It was 1974. Harry Gubbay's funeral loomed as a delicate business. The father of three, son of Iraqi Jews and owner of a photography shop in Mayfield had died on bad terms with the Newcastle Synagogue.

"He'd obviously had issues with some people. I forget what it was about but it lasted decades, maybe my whole life," David, 69, says.

"I don't ever remember going to the synagogue with my father."

David's grief turned into worry. Newcastle's Jewish community, then, was at its peak of about 100 families, but still tiny. At an orthodox funeral, to recite the Kaddish memorial prayer you need a quorum of 10 men called a minyan. David worried that his father wouldn't get a minyan.

Someone told him to seek Saul Hilman, a Waratah tailor and the honorary officiant at the synagogue on Tyrrell Street, Cooks Hill. Hilman asked around the congregation and arranged a minyan for Harry's funeral.

"Dad had abandoned the synagogue a long time ago, so most of the men in the minyan hadn't known him," says Gubbay, now the treasurer of the synagogue.

"That's what Jewish people do. We've always had to help each other."

LIVE in Newcastle long enough and you start to see the threads of its Jewishness; the white-lettered Cohen & Co sign on Bolton Street, the bar run by Jewish siblings on Hunter, the Harkham family winery in the valley.

The city's Jewish story is interwoven with its brutal beginnings. The Jewish convict Joseph Samuels was brought to Sydney in 1801, where he promptly robbed a house, killed a trooper and was set down for execution on the solemn day of Yom Kippur.

"It is the first record of Hebrew prayers being chanted in public in Australia," notes DD Mann in The Present Picture of NSW.

When they tried to hang him, the rope snapped three times. The reprieve was short-lived, though; Samuels "drowned Newcastle 1 Apr 1806, while escaping with seven others".

Almost 40 years later the bushranger Edward "Teddy" Davis led his Jew Boy Gang, robbing and galloping through the country around Maitland in turned-up hats, pink ribbons and satin neck ties. Panache notwithstanding, the gang was executed in 1841.

By the time businessman George Judah Cohen manoeuvred in 1905 to establish a congregation in Newcastle, the city had eclipsed Maitland as the centre of Hunter Judaism.

Isack Morris, 40, Newcastle's first rabbi who had come via Latvia, Wales and Hobart, purchased a block on Tyrrell Street and built a "temple house". He virtually ran the congregation himself, leading services, teaching and acting as schochat (ritual slaughterer) and mohel (circumciser).

A few blocks away, Newcastle had a Jewish mayor. Morris Light had migrated from Russia, set up a shop in Carrington and, in the 1920s, seized control of the city's bitterly divided councils to ram through a building program inspired by the South African city of Durban. Amid howls of wastefulness in a town that could-ill afford such luxuries, Light delivered City Hall and the Civic Theatre.

Newcastle's white-walled, art deco synagogue began to take form in 1927, paid for in part by the sale of the Maitland Synagogue.

The building sits today at the foot of one of the steepest streets in Newcastle, domed, tucked in from Darby Street, a block down from a mossy wall of convict stone.

EAT this."

A woman in her 50s is offering a plate of little brown balls. She scolds, jokingly.

"Eat, then I'll tell you what it is."

The balls turn out to be (salty, savoury) gefilte fish, made from a few types of ground-up fish, usually whitefish or carp.

They're traditionally boiled, but these are fried. A small army of women is rolling brown balls of gefilte fish in a kitchen beneath the synagogue.

"I ended up using barramundi," says another woman, Claire Tipper, in an English accent."This is the world's most expensive batch of gefilte fish."

Tipper is from Birmingham, where her family attended a liberal synagogue. They migrated six years ago and connected with this, an orthodox synagogue.

The cooking is for her 13-year-old son Josh's bar mitzvah in two days. He's picked a colourful tallit [prayer shawl] - "to stand out from the crowd", but feels a bit under-prepared. A bar mitzvah is the religious initiation ceremony of a Jewish boy who has reached the age of 13.

"I'll be reading 31, 34 verses in Hebrew and there are no vowels, so it makes it harder to read," Josh says, holding up two sheets of what looks like braille.

"Six months or a year before, you start to learn it, but I like to leave things late. I probably only started three or four weeks ago."

Newcastle Synagogue, with a congregation of 44, doesn't host many bar mitzvahs; the last was five years ago. There isn't a rabbi in residence, but some family connections in Melbourne are flying a rabbi up for Josh's bar mitzvah. He's young, with an 18-month-old child. Josh says he's nice.

Tipper, from Mayfield, doesn't wield the power of a rabbi, but she ran services at the synagogue in Birmingham. It's not something she'd broach here, though. Newcastle is established as an orthodox synagogue and while flexibility is possible on some things, having a woman perform certain roles wouldn't sit well with some of the congregation, male and female.

"It does frustrate me. I see myself as an active member of the community," Tipper says.

"I guess the answer, and I know how this sounds, is that the women are so much more important in the work they do to prepare the men, and that is holy."

She pauses every now and then to banter with Batsheva Stewart, a lady working methodically in the kitchen.

Tipper: "Batsheva keeps us running, but she disappears once in a while and leaves me to cook!"

Batsheva, waving a hand: "no, don't say things!"

Batsheva Stewart is a grandmother who lives in Wallsend, was born in Afghanistan and yearned, for much of her life, to live in Israel. She speaks English, Hebrew and some Farsi. Stewart and her (devout Christian) husband Kevin met while working on a kibbutz (communal farm); her, on her national service; him, on a working holiday. Stewart's family is in Israel and she tries to visit every two years. She's lived here since 1980.

"We agree to disagree a lot. We've had a few moments over the years," Stewart laughs.

"I wanted to live in Israel, but we did agree to bring up the children Jewish."

Of the couple's five adult children, only two remain in Newcastle. This is how the Jewish population ends up concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne, Stewart says. Like with many young people, life whisks them away.

David Gubbay, the synagogue treasurer, told me his father warned him never to tell people he was Jewish. Don't lie if somebody asks, he said, but don't volunteer it. Has Stewart's Jewishness ever put her in danger?

No, not her. There are so few Jews in Newcastle that people find it an affable novelty. But. She looks now like she's measuring what to say. Stewart makes me promise not to make her sound political and honestly, she's not. But, when pressed, she says the reporting on Israel is one-sided.

"It's like a child at school is being bullied by other children, and when it finally gets the courage to punch them in the face, everyone runs to the child with the bloody nose."

A PRAYER for the state of Israel is part of the Sabbath service I'm invited to one warm Friday night.

Max Lenzer, the synagogue president and Wallsend GP a bit younger than Gubbay, says a prayer for Israel is pretty typical in Australian synagogues. I ask if the state of Israel figures much in the thoughts of an Australian Jew.

"I would've thought so."

There have been two attacks on the synagogue in the past decade.

In one, someone smashed all the stained glass windows facing the driveway. The windowsills are engraved with the names of men and women from the congregation, many of whom have died. They're important to these people.

In the other attack, someone threw eggs at the synagogue and painted swastikas on its walls. It shook the congregation.

The most damage wreaked in recent times, says Gubbay the treasurer, has been from the weather.

"We fixed the roof at a cost of $100,000, and we had to rely on a couple of generous donors.

"Thank goodness it was fixed before the storms in April."

Gubbay is an accountant and late night radio host on 2SM who sounds younger than he is.

He's also a theatre actor recently cast as the dapper Belgian detective Poirot which, with his silver hair and brooding dark eyes, seems about right.

My place at a bench in the men's section of the synagogue (the women are behind a see-through curtain) is set up with a prayer book in English and Hebrew and another book, provided by Gubbay, with anglicised translations of the Hebrew.

About a dozen people file in quite late, and the building is filled with the murmur and soft laughter of people who know each other well.

"Shabbat shalom."

David and Max greet the arrivals wearing kippahs (skull caps), and the two men are suddenly no longer a doctor and an accountant.

"Please, have a seat. Welcome."

Next to me is Alan, in his 50s.

Lenzer and Gubbay step onto the bema (elevated stage), turn their backs to us and begin the prayers, and Alan helps me find my place in the book.

"Though I'm really the wrong person to ask," he says, in a faintly South African accent.

It's folklore in certain parts of Sydney that South African Jews are to be avoided - especially at school P&C meetings - but Alan must be an exception.

The treatment of Jews in South Africa, he says, fell in largely with the divide between the English and the Boers. The Boers aligned themselves with Hitler, and anti-Semitism metastasised.

Alan's brother was a political prisoner for 20 years, and later became part of Nelson Mandela's first cabinet.

He says it's OK to chat during the service. In the old times, men did business in the temples.

"And now comes the race," says Alan dryly, as David and Max launch into the final prayer in a flurry of Hebrew.

A tray comes around with shots of red wine.

It's not like communion, assures David. It's a toast to bring in the Sabbath.

"You like the wine?" he says.

"It's from Israel."

And so begins the Sabbath, a stopped world, a time outside time for the Jews of Newcastle.