Melbourne business Gottlieb’s latest target of anti-Semitic attack

The grandson of Holocaust survivors whose family business was vandalised says the hatred of Jews is ‘festering’.

Graffiti at Gottlieb’s Builders Supplies in Melbourne.

The grandson of Holocaust survivors whose family business was targeted in an anti-Semitic ­attack says hate is “festering” within the Australian community.

Yehuda Gottlieb – grandson of Holocaust survivors Herc “Harry” Gottlieb and his wife Mala – said it was “confronting” to find a swastika and the words “gas the Jews” scrawled on the side of his family’s building supply store in Melbourne.

He said there was a “genuine level of unease” within the Jewish community, with many people feeling “unprotected” amid an anti-Semitism crisis.

“My grandparents are Holocaust survivors, my parents are children of Holocaust survivors and it’s not something they would have ever expected to see in Australia,” he said.

“We practise our Judaism and my name is inherently Jewish. We don’t hide it, and we’ve never had to hide it because we’re living in a free Australian society … Australia took care of (my grandparents) and gave them the freedom they had, and now it feels like it is tightening. I think there is a genuine level of unease from the Jewish community.”

Mr Gottlieb’s grandparents came to Australia in 1947 from ­Poland, opening Gottlieb’s Builders Supplies on Melbourne’s Dandenong Road. He said the attacks were being met with “silence”, and that it “feels like no one in leadership is taking it seriously”.

A wave of anti-Semitic attacks – including on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and more recently in Dover Heights and Maroubra in Sydney – has shocked Australia and the world.

Last week, two NSW nurses were sacked after claiming they would kill Israeli patients.

“(From) the incident of the nurses in Bankstown last week, the graffiti we see on homes, car bombs, synagogue bombings – it seems like every week there is another incident and nothing seems to be happening,” Mr Gottlieb said. “There’s just silence. There’s words, but there’s no actions. This is not the society that we want to live in, where we see one Australian threatening another Australian ... because of something that’s happening across the world.”

Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler said the Holocaust did not end anti-Semitism. “It simply drove it underground for a time,” he said.

“Now it is out in the open, on our streets, in our schools, on our buildings. If Australia was once a safe haven for those fleeing ­hatred, what is it becoming now? Silence in the face of this is complicity,” he said.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said it was “telling” that those responsible for the attack used the words “gas the Jews”.

“We have ample evidence that a small but determined group of Australians would be happy for the Jewish community to go the way of our European brethren during World War II,” Mr Ryvchin said. “But we know we are now joined by millions of Australians who abhor this hatred.”