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A Life

A Life

By: Nachum Zalman Gurewicz

Nachum Zalman Gurewicz was born into a learned and pious Jewish family in decaying Imperial Russia. He established his own Jewish household in the Stalinist Soviet Union against implacable hostility. After bringing his family to Australia’s safe haven in 1950, he found himself in the midst of a Jewish community that had largely modified its practices to accommodate the pressure, by the general community, to assimilate. With a small group of others, he was instrumental in establishing Lubavitch Chassidism and fostering its development. Well before he passed away in 1998, he saw this group, also known as Chabad, become a most influential religious component in the Australian Jewish community.