Australia's oldest Jew, who lived half her life in England and made hats for the Royal Family, will celebrate her 110th birthday next weekend.

But Mary Rothstein's actual birth date is unconfirmed; she doesn't have a birth certificate because her family escaped Russia for London soon after she was born in 1901.

An Australian woman has developed an iPhone application to help mourners observe the Yahrzeits (anniversaries of the death) of their loved ones.

Gila Rakusin-Frankel came up with the idea for the iYahrzeit after she marked four years since the death of her brother Arie. Now available to download, the technology automatically reminds people of when an anniversary falls.

It also converts dates from the Hebrew calendar and comes with an English translation of the Mourner’s kaddish.

The beautiful parkland opposite my house had disappeared. I watched as the swings and slides of the playground vanished beneath murky brown waves. The rooftops of houses on the other side of the park soon vanished too. Within hours it was difficult to see where they had been.

A torrent of rusty-coloured water was right on my doorstep. Pieces of furniture, children's bicycles, rubbish bins and the occasional car floated past my front lawn.

Esther Oliver's house backs on to a creek in Brisbane, Australia's third-largest city and the capital of the beleaguered state of Queensland. Last Wednesday, Ms Oliver, a former teacher at a Jewish school in Melbourne who sits on the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, looked on anxiously as the flood waters began inching towards her house. When it started flooding her garden, she began to panic.

"I was watching it coming. It was seeping. I fully expected it to flood the house. I expected snakes. I was scared."

At least a dozen Jewish families in north-eastern Australia have been evacuated from their homes as a "flood of biblical proportions" ripped through Queensland this week, killing at least 12 people.

More than 50 people are still missing and one Jewish man remains unaccounted for near the rural town of Toowoomba, which was flattened on Monday by what police described as an "inland instant tsunami".