it. A girlfriend brought me a beautiful brightly coloured talit from Israel which I really treasure. Unfortunately Sydney's only female cantor and her rabbi husband have not had their contracts renewed. It's a great loss.

Apart from all that, I also belong to a spiritual group, which has nothing to do with anything Jewish. People from all backgrounds, all ages, all genders, meet along spiritual lines for spiritual reasons. When I was 28, I found this group and I felt I belonged from the minute I was there, because actually there is no dogma, you don't bow down to anyone. We just meet in old halls and community centres, because they're the cheapest halls to rent. We have meetings and we go away on weekend conventions. We have a singing group and I love singing. I taught the group two Hebrew songs. And, of course, I keep meeting other Jews there.

I've found that Judaism is coming out in my artwork more and more. Two years ago I was invited to give a guest lecture as an artist, which I do quite often, and it was the first time that I included images with a Jewish content. A lot of my main work has been about women, body image, sexuality, the female form, with a feminist consciousness, and now slowly this Jewish content is creeping out. It was fascinating. I felt that I was coming out in public as a Jew in my artwork. And my Jewish Women's Group has had huge impact on that sense of confidence to be a visible Jew again in the world, because I was when I was young and then I wasn't for a long time and now I feel really comfortable again. My father gave me a large copper Star of David which I have started wearing out sometimes.

I have a project I want to do for my Master's degree. It will take me to Germany where I've been scared to go all my life. It's loosely titled Beyond the Family Album and I'm going to create and fictionalise my life as it were had my family not left Germany. I'm going to create a photographic family album of simulated family snapshots or portraits of a Jewish life that would or could have been were it not for the Holocaust. The artwork will be an act of reclamation of my lost heritage.

It's really important to me that my kids know they're Jewish and are exposed to Jewish culture and Jewish practice. I sing to them in Hebrew, we light the Shabbat candles, read Jewish stories and hold a wonderful Channukah party every year. I think they're getting the message.

Contents of Shades of Belonging
In the shadow of destruction: Voices in the aftermath of war
Sabina Van Der Linden - A Survivor's Tale
Paul Cullen - Decorated War Veteran
Ron Penny - A Scientific Approach
Melita Stillchweig - Reflections on a Life of Orthodoxy
Kitty Finger - Spiritual Healing
Sarolta Budai - Defeating the Odds
Diane Shteinman - The Communal Leader
Joe & Racheline Barda - Reminiscing about Alexandria
Eva Fischl - Helping Others
Sarah Schaiowitz - Journey from South Africa
Asher Joel - A Public Life

Diaspora with a centre: The post-war generation
Henry Kinstlinger - Rethinking Priorities
Miriam Frommer - A Woman's World
Zina Satanovskaia - Making Do
Tom Budai - Happy-Go-Lucky
Ella Dreyfus - Finding Her Place
Vic Alhadeff - The Newspaper Editor
Myer Samra - In Search of Lost Tribes
Michael Nisner - Converting Gay
Peta Jones Pellach - The Orthodox Jewish Educator

Voices from the new generation: 1960s and beyond
Tmne Blair - Finding the Middle Ground
Yosef Feldman - Growing up Lubavtich
Miriam Samra - Descendant of Menasseh
Juanita Stein - Universal Beliefs
Paul Benjamin - Reform Teachings
Vaughan Cobbin - Converting through Orthodoxy
Debritu Alemeneh - Journey from Ethiopia
Tom Reed and Jackie Reed - All in the Family
Glossary