1941 - present

Henry Benjamin was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1941, and when he and his wife Kathy arrived in Sydney in April 1970, she was already an Australian citizen.

Henry was one of the many British immigrants who arrived in Australia after World War II under the Assisted Passage Scheme and were known as Ten Pound Poms because they contributed only £10 towards their immigration costs. Many were working-class Jewish immigrants from London’s East End. Between 1945 and 1972, more than a million UK migrants travelled to their new Australian or New Zealand homeland on board ships of the P&O and Orient lines. The mass exodus was a scheme the Australian and British governments devised to help populate Australia. During the 1960s, because Britain alone couldn’t supply enough migrants for Australia’s needs, Australia’s Commonwealth Government was forced to allow a more diverse range of people to migrate and gradually abandoned the White Australia Policy. The Assisted Passage Scheme was wound up in 1982.

During Henry’s time in Glasgow, he was a member of the Jewish Board of Guardians Auxiliary, which had the purpose of raising funds for relocating the Jewish families that were still living in the Glaswegian slums, known as the Gorbals.

In Sydney, from 1970 to 2010 he ran a clothing/textiles business. In addition to this he moved back into journalism in 2000 as a foreign correspondent and went on to be the editor and publisher of J-Wire, the ‘digital Jewish news daily for Australia and New Zealand’ and is continuing in both roles.

Courtesy Henry Benjamin and the Eat, Pray, Naches: Jewish Community Stories project.