“Whose Ship Is This?”

Rebbetzin Devorah Groner, who together with her husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Groner, served at the helm of the Jewish community in Melbourne for almost 60 years, tells the story of their move to Australia and becoming established there.

Here’s My Story

Together with her husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Groner, Rebbetzin Devorah Groner served at the helm of the Jewish community in Melbourne for almost 60 years, until her passing in 2018. She was interviewed in February, 2015 and July, 2016.

We had been married for more than a decade, with five children and one more on the way. After our marriage in 1946, we had been working at the Chabad school in Providence, Rhode Island, and then spent eight years in Buffalo, New York, teaching and working with the local community, until we had to leave when the school there closed down. Throughout this time, my husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Groner, had made a couple of trips to Australia and New Zealand, connecting with local Jews and raising charity for recent immigrants from Russia. On his second trip, the community in Melbourne asked him to stay on as a rabbi, but he had responsibilities and we weren’t yet ready to make such a move.

Instead, in 1956, we came back to New York, where my husband would work as a fundraiser for the Chabad yeshivah network under the direction of Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary. The Rebbe approved only reluctantly: “To Australia, you don’t want to go; in Buffalo, you don’t want to stay; but you need to support your wife,” he remarked to my husband. “So you may as well take the job.”

But life in New York was also challenging, and the Rebbe often sent my husband away to speak in and report on out-of-town schools in Boston, Worcester, and elsewhere. Then after a couple of close calls with our little children – Miriam was nearly run over by a truck and then Yossi bumped into a taxi when he was out with his uncle – I began to feel uneasy, like we weren’t supposed to be in New York.

That year, 1957, my husband had a personal audience with the Rebbe, where they discussed various ideas for his future fundraising and outreach work. It was late, and at one point, the Rebbe stopped and gave a heavy sigh.

“Reb Yitzchak,” he said to my husband, “We are caught up in such trivialities.”

A few months before Reb Moshe Zalman Feiglin – a pioneer of Jewish life in Australia whom my husband knew from his travels there – had met with the Rebbe to discuss communal matters. Later, we found out that at that moment in Australia – just as the Rebbe had been sighing – Reb Moshe Zalman had been hit by a car. He was already in his eighties by then and passed away a week later.

Reb Moshe Zalman had been a backbone of the Australian Chabad community, which was going through some other troubles at this time. Not long after, a Melbourne businessman named Nosson Werdiger visited the Rebbe to ask that he send my husband to lead the community.

This was the first time the Rebbe directly asked us to go. I was pregnant at the time, so my husband ended up going ahead on his own five weeks after the birth.

After arriving, my husband got to work building up the Jewish community in Australia, while he raised funds for us to come and looked for a place for us to live.

It was 1958 when I finally left with the children to join him, first flying to California, and then sailing for two weeks. Beforehand, I met with the Rebbe. “I want you to write about everything that happens,” he told me.

When we arrived in Melbourne, there was a crowd who came to greet us at the airport – and they all knew my husband. In those days, he was working like mad, a hundred hours a week, while I worried about the kids. Our first home didn’t have an indoor toilet, or proper heating in the winter, and we even lived out of suitcases for a while because we didn’t have furniture. It was also very difficult financially and we were getting into debt.

Initially, the Rebbe had sent us for three to five years. After about two years, my husband was getting very depressed, although he suffered in silence.

But I had to tell the Rebbe. I would write letters to the Rebbe describing our situation as it was, while being careful not to mention the names of individuals while describing frictions within the community.

In 1960 an arsonist started a fire in our schoolhouse, and then another in the synagogue. The Torah scrolls were burned, along with books and office documents. It was terrible. Shortly after the funeral held for the Torah scrolls, having taken a High Holiday cantorial job abroad, my husband went to America.

“The ship is sinking,” one local rabbi quipped, “and the rats are always the first to flee.”

It was a corny joke, but I was very upset. And so I wrote to the Rebbe exactly what was going on. “Whose ship is this?” I asked him. In other words, “Who are we working for? What am I doing here?”

Immediately after getting my letter, the Rebbe sent me a three-page response.

He wrote that he was surprised to hear my doubts about “whose ship” we were on. “Obviously, the ship is that of my father-in-law, of saintly memory… the leader of our people.” By this he meant the Previous Rebbe – and, by extension, the Rebbe himself. “Happy are they whom he has enrolled in his crew and has assigned to them various tasks.”

The Rebbe then explained that although the positions my husband had held in the past had some advantages over his present one, there was a difference in the essential quality and character of the work itself. Previously, he had been a “clerk,” who needs “only to do the task given to him, in his best way, and he can then feel no worries, responsibilities or other commitments. Furthermore, such a job arouses a minimum of envy, less nervous strain, etc.” Now, however, he was an “executive, upon whom… full responsibility rests.”

He went on: “Obviously, one whose capacity limits him to [being] a clerk… this is all that he can accomplish.״ But if he can assume great responsibilities and still confines himself to “a clerk’s job, it would be a gross injustice even to himself, not to mention to the cause…

“In a country where Judaism is still in its infancy, requiring a real pioneering spirit to transform the whole of Jewish life in that remote continent, what a challenge and opportunity such work offers to the qualified person!”

The Rebbe insisted that although the other members of Australia’s original immigrant Chabad community had “prepared the ground,” there was much work to be accomplished by people with “an American English background” – like us.

In his conclusion, he made clear that we have the freedom “to decide whether you wish to continue your work in Australia at the end of the three-year period, with all that it entails, or return to an easier job in this country… The important thing is that if the task is to be done successfully, the work must be carried on willingly, without compulsion and without considering it as penal servitude or deportation.”

This letter was describing to us what a shliach is supposed to do, and encouraged my husband and I to take to the task with renewed enthusiasm. The Rebbe also noted that he told all of this in person to my husband – who soon came back to Australia and threw himself into the work. He raised a lot of money to rebuild the synagogue and expand his activities. After this, things began to progress very quickly. And, several years later, when we put up another building for the girls’ school, the Prime Minister of Australia himself came to speak. More people, and more children, became involved, thank G-d, that progress has gone on and on.