From the Australian Outback, a niftar’s gift to Am Yisroel

When you think of venues of Yiddishkeit, how far up the list would you place the Australian Outback? It’s unlikely to have made my list — until now.

We received another reminder last week of how the incredible unity of the Jewish people can rise anywhere, surviving even the harshest conditions in the most remote regions. It came to us courtesy of a levaya (funeral) in a distant Australian town that hasn’t seen many Jews since its gold rush in the 19th century, if then.

Responding to a plea on Facebook and Twitter, 10 Jewish men arrived to satisfy the dying wish of Wayne Robinson that he receive a Jewish burial.

JTA reports it was the first Jewish funeral in any Outback town since 1943.

Rabbi Shmueli Feldman, son of Chabad’s Baltimore-born chief rabbi of New South Wales, was summoned to Robinson’s bedside from Canberra.

He received the approval of Goulbourn’s town elders to designate a piece of the local cemetery for Jewish use, and through social media recruited a minyan of men who travelled from Canberra, where Feldman leads a small Jewish community, and Sydney, to consecrate the burial site.

“The story highlights the incredible unity and interconnectedness of the Jewish people,” Feldman told Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio.

”It was the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever witnessed.”

The group that came for the funeral reportedly included four or five previously unknown Jews from Goulburn. One of the men told Feldman he had never officially become a bar mitzvah.

Hours after the funeral, in front of his wife, daughters and the traveling minyan, the man put on tefillin and had what Feldman described as “a mini-bar mitzvah” half a century after his 13th birthday.

Am Yisroel Chai!