Celebrating 100 years of service

The Jewish community of Launceston gathered on May 11 to honour a century of dedication and service by the Crawcour and Sandor families to the historic Launceston Synagogue.

The story of this remarkable legacy began in 1916 when Sim Crawcour arrived in Launceston and discovered the Synagogue abandoned and overgrown, with blackberry bushes and moss covering its walls.

Undeterred, he partnered with the only other two Jewish families in the city to begin the process of reviving the community and the synagogue.

In 1925, after a bill was tabled in Parliament in December 1924, Sim Crawcour and Harry Joseph were officially appointed trustees of the Synagogue. Over the next two years, they cleared the grounds and arranged for the building to be rented to the Oliver Cromwell Lodge, which undertook essential renovations as part of the agreement.

By 1929, the local Jewish population began to grow. With the synagogue still rented out, services were held in private homes. In 1938, a formal synagogue board was established, and regular services resumed, often with rabbis flown in from interstate.