Greg Joffe elected NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president

Greg Joffe has been elected president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBD), defeating Garry Browne in a contested election at the organisation’s 81st annual general meeting on Thursday night.

In brief remarks after the result, Joffe thanked Deputies for electing him and asked Browne to continue working with the organisation. “I recognise your passion for the Jewish community, and we will look for ways to make sure we use your skills, your expertise, and your passion to get great outcomes,” Joffe said.

In his candidate address, Joffe said his priorities were to deepen and broaden the board’s political and multicultural relationships and to restructure plenums around topics with expert speakers. He pointed to his career advising large organisations on strategy, and to his work with Rabbi Mendel Kastel and others in the eight months after the Bondi attack, setting up mental health supports and chairing the recovery task force.

Outgoing president David Ossip, whose four-year term concluded at the meeting, paid tribute to Browne as an individual of the highest integrity and capability, with “a pedigree which is almost unrivalled in the community”.

“You leave with our profound admiration,” Ossip said. “The only trick is I don’t think you’re going to be leaving, because once a member of the Board of Deputies family, always a member.”

Ossip told the meeting it was surreal to be marking the end of his term, and described a stream of images that had come to him the previous night: sitting at a friend’s house on the afternoon of October 7 as the first reports came through; taking a call from the Premier on the night of October 9 as scenes unfolded on the steps of the Opera House; waking each morning during the summer of terror to learn what the latest target had been.

“Standing on a beach in Hawaii, next to my pregnant wife, looking at a turtle, whilst receiving a phone call about the Harbour Bridge protest,” he said, and a week after the Bondi attack, “being driven to the vigil at Bondi Beach and arriving to see snipers positioned on the rooftops of familiar Bondi landmarks”.

“These are scenes I could never imagine when I became president four years ago.”

Ossip said the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion should not be expected to be a panacea, and that its measure of success would be whether Jewish Australians could live with greater safety and confidence, and whether the broader community was no longer inured to antisemitism.

That could not be done, he said, without confronting the demonisation of Zionism, which gave a social licence to activists to engage in acts of hatred and violence. He also called for a rethink of Holocaust education, arguing it must begin with the particular rather than the universal.

“We must make the conscious decision not to define ourselves by antisemitism,” Ossip said. “Our children must associate being Jewish with joy, pride, and belonging, with antisemitism at the margin of their Jewish education and not at the centre.”

JBD CEO Michele Goldman told the meeting the past year had been one of the toughest the community had ever faced, and recalled advice Ossip gave her when she started. “I remember in my early days, David Ossip saying to me, ‘We are in the business of relationships’,” Goldman said. “It’s the relationships that have been built over many decades by many people in this room that we were able to leverage through these challenging times.”

She said the test of an organisation’s true culture was what happened when people were under pressure, and paid tribute to Ossip’s calm leadership.

Ossip thanked his vice presidents Natalie Rubinstein and Richard Glass, honorary secretary Melissa McCurdie and treasurer Ed Feiner, each of whom served as an honorary officer during his term. Goldman acknowledged McCurdie, Feiner, Glass and Andrew Whitten, who are stepping down.

Keynote speaker Ben English, editor of the Daily Telegraph, said he had grown up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs surrounded by Jewish friends, bar mitzvahs, Shabbat dinners, footy and the beach. “That was the Australia I knew, and perhaps because I took that for granted, I found what happened after October 7, and then after Bondi, so deeply shocking and unforgivable,” English said.

He told the meeting his grandfather was born Jewish, and that his grandfather’s sister had two boys in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. “They tried to flee. They were stopped by the Nazis at the border, put on a train, and were dead within hours of Auschwitz. I do not know enough about them. In truth, I know almost nothing,” he said.

“Maybe that is part of why I feel this so strongly, because antisemitism is never just an argument. It’s never just a slogan. It destroys names, faces, branches of families, entire futures.”

English said that when the Telegraph placed a menorah on its front page after Bondi, “it wasn’t merely a statement of grief; it was a statement of resolve, a declaration that light is not fragile”.

Ossip described the address as one of the most powerful he had heard in the past three years.