Megillah arrives just in time

IN a small synagogue on the ground floor of Emmy Monash Aged Care, a transformation has been taking place.

A Megillat Ruth, believed to be the third in Australia, is now sitting in a velvet tube in a mahogany box right beside the bimah, ready to be read on Shavuot.

Emmy Monash resident Josef Rewinson took it upon himself, the moment he arrived at the home three years ago, to make the shul a place all his neighbours could be proud of.

After donating a Megillat Esther early this year, he saw it as necessary for the shul to have a Megillat Ruth as well.

He commissioned local sofer Rabbi Eli Gutnick to organise for it to be made. Rabbi Gutnick personally brought the new scroll back from Israel and edited it in Melbourne to ensure its perfection.

Rabbi Michoel Stern, of Emmy Monash, said with pride that Rewinson complained he couldn’t sleep properly for weeks because he was so concerned about the scroll being finished and safely arriving for the shul.

For those that know Rewinson, this would not come as a surprise.

With the majority of his family still in Israel and his wife not in the best of health, he focused his passion and energy in ensuring the shul is the very best it can be.

“I like to see the synagogue and the rabbi happy that everything is in it,” he said.

On top of the transformation of the shul, he has also funded the renovations of the gardens at Caulfield Hospital, where his wife is a long-term patient, all of it with German post-Holocaust reparations.

In his thick Polish accent and with a sprinkling of Yiddish and Hebrew words, the Holocaust survivor takes great pleasure in explaining what he has donated, not out of arrogance, but simply out of pride – a deep pride that others will be able to benefit from the money he has received out of such tragic circumstances.

With his keen attention to detail, he even donated little Torahs to the Emmy Monash  shul “so children can celebrate Simchat Torah with their bobba and zaida”.

Yet underpinning everything, from the Megillat Ruth to the new curtains on the Aron, Rewinson’s reason for everything is pretty simple. “It’s my home, and I live here.”

SAMSON ADAMS

Josef Rewinson and Rabbi Michoel Stern with Emmy Monash’s new Megillat Ruth