PM’s mild rhetoric simply not enough to combat anti-Semitic surge

Anthony Albanese speaks during a visit to the St Kilda Shule in Melbourne in October 2023.

Australian civil society is fracturing and Jews are in the frontline.

Last Wednesday in Woollahra, a suburb with synagogues, a Jewish funeral home, a hospital created by the Jewish community and an area where many of my congregants live, an anti-Semitic attack took place. Homes, businesses and cars were targeted in an outbreak of violence, graffiti, threats and slurs.

Just when we had recovered as a community from the targeting of The Great Synagogue by protesters a few months ago, and when we felt we had moved on from the disgraceful behaviour at the Opera House on October 9 last year, we now find this much more extreme and aggressive attack on our doorstep.

Law enforcement and our elected representatives cannot control what every malicious actor carries out, but they can set a tone. I don’t generally criticise or endorse specific politicians, but I was struck by the difference between the response of Anthony Albanese and that of NSW Premier Chris Minns.

The Prime Minister did say “there is no place for anti-Semitism in Australia” and that “conflict overseas cannot be made a platform for prejudice at home”. But it was disappointing that the strongest words he could summon up to describe the incident were “disturbing” and “deeply troubling”.

This is no time for understatement. We have gone beyond the stage when we should feel merely disturbed and troubled. Homes were vandalised and a car was set ablaze in a Jewish neighbourhood in an organised and vicious attack, intended to intimidate and terrify the Jewish community of Sydney and, by extension, Jews across Australia.

This matters, because underplaying what took place last week, and the trend over the past year of increasing hostility towards the Jewish community, encourages other people to try their luck. Lives are now at stake. We have gone beyond a minor quibble about whether the protesters on October 9 said “gas the Jews” or “where’s the Jews?”. That quibbling is part of the reason we have arrived at this deplorable situation.

Minns found a better tone when he said “it is unacceptable, un-Australian and it will not be tolerated. The Jewish community is an integral part of the wider NSW community and we are completely committed to ensuring the safety and security of Jewish people in NSW”. What we need now is action to back up those words, through the police, the prosecution service, the parliaments and the courts.

I learned about the attack on Thursday when I was in Canberra and had just left the Australian Catholic University’s annual interfaith breakfast in the federal parliament. There was a great deal of talk about the importance of dialogue and friendship across communities, there were wide smiles and warm handshakes, but as I left the building I was faced with the ugly reality of what is actually taking place on the grounds and in the streets, streets where Jews are trying to live, work and pray.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton pictured at the Great Synagogue in Sydney.

When the same slogan that was written on those cars in Woollahra a few days ago was also screamed from a moving car as I walked down Oxford Street to my synagogue on a Friday evening a couple of weeks ago, there is a problem and we must face it.

It is easy in these moments to fall into despair. The proper alternative to despair is not wishful thinking, but action. That cannot come from the Jewish community and, crucially, it cannot be made the responsibility of the Jewish community through security grants, as important and welcome as they are. It has to come from principles articulated and enforced by the whole of Australian civil society, so it is clear what will and what will not be tolerated. At the moment that has been left too unclear, and that has to change.

I urge the Prime Minister to exercise clear leadership, which not only condemns anti-Semitism, but goes further and calls out the attitudes that enable it to flourish. The current standard being set is unacceptable for Australia and its citizens. Mr Albanese, along with all other leaders of goodwill, is always welcome to visit our synagogue, and I hope when he does so he will bring a clear plan of action to address the severe challenges we face.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once warned, we have reached the limits of multiculturalism when each group feels it has the right to uphold only its own ideas, and entitled to reject all others.

We do not want a monoculture; we enjoy and benefit from diversity. What we do need is a genuine commitment by all Australians to overarching values, to our common endeavour in building up our nation, and a shared responsibility for the welfare of each other. Those mutual commitments cannot be extinguished or diminished by our individual creeds or cultures. In such a society the events of last week would not have taken place.

NSW Premier Chris Minns visits the Emanuel Synagogue in Woollahra. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

That has always been the Jewish way, and humbly, but persistently, we need to share that with the leaders and fellow members of our society. In the 1920s my grandfather was the son of Russian immigrants and a member of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade in Manchester. Their motto was “a good Jew and a good Englishman”, and I am sure in the 1960s and 1970s that slogan was sneered at, but it turns out it was wise and necessary, and quintessentially Jewish.

It is why we pray for Australia’s governments and the Defence Force every week. We have found a way over millennia to combine our personal commitments with a genuine sense of loyalty and belonging to the country in which we live.

That is the posture we have continued to adopt, and which Australian society should expect from all its diverse communities. That is the only way in which we are going to restore what is being lost, before the consequences are too disastrous. There is much work to do, and all who care about Australia should be at the forefront.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton is the chief minister of The Great Synagogue in Sydney.