The Convict Synagogue at the End of the World

Australia’s oldest temple was built by Jewish penal colony prisoners in 1845

By Mark I. Pinsky for Tablet Magazine

As Jews around the world gathered earlier this fall to observe the High Holidays, few houses of worship rivaled the exotic history of the Hobart Synagogue in Tasmania, the remote island state off Australia’s southern coast. Here, no tickets were required for seats. Just 25 people attended lay-led Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in a sanctuary that seats 150. This faithful—if disputatious—remnant clings tenaciously to Judaism at the farthest fringes of the diaspora.

“There’s a determination among a number of us, a dozen or so only, to make sure that there is a continuing congregational life,” Tony O’Brien, on of the synagogue’s lay leaders, told me last summer. One congregational history, he noted, was titled Survival Against All Odds. “What animates us is a determination that Judaism will survive ‘against all odds’ as a living community in this island at the end of the earth, as some have called it.”

The oldest surviving synagogue in Australia was built by Jews who were former convicts in the bleak, infamous penal colony. There was special seating—numbered benches—in the sanctuary for those co-religionists who were still in bondage, some in chains. Being excused from work on Saturdays and given a home-cooked meal helped encourage piety and filled the pews in the 19th century.

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