![]() And Mina’s work with the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia (NCJWA) fostered a nascent Australian Jewish feminism. They worked as a team, lobbying to bring homeless Holocaust survivors to Australia, building a support base to nourish this new cohort, and promoting Shoah remembrance. “Part of Leo and Mina’s leadership skills was their ability to bring people along with them,” explains Taft. The phrase rings oddly for a husband and wife who lived their lives before that terminology became vogue. Interviewed by The AJN, the Melbourne researcher describes Leo and Mina as “a power couple”. Her later research, while the COVID pandemic kept her within her four walls, revealed the Finks as a model of the courage and energetic chutzpah that characterised post-World War II Jewish communal pioneers. ![]() “It really spiked my interest,” she says. ![]() ![]() ![]() Researching Yiddish-speaking Melbourne with former colleague Dr Andrew Markus, Taft, the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation’s research associate – and a child of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors – became fascinated with the Fink name that pervades the Jewish community. AUSTRALIAN Jewish academic Dr Margaret Taft’s odyssey into the life and times of Leo and Mina Fink – while she was in lockdown in 2020 – has culminated in her important biography, Leo and Mina Fink: For the Greater Good. ![]()
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