Emeritus Professor Louis Waller
I met Arnold in February 1950. It was at the Bar Mitzvah of Bubi Gelley a'h, celebrated in the Howitt Road home of his aunt and uncle, the late Mr and Mrs Shimmy Klein. It was a meeting I had keenly anticipated for some weeks, ever since my friend Max Jotkowitz had regaled me with his accounts of the first B'nai Akiva camp he had attended, and which I hadn't, held at Warrandyte during the summer holidays. My parents had not allowed me to go because of the polio epidemic, which broke out in Melbourne in August ' September 1949, resulting in the cancellation of school sporting meetings and assemblies. Max told me of this new arrival from England, who had been the Rosh Machaneh, the camp director. He knew everything and could do everything: daven, leyn, conduct shiurim, give sichot. The camp, said Max, had been thin in numbers but full of interest, fun and friendliness. I had been attending B'nai Akiva meetings since November 1947, held on Sunday afternoons at Elwood Talmud Torah, but they had been abandoned because of the epidemic.
Arnold fulfilled all my expectations. There was a B'nai Akiva meeting on that Shabbat afternoon where he gave a shiur, a learning session, probably on the week's Torah reading ' I can't remember that ' and also spoke about some Zionist theme. The State of Israel was less than 2 years old. I was captivated. Here was a madrich who brought limmudei kodesh and a broad and deep secular scholarship together. Of course I didn't articulate my experiences then in the language I've now used ' he just knew everything, and moreover, he communicated what he knew ' certainly to me ' so impressively.
From then on I came to all the B'nai Akiva meetings of the group he led, joined in its leadership at some point by Elaine Freedman, who had been a madricha in the group of which I was one in 1948-1949. My respect and my admiration for Arnold grew and grew as that year progressed. I was avid for knowledge about his own life, especially his years at Cambridge. As the years passed and I began and proceeded in my studies in law at the University of Melbourne, Arnold told me more of his own studies, and especially of his LLB program, under the guidance and the supervision of Professor Hirsch Lauterpacht, a Galitzianer who graced Cambridge as the Whewell Professor of International Law and who, as Sir Hirsch Lauterpacht, was a Judge of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, until a premature death brought a remarkable career to an end. As happened, we sadly recall again tonight, to Arnold, one of Lauterpacht's most able pupils.
It wasn't Arnold's outstanding intellectual gifts alone which made me not only admire him but become very fond of him. That's an inadequate expression of the feelings I had in that year of grace 1950, which grew and developed as the years passed. For whatever reason, Arnold spoke to me as if I was his peer, and I was ' though I could then not have voiced it thus ' both very proud and very humbled by his manner towards me. Of course our relationship both flowed and ebbed as the years and the decades passed, but those first feelings never disappeared.
Two snapshots: Arnold asked me to visit him at some stage, to collect something for a program or for the embryonic Iton B 'nai Akiva, the movement newspaper. It was produced on a Gestetner duplicator in the Mizrachi offices in Collins Street, where that unforgettable personality Dr Hans Ruskin, a'h, either gave way to or reined in an imagination rarely encountered in Jewish Melbourne, much less in Melbourne Mizrachi, then and now. Arnold was living in a one-room flat in a curious street, of which I hadn't heard before, tucked away behind Acland Street, St Kilda. The flat was overflowing with books, pamphlets, notes, journals ' an ocean of paper. There were some tea-chests still unpacked ' more paper. I had never encountered a scene like it. Arnold slept, ate, read and thought in that room, off which gave several doors. One opened to reveal a conventional hanging cupboard, the second a minute kitchen, with unwashed plates in the tiny sink, and the third a bathroom fit for an agile if not acrobatic midget.
The second B'nai Akiva camp was held at Whittlesea in the summer of 1950'1951. Arnold was again Rosh Machaneh. It was a large camp ' about 100, I think, ranging in age from 6 or 7 to 19 or 20. There were tensions between the Hanhala, the camp committee where Arnold presided, and the members of Torah V'Avodah, then a semi-independent religious Zionist youth group of 17, 18 and 19 year olds ' Jonathan Sheink, Max Jotkowitz, Alfie Slonim, Reuben Wein, Manny Pinczower, Vera Gelley, Eva Weiss, Marta Weiss and lehavdil beyn hachayim uveyn hameytim, Noemi Weiss and Stanley Catts, a'h, were among its members. They had, some of them reluctantly, agreed to sacrifice their independence and take part in the B'nai Akiva camp, and in a Chug Hadracha, a youth leaders' training program, that was going to be a very important part of it. One of the TVA members ' not to be named by me ' put up a sign on his tent ' each tent was encouraged to create its own name ' bearing the legend 'Beyt va'ad lachachamim' ' 'the house of the council of the wise'. When Arnold saw the sign he snorted and said, 'They should call it 'moshav leytzim' ' 'the seat of scoffers''. The beauty of his riposte is that it comes from Pirke Avot, and the proof verse for Rabbi Chananya ben Teradyon's reproof to those who meet for idle chatter instead of Torah study is, in the words of the Psalmist, 'The godly man sits not in the seat of scoffers'.
In the latter part of 1951, Arnold and Elaine became engaged to be married - not to the surprise of the more discerning of their chanichim. After they married, in St Kilda Synagogue, in February 1952, Arnold's participation in B'nai Akiva lessened. It ended at the end of that year. His contribution to the growth of B'nai Akiva as a religious Zionist youth movement fostering Torah values and aliyah was profound. He continued to give occasional lectures to Torah V'Avodah, but family and profession occupied most of his time. It was in his profession that in 1955, in my final year in the Melbourne LLB , our relationship acquired another quite new and again unforgettable dimension. Arnold Bloch, solicitor, had moved from his first offices opposite Ripponlea Station to 49 Elizabeth Street, in the CBD. He asked me to work for him, on a part-time basis, of course, keeping his trust accounts. I began by spending an afternoon each week in his office and by the year's end was spending nearly all my time outside the lecture theatre and the Law Library there. My only complaint was that Arnold steadfastly refused to buy an adding machine, which I knew would have made my trust accounts life immeasurably easier. I saw and I heard a great lawyer at work. I think I absorbed something of Arnold's extraordinary feel for the language of the law, for language generally, from those hours. When I manage to persuade my own students to realise that rules are attempts to regulate human behaviour through the use of words I sometimes think of him, as well as of my unforgotten teacher in jurisprudence, the late Professor Sir David Derham, who founded the Monash Law School. Arnold was immensely generous in the time he took, and gave, to speak to me about the study and the practice of the law. When I was preparing to go to Oxford, in July 1956, he told me at length of his experiences in the Cambridge LLB, and gave me all his valuable International Law notes. In the event, I took Evidence as my special subject, not International Law, but it was an act of informed kindness I had not often experienced before.
Like Oliver Cromwell, Arnold would not have wanted his portrait to be an air-brushed photograph. He would have echoed that it be painted 'warts and all'. I know some of my contemporaries were uncomfortable with Arnold; they found him, they said, distant, even aloof. Such was his high intelligence and his quickness of wit that he often got there long before others, and said so. He did not suffer fools too gladly. He could, thank God, become irritated and even angry. I say 'thank God' because we remember tonight a man who had extraordinary gifts and wonderful talents, but who also had those traits or characteristics which all of us possess and which are, sometimes, spoken of as human weaknesses.
He was, in my eyes, a man who was aware of his strengths, but who was also, mostly, modest about his remarkable accomplishments. It was late in our friendship, sometime in the end of the 1970's, that he gave me this booklet. It is entitled Hilchot Nachalot , the Laws of Inheritance, being the Hebrew text and English translation and an Introduction and Notes of that portion of Maimonides's, the Rambam's, famous Mishna Torah , his Code of Jewish Law. It was published by Shapiro Valentine in London in 1950. The title page reads: By Arnold Bloch BA LLB , Scholar of St John's College, Cambridge and Hyman Klein, MA, Principal of Liverpool Talmudical College, sometime Exhibitioner and Baldwin Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge. On the facing Hebrew title page, Rabbi Klein's name comes first, and is followed by the text Behishtatfut talmido Aharon Bloch ' With the collaboration of his pupil, Arnold Bloch. It is of interest that this publication carries the message that it was 'Inscribed by his children and grand-children to a staunch friend of Jewish learning, Aaron Blashki JP, 1860'1938, of Sydney, Australia'. It is a fine piece of Jewish scholarship and legal analysis. I tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Arnold to undertake some regular law teaching when I was Dean of Law at Monash in 1969, especially during the visit of the late Professor David Daube, who had been at Cambridge when Arnold was in residence. I am sure he would have been a memorable teacher of law.
I end with a recollection from that Whittlesea B'nai Akiva camp in the summer of 1950'1951. The site Arnold and Bernie Pushett, a'h, chose was treeless and waterless. There was a small hillock nearby and eucalypts in adjoining paddocks, and around the creek where we drew our water supply. Arnold said that our first Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday evening service, should be held not in the marquee which served as shul and dining hall but outside, on the hillock. We all assembled, in our Shabbat white shirts and blouses. Arnold, wearing a battered sun-hat and a safari jacket, led the service. As we turned westwards for the last verse of Lecha Dodi with its final words of welcome, Bo'i Khala, Bo'i Khala 'Oh come, oh Bride; oh come, oh Bride', the sun was setting, orange and red through the muggy haze of the day, just above the free-line.
Some years later I read Bialik's famous and beautiful poem Shabbat Hamalka , 'Queen Sabbath', and that moment in my life I lived again:
Hachama meyrosh hailanot nistalkah Bo'u v'netzeh likrat Shabbat hamalka Hinei hi yoredet hak'dosha hab'rucha V'ima malachim tzva shalom um'nucha. The sun bids her farewell from the treetops Come let's go out to meet Shabbat, the Queen. Look she is coming down, the holy, the blessed one, And with her the angels, a host of peace and of quiet.
Arnold was, with all else a man of vision and of imagination. I shall not see his like again. Yehi zichro baruch. May his memory be a blessing.