Sadness, bewilderment and anger as Australians commemorate October 7
After a year of grief, anguish and deep introspection, many from Melbourne’s Jewish community gathered in a tightly guarded, converted warehouse in Moorabbin for a night of song, prayer, reflection and commemoration.
Titled “Illuminate October”, the program was intended to honour victims of October 7 and lighten Jewish spirits weighed down by Hamas’ atrocities, the fate of surviving hostages and uncertainty about Israel’s future and the place of their own communities in a divided Australia.
Jewish people commemorate the October 7 attacks at The Morris Moor complex in Moorabbin.Credit: Joe Armao
Staged within a cavernous space with sombre exhibitions projected onto the walls, it was a place for political leaders to come and listen rather than make speeches. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was a prominent face in the crowd alongside Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, state Opposition Leader John Pesutto, former premier Daniel Andrews and federal and state MPs and Jewish community leaders.
About 5000 people came to light lanterns, perform music, share kosher food and listen to the horrific stories of what happened in southern Israel a year ago, when Hamas and other Palestinian militants murdered 1200 Israelis and abducted 250.
Some brought Israeli flags but there were few overt expressions of nationalism. On the walls, the work of artists, writers and poets who survived the massacres spoke to the deep sorrow, rather than any sense of defiance, which has shaped the Australian Jewish experience.
Nikki Perzuck, a cousin of 20-year-old hostage Naama Levi who was forced into the back of a Jeep by Hamas militants and is presumed to be alive and still captive in a tunnel beneath Gaza, took to the stage wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message: Bring Naama Home Now.
Participants take part in a lantern procession on Monday evening. Credit: Joe Armao
“We send you this light,” she said. “We were protecting your spirit. We need you to survive.”
Speaking earlier in the day, Rabbi Ralph Genende described it as an agonising anniversary.
At a gathering within Jewish Care, a charity which provides aged care, financial assistance and mental health services to a scarred community, Genende recounted a year of broken pieces, hearts and hopes.
“As if that wasn’t enough, it’s been a year of shattered innocence – or was it blissful naivety – for those of us who believed that antisemitism had been banished to the dark corners of humanity,” he said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Walk of Light lantern procession in Moorabbin on Monday night.Credit: Joe Armao
“The ferocity and the pervasiveness of the new antisemitism has sent us spinning into a vortex of doxing and cancelling and cold, isolating spaces.”
Former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he felt anguished and anxious.
He said he feared for hostages in Israel, people grieving murdered loved ones and Israel’s security at a time of dramatically expanding war.
His anxiety is centred here, at the targeting of Jewish businesses, the harassment of Jewish students at university and the doxing of people working in creative industries and anti-Israel protesters carrying flags of proscribed terrorist groups.
The Walk of Light lantern procession.Credit: Joe Armao
“It is because we have been failed by our leaders,” he said. “Failed in the parliaments, failed in our institutions, failed by our university leadership in our houses of learning, failed by the absent Human Rights Commission.
“At a time when we needed conviction, clarity and courage, we have had doublespeak, equivocation, silence and inaction.”
Rabbi Genende said the year of mourning was at an end and Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive manager Joel Burnie said the time had come for more Jewish people to speak out.
Burnie has travelled to Israel repeatedly over the past year, leading delegations of parliamentarians, journalists and influencers of public opinion to the sites of Hamas massacres. Each time, he has watched the 43-minute film that depicts, through footage filmed by Hamas militants, some of the worst atrocities carried out on the day. He said he now sees those images whenever he closes his eyes.
Albanese at the centre of the lantern procession.Credit: Joe Armao
“We will not be victims of a growing tide of antisemitism or government inaction,” he said. “We need to be loud and proud as Jews for how can we expect the silent majority to rise if we ourselves are hiding?”
Away from the formal commemorations, barrister Nina Vallins shared a personal story about what the past year has meant for some Australian Jews.
Vallins, until late last year was a member of the Brunswick Women’s Choir, an amateur group of singers founded more than 30 years ago. In the lead up to Hanukkah, a Jewish festival, the choir agreed to perform at a multi-faith event in Melbourne’s Federation Square.
Last year’s event was a significant one for Melbourne’s Jews as it marked the first time they had gathered in significant numbers in the city since the October 7 attacks and Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians. A few weeks before the performance, members of the choir questioned whether they should be taking part.
“It’s promoted as a multicultural festival but it is clearly run by the Jewish community,” the choir’s founding director, Cathy Nixon, wrote to fellow members of the organising committee. “Perhaps this is not something that we want to be associated with at this time in particular?”
After a short discussion, the rest of the committee agreed. Vallins, who came to the discussion after the decision to pull out was made, was incensed.
“I was so excited to see that we would be participating in the festival because the antisemitism all Jews have experienced from allegedly progressive people has been unrelenting and so hurtful,” she replied. “At a time when the Jewish people are hurting deeply, the solidarity of the Brunswick Women’s Choir with my community would have been a balm to my soul.
“What do you not value about Hanukkah? The survival of the Jews?”
Nixon told this masthead that her primary concerns were the safety of choir members in a volatile environment and for the choir not to be seen to be choosing sides in a divisive conflict.
Vallins and two other members quit the choir in protest.
”You think that Jews are safe and then you realise that antisemitism was just sleeping,” Vallins told this masthead.
“That choir was my community. When they decide they can’t sing for Jewish people any more, it feels like a betrayal.”
This was a recurring sentiment at Monday’s commemorations. Jewish Australians said they no longer feel they can rely on people they previously counted as friends.
Jewish Care president Lisa Kennett, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said the stress on her community since October 7 could be measured through the increased number of calls to the charity’s switchboard and the type of people reaching out for help.
Some of them are Australian-Israeli citizens who had returned home from the conflict zone without access to government services. Others were business owners targeted by anti-Israel activists. Many were university students confronting antisemitism on campus.
Since October 8, the charity has required round-the-clock security at its aged care centres – something it has never previously needed in its 175-year history. It has employed a psychologist full-time to help students who felt harassed at campus.
Jewish Australians also gathered in Sydney to commemorate the October 7 attacks.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“We have had a curtain drawn back and we have seen a side of Australia that has made us feel unsafe in the community,” she said.
“In the Jewish community we are incredibly optimistic. We believe in the goodness of humanity. We have seen the worst and we have recovered. But it is very hard for so many of us.”
Meanwhile, in Melbourne’s CBD, about 500 pro-Palestine protesters, dressed mostly in black and wearing keffiyeh scarves, gathered at the Marquis of Linlithgow monument on St Kilda Road.
Passionate cries of “free, free Palestine” and the beat of drums have become synonymous with pro-Palestine rallies over the past year, but they were replaced by a funeral-like procession on Monday night as protesters traced a mournful path from the monument to Parliament House.
A pro-Palestine vigil in Melbourne on Monday.Credit: Penny Stephens
A lone drummer marched at the front of the procession while protesters carried stretchers covered with Palestinian flags to parliament’s steps.
“Today is a space to feel. To stop, to be still, to mourn, to grieve, to reflect,” an organiser told the crowd. “It should not be a controversial statement to say Palestinian life is worth fighting for, and Palestinian death is worth grieving.”
In Canberra, Coalition frontbenchers Bridget McKenzie, Michaelia Cash, Simon Birmingham and Jane Hume attended an October 7 commemoration event outside Parliament House.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott told the crowd the Hamas militants who attacked southern Israel had been unlike “even the Nazis” who sought to hide their actions.
Pro-Palestine protesters in Melbourne on Monday.Credit: Penny Stephens
“That’s why it is absolutely right that these murderers and the organisations which put them to it, should be utterly destroyed. And that’s exactly what the Israeli government has been doing every day since then,” he said.
“And sure, we lament the civilian casualties, and we admire the way that Israel has been so incredibly fastidious in trying to avoid them, and we admire the extraordinarily clever and successful way in which the Israeli military and government have fought back.”
The events in Melbourne and across the country were happening as Australians were fleeing Lebanon, which is being bombed by Israel as it attempts to wipe out Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.
On Sunday, 448 Australians and their family members left Lebanon for Cyprus on government-assisted flights, bringing the assisted departures to more than 900. The first flight from Cyprus landed in Sydney on Monday night.
With Cassandra Morgan and Natassia Chrysanthos
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