South Head father figure mourned
A PILLAR of Australia’s rabbinate was lost with the passing of Rabbi Tobias Silberman on Yom Kippur morning in Melbourne last month.
A PILLAR of Australia’s rabbinate was lost with the passing of Rabbi Tobias Silberman on Yom Kippur morning in Melbourne last month.
Rabbi Silberman, who served Sydney’s South Head community from 1970 to 1984, commenced his rabbinic career in Scotland. He subsequently spent five years in Wellington, before returning to the UK for a brief stint in Liverpool ahead of his move to NSW.
In 1984, he retired to the Gold Coast, remaining there until he moved to Melbourne in 2009.
Paying tribute, his successor at South Head Synagogue, Rabbi Benzion Milecki, said he felt indebted to Rabbi Silberman “for the strong foundations that he laid for our community”.
“Rabbi Silberman, a talmid chochom [wise student] who loved learning and teaching, was much beloved by our community, which he served with distinction,” he said.
“Always an impassioned defender of Orthodoxy, he cemented the strict Orthodox guidelines of our shul, which remain in place today.
“Rabbi Silberman was also a lover of Israel, which he never tired of defending from the pulpit at a time when the UN routinely castigated it.”
Former South Head president Sam Friedman remembered Rabbi Silberman as a “very wonderful, honest, very close to his community, very caring, and very, very humble person”.
“He was my mentor and he was a fatherly figure to everybody. Very approachable, very kind, very caring, never wanted to tread on anybody’s toes. He was just a very modest person.”
Son Dov Silberman recalled his father as someone who always put the other person first, even going to the extraordinary length of leaving Sydney after handing over South Head Synagogue’s spiritual leadership, in order to not step on the new rabbi’s toes.
“As a rabbi he would always be very considerate of other people and there are many stories that people tell how he was able to inculcate to anybody a sense of genuinely loving and enjoying Yiddishkeit,” he said. “He was always able to communicate, to connect with the other person individually, without being overbearing.”
Rabbi Silberman spent his final three years living with Dov, in a four generational household with Dov’s daughter, son-in-law and their children.
“He saw all of them growing up and that was the greatest nachas that he actually could have,” Dov said.
“Every day they would be always running around and he would be playing with them.
“For somebody who had lost his entire family – he was the only survivor of his family from the Holocaust – that would have probably meant a great deal to him.”
GARETH NARUNSKY
The late Rabbi Tobias Silberman (Photo: Roei Chemny)
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