This award is supported by the Caplan Family to honour the memory of their parents, the late Leslie and Sophie Caplan, pillars of the Australian Jewish community who had a lifelong interest in modern Jewish history and literature, and who both had published works on aspects of Australian Jewish History. 

This award is supported by the Shad Family in recognition of young Jewish writers. It is donated in memory of Bobby Adler. 

The award recognises excellence in contemporary Australian fiction writing by a Jewish author and is supported by Dr Janet Hiller. It has been donated in memory of Szymon (Simon) Klitenik z”l who arrived in Melbourne from Poland in 1939 at the age of 15. Szymon enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces at 19 and was killed in action in New Guinea in 1945, at the age of 21. No known members of Szymon’s family survived the Shoah. 

The Edith Hausmann Award for Jewish Playwrights, supported by Judi Hausmann, recognises a full-length unproduced play of any genre that engages in some capacity with Jewish subjects written by a Jewish Australian writer aged 18-45.   

 

This award is donated in memory of Edith Hausmann, Moriah College’s founding librarian, who had a lifelong appreciation of the theatre.     

This award is for a poem that captures an aspect of the Jewish experience and has a Jewish ‘neshama’ (soul or spirit). It has been donated by Joanne Fedler to honour the memory of her paternal grandmother, Chaya Fedler (Michelson), a Yiddish poet from Zagare, Lithuania, who lost her family in the Holocaust and whose greatest hope was to see her poems published. Her wish was fulfilled by her husband Solomon after her untimely death in her early fifties. A translation of her poems in English, The Fruits of Quiet Songs, will be published by Joanne in 2026. 

This award recognises unpublished illustrated manuscripts. It has been bequeathed by Joanne Fedler to honour her late father, Dov Fedler, one of South Africa’s pre-eminent anti-Apartheid political cartoonists. His magnum opus, thirty-five years in the making, Gagman (published in 2022) is a graphic novel about a man who survives the concentration camps by telling jokes.