Perth, Australia: Where the Swan River Meets the Southwest Coast

One afternoon in early September, four young men stepped onto Trigg Beach, a haven for surfers just north of Perth, Australia. A spring storm was brewing. Dark clouds threw shadows on the white sand and turned the usually turquoise water a dull gray. Dangerous weather, but the young men were not easily deterred from their purpose. It was the eve of Yom Kippur, and they had come to immerse themselves in preparation for the holy day.

“I grew up surfing, and I was a good swimmer, but the ocean was different that day,” Yitz Faigenbaum recalled. 

As the four men waded in, Yitz was caught in a riptide that swept him out to sea. He felt his muscles begin to freeze up, and he called out to his best friend, Aaron Lazer Goodman, who swam into the current to help him. “He held me up for as long as he could, but the current was dragging him under, so I pulled away.” 

Eventually, both men got a second wind and managed to swim back to shore, collapsing on the sand in exhaustion. “I walked into Kol Nidrei that night quite shaken,” Yitz said. “I felt the fragility of being human.” In synagogue the next day, Yitz and Aaron recited the blessing thanking G-d for delivering them from danger.      

For Aaron, the episode came to embody the exhilaration of that time, when a group of young people were embarking on a life of Jewish observance in a city where it was almost unheard of. “There was something so riveting and visceral about those experiences,” he said. “We never had a mikvah. It was the raw ocean, an ocean that we had all surfed, and it became a place of kedushah, of holiness.”

Frum from Perth

My husband, Michoel Ogince, has four very good friends. They went to high school together, backpacked across New Zealand together, and flew across the world to attend each other’s weddings. Such friendships are unusual by any standard. But in the world of baalei teshuvah, people who have transformed their lives—even changed their names—to embrace Jewish observance, they’re unique.       

Michoel and his friends were among the many young men and women who spent time with Rabbi Mordi and Naomi Gutnick when the couple lived in Perth in the early aughts. Every week, the Gutnicks hosted hours-long Shabbat meals that attracted young Jews from all over the city. Inspired by the Gutnicks, at least eleven of those young Jews eventually attended yeshivah and started their own observant families. The phenomenon became so well defined that someone coined an acronym to describe it: FFP, frum from Perth.   

“As far as I know, there is no place in the world that ever generated that many baalei teshuvah in such a short amount of time—especially considering the amount of Jews in the area,” said Rabbi Dovid Dick, mentor and teacher at the Rabbinical College of America, where Michoel and his friends studied. “It’s not like we’re talking about Great Neck, or Manhattan, or the north shore of Chicago.”  

My husband and his friends have many stories like Yitz’s and Aaron’s brush with death on the beach. The most interesting story though, is their own. It’s the story of South African immigrants who sought a better life for their children in Australia—of bright, talented young people coming of age in a small, isolated community—and of the couple who connected with them in a profound way, sending them down a path that no one, least of all they, ever expected.  

A Wave of Immigrants

Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is the most isolated city in the world, closer to Jakarta than to Melbourne. It’s also about as far from New York as you can get (the time difference is exactly twelve hours). To fly there from the East Coast, you have to go through Europe and Asia, or take the Pacific route—Los Angeles to Sydney—then board a final, six-hour flight across the Australian continent, for a total of thirty hours of consecutive travel. I’ve done the trip twice, once with young children. It took a week to recover.

The effort is worth it, though. Perth is beautiful, clean, modern, with postcard-worthy beaches and parks. The Swan River runs through the city center, graced by its famous, eponymous black birds. 

Perth’s Jewish community is larger than one might expect given its location. In the 1980s, a wave of South African immigrants fleeing violence and instability nearly quadrupled the city’s tiny Jewish population, which today hovers around six thousand.

Within a decade, a city that had had one synagogue for over a century suddenly had four. “The South African Jewish community is extraordinarily strong,” said Rabbi Shalom White, Perth’s current Chabad representative, who also heads the city’s South African synagogue, known as the Noranda Shul. “They immigrated not as paupers, but as people who wanted to be in leadership roles.”

My in-laws, Owen and Sharon Ogince, were among them. The Oginces arrived in Perth in 1987, drawn by the low cost of living and the city’s Jewish school.   

Then, as now, the vast majority of Perth’s Jews sent their children to Carmel School, a private Jewish day school. Thus Carmel, which emphasizes its strong academic credentials, became the place where the South Africans integrated into the community, and where their children embarked on the academic careers generally taken by children of immigrants. With the exception of Yitz, who was born in Australia, Michoel and his friends all went on to study law or medicine. “We all had ambitious pursuits that didn’t include Judaism at all,” said Dovid Birk, one of the five young men.      

“We Knew What Our Path Was”

South Africa is sometimes credited with having the largest Orthodox community in the world. The majority of South African Jews identify as Orthodox and attend Orthodox synagogues (often led by Chabad rabbis). But the South African community, which traces its roots to Lithuania, is more traditional than religious. Sharon recalled her childhood in the small town of Springs, where her parents owned a glassworks:

“My parents weren’t frum, but we kept a strictly kosher home. My father opened up the shop on a Saturday morning, though on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he would close it. He never said anything, but I knew my father would have been very disappointed if we married out. We knew what our path was.”

In Perth, the South Africans raised their children in much the same way. Shabbat was celebrated on Friday evening with Kiddush and a family meal, while Saturdays were like any other day. “We celebrated the major festivals—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Pesach—sometimes with synagogue attendance, always with family meals and traditional food,” said Yitz’s wife, Talya Faigenbaum, whose parents arrived in Perth from South Africa in 1993.   

This approach had worked well enough in the Free State, but in Australia, many families found that it was not a guarantee of continuity. “In South Africa, they lived in a shtetl,” said Mordi Gutnick. “They go to new places, like Perth, and they’re faced with an identity question. Can they remain Jewish, or will they assimilate?” The intermarriage rate in Perth is very high, he noted, even among those who attend the Jewish school.

Thus, while the imperative to marry a Jew remained unspoken in my mother-in-law’s home, it was a topic of frequent discussion when my husband was growing up. “I read him the riot act,” Sharon said wryly.

The Turning Point

In some ways, Perth was an idyllic place to grow up—in their late teens, Michoel and Dovid would hike into the wilderness on the outskirts of the city, pitch their tent on an empty beach, and watch the sun set over the ocean. But the isolation was hard, especially as the young people got older and sought to broaden their social circle. “There were fewer than fifteen kids in my class,” Michoel said. “By the time I graduated high school, I was ready to experience the world.”

Outside the hothouse environment of Carmel School, the young people began to question who they were and who they wanted to be. It was then that they began to think more seriously about Judaism. Yitz, who was studying fine arts and 3D animation at the University of Western Australia, described his younger self: “I was deep into existentialism, and I was on a spiritual journey and quest for meaning, truth and authenticity.” Inspired by a Jewish studies teacher at school, he began to read the writings of Aryeh Kaplan every night before bed.

Michoel, Dovid, and their friend Gilad Lurie, meanwhile, were part of a different social circle. “We were deeply involved in a niche social life of going to raves and parties,” Dovid recalled. Yet they, too, had begun to wonder whether their heritage should mean more to them than it did. “In the wee hours of the morning, between three and six, I’d be sitting in Gilad’s car outside his house, discussing science and G-d and life.”

Into this churning mix of youthful idealism and exploration stepped Rabbi Mordi and Naomi Gutnick. Mordi had come to Perth on business. He had a vague idea about getting involved in the Jewish community, but no definite plans.

Aaron recalled his first meeting with the rabbi at the Noranda Shul. “I noticed him in the back of the shul, doing his own private thing. He wasn’t standing on any pulpit. I introduced myself to him and he invited me for Shabbos.”

The gesture meant more than Mordi perhaps realized. South African rabbis generally have a formal, distant relationship with their congregants, and since South African Shabbat is a Friday-night affair, the Gutnicks’ open home made the Sabbath day possible for the Perth young people. “If you didn’t go there,” Aaron said, “there was no Shabbos.”

“It Was About Truth” 

Aaron accepted the invitation, came back, and brought his friends. A dynamic began to develop. “These guys were the personalities,” Mordi said. “It was the popular guys, the guys who were good at sports, who were getting involved in Judaism. We got along personally. It was a friendship relationship.” In fact, Mordi and Naomi were in their early twenties, the same age as their guests.

Soon, the Gutnicks’ Shabbat meals had become extensions of the late-night conversations in parked cars, only now with a rabbi participating.

“I had never seen an Orthodox, Chasidic Jew talk about worldly things,” Dovid said. “All of my previous clichés were shattered.” His encounter with the Gutnicks came at a pivotal moment for Dovid, who was deeply interested in nature and conservation. He and Michoel had recently developed a close relationship with a man who was leading retreats in the Australian wilderness, and this man’s ideas about the origin of the universe presented a stark contrast to what they heard at the Gutnicks’.

“When I first came, it wasn’t about G-d. It was just about truth,” Dovid said. “You couldn’t come there and not be drawn into the conversation. It was hot and relevant and energetic. Then it would stop, and we’d get up around the table and dance. That juxtaposition was powerful.”

In retrospect, the Gutnicks said, their closeness in age to the young people gave the conversations an intimacy and immediacy. “No one was judging anyone,” Naomi said. “We understood the world through their eyes, and they felt that.”

Inching Closer to Commitment

As the years passed, the Shabbat-table debates became less contentious. By then, Mordi and Naomi had reopened Perth’s Chabad house and were running programs and services. The young people helped them, speaking in synagogue, running matzah-baking factories and camps.

And they began to change their lives. “You’d come away from the meals inching closer to another commitment,” Aaron said, recalling how he agonized over the decision to begin wearing a yarmulke to his job at a nightclub. 

After the small steps came a much larger one. Whatever they had experienced at his table, Mordi told the young people, was nothing compared to what they would have in a full-time Torah-study program in Israel. “I pushed them to go to yeshivah, not necessarily to become religious, but so that they could make an informed decision. They were all smart,” Mordi said. 

One by one, the young men finished their degrees, or put them temporarily on hold, and left for Israel and the United States. Most returned to Perth for brief periods; others found spouses abroad and came back only to visit. In 2007, Mordi and Naomi themselves moved away, and Rabbi White and his wife, Odeya, stepped in to fill their role.  

Rabbi White, who visited the city before his marriage to help the Gutnicks, said the job is different now: “When I first came to Perth, it was a magical place, with magical people. Now we’re living the revolution.” In addition to leading a congregation of five hundred at the Noranda Shul, the Whites are operating the Perth Chabad House at full capacity with camps, classes, and lifecycle events. They are also in the process of building a mikvah. 

My husband’s parents and his sister and brother-in-law still live in Perth. My nephews attend Carmel School, and the older one, Jake, will celebrate his Bar Mitzvah this year. The community and the school have expanded, Owen and Sharon told me. Still, things haven’t changed that much from when Michoel was young. “Young people often move east when they graduate high school,” Sharon said. “They want to mix in a bigger community with Jews of their own age.”   

The Meshugenas 

Today, Michoel’s friends are scattered all over the world. Dovid and his wife, Miri, are directors of programming at Chabad of Cornell University. Yitz, a 3D digital designer, and Talya, a lawyer, live in Melbourne; Aaron, an attorney specializing in real estate, lives with his wife, Gani, in Morristown, New Jersey. Gilad Lurie and his wife, Liba, live in Tekoa, Israel. Michoel works for a tech startup. We live in Spring Valley, New York.

But the farbrengen that began at the Gutnicks’ table continues. A WhatsApp group, aptly named “The Meshugenas,” connects the men across time zones and oceans. “The Meshugenas are at it again,” my husband will say with a smile, and describe a heated debate about the role of women in Judaism, science and Torah, or the rebuilding of the third temple. Now approaching middle age, the Perth young people are still asking questions, still arguing, still searching for truth.

“Meeting Mordi and Naomi was like a six-year flash of inspiration,” Aaron said. “They were living examples of how a Jew could live connected to G-d and yet be firmly planted in the earth. But meeting the people around the table, and watching us change our lives as a result of that inspiration, has been a grass-roots journey. We’ve all ended up in different places, we’ve had our ups and downs, but we all have G-dliness in our lives.”