Abraham Tobias Boas
rabbi of a Hebrew congregation (1844-1923)
Abraham Tobias Boas (25 November 1842 – 20 February 1923) was a Dutch-born Australian rabbi who led the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation in Adelaide, South Australia. He is commemorated on Adelaide's Jubilee 150 Walkway as South Australia's first rabbi.
Biography
Early life
Abraham Tobias Boas was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, son of Tobias Eliesar Boas, rabbi, and his wife Eva Salomon Levi, née Linse. Boas was educated at Amsterdam Theological Seminary.
Ministry in Adelaide
In late 1869 a committee acting under the authority of Nathan Marcus Adler, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, chose Boas for the vacant ministry of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation. The voyage out to South Australia, aboard the sailing ship Tamesa under Captain Phillips, took 83 days. He preached his first Adelaide sermon six days later.
The Adelaide Hebrew Congregation was then building a new synagogue in Rundle Street, its foundation stone laid in 1870 by the president, Gabriel Bennett, with whose family Boas boarded until his marriage. Boas consecrated the completed building, which seated 350 worshippers, on 20 March 1871.
Over the following decades the congregation's schools, societies and charities all ran through him.
“Abraham Tobias Boas” enters the record as rabbi of a Hebrew congregation (1844-1923). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Abraham, Tobias and Boas can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abraham Tobias Boas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.