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Jewish Care is a philanthropic organisation that was originally founded to serve the Jewish population of Victoria, Australia. Today, Jewish Care run several aged care facilities and help peoples in poverty, disability services and rehabilitation and respite. [1] It is located in Melbourne, Australia.
The organisation was founded in 1948 as the Melbourne Jewish Philanthropic Society. Another organisation with the same name was established as early as 1892. [2] In 1936, the organisation changed its name to the Australian Jewish Welfare Society
In 2001, the organisation became Jewish Care after merging with Montefiore Homes, the largest Jewish aged care facility in Victoria. [1]
Jewish Care has several aged care facilities in addition to Montafoire Homes. These include Gary Smorgon House, [3] and Munzer House. [4] Jewish care also has respite centres and home care services. [5]
Jewish Care also offers as interest free loans for Jewish entrepreneurs and their start ups, [6] and partnerships with other communal organisations. [7]
Jewish Care is listed by the JCCV's emergency response organisation, Jewish Emergency Management Provider (JEMP) as a part of the communal support network. [8] Jewish Care was are slated to engage in over $180 million worth of building works, [9] including $85 million for one building in St Kilda Rd. [10]
In 2012, the families of some residents at Munzer House accused Jewish Care of substandard care at the facility. The families claimed that the situation was cause by staff and budget cuts. Examples of substandard care included rationing of sanitary pads, failure to look after the religious needs of the residents, and forcing residents to wait to go to the toilet for up to an hour. [11]
The claims of neglect and elder abuse soon extended to other care facilities run by Jewish Care, including banning family members and serious neglect of the elderly residents. Some of the families contacted the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission regarding the care at the facilities. [12]
In 2013, Jewish Care began an inquiry that dealt with extensive child sexual abuse that happened at a children's home between 1939 and 1992, when it closed. [13] [14]
In 2015, the General Manager of Cultural & Spiritual Services, Meir Shlomo Kluwgant, was forced to resign following an abusive text message that he sent calling the father of a victim of sexual abuse a "lunatic". [15] [16]
In 2016, Jewish Care opened a confidential phone line to assist the Yeshivah Centre, Melbourne in their redress scheme for the victims of sexual abuse by the centre. The name of at least one of the victims was leaked by a board member of Jewish Care to the board of the Yeshiva Centre. This act allegedly led to the bullying and intimidation of the victim. [17] [18]
Yeshivah College, officially Yeshivas Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch, is an independent Orthodox Jewish comprehensive single-sex primary and secondary Jewish day school for boys, located in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda East, in Victoria, Australia.
St John of God Health Care is a Catholic provider of health care services in Australia, with 24 hospitals and facilities comprising more than 3,400 beds. The group operates in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand.
Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner was the most senior Chabad rabbi in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and the director of the Yeshivah Centre.
The Yeshiva College, also known as the Harry O. Triguboff Centre, is a Hasidic Jewish synagogue, learning centre, and library of the Chabad-Lubavitch nusach, located at 36 Flood Street, in the Sydney suburb of Bondi, New South Wales, Australia. The Centre runs various adult and child-based educational programs.
The Smorgon family is a Jewish-Australian business family known for their establishment of Smorgon Steel.
Sanctuary Point is a town in New South Wales, Australia, under the jurisdiction of the City of Shoalhaven, on the shores of St Georges Basin. It is roughly 25 km south of Nowra, and approximately 200 km south of Sydney. At the 2021 census, the population of Sanctuary Point was 7,874.
Rabbi James Kennard is an educational leader in the Australian Jewish community. He previously served as the Jewish Student Chaplain at the University of Leeds, headteacher of King Solomon High School in Barkingside, London, and has been the principal of Mount Scopus Memorial College since 2007.
The Yeshivah Centre is an Orthodox Jewish umbrella organisation in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, that serves the needs of the Melbourne Jewish community. It is run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, until recently, under the direct administration of Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner. Rabbi Zvi Telsner has been brought as the new Dayan of the Centre and Lubavitch community.
Judaism is a minority religion in Australia. 99,956 Australians identified as Jewish in the 2021 census, which accounts for about 0.4% of the population. This is a 9.8% increase in numbers from the 2016 census.
Australian Jews, or Jewish Australians, are Jews who are Australian citizens or permanent residents of Australia. In the 2021 census there were 99,956 people who identified Judaism as their religious affiliation and 29,113 Australians who identified as Jewish by ancestry, an increase from 97,355 and 25,716, respectively, from the 2016 census. The actual number is almost certainly higher, because being a Jew is not just about being religious, but the census data is based on religious affiliation, so secular Jews often feel it would be inaccurate to answer with "Judaism". Also, since the question is optional, many practising Holocaust survivors and Haredi Jews are believed to prefer not to disclose their religion in the census. By comparison, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimated a Jewish-Australian population of 120,000–150,000, while other estimates based on the death rate in the community estimate the size of the community as 250,000, which would make them 1% of the population. Based on the census data, Jewish citizens make up about 0.4% of the Australian population. The Jewish community of Australia is composed mostly of Ashkenazi Jews, though there are Jews in Australia from many other traditions and levels of religious observance and participation in the Jewish community.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Victoria is part of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse in Australia and the much wider Catholic sexual abuse scandal in general, which involves charges, convictions, trials and ongoing investigations into allegations of sex crimes committed by Catholic priests and members of religious orders. The Catholic Church in Victoria has been implicated in a reported 40 suicides among about 620 sexual abuse victims acknowledged to the public after internal investigations by the Catholic Church in Victoria.
The Jewish Community Council of Victoria Inc (JCCV) is the main representative body for Victorian Jewry, representing 52 Jewish community organisations and over 60,000 Victorian Jews. The JCCV's mission is to represent the Victorian Jewish community, the largest Jewish community in Australia, and deal with matters that affect its status, welfare and interests. The JCCV was established in 1938 as the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board. It has been known as the Jewish Community Council of Victoria since 1989 and became incorporated in 2000.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, or ECAJ, is an official peak national body representing the Australian Jewish community. It is the umbrella organisation for over 200 Jewish organisations across Australia. It is the Australian affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, the worldwide umbrella organisation of Jewish communities. It is also affiliated with the Commonwealth Jewish Council, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Moshe D. Gutnick is an Australian Orthodox rabbi, and a member of the ultra Orthodox Chabad Hasidic movement. Rabbi Gutnick is a senior member of the Beth Din in Sydney, Australia. Gutnick is currently President of the Rabbinical Council of Australia and New Zealand. Gutnick is the head of the NSW Kashrut Authority. He formerly served as the rabbi of the Bondi Mizrachi Synagogue in Sydney.
Menachem Leib "Manny" Waks is an Australian activist. He was previously part of the Orthodox Jewish community in Australia and later became known for his activism against child sexual abuse in the Jewish community worldwide. He founded Tzedek, an organisation to fight child sexual abuse in Jewish communities. Waks assisted the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in investigating Melbourne Yeshivah centre of the Orthodox Chabad movement of Judaism on their handling of child sexual abuse cases. After publicising child sexual abuse in the Jewish community in Australia, Waks moved to France.
The Melbourne Beth Din (MBD) is an Orthodox / Chassidic Jewish court in the city of Melbourne, Australia. Located in Caulfield North, Victoria, it rules mostly on divorces and conversions although it does rule on other matters as well.
Meir Shlomo Kluwgant is an ultra-Orthodox Chabad communal rabbi in Melbourne, Australia. He has held numerous posts including at Jewish Care, chaplain at Victoria Police, and has at various times held the presidency of both the Rabbinical Council of Victoria (RCV) and the Organisation of Rabbis of Australia (ORA).
The Adass Israel School sex abuse scandal is a criminal case and extradition dispute regarding incidents of child sex abuse at a Jewish religious school in Melbourne, Australia. A former principal, Malka Leifer, faced trial on 70 sex offence charges laid by Victoria Police, with accusations from at least eight alleged victims. Leifer, a dual Israeli-Australian citizen, fled under suspicious circumstances shortly before a warrant could be issued, and remained in Israeli-controlled territory from 2008 until January 2021, under varying levels of police and court supervision, pending the resolution of her extradition case. Leifer's trial did not address other alleged sex crimes in Israel and the West Bank because they did not occur in Australia.
Rabbi Yaakov Glasman is a rabbi and communal leader in the Jewish community of Melbourne, Australia.
Yossi Feldman is an Australian rabbi. He has been a Rabbi in the Yeshiva Centre and Chabad NSW for the past 32 years. He was the President of the RCNSW for 3 years from 2009-2012 and Rabbi of Southern Sydney Synagogue from 1993-2015
