More than one community, this was an attack on Melbourne’s multicultural fabric

A few months ago, my family started attending a Melbourne synagogue regularly on Saturday mornings in preparation for my daughter’s bat mitzvah.

The bat mitzvah is a Jewish coming-of-age ritual when 12-year-old girls reach symbolic adulthood, according to the Jewish faith.

Community members have laid flowers outside the Adass Israel synagogue following an arson attack on Friday.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

My family’s Jewishness is largely secular – defined by song, food and speaking the Yiddish language. But to mark her bat mitzvah, my daughter was eager to learn to read from the Torah and sing the ancient melodies and words as our people have done for thousands of years.

Before she stepped up to the Torah on her bat mitzvah day just a few weeks ago, a friend who is a scholar in Jewish mysticism offered her two pieces of advice: have fun, and above all, be loud.

Her performance was indeed loud, spirited and flawless, filling me with such pride (or “naches” as we would say in Yiddish), that since then, my family has continued going to synagogue on Saturday mornings.

On Friday, even as I was reporting on the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue in Ripponlea, I struggled to believe that anyone in Australia would so brazenly target a place of peaceful prayer. The fact that there were people inside at the time of the attack makes it all the more sickening.

In the course of my reporting I called Rabbi Noam Sendor, who leads a separate congregation in Caulfield, looking for comment. I asked him if he thought the attack had created a mood of reluctance among his congregants about attending his Sabbath services.

“On the contrary,” he said almost before I’d even finished the question. “Unequivocally, it’s defiance.”

It was in this spirit that I went back to my own synagogue at the weekend, walking down the street publicly wearing my yarmulke, which identifies me as a Jew.

The synagogue I attend is lay-led, meaning there is no rabbi officiating the service. And unlike most other orthodox congregations, where only males read from the Torah, in our congregation men and women participate equally. This communal nature of my synagogue raises the likelihood that anyone might get dragged into fulfilling some of the many Sabbath rituals without prior warning.

Inside that Addas Israel Synagogue following the attack,

On Saturday, it was my turn for Hagbah – holding the Torah scroll after the reading is complete. In preparation for the Torah scroll to be placed safely back in its ark, my daughter again sang the prayers she had learned months earlier, while my son dressed it in its cover. As this was happening, I started to wonder about the condition of the Torah scrolls that were kept in the Adass Israel synagogue.

Although I had never set foot inside, I knew the Adass Israel building well from the outside. I have lived in Ripponlea for about six years now, and often walked my dog around there hoping to overhear a few words of Yiddish from the congregants who would regularly mill outside.

On Saturday morning, I clutched the Torah scroll to my chest while its substantial heaviness weighed on the wooden handles propped on my legs. I thought about how the Adass Israel community might have wanted to do little more than what I was doing at that moment – joining in the weekly ritual of the Sabbath service, surrounded by family and community.

These scrolls hold our creation stories: Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Moses leading his people to freedom from slavery in Egypt. These narratives all come from the Torah. They are Jewish stories, yes, but they belong to everyone too.

While the firebombing on Friday targeted the Adass Israel congregation specifically, it felt to me that this was an attack on the Jewish community more broadly. But even more than that, it felt that this was an attack on the identity of Victoria, and its multicultural fabric.

Currently, it’s impossible to know what the exact intentions of those who firebombed the Adass Israel synagogue were. Whether it was to protest the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, meant as an act of hate against Jews, or something else entirely remains unclear.

But if those attackers hoped to deter us from practising our faith and culture, it simply will not work. For me, it has had the opposite effect. Antisemitism is an ancient hatred. Yet, Jews have shown for thousands of years that persecution and violence always fails – regardless of its severity.

This attack has made me feel more determined to practice my Jewishness openly. On this past Sabbath, I held my Jewish identity closer. I was determined to follow my daughter’s example, and the advice from my friend, to be loud about it, too. Every Jew in Australia has the right do just that.

Benjamin Preiss is The Age’s regional editor.