Sydney Jewish Museum – 148 Darlinghurst Road – Darlinghurst – The Story of Jewish Australia

Walk along Darlinghurst Road from Kings Cross towards Oxford Street and, across from Green Park on the corner of Burton Street, you pass a handsome cream building with tall columns and the words "The N.S.W. Jewish War Memorial" across the top. Most Sydneysiders know it as the Sydney Jewish Museum, but to generations of Jewish Sydney it was "the Macc", the Maccabean Hall, built in 1923. The story inside goes all the way back to the First Fleet, so here's a look at how Jewish people came to Australia, how they made their homes and places of worship in Sydney, and how a group of Holocaust survivors turned an old community hall into one of the most moving museums in the country.

The Sydney Jewish Museum, in the old Maccabean Hall on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Burton Street, photographed in 2009.
Credit: Photo by dunedoo (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Convicts and Free Settlers: The First Jewish Australians

There were Jews in Australia from the very first day of European settlement. The Australian Jewish Historical Society says the First Fleet carried eight Jewish convicts with some certainty, and possibly as many as sixteen. Between 1788 and 1842 about 800 Jewish convicts were sent to New South Wales.

The best known of them is Esther Abrahams. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, she was a milliner sentenced at the Old Bailey in August 1786 to seven years' transportation for trying to steal twenty-four yards of silk lace. Her daughter Rosanna was born in Newgate prison in March 1787, and mother and baby sailed in the Lady Penrhyn. On board, Esther met Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines, and after the landing she became his partner. They had seven children together.

Her life reads like a novel. Johnston was a leader of the Rum Rebellion that overthrew Governor Bligh in 1808 and for a time ran the colony, so the State Library of NSW calls the former convict girl its unofficial first lady. While he was in England standing trial, Esther managed his estates at Annandale and near Bankstown, selling meat and grain to the government stores. They married at Concord in November 1814, with Samuel Marsden officiating. Her last years were sad. After Johnston died, their son Robert went to court in 1829 to have her declared unfit to manage her affairs, and she died at her son David's property, George's Hall, in August 1846. Her remains now lie in the Johnston family vault at Waverley Cemetery.

A portrait believed to be of Esther Johnston, née Abrahams, from an oil painting of about 1830. The State Library holds a later photographic print of the original.
Credit: State Library of New South Wales (PXB 314 2), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Barnett Levey, who arrived in December 1821, is usually named as the colony's first free Jewish settler. A merchant and a dreamer, he built Sydney's first permanent theatre, the Theatre Royal in George Street, and Waverley House, which gave its name to the suburb (I mentioned him in my 10 Things You Didn't Know About Waverley post). In 1828 Phillip Joseph Cohen arrived with the Chief Rabbi's permission to perform Jewish marriages. The first, in 1832, joined Moses Joseph, a convict who became a wealthy trader, and Rosetta Nathan, who had come out from London to marry him.

The first organised Jewish activity in Sydney was caring for the dead. A burial society was formed in 1817, and in 1832 part of the Devonshire Street Cemetery, where Central Station stands today, was consecrated as a Jewish burial ground (I've written about the Sandhills Cemetery before). The same year a formal congregation was set up, with the merchant Joseph Barrow Montefiore as its first president.

Finding a Place to Pray: York Street and the Great Synagogue

For years Sydney's Jews worshipped in private houses and then in a rented room in Bridge Street. As the congregation grew it bought a block of land in York Street, not far from today's Town Hall. The foundation stone was laid on 19 April 1842, and the synagogue was consecrated on 2 April 1844, with music specially written by J. H. Anderson and Isaac Nathan. James Hume designed it in the Egyptian style, and it was paid for by the Jewish community with help from Christian well-wishers and a government grant. It served the community for about thirty-five years, and I wrote about the York Street Synagogue a while back.

The York Street Synagogue, Sydney's first purpose-built synagogue, photographed by John Sharkey in November 1870.
Credit: Royal Australian Historical Society, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1859 a dispute split the congregation, and a breakaway group set up a second synagogue in a former Baptist chapel in Macquarie Street. In the 1870s, under the Reverend Alexander Davis, the two joined forces to build something much grander. A builder, John Solomon, bought land facing Hyde Park for £2,000 in 1871 and held it until the money could be raised. Thomas Rowe won the design competition in 1872, and on 26 January 1875 the foundation stone was laid by Saul Samuel, the colony's first Jewish legislator and, according to the ADB, the first Jew to become a minister of the Crown. The women of the community ran a great bazaar that December to help pay for it.

The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street was consecrated on 4 March 1878, though the decoration wasn't finished until 1883. Its front and towers are Pyrmont sandstone, and inside there's carved timber, stained glass and a midnight-blue ceiling scattered with gold-leaf stars. It seats about a thousand people, and for thirty-five years it was the only synagogue operating in Sydney. The State Heritage Register calls it the mother congregation of Australian Jewry. If you've ever strolled through Hyde Park, you've probably looked straight at it.

The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, seen from Hyde Park, in a photograph from Edward Hungerford's album of Sydney in the 1880s.
Credit: Australian National Maritime Museum, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

Making Their Mark

Sydney's Jewish community was small, around half of one per cent of the population, but it punched well above its weight. Joseph Barrow Montefiore came out in 1829 from a wealthy London Sephardi family and helped found the Bank of Australasia. The depression of the 1840s ruined his Sydney firm, so he started again in Adelaide in 1846. Saul Samuel was later knighted and served as Agent-General in London. The Dictionary of Sydney has a lovely story that in 1917 the Legislative Assembly didn't sit on Yom Kippur, because the Speaker, John J. Cohen, and his deputy, Sir Daniel Levy, were both observant Jews. And in 1930 Ernest S. Marks became Sydney's first Jewish Lord Mayor.

From the 1880s Jews escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia arrived, many settling in Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Paddington and Newtown and bringing Yiddish culture and new ideas such as Zionism. Over the following decades more and more families moved east towards Woollahra, Bondi and Randwick.

Two of the best-known Jewish Australians came from Victoria. Isaac Isaacs was born in Melbourne in 1855, the son of a tailor from Russian Poland, and grew up in the goldfields towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth. A barrister and federationist, he became a High Court judge in 1906 and Chief Justice in 1930, and on 22 January 1931 he was sworn in as Governor-General, the first Australian-born person to hold the job.

Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor-General, about 1930.
Credit: Fairfax Corporation, National Library of Australia, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Sir John Monash was born in West Melbourne in 1865 to a family from Prussian Poland, went to school for a while at Jerilderie in the Riverina and celebrated his bar mitzvah at the East Melbourne synagogue. An engineer and citizen soldier, he commanded a brigade at Gallipoli and a division in France, and in mid-1918 took command of the Australian Corps. After the Battle of Hamel and the great attack of 8 August, King George V knighted him in the field. At least 250,000 people turned out for his state funeral in 1931, and he was buried with Jewish rites.

General Sir John Monash, photographed by Elliott & Fry in London, about 1919.
Credit: Australian War Memorial (A02691), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gold Rush Towns and Country Congregations

The gold rushes brought a new wave of Jewish migrants. The Australian Jewish Historical Society counts 1,887 Jews in Australia in 1851 and 5,486 ten years later. Many went to the diggings, usually not to dig but to run the stores and hotels on the goldfields and in the country towns that grew out of them. Ballarat's congregation was founded in 1855, and the synagogue it built in 1861 is still standing and still used.

Country life could be lonely for Jewish families, though. The Dictionary of Sydney says that in the mid-nineteenth century about 40 per cent of the colony's Jews lived in country New South Wales, but most found it too hard to keep up a Jewish way of life and either drifted from their faith or moved to Sydney. Maitland's little brick synagogue in Church Street was consecrated in 1879, but as the community dwindled it closed in 1898. The building survives as the oldest surviving synagogue in NSW outside Sydney. Down in Tasmania, the Hobart Synagogue of 1845 is the oldest synagogue building in Australia.

The Maccabean Hall, 1923

Sydney's Jewish community had long wanted a proper community centre, and after the First World War that idea came together with plans for a war memorial. A row of houses at 140–148 Darlinghurst Road was pulled down to make room, and the heritage assessment says the whole project was paid for by public subscription. Judge Cohen laid the foundation stone on 28 February 1923. The architect, Gordon Keesing, was himself Jewish, and he gave the building an interwar classical front with tall columns and Ionic capitals. It was named for the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors of ancient times.

Sir John Monash opened it on Armistice Day, 11 November 1923, saying the hall had "the aim of keeping the Jewish people together and preserving the creed, perpetuating the faith". The entrance foyer holds the war memorial itself, with stained-glass windows in the Rising Sun pattern on either side, and the black marble forecourt carries the names of nearly 3,000 Jewish service men and women, including 177 who gave their lives in the two world wars. A plaque to Monash calls him "a great Australian and a worthy Jew".

The "Macc" quickly became the heart of Jewish Sydney, and the museum says that by the early 1940s it hosted more than 90 per cent of the community's activities. After the Second World War it helped refugees and Holocaust survivors find their feet, with English lessons, weddings, Sunday dances, rallies and memorial services, while the Australian Jewish Welfare Society worked from the building to support people who had arrived with nothing. Plenty of Sydney couples met under its ceiling.

A bar mitzvah dinner in the Maccabean Hall, 27 April 1947.
Credit: Photo Sam Hood; State Library of New South Wales (Home and Away 31114), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the community grew, so did the site. In 1965 the architect Henry Epstein added a five-storey Brutalist wing, the Rupert Michaelis Building, whose front carries a four-storey concrete relief of a seven-branched menorah by the sculptor Lyndon Dadswell. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and other community organisations still work from the complex.

Refugees, the Dunera Boys and the Survivors

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jewish families began looking desperately for somewhere to go, and Australia's record is not a proud one. At the Evian conference on refugees in July 1938, Australia's delegate said, "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one". Late that year the government agreed to take 15,000 refugees over three years, but the war cut the scheme short. Even so, the Dictionary of Sydney says about 8,000 Jewish refugees reached Australia before the war, around 5,000 of them settling in Sydney. They founded Temple Emanuel in Woollahra in 1938, the city's first Reform congregation, and along with other European migrants brought a continental flavour to Sydney's art, music, theatre and food.

Then there were the Dunera boys. In 1940, with Britain afraid of invasion, thousands of German and Austrian men there were interned as "enemy aliens", although most were Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis. On 10 July 1940 more than 2,500 detainees were crammed aboard the troopship Dunera at Liverpool. On the voyage the guards beat them and threw their luggage overboard. When the ship reached Sydney on 6 September, the army medical officer who went aboard was so appalled that his report led to a court martial in London. The men were taken by train to camps at Hay, and later Tatura in Victoria, where they ran their own classes, concerts and camp "university" and even printed their own money. Once released, many joined the Australian Army, and just under half of those held at Hay chose to make Australia home, among them men who became leading academics, artists, musicians and scientists.

After the war came the survivors. The Sydney Jewish Museum says about 27,000 Holocaust survivors migrated to Australia, and Australia is often said to have taken in more survivors per head of population than any country except Israel. Most came from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Because the government kept Jewish numbers down with quotas and left them out of the official migration schemes, most were sponsored and supported by Jewish families and organisations already here. By the 1950s, more than 60 per cent of Sydney's Jews had been born overseas. The survivors rebuilt their lives, raised families, started businesses and, years later, decided their stories had to be told.

A crowd outside the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street during the High Holy Days, September 1934.
Credit: Photo Sam Hood; State Library of New South Wales (Home and Away 576), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Museum Is Born, 1992

Through the 1960s and 1970s more survivors felt the need to speak about what they had been through, and they wanted a place where the history of the Holocaust could be kept and taught. The old Maccabean Hall, where many of them had found their first friends in Australia, was the natural home for it.

The driving force was John Saunders AO. Born in Hungary in 1922, he survived the Holocaust, came to Sydney and, with fellow Hungarian Frank Lowy, built up the Westfield shopping centre business. With other survivors, including members of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, he set out to create a museum in the old hall. The architect Michael Bures kept the hall's Art Deco barrel-vaulted ceiling and added a sculptural staircase in the shape of the Star of David, around a central void linking the exhibition levels.

The Governor of New South Wales, Rear Admiral Peter Sinclair, officially opened the Sydney Jewish Museum on 18 November 1992, with hundreds of people looking on. For the survivors it was a dream come true: Sydney finally had a place to remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, where survivors could speak for those who had lost their voice. John Saunders died in December 1997, but his museum is still going strong.

What made the place special was the survivors themselves. From the day it opened, survivors volunteered as guides, walking visitors through the history they had lived and telling their own stories. Eddie Jaku, a founding member who lived to 101, became world famous with his memoir The Happiest Man on Earth, and his message was simple: "as long as I live, I'll teach not to hate."

What's Inside

The museum has grown a lot over the years. The Sanctum of Remembrance opened in 1994, giving families a place to remember loved ones who have no graves, and the Children's Memorial followed in 2002, honouring the one and a half million children who died in the Holocaust, with a sculpture of children's shoes by Elza Pollak called All That Remained.

On the ground floor, Culture and Continuity: Journey through Judaism, opened by Governor-General Quentin Bryce, traces Jewish history from its beginnings in the ancient Near East to Jewish life in Australia today, including the waves of migration that built the community. Serving Australia, opened by General Peter Cosgrove in 2010, tells the stories of Jewish men and women in Australia's armed forces, which fits nicely in a building that began as a war memorial.

The heart of the museum is the Holocaust exhibition. After nearly five years of development, the refurbished exhibition was officially opened by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on 19 March 2017. It traces the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews between 1933 and 1945 through documents, photographs, film, survivors' own belongings and recorded testimony, remembers the other groups the Nazis persecuted, and ends with the new lives survivors built in Australia. The final stage of the refurbishment, The Holocaust and Human Rights, was opened on 15 February 2018 by Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow. One of the first permanent human rights exhibitions in an Australian museum, it asks visitors to think about rights here at home, including those of refugees and asylum seekers, people with disabilities, First Nations people and the LGBTIQ+ community.

The entrance on Darlinghurst Road, with "Maccabean Hall" over the door and "The N.S.W. Jewish War Memorial" across the top, in 2011.
Credit: Photo by Sardaka, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Teaching the Next Generation

Ask most Sydney teachers about the museum and they'll mention the school excursions. Students hear a Holocaust survivor speak, take a guided tour and do workshops linked to History, English, Studies of Religion and Legal Studies. Before the redevelopment the museum was getting about 55,000 visitors a year, some 35,000 of them school students, and it says more than 850,000 students have come through since 1992. One teacher quoted on its website put it simply: "If you haven't taken your students to the Sydney Jewish Museum, you haven't prepared them for life."

With fewer survivors still with us each year, the museum has worked hard to keep their voices. Its collection holds more than 15,000 artefacts and over 1,000 oral histories and testimonies. For its 30th birthday it opened Reverberations, built around recordings of 43 survivors, and it has been making interactive biographies so future visitors can still ask a survivor a question and hear an answer. With Holocaust studies becoming compulsory in NSW schools from 2027, that work matters more than ever.

The museum has also been a place of remembrance in hard times. After the attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025, in which fifteen people were killed, it set up Remembering Bondi, an online space for people to share how the attack affected them. With the USC Shoah Foundation it has been recording the testimony of survivors, witnesses and first responders, and with the Australian Jewish Historical Society it gathered up the cards, toys, candles and flowers left at the beachside memorial so they won't be lost.

The Museum Today and Tomorrow

Right now the museum is going through the biggest change in its history. With support from the community and from both the NSW and federal governments, it is being expanded on its Darlinghurst site to a design by Architectus. The Holocaust museum will stay, and a new museum of contemporary Jewish life with eleven new galleries is being built beside it, with the aim of welcoming 100,000 visitors a year by 2032. The NSW Heritage Council is also considering listing the NSW Jewish War Memorial and Sydney Jewish Museum on the State Heritage Register, in recognition of more than a century of Jewish community life on this corner.

Not bad for an old community hall. From a convict girl on the Lady Penrhyn to a general opening a war memorial on Armistice Day, and from the Dunera boys to survivors talking to a room full of teenagers, it's a very Australian story, and Sydney is lucky to have a place that keeps it alive. While you're in the area, the old Darlinghurst Gaol, now the National Art School, is just down Burton Street, and St John's Church is a short stroll along Darlinghurst Road. Further afield, the Jewish section of Rookwood Necropolis is well worth a visit too.

Visiting (as at October 2026)

As at October 2026, the Sydney Jewish Museum is closed to the general public during the redevelopment, and the museum says it will reopen in mid-2027 with new exhibitions on Jewish life and culture alongside its Holocaust and military history exhibitions. While it's closed there are no public opening hours or admission prices, but school programs continue at a nearby temporary location on weekdays except Fridays. The museum is at 148 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, a short walk from Kings Cross station, and the phone number is (02) 9360 7999. Check the Sydney Jewish Museum website for the latest news before you go.

Sources

• Sydney Jewish Museum: Our Story, History of the Building, Memorials and Exhibitions, The Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, The Happiest Man on Earth, High School Excursions, Learning, Creating a Museum for the Future
• Sydney Jewish Museum news: Sydney Jewish Museum to expand by 2027 (March 2023); Development approval (May 2024); Federal government grant (December 2024); Call-out for Soviet Jewry stories (2026); Bondi Testimony Project (2026)
• Sydney Jewish Museum, "30 Years of the Sydney Jewish Museum" timeline – exhibitions.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au; media release on The Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition (2018) – sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au (PDF)
• Suzanne D. Rutland, "Jews", Dictionary of Sydney, 2008 – dictionaryofsydney.org; Dictionary of Sydney, Waverley
• Australian Dictionary of Biography: Esther Johnston (G. F. J. Bergman), Barnett Levey (G. F. J. Bergman), Joseph Barrow Montefiore (Israel Getzler), Sir Saul Samuel, Sir Isaac Isaacs (Zelman Cowen), Sir John Monash (Geoffrey Serle)
• Australian Jewish Historical Society, "Walks of Jewish Australia" – ajhs.com.au
• State Library of NSW: Esther Johnston and Michael Isaacs, York Street Synagogue, Sydney, The Great Synagogue, NSW Jewish War Memorial; State Library of Victoria, Ergo, The Holocaust
• NSW State Heritage Inventory: Great Synagogue; NSW Jewish War Memorial and Sydney Jewish Museum (under consideration); NSW Government, heritage listing consultation
• NSW War Memorials Register, NSW Jewish War Memorial and Honour Roll
• "Philanthropist retail king dies at 75", Australian Financial Review, 8 December 1997 – afr.com
• Wikipedia (as a cross-check): Sydney Jewish Museum, Great Synagogue (Sydney), HMT Dunera, Dunera boys, History of the Jews in Australia, Ballarat Synagogue, Maitland Synagogue, Hobart Synagogue
• Sydney Jewish Museum, The Maccabean Hall: Jack Meister's second home; History Matters (University of Sydney), The Maccabean Hall: what lay amid the art deco walls (2018); Claims Conference Kavod, Supporting Holocaust survivor guides and volunteers at the Sydney Jewish Museum (2015)
• "Ageing Holocaust survivors in Australia", Medical Journal of Australia, 2011 – mja.com.au; University of Sydney, Holocaust memory: an Australian story? (2020)
• BBC News, Why Sydney is preserving thousands of flowers after deadly Bondi attack; SBS News, Bondi attack stories and memories to be preserved in new digital project
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, from the State Library of NSW, the Royal Australian Historical Society, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and individual photographers credited in the captions