Jewish Childhood: Growing up in New Zealand

Abstract

'What Church do you go to?', one of the women inter-viewed in our study about the lives of Jews in New Zealand was asked when she first started school in Hawera during the mid 1950s. She was eight and had recently come with her family from South Africa to live in New Zealand. When she replied that she was Jewish, the questioner said: 'Yes, but what Jewish, Presbyterian Jewish or Anglican Jewish?'

Such questions illustrate how little many non-Jewish New Zealanders in earlier decades knew about Jewish people. Living with this ignorance was (and perhaps still is) one of the significant characteristics of a New Zealand Jewish childhood.

In South Africa the woman being quoted had lived in a closely-knit, though small by South African standards, Jewish community where 'everyone' was Jewish and therefore Jewishness had seemed 'normal'. Her earliest memory of being Jewish in New Zealand is that here nobody else was-an upsetting notion for her as a young girl. Eventually she was reassured by her mother's list of other people who were Jewish, though not unfortunately living in Hawera.