‘This is an attack on all Jews in Melbourne’: Leaders reeling after attack

If the masked arsonists who torched a Melbourne synagogue in Friday’s pre-dawn hours intended to send an incendiary message about Israel’s war in Gaza, they picked the wrong Jews.

The members of the ultra-Orthodox community who pray at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea are not Zionists. Nor are they politically active. Where many Jewish groups advocate strong views about the conflict in the Middle East, they tend to say little outside their small, cloistered community.

Where Israelis speak Hebrew, they speak Yiddish. While many of them have family connections within Israel and have spent time in the country, they have no truck with the state of Israel nor its government.

Put simply, this is not their war.

Adass Israel community members recover treasured objects feared lost in the synagogue fire.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

“We are a very quiet community,” Adass Israel board member Benjamin Klein says. “We are not involved in politics, we don’t have Israeli flags.

“We pray for Israel, we pray for peace. We don’t recognise the state per se but we don’t protest for or against. We really don’t get involved. We are busy trying to do the right thing by God. That is what our mission is and that is what we focus our lives on.”

So why is it that, on a hot Friday morning a few weeks before Hanukkah, Klein is standing on a grassy verge in Ripponlea with other members of his community, his face red and sweaty beneath his orthodox garb, watching arson detectives pick through the charred remnants of a suspected hate crime inside his house of worship?

Jillian Segal, the Australian government’s Special Envoy to Combat Anti-semitism, says this is what happens when hate, mixed with ignorance, is let off the leash. In comments to this masthead, Segal describes it as a destructive continuum.

Jillian Segal speaks alongside Executive Council of Australian Jewry chief Alex Ryvchin shortly after the October 7 attacks.Credit: Nikki Short

“We have gone from weekly demonstrations morphing into antisemitism to demonstrations outside a synagogue in Victoria, to the daubing of cars in Woollahra with “f--- Israel”. The next step is actually lighting up a synagogue.

“The cause is antisemitism, which is hatred of Jews. That is the cause and that is what we haven’t been calling out and stopping in this country.

“We know it is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a concerning environment where individuals have felt for some time emboldened. Antisemitism is a virus. It mutates, it infects and it destroys. It will destroy our country and our democracy unless we see governments, both state and federal, take immediate action to try and stop it.”

The virus has spread in Melbourne faster than elsewhere. Two weeks ago, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry released its annual report on antisemitism in Australia. Its findings show that between October 2023 and September this year, Victoria led all states in most categories of reported anti-Jewish incidents.

Of 65 episodes of physical assault linked to antisemitism recorded in Australia, 42 were reported in Victoria, which is home to 46.7 per cent of the country’s Jewish residents, according to 2021 data.

“We can’t ignore that,” says Jewish Community Council of Victoria chief executive Naomi Levin. “What is happening here? Why is Victoria the hotbed of this in Australia?”

Where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message to the Albanese government that its shift in diplomatic position on a future Palestine state at the United Nations would invite more antisemitism in Australia might have been dismissed before this attack, it now appears horribly prescient.

On the streets of Melbourne, the synagogue attack has added momentum to previous calls for the Victorian government, with the help of Victorian police, to bring an end to roiling, weekly pro-Palestinian protests in Melbourne’s CBD every Sunday since last October.

While these gatherings of thousands of people have been largely free of violence, and some of the protest movement leaders today were quick to condemn the attack on the synagogue, the demonstrations have filled the CBD with angry and at times, hateful cries.

Congregants comfort each other outside the Adass Israel Synagogue on Friday morning.Credit: Simon Schluter

At separate protests, activists have brandished portraits of two slain terrorist leaders, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and one of the architects of the October 7 attacks, Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar. Other protesters have reproduced the red triangle targeting symbol used by Hamas or concealed their faces with keffiyeh scarfs.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, says Melbourne’s tolerance for the demonstrations should have long expired.

“I have heard from many people from the Jewish community who, quite frankly, don’t go into the CBD on a Sunday,” he says. “If they do, they will take their skull cap off. They will de-identify as Jews for fear that if they wear this in the central business district, they are at risk of being a target.”

He says the “natural limit” to free speech and political expression in a democracy is where it creates fear and a risk for others. “We passed that limit a long time ago. There needs to be a permit system, the protests need to be brought to an end.”

Aghion was backed by Liberal MP David Southwick, the state’s most senior Jewish parliamentarian. “We have had enough,” he declares. “These people literally take over the city like it is theirs. It is a free-for-all in Victoria and that should not happen.”

Police have not established the identity of the synagogue arsonists or made any suggestion that they belong to a pro-Palestinian group.

Yumi Friedman was inside the synagogue, deep in morning prayer, when the arsonists started banging on the door with what sounded like a sledgehammer. He was left shaken and angered by his experience. “The question is, what are the government, what are the police going to do? Nothing.”

Michael Friedman, Yumi’s brother, is the president of Adass Israel. While a steady procession of political and community leaders come to the synagogue and make statements for the TV cameras, he stands on the pavement beyond the police tape marking off the crime scene, waiting to see if all the Torah scrolls, rolls of parchment which carry the five books of Moses in ancient Hebrew script, have survived the fire.

“If a Torah scroll gets burnt or ruined in a fire, it is to us like a person being burnt,” he says. “We mourn that in the same way we would a member of the community. That is a big worry for us.”

Pictures from inside the synagogue taken by a member of the congregation showed the fire completely gutted the building.

If the Adass Israel congregation are the wrong Jews for anti-Israel activists to target, they are the easiest Jews for anyone to spot.

They dress differently, they live in suburbs close to their shul, they wear their beards long and they grow side locks. They also worship in a synagogue that has no high walls, no protective guards, is open 20 hours a day and easily accessibly from the street.

For antisemites, they are an easy target.

“The only reason they were targeted is because they wear fur hats and have side locks and visibly look like Jews,” says Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann, the leader of a modern orthodox congregation in nearby Hawthorn. “That makes it pure, unadulterated antisemitism.”

This is why Friday’s attack is being seen, within Jewish communities, as an attack not on some Jews, but all.

Naomi Levin is ashen faced as she watches the scene unfold outside the synagogue. “This isn’t an attack on one particular synagogue or one particular group within our community, this is an attack on all Jews in Melbourne,” she says. “This could have happened at my synagogue, it could have happened at any of our synagogues.

“We see these things happen in Europe and the US. We had a sense of security that it wouldn’t happen here. That has been shattered today.”

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