Walt Secord: ‘I’m Jewish’

NSW Labor frontbencher Walt Secord has had a long association with the Jewish community – now he has made it official.

Following 15 months of study and private Hebrew lessons, the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Israel deputy chair completed his conversion to Judaism through Emanuel Synagogue on June 10.

Days later his fiancée and partner of seven years, Julia Levitina, along with close friends attended his naming ceremony, where he took on the Hebrew name Avraham.

“It was quite an emotional and wonderful several days,” Secord said.

“After appearing before the Progressive movement’s Beth Din, I undertook the ritual immersion at Parsley Bay. It was on the coldest day in 37 years in Sydney … It was so cold that I have to admit it was the most rapid but thorough reciting of the Shema Yisrael I have ever done.

“The rabbis made it a day that I will never forget.”

Secord thanked Emanuel Synagogue’s Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins for being his sponsoring rabbi and Rabbi Rafi Kaiserblueth and Rabbi Cantor George Mordecai for “braving the elements” at Parsley Bay.

He also paid tribute to Shelly Triffon, director of the Sydney Hebrew Ulpan, for her “patience as I struggled to grasp and understand Hebrew via Zoom at the height of COVID”.

Secord has been associated with the Jewish community since his childhood in rural southern Canada on a First Nation Indian reserve, where his childhood mentor was a Holocaust survivor.

“I’ve been connected to the Jewish community since my childhood – so it is about a 50-year connection. It felt inevitable,” he said.

“It has been a process that I had been thinking about for a long, long time and it is the formalisation of what I have felt and known for years; that I am joining the Jewish community and Julia’s people are my people.

“This also means that Julia and I can get married under the chuppah in October and we can be buried together in the Jewish section of a cemetery.”

Secord, who immigrated to Australia in September 1988, worked at The AJN between 1988 and 1991.

He has since has been associated with the Labor Party in various capacities, having worked for two premiers, several state and federal ministers and a federal opposition leader.

He has been a Member of the Legislative Council since 2011 and has held several shadow portfolios.

He has been deputy chair of the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Israel since 2011.