‘I Don’t Recognize This Australia’: Persistent Antisemitism Rocks Australian Jewry

by Mendel Super – chabad.org

It was a little past 4 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2024, and two members of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Congregation were studying Torah in the synagogue. The first morning services were about two hours away, not unusual for a synagogue where the lights are on well past midnight, with congregants studying Torah and early risers coming in shortly after the last night owls head out.

Yumi Friedman, producer of the national kosher favorite Yumi’s Dips, was one of the men studying that early morning when he suddenly heard loud banging. CCTV footage would later reveal that it was three masked individuals breaking into the synagogue. Just as soon as they’d broken in, the assailants began rapidly emptying jerry cans of accelerant and spreading it with brooms.

Friedman and his study partner managed to escape the synagogue moments before it was engulfed in flames.

William Eckstein, or “Willie,” as he’s known in Melbourne’s tight-knit Jewish community, was one of the first to arrive on the scene following the attack. “What I saw was indescribable—a hundred times worse than the photos,” he said. “It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit.”

What he witnessed that early morning—and what the rest of the world would likewise soon see—was a vicious and brazen antisemitic attack on one of Australia’s busiest synagogues. The arson of the synagogue Eckstein’s parents had helped build and he grew up in was the climax of a spree of antisemitic violence visited upon Australian Jewry over the last few years, a horrifying trend many members of the community say the government has ignored.

In early February, a video showing two Muslim nurses from Western Sydney making disturbing threats against Jews went viral. The video shows a male and female nurse speaking with a man in an online chat room. When the nurses learn that their interlocutor is Jewish, their demeanor changes dramatically and they proceed to say that they would refuse to treat Israeli patients, before insinuating that they have harmed Israeli patients in their care.

“Eventually, you’re going to get killed, and you’re going to go to jahannah,” says the male nurse, using the Arabic word for “hell.” Falsely claiming to be a doctor, the male nurse continues: “You have no idea how many Israeli … dogs came to this hospital, and I send them to jahannah,” he says as he makes a throat-slitting gesture.

Both nurses were quickly identified and suspended from their positions, initially with pay, before they were fired and banned from practicing medicine in Australia.

After several weeks of investigation, they were finally criminally charged in March. The male nurse was charged with using a carriage service to threaten, menace or harass and with possessing a prohibited drug that he had stolen from the hospital (carriage services refer to modern communication systems such as phones and the internet). The female nurse was charged the week prior with three offenses: threatening violence to a group, using a carriage service to threaten to kill and using a carriage service to harass or cause offense.

‘We Never Thought It Could Happen Here’

Though the firebombing of Adass was almost immediately designated an act of terrorism by the Australian Federal Police, the culprits have yet to be found, and many in the community have questioned the government’s handling of the case.

Adass Israel was founded in the 1940s by Orthodox Jews who fled Nazi Europe. They were joined after the war by dozens of Hungarian, Romanian and Czechoslovakian Holocaust survivors seeking a new life in a country as far away from Europe as possible. Eckstein, born in Bratislava, was 1 year old when his parents arrived in Melbourne in 1948. Among his parents’ many contributions to the growing Adass community were several sacred Torah scrolls that his father had rescued from the flames of the European inferno.

The Torah scrolls had always seemed like a symbol for Australian Jewry, salvaged from the dead, Old World and brought to a safe new home Down Under. It wasn’t only Adass—nearly every synagogue in Melbourne holds Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust. The immigrants who brought them built synagogues to house the scrolls, and a thriving Jewish life for themselves and their families, forming the backbone of a community that has enjoyed decades of refuge and tranquility.

When Eckstein arrived at the burned-out shell of his synagogue, the history of his family’s Torah scrolls was on his mind, as was their future. While the scrolls survived with minimal damage to the velvet covers, Eckstein sees an ominous parallel between its past and present: “This Torah has a history; it was firebombed by the Nazis in Bratislava. We never thought it could happen here.”

The Adass firebombing, other acts of overt antisemitism and the government’s overall apathetic responses have forced Australian Jews to reckon with a question they never dreamed of asking: Is Australia still a safe haven for Jews?

‘Have You Lost Control?’

Historically, Australia’s Jews have been fiercely supportive of the nation that welcomed them and their ancestors when many others wouldn’t, and the community has long kept close ties with the government on the local and federal level. The Jewish community has prospered in Australia, building successful businesses that have shaped the country’s economy. It has also invested in a strong Jewish infrastructure, and Australia’s 120,000 Jews are served today by no less than 19 Jewish day schools and at least 100 synagogues.

Australia has been good to the Jews, and the Jews back to it.

But that safe bubble of security has grown increasingly fragile in recent years, threatening to burst. At a press conference in the wake of the Adass Synagogue firebombing, Jacinta Allen, the Premier of Victoria—the state with largest Jewish community in Australia and home to the Adass Israel synagogue—faced a huddle of community members seeking assurances that they and their families would be safe from future incidents and the perpetrators would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

One member asked Allen what her government planned to do to ensure the safety of the Jewish community, noting that in the weeks prior to the firebombing, there was another (albeit less violent) attack on a different synagogue less than two miles away. He also mentioned that the threshold for what legally constitutes an “antisemitic act” had been lowered in recent months.

“Jewish communities are now under real threat; your government has ultimately failed,” he called out. “Have you lost control?”

Instead of facing the community’s questions, Allan abruptly cut the press conference short and walked off.

‘Everyone Is in Disbelief’

As of yet, despite the Australian Federal Police declaring the arson a terrorist attack, triggering a wider response from multiple law-enforcement agencies on state and federal levels with broader powers, the masked attackers—believed to be three—are still on the loose. This further compounds the shattered sense of security in Melbourne’s quiet, leafy and densely Jewish-populated South Eastern suburbs of Caulfield, Elsternwick and Ripponlea.

“This feels shocking beyond words,” Eckstein says. “I don’t recognize this Australia. The Australia we grew up in didn’t have events like this. Everyone is in disbelief.”

The damage to the synagogue is estimated to be more than $1 million with thousands of volumes of Jewish literature burned, the interior gutted, and some Torah scrolls damaged. Thankfully, says Eckstein, none were destroyed, although time will tell if they can be salvaged after smoke and water damage.

But it’s not the physical rebuilding of the synagogue that has Australian Jewish leaders concerned. It’s the fact that this attack was not isolated. The same Australia that has long been a safe haven for Jews has become rampant with antisemitism.

“It saddens me that Australia is no longer the country that welcomed my parents and so many others after the devastation of World War II,” says David Weridger, a senior member of the community whose father survived Auschwitz and found refuge on Australia’s shores. “The current government has done little to keep us feeling safe, let alone physically safe. People are toning down public expressions of Jewishness, and some are wondering if our future is indeed in Australia or we should be looking to Israel.”

Days after the December firebombing of Adass in Melbourne, cars were torched in the heart of Sydney’s Jewish neighborhood, Woollahra, with “Kill Israiel [sic]” sprayed (and misspelled) by vandals. That incident followed pro-Hamas demonstrations in the city over the past 15 months, with chants of “Gas the Jews!” heard.

In mid-January of 2025, multiple cars were firebombed and graffitied, and a home vandalized in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Dover Heights, a suburb in Sydney. The phrase “F*** Jews” was spray-painted on the side of a car; several other vehicles were defaced with antisemitic graffiti, and a Jewish house was splashed with paint.

This continues a worrying trend that has swept across the country in recent years. In 2019, the same day as the Poway Chabad shooting, that killed one and injured another three, an anonymous online threat to shoot community members at Sydney’s Central Synagogue triggered a large-scale police operation; later that year a Jewish-owned cafe was targeted with antisemitic graffiti claiming “The Holocaust is a lie” replete with a swastika. In October of that year, a 12-year-old boy was forced to kiss the feet of a Muslim classmate and was physically assaulted. This was after a 5-year-old boy came forward about being bullied on a daily basis by multiple classmates in the school bathrooms, forced to face a barrage of antisemitic slurs, including “Jewish vermin,” “the dirty Jew” and “Jewish cockroach.”

In 2020, a kindergarten in Melbourne was defaced with spray-paint that read “4th Reich” accompanied by a Star of David; and in 2020, the Victorian Department of Education launched a full investigation following allegations of antisemitic bullying against students and teachers at a state-run school.

Then came a flood of pandemic-fueled antisemitic virulence, egged on by a disinformation campaign claiming Jews were responsible for the global pandemic. Stickers were placed around Melbourne during “freedom” rallies bearing a Star of David and a QR code. When scanned, it led to a website that blamed the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Jews. At the same time, an anti-vax group plastered Jewish neighborhoods in Melbourne with stickers bearing swastikas.

Synagogues faced menacing threats on their voicemail machines, and social media posts referencing the Holocaust in overtly antisemitic ways became the norm. But that wasn’t the end of the harassment, which came to a head on Oct. 7, 2023.

‘We Are Going to Rebuild’

Since the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, reported incidents of antisemitism have more than quadrupled, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ). A total of 2,062 incidents were recorded between October 2023 and September 2024, with 495 the previous year.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, some 10,000 pro-Palestinian protestors attended a rally in Sydney in support of Hamas, donning keffiyehs and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Only one person was arrested at the rally: an Australian kippah-wearing Jew who attended carrying an Australian flag.

In a country with the largest number of Holocaust survivors per capita outside of Israel, community members are rattled.

“We’ve tightened security,” Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the assistant rabbi at Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, tells Chabad.org. “Local police visit our shul three times a day and ensure a visible presence at every synagogue.”

Schlanger says that despite the fact that he and his colleagues have been forced to beef up security, attendance has increased significantly since Oct. 7, tracking with North American Jewry’s response highlighted by findings in a Chabad.org report from late 2023.

He reports that Chabad of Bondi’s popular Chanukah on the Beach festival, which used to see an estimated 1,500 participants, saw attendance double in 2023, and an even larger crowd in 2024. Regular synagogue attendance has not dropped as antisemitic attacks have risen, though Schlanger says he has fielded calls from concerned community members asking about security protocols before they decide whether to attend.

Schlanger cautions against getting caught up in the media feedback loop and overstating the risks of being Jewish in Australia: “Since Oct. 7, there have been weekly demonstrations in the heart of the city, about a 20-minute drive from the eastern Jewish suburbs. These demonstrations haven’t reached our area. It is mostly quiet here.”

Walking the streets as a visible Jew, Schlanger says he has “never personally been the target of antisemitism. My car—emblazoned with mitzvah symbols—is a living example of pride and resilience.”

The rabbi says that the way forward is the same: “Be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish.”

Werdiger agrees: “This has been a wake-up call for a number of young, politically progressive Jews who thought non-Jews were supportive and aligned with them, and who have dumped them like a hot potato and shown their true colors. This awakening of the pintele yid [‘inner Jewish spark’] has been one of the silver linings in this awful situation.”

In Melbourne, a shaken Eckstein echoes that message: “We are going to rebuild, bigger and better. That’s the only appropriate response.”