Descendant Stories
Family histories from descendants of the founding members of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation.
The Solomon–Benjamin family and Temple House
By Beverley Hooper
Beverley Hooper, a descendant of Judah Solomon — the donor of the synagogue's land and Treasurer of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation for around fifteen years — has shared her family's connection to both the synagogue and Temple House, Judah's former home on the corner of Argyle and Liverpool Streets.
She traces her line through one of Judah's daughters, Lydia Benjamin (née Solomon), to Lydia's son Samuel Benjamin, his son Montefiore (Monty) Benjamin, and her own mother, Dorothy Hooper (née Benjamin) — the last surviving family member born at Temple House. Dorothy lived there with her parents, grandparents and siblings until she was almost ten.
Much of the family's earlier history only came to light through research her father began in the 1960s. Before that, what her mother knew of the family was mostly a story about the “Joseph Solomon estate” — an inheritance that had passed down through the generations without her fully understanding where it came from.
Joseph Solomon
The source of that inheritance turned out to be Joseph Solomon — not Judah's brother of the same name, as the family had long assumed, but Judah's son with Elizabeth Howell, the woman he lived with at Temple House after arriving in Hobart. Judah remained formally married to his first wife, Esther, who had stayed in England with their nine children after his transportation to Tasmania in 1820. Esther later travelled to Hobart and successfully opposed Judah's attempt to obtain a free pardon, which would have allowed him to divorce her and marry Elizabeth — a campaign that caused public scandal at the time.
When Judah died in 1856, Temple House passed to his eldest (legitimate) son Isaac, who later moved to New Zealand, while the bulk of the estate went to Joseph. Joseph bought Temple House outright in 1863 and, having no children of his own, left the estate — including the house and assets worth around £100,000, roughly $A6 million today — to his half-nephew Samuel Benjamin when he died in 1894.
Samuel Benjamin
Samuel Benjamin, son of Lydia and Henry Samuel Benjamin, was born in Hamilton, Tasmania, in 1839. After his father's sudden death in 1852, the thirteen-year-old began learning the Solomon family business, later building a peripatetic career that took his own family between Sydney, London, New York and Cincinnati.
Joseph Solomon's 1894 bequest brought Samuel, then fifty-five, back to Hobart and to Temple House with his wife Fannie and their children. He became a Justice of the Peace and an Alderman, and succeeded Joseph as President of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation — between them, Joseph and Samuel held the roles of President and Treasurer of the Congregation for almost fifty years.
Family memory describes Samuel as an imposing, sometimes domineering patriarch with a long beard, and Fannie as universally well loved.
After Temple House
Temple House was sold to the YMCA in 1921, and generations of family heirlooms — among them a roll-top mahogany desk with a secret drawer — passed down through the family's later homes in Hobart.
In 1991, Dorothy was shown through Temple House, by then part of the Tasmanian Police headquarters, by a local historian researching a heritage report. Walking through it brought back clear memories of the staircase and the former children's nursery. Years later, not long before she died in 2004 at the age of 95, Dorothy recalled attending services at the synagogue as a child — women and girls seated upstairs — and recited a few remembered lines of Hebrew, despite rarely having set foot in a synagogue for seventy years.
Today, the building the family once called home forms part of the headquarters of Tasmania Police, who restored it after a period of disrepair — a few streets from the synagogue whose land her ancestor once gave.
Connected to the Congregation's history?
If your family has a story connected to the Hobart Synagogue or Temple House, we'd love to hear from you.