Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann says the AFL ‘pick and choose when to come out and make statements’
Gabi Kaltmann, who became the youngest senior Rabbi in Australia, has revealed why he is disappointed with the AFL and what he thinks is needed to maintain calm in the face of terror.
Victoria
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Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann is vibrating like his phone.
At the time of this interview, bloody attacks on Israelis by Hamas terrorists were still unfolding and shockwaves were rolling through the Jewish community in Australia.
In one hour, he misses seven calls and 25 text messages.
The energetic 32-year-old, fondly known as Rabbi Gabi and known for outreach work and a mental health focus, is struggling to contain community rage while rallying support.
“This is the biggest loss of Jewish life in one day, since the Holocaust,” he said.
“It has shaken us to the core, it has rocked us.”
Four years ago, the Melbourne-born Collingwood tragic became the country’s youngest senior Rabbi, at the ARK Centre in Hawthorn.
He told synagogue leaders at the time what to expect.
“It’s high energy, I’m out there, and I love connecting with people,” he said.
“If you can handle that, then employ me, but you have to embrace it.”
He sat down for the Herald Sun’s Big V Interview to discuss dealing with grief, why the AFL is sometimes a “basket case”, and giving circumcision advice to Hollywood A-listers.
Shaped by resilience
Rabbi Gabi remembers his grandfather, Yossi Kaltmann, nervously checking his grandchildren’s seatbelts whenever they got in the car.
Yossi had survived six concentration camps as a boy during the Holocaust, but had lost his entire family; risks of losing someone else were obsessively avoided.
There were other signs of the trauma that followed him like a shadow.
“If somebody was crying, he couldn’t handle it; if one of his grandchildren were crying you’d see him just want to make it better, anything to make it stop,” Rabbi Gabi said.
Yossi’s younger brother, Leopold, survived World War II with him but died of dysentery two days after liberation.
After fighting in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Yossi pleaded with a cousin in Australia to help him start a life far from conflict.
Yossi found work on the Victorian railways and was introduced to a soft-spoken Shepparton girl, Shulamit Miller, from a family of orchardists who had fled Russian antisemitism in the 1920s.
Shulamit had grown up around the Feiglin and Pratt families, far from European terror and in stark contrast to Yossi, who would pace hallways at 3am, haunted by nightmares.
Rabbi Gabi now knows the impact it had on his father, Max, but says it was not unique.
“Outside of Israel, Melbourne has — per capita — the highest number of Holocaust survivors,” he said.
On his mother’s side, great-great grandparents came to Australia to pan for gold and are buried in the Ballarat Jewish cemetery.
“I often ask myself, who am I? Am I an Australian Jew, or a Jewish Australian?” he said.
“I’ve come to the realisation that it doesn’t really make a difference what comes first, they come hand-in-hand.
“I’m shaped with this identity of being Jewish and having incredibly strong resilience, as well as a deep love of Australia and the refuge it provided my dad’s family.”
As a young boy in Elsternwick and Caulfield, Rabbi Gabi often heard Australia described as the golden country, so was shocked when he was egged and abused while walking to synagogue with his father.
The eldest of seven children, he went to Yeshivah College and travelled to Israel with his father and sister Nomi for his bar mitzvah, where he recalls marvelling at Kosher gummy bears and the Western Wall.
On their way to Europe, the Kaltmanns stopped in Thailand where they dined with the head rabbi.
Little did 13-year-old Gabi know, that rabbi would later become his father-in-law.
Matchmaking and Disneyland
After school, Rabbi Gabi studied at the Rabbinical College of Australia and New Zealand in Melbourne, before travelling to rabbinical schools in Paris, New York, and Israel, where he was ordained.
He was in Miami as a rabbinical intern when Jewish matchmakers suggested he meet a young woman living in Los Angeles, Mushka Kantor.
The Kantor family stems from the famous Feiglin family, who was integral to setting up the Jewish community in Shepparton from the 1910s, and which turned into a “dynasty”.
The couple was engaged within 10 days.
“I knew I would marry her after the second date. She was the one,” he said.
Mushka, the daughter of Rabbi Yosef Chaim Kantor, was “from a very orthodox household”, and Rabbi Gabi laughed when recalling their date at Disneyland.
“I’m an Australian Jew and I know who mickey mouse is, although I didn’t grow up with a TV,” he said.
“I’m having the time in my life – it’s Disneyland! – and Mushka’s going, ‘what is this place?’ She didn’t know any of the songs and she hadn’t seen any of the movies.”
Rabbi Kaltmann pauses to confess that he recently bought a TV, which is strictly to watch the AFL on Kayo. He is “still learning to use a remote”.
About 800 people were at their wedding in Bangkok in 2014, after which they lived in Israel and then Thailand after the birth of their first child Avraham Dov, in 2015.
After a stint in Sydney, the young family decided to make their home in Melbourne.
‘People need help’
As a youth rabbi, Rabbi Gabi felt “a little out of depth” talking to parents worried about their children’s social issues.
He said he knew the Talmud and the Torah “which underpins who we are”, but most people were not coming to him with religious questions.
So he began a Masters of Social Work from Deakin University, which included a placement with homeless heroes Brendan and Sandra Nottle at the Salvation Army on Bourke St.
“I saw overdoses, I saw people on the street, people being kicked out of their houses, we were intervening, we were advocating, we were cleaning up people’s sh__ on the floor,” he said.
“When you’re a young man with two kids who’s lived in Elsternwick and Caulfield most of your life, sheltered by a community, that just moves you, but it also makes you level up and say, ‘all right, this is a big world, there is a lot more we can do to help people’.”
The experience also helped shape his response to trauma and grief in the community that necessitates being able to “switch off” personal feelings while tending to people’s needs.
Before he had finished the degree, the senior Rabbi at the ARK Centre in Hawthorn retired, leading to a meeting between Gabi and synagogue leaders.
Rabbi Gabi was upfront about his style.
“I’m high energy, I’m out there, and I love connecting with people,” he said.
“If you can handle that, then employ me, but don’t shut me down, embrace it.”
At 28 years of age, he became the youngest senior Rabbi in Australia.
“It was a lot of responsibility.”
Pillars of light
Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann has never watched an AFL Grand Final live because it falls on the Jewish day of rest that prohibits TV, internet, or sports.
Collingwood tragic Rabbi Gabi and his seven year-old son walked to the shops towards the end of Shabbat this year, in search of a black and white clue to the result.
“There was a guy in his (Pies) jumper and he gave me an entire revision; how Murphy had been knocked out, and how Bobby Hill had the game of his life,” he said.
“He was so drunk; only at the end he was like, ‘why are you asking me, didn’t you watch the game?’”
As a former AFL Multicultural Ambassador, Rabbi Gabi became frustrated by the sporting code’s complacency and described it as, at times, a “basket case”.
“I’m so disappointed with the AFL. They pick and choose when to come out and make statements. They should have made a statement about what is happening in Israel and the terror attacks, and the innocent civilians caught up in it.”
Rabbi Gabi’s multicultural and multifaith work evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he helped establish the 8-night Pillars of Light festival to celebrate Chanukah at Federation Square, which invited different communities to participate between lockdowns.
The Andrews Government, alongside the Gandel Foundation and other leading Jewish families, provided funding for four years.
“It’s really just about finding the humanity between us and celebrating our great multicultural city,” he said.
The celebrity rabbi
Early this year a Hollywood studio called Rabbi Gabi for advice on a film they were shooting in Melbourne’s inner east.
“I get this call and they ask, ‘do you know anything about circumcision?’,” he said, laughing.
“I said ‘I’m not actually a Mohel, but I’ve got four boys, I’ve been there.”
The producers of Ricky Stanicky, starring Zac Efron and John Cena and directed by Peter Farrelly, sent through a script for the Rabbi to check.
“I’ve never read anything so funny, and so dirty, in my life,” he said.
The role also required advice on set, where the tools of circumcision were laid out and 30 people gathered round to hear his instructions.
“They’re like, Rabbi, we want to know everything, start from the beginning. I’m like, ‘you want me to start with Abraham?”
“What I found special and exciting was they cared about not offending the religion and getting all the details accurate,” he said.
“I think they nailed it.”
Maintaining the golden age
When Israelis were murdered in their homes by Hamas terrorists this month, the first reaction from Melbourne’s Jewish community was “fear”, despite being 15,000km away.
A lack of action at protesters who chanted “gas the Jews” on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, and a directive from the NSW government for Jews to avoid the CBD during the rally, compounded grief.
Despite warning about the threat of antisemitism in Australia, Rabbi Gabi said he still believes we’re living in “the lucky country” and “a golden age for Australia and for Jews”.
“If you’re a student of history, you know the Golden Age can end – but it doesn’t have to. And that’s what I pray for, that it never ever ends,” he said.
“We must do everything possible to call out hate speech and calls for violence against any person or community. I believe this is something we all must do as parents and educators.”
Three of Rabbi Gabi’s siblings live in Israel, including many extended family members.
Last week the family was also rocked by the news that a cousin of his wife, Adi Vital-Kaploun, had been brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists.
Support from the community and government, he said, would be critical to maintain calm and ensure ongoing “unity in the face of terror”.
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