Sydney’s Jewish community living in fear as anti-Semitic incidents on the rise
Jewish people in Sydney have had to change their daily routines and are scared to show their faith in public as anti-Semitic incidents around the city rise rapidly.
National
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“How can this be happening in the streets of Sydney?”
The question, posed by local father of four Marc Rosenthal, has been on the lips of Jewish and non-Jewish Sydneysiders ever since Hamas launched terror attacks on southern Israel, triggering a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment across the globe.
Mr Rosenthal and his family had barely returned from Israel, where they were visiting for the Jewish holidays, when they saw protesters screaming vile chants right here in Sydney.
“After we evacuated from Talmei Yosef, I switched on the news and saw people protesting in front of the Opera House and chanting ‘gas the Jews’,” he said.
He is one of thousands of Sydneysiders who are now worried about showing their faith in public and are changing their daily routines and hiding anything that might mark them out as Jewish for fear they will collide with a rising tide of Jewish hate across the city.
“I know people who are scared to go on the streets. People have stopped wearing their kippah and other outward displays of Judaism like taking down their mezuzah on their doors,” he said.
David Ossip, president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, said it was a “tragedy.”
“Jews have been a proud and committed part of the Australian story since the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788,” he said.
“It is a tragedy that for the first time many Jewish Australians are now afraid in their own country.
“Enough is enough. The calculated attempts to intimidate and harass Jewish Australians – including on Remembrance Day – is not the Australian way.”
ATTACK ON VALUES
Nathan Compton, who describes himself as “openly Jewish” and teaches Year 11 and 12 students at a school in southern Sydney, said that he no longer feels safe working in his classroom alone and instead chooses to work in the staffroom.
“There has been an uptick in anti-Semitism in the last year, even before the October 7 attacks,” he said.
“I’ve had swastikas drawn on my whiteboard, and kids tell me I should ‘go to a camp,’ meaning a death camp.”
“My principal and school are really supportive, but it’s a very eerie feeling.”
Mr Compton said that he had noticed that in any conversation about October 7, he had encountered “a lot of denialism, that it didn’t happen”.
“But if you know your history, you know that it starts with the Jews, but it doesn’t end with the Jews.”
Former prime minister Tony Abbott said “it does look like a toxic mix of old fashioned anti-Semitism that the left dresses up as anti-Zionism, coupled with the general amnesia on the virtues of the West, which Israel represents in the Middle East”.
“It’s not just ugly Jew hatred but a fair dollop of self-hatred too,” he said.
RISING TIDE
While many have been sympathetic to the plight of Israelis in the weeks since Hamas forces massacred at least 1200 Israeli civilians and took an estimated 200 more hostage on October 7, experts say the attacks have also touched off a wave protests driven by hatred of Jews, Israel, and the West.
In the first 48 hours after the attack, before Israel had even begun to respond, a rally of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched from Town Hall to the Opera House where a number of them were filmed chanting “f--k the Jews” and “gas the Jews”.
The day after Hamas’s attacks, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun told a cheering crowd in Lakemba “I’m elated, it’s a day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory”.
“This is the day we’ve been waiting for,” Dadoun said, who earlier this year offered prayers at an Iftar dinner attended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
In the weeks since, there have been a series of incidents including aggressive pro-Palestinian motorbike convoys driven through the Eastern Suburbs and in Melbourne a demonstration in a heavily Jewish area that led to the evacuation of a local synagogue.
Isaac Solomon, whose mother fled Romania when she was 14 after a number of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust, said “there is a huge problem”.
“When I take my daughter to school there is a lot of police and security … Something you thought would never come again, it’s coming again.”
Australia’s peak Jewish body, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said that they recorded one anti-Semitic incident in the week before Hamas attacked Israel.
In the following four weeks from October 8 to November 7, they recorded 221 across Australia.
The group said that the figures were likely only a small fraction of the actual number of incidents, most of which they said go unreported.
“It is one of the most challenging times we have faced as a community,” said ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.
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