9 August 2025

By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in the Herald Sun

If I ever want to know what the world was like more than 100 years ago, I don’t have
to Google it. I can just walk a few doors down and talk to my neighbour, Mr Berysz
Aurbach.

On 17 August this year, Mr Aurbach will turn 105. Yes, that’s right, one hundred and
five years old! That number alone is hard to wrap your head around, but when you
know his story, it feels nothing short of miraculous.

Mr Aurbach is not just a local icon in Caulfield, he’s an institution. A regular presence
at Caulfield Beth Hamedrash, where he once served as president, Mr Aurbach is
wheeled to shul each week, impeccably dressed, full of warmth, wit, and history. His
mind is sharp, he remembers details from his early childhood with astonishing clarity.
He tells stories about growing up in Poland before the war, escaping the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising while the ghetto was on fire, and rebuilding his life in Australia after
the Holocaust.

He has lived through things that most of us will never be able to imagine. His mother
died of tuberculosis when he was just three months old. His father and three brothers
were murdered during the Holocaust. Only one sister who had moved to British
Mandatory Palestine survived the war. However, despite the hardships, Mr Aurbach
doesn’t dwell in bitterness. He carries a profound will to live.

Each year, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, he recites Kaddish, the
traditional Jewish memorial prayer. It’s something he’s been doing his entire life. To
think of a man reciting Kaddish annually for a mother he never got to know, for 105
years is deeply moving. That alone might be a world record. His story is now on
display at Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum, and it should be.

Mr Aurbach still lives in the same home he’s lived in for decades, with his devoted
son Moshe who takes care of him. And every time I see Mr Aurbach, I’m reminded
that he is one of the last living links to the old world of European Jewry, a world that
was shattered but not extinguished. He is living proof.

My kids know we have an “old neighbour.” They talk about it unironically, saying
things like, “He’s more than a hundred years older than us!” Which is true. But it’s
also such a strange, wonderful thing for them to grow up knowing that history is not
just something you read about, rather, it lives here. On our street.

Each year, when Mr Aurbach celebrates his birthday, he doesn’t do it quietly. He
orders one of the biggest cakes you’ve ever seen from Haymishe kosher bakery in
East St Kilda, and invites the whole street and his entire synagogue to celebrate. He
holds court from midday until well into the night where he tells stories of his
childhood, his family, and of his brother Mordechai who did not survive the Holocaust
but organised for Mr Aurbach to be saved from the ghetto.

He tells the history of the Jewish community in Poland, what life was like before the
war, how his family was from Biala Podlaska and had connections to the Gerer

Hasidic rabbinic dynasty. And he does it all with the energy and passion of someone
far younger. You sit in his presence, and you forget, for a moment, that this is a man
who was born in 1920.

There’s a French term, joie de vivre, joy of life, and if ever anyone embodied that, it’s
Mr Aurbach. He’s not defined by what was taken from him, but by what he built after.
He’s not interested in pity or platitudes. He believes in life. He knows that his children
and grandchildren are lucky to grow up in Australia.

Sometimes I think about how surreal it is that our lives intersect. That my kids get to
grow up a few doors down from someone who survived the Warsaw Ghetto. That he
gets to see another generation of Jewish children walking freely down a suburban
street in Melbourne.

When you turn 100, you receive a letter from the British monarch. In 2020, Mr
Aurbach received a letter from Queen Elizabeth. This year, he’s looking forward to
one from King Charles. Mr Aurbach may have lived through empires rising and
falling, but he still appreciates a nicely worded royal letter.
So, I know I join most of Australia in wishing Mr Aurbach a very happy 105th
birthday! May you continue to go from strength to strength.