Vale Jack Smorgon

When Carlton runs out against St Kilda at Marvel Stadium on Sunday, in the AFLW season opener at 4.35pm and again in the men’s match at 7.20pm, players will wear black armbands.

The club is honouring Jack Smorgon, Foundation Member of the Carltonians, long-serving member of the Carlton Coterie and Life Member of the Carlton Football Club, who has died at the age of 89.

That a footy club should be among the first to mourn him says much about the man. Smorgon was a passionate Zionist who visited Israel more than 70 times, and he was every inch an Australian, a Blues man and a supporter of Army reservists.

For more than a quarter of a century he stood at the centre of Australian Jewry’s partnership with Israel. He chaired the United Israel Appeal’s Victorian campaign from 1994 to 2006, served six years as president of UIA Australia, and later became its honorary president.

He sat for many years on the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Board of Governors, where he chaired the Activism and Partnerships Committee, helping direct Keren Hayesod funds raised across the world to the Israeli communities that needed them most.

It was under his chairmanship that UIA Victoria chose the Central Arava as its partnership region, taking up Ben-Gurion’s challenge to make the desert bloom and building educational ties, including between Bialik College and the Shitim School in the Arava.

His friend Eitan Drori, who arrived in Melbourne in 1998 as executive director of UIA Victoria and worked beside Smorgon daily for five years , remembered a chairman who never wasted a word and never sought the spotlight.

He was, Drori said, “a leader by humble approach, always behind the scene”. Few Australian Jews, he added, travelled to Israel as often, two to three times a year, decade after decade, and few had such quiet influence on how world Jewry supported the Jewish state.

Australia recognised him too. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1998 and an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006 “for service to the community through philanthropy and support for a broad range of organisations including Jewish community and health and welfare groups”.

In 2017, at the Jerusalem residence of then Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, he received Keren Hayesod-UIA’s highest annual honour, the Israel Goldstein Prize for Distinguished Leadership. UIA had honoured him with its Yakir Award a decade earlier.

Smorgon’s Australian patriotism was practical and personal. As national chairman of the Defence Reserve Support Council he travelled constantly to Canberra, shaping how the nation looked after its reserve soldiers, particularly through the years of the Afghanistan war. “Jack was an Aussie from bottom to top,” Drori said.

Nowhere did his two loyalties meet more movingly than in one Israeli military unit. Nimrod Vromen first heard of Smorgon as a 13-year-old whose father worked with him at UIA Victoria. Years later, serving in a highly classified IDF unit, Vromen saw that its technical and logistics soldiers, many from difficult backgrounds, shared the dangers of their combat comrades but felt invisible. His father suggested Smorgon visit.

“He did. He listened. He understood. And then he acted,” Vromen recalled. The Jack and Robert Smorgon Families funded clubhouses that became the heart of the unit, then provided hundreds of scholarships for soldiers building lives after their service.

And Smorgon came back, every year, for 20 years. He flew the unit’s Skylark aircraft, toured its bases, ate meals the soldiers cooked for him, and often brought Val and members of the family so they could see what giving really meant.

“Today, ‘Smorgon’ is a household name in that unit,” Vromen said. To Jack, he added, “philanthropy was never just writing a cheque. It was building relationships. It was showing up. It was caring enough to come back.”

The same instinct ran through his business life. A long-time figure in the World Presidents’ Organisation, he led its global leadership mission to Israel in 2005, insisting that some of the world’s most senior business figures see the country he loved. The delegation met the King of Jordan and Israel’s political leadership.

Tributes have flowed from across the community. The Zionist Federation of Australia mourned “an exceptional communal leader, philanthropist and devoted friend of Israel”.

UIA Victoria president David Slade called him “a wonderful community figure and a most generous man both in spirit and philanthropic vision”, saying his philanthropy for the Jewish community and beyond would be felt for generations.

A tribute read by his son Tony at the funeral remembered “a beloved Jewish Australian and a proud community builder, a gentleman and a family man, who loved Israel and dedicated himself to his Jewish people”.

For all the boardrooms and honours, those who knew him say family always came first, and that every new grandchild, wedding and milestone brought him unmistakable joy. He is survived by his wife Val, his children Lisa, Norman, Tony and Michael, and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

On Sunday afternoon, and again under lights that night, Carlton players will carry a small band of black cloth for a man who spent a lifetime showing up, for his club, his community, his country and his people.