In Ferryman, Ariel draws on Finch’s journals and her interviews with him and those in his orbit to tell the story of this remarkable man. The nominally Anglican son of a butcher, Finch, with his wife Cas, converted to Judaism in his twenties, becoming Ephraim. Then, as the director of Melbourne’s Jewish burial society Chevra Kadisha, this Akubra-wearing, Nick Cave-listening Orthodox Jew with a broad Aussie accent became a beloved community figure known as ‘Finchie’.

Ariel emphasises the ease with which Ephraim moved between religious and secular worlds as he cared for the dead and their families for over three decades. Navigating theology, mortuaries, hospitals, and cemeteries and dealing with police, policymakers, coroners, clergy, and doctors, he worked assiduously to preserve Jewish traditions and document the unique story of each person he buried. Here was a man of practicality as well as piety who dwelt ‘easefully’ at the intersections of body and spirit.

There are moments when Ariel brings Ephraim’s straight-shooting, can-do attitude vividly to life – ‘I hate it when I get this attitude, “You can’t do that”’, he tells her at one point. ‘Shit, yes you can. You have to!’, he says. Finch’s warmth and worldly wisdom is marvellously captured in interviewee Rabbi Surfin’s description of him as a great hugger: ‘And he tells me, “People are not being hugged. People need a good hug.” And that’s what he does … And you see it: when people receive, they love it.’

Reading about the Jewish way of death and mourning Ephraim nourishes, I am aware of my agnosticism but more acutely, and rather miserably, of my Anglo-Celtic heritage that is bereft of the kinds of ritual that, Ariel suggests, offers even the most secular Jewish Melburnians profound solace. At one point an interviewee, Max, recalls attending a non-denominational bereaved parents’ group: ‘And you’d go and you’d sit in a big circle and they’d say, “How do you cope?” And people would say, “Well, I went to the pub,” or “I went to chop some wood”. So I said, “Well, we had a shiva. We had a shloshim. And we have yortzheit.”’ Just ‘the naming of these ancient rites’, observes Ariel, seems to give Max ‘something solid to hold on to all these years later’.

Of course, tensions exist within and between all communities. We get a hint of these via Ephraim and Cas’s eloquent son Ben, who is no longer Orthodox. He explains that growing up he found Orthodox Judaism’s emphasis on the mind over the body oppressive and wondered about the trajectories of distant Aussie relatives and ancestors who worked the land, imagining an alternative life for himself where he ‘could have gone hunting, and ... been in my body, and gone swimming instead of sitting and being told that I wasn’t allowed to go to the beach because I’d see naked women’.

For the most part, though, this book reads as a tender homage to a community as much as a man. A significant proportion of this community are survivors of the Holocaust or their descendants (outside Israel, Melbourne has the highest per capita population of Holocaust survivors). When Ephraim became the director of the Chevra Kadisha in the 1980s, he began to document each deceased person’s family history and invited relatives to help him. ‘Time after time,’ writes Ariel, ‘people surprised themselves with shocking or poignant memory – the name of a village where they hid out, the last place they saw their disappeared spouse, the surname of the gentile family that fed them as they fled over the border.’

Like ancient Jewish burial and mourning customs, the Holocaust is an integral part of this community’s cultural memory, and it shadows Ariel’s project. Threaded through her account of Ephraim’s life and deathwork are detailed and moving descriptions of survivors’ histories and experience of the Shoah – portraits woven from Ephraim’s documentation, interviews Ariel conducted with survivors and their families, and video testimony such as that held at Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum.

A chapter towards the end of the book is devoted to a trip Ephraim and his family took to the death camps of Eastern Europe in 2005. Ariel recounts this journey, which took in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Krakow, as well as synagogues, cemeteries, and museums, in exhaustive detail. ‘It feels painful to abbreviate any of this account,’ she explains; ‘the fact that I am omitting details ... feels physically unbearable.’ For Ariel, recreating the Finches’ March of the Living stirs memories of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union of her youth and more broadly and deeply a ‘sensation of being hated, hunted for my heritage ... In my cells is a memory not just of a war, the ‘Final Solution’ of which was the complete eradication of Jews from our planet. It is older than that, and wider.’

I didn’t expect this book to take me to an issue that is dominating public conversation and neither, I suspect, did Ariel. It becomes clear that she wrote this chapter and completed the book in the wake of Hamas’s horrific massacre of Israelis, the beginnings of the Netanyahu government’s catastrophic retaliation against the Palestinian people, and a rise in incidents of anti-Semitism in Australia.

This heartfelt, finely wrought tribute to a community builder of extraordinary compassion and capacity comes at a time when it seems almost impossible to see past the raging pain and anger fracturing communities in Australia and the devastating bleakness of events unfolding in Gaza.