AustLit

'When, in 1936, Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger arrived in Melbourne, he found himself conducting services for a small group of non-Orthodox worshippers in the hired Parish Hall of Christ Church, St Kilda. It was an inauspicious beginning to a significant phenomenon in Australian Judaism. In writing the biography of a man who became a much-admired public figure, Rabbi Dr John Levi has undertaken a challenging task, not least because he became the subject's rabbinic successor. He has produced an absorbing and frank insider's account of a rabbi who proved to be a catalyst in fashioning a minuscule congregation of breakaways from Orthodox Judaism, into a major element of Australia's Jewish religious and communal life. The new arrival possessed the personal, intellectual, moral and oratorical skills much needed by the community in times of Nazism, war and the Holocaust.' (Publisher's blurb)