My dear friends : the life of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger

Australia's finest orator was born in Berlin in 1909. The seventh son in a dynasty of German rabbis, Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger began his pulpit career on 'Boycott Day' 1933 while Nazi thugs literally chanted hymns of hate in the streets outside the synagogue of Berlin.Chosen by the Berlin Jewish community as their emissary in the first three years of the National Socialist Regime, the 26-year-old soon came to the attention of the Gestapo. He left Berlin one step ahead of the police and arrived in Melbourne in 1937 to lead a dispirited group of one hundred individuals who were struggling to establish a non-Orthodox Jewish religious alternative in Australia.Inspired by his leadership, Temple Beth Israel built their first sanctuary in Alma Road, St Kilda. By the end on the next year the rabbi had established a second liberal synagogue in Sydney. Week after week he would go down to the docks and welcome bewildered new Australians.Sanger knew that war with the Nazis was inevitable and his prophetic voice was heard wherever he spoke. He was the Australian pioneer in Jewish Christian relationships. He faced the barriers of prejudice in war-time Australia. The bureaucracy dubbed the thousands of Jewish refugees from Hitler 'enemy aliens' and Sanger successfully struggled against such nonsense.Within a few years his congregation grew to become Melbourne's largest synagogue and he had become the community's unofficial spokesman. An urbane and cultured thinker, his speeches and sermons form part of this biography.… (more)