Attacks on Jews in Australia at record levels

Australia’s Jewish community has suffered its most traumatic year since records were first kept, with more than 1800 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the country, a staggering 324 per cent increase on the previous year.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin says ‘the Jewish community has been permanently transformed by the events of the past year’ Picture: John Feder

Australia’s Jewish community has suffered its most traumatic year since records were first kept, with more than 1800 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the country, a staggering 324 per cent increase on the previous year.

The racist backlash against Jews in the year since the ­October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and during the subsequent war in Gaza has seen Jewish men, women and children targeted across the spectrum of Australian society.

It has included physical and verbal abuse on the streets, on public transport, in workplaces, shops, parks and online, at arts, music and literary events, in schools and universities, and on sporting fields among others.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin told The Weekend Australian: “The Jewish community has been permanently transformed by the events of the past year. We have been hardened, shed some of our optimism and ­naivete, and now firmly understand that the battle for our rights and freedoms is a battle for the very future of this country.

“We have had to fight as a community, hour by hour, against radical clerics, flaccid vice-chancellors, an unpredictable government torn ­between what is right and what is expedient, and issues of complexity and scope that go to the heart of what it means to be an Australian and a Jew.”

The ECAJ, the country’s peak Jewish body, says the true level of anti-Semitism is much greater than the 1800 anti-Semitic incidents it recorded between October 1 last year and August 31 this year because, it says, so many incidents continue to go unreported by the victims.

Mr Ryvchin said the anti-Semitism against his community was often perpetrated by those who were anti-democratic and anti-western – themes embraced by many anti-Israeli activists.

“Those who hate us also happen to hate that bundle of rights and freedoms we call Western values: free markets, individual rights, anything perceived to be white or European or American,” Mr Ryvchin said.

“They hate Israel because they stupidly view it as a symbol of all these things just as the Jews were always perceived as the engineers of capitalism or communism or whichever ideology one seeks to oppose.”

My Ryvchin criticised the pro-Palestinian “thugs” who called for Jewish blood outside the Opera House on October 9 last year and who cheered the October 7 massacre by Hamas of more than 1200 Israeli men, women and children.

“October 7 utterly devastated the community,” he said. “Our pain was exacerbated by the reaction of some of our fellow Australians – the convoys of cars, the preachers on the streets, the lowly thugs on the steps of the Opera House looking for us and warning us that the ‘armies of Muhammad were coming’.

“They all took great delight in seeing Jewish women dragged by their hair to captivity, young festival-goers cowering in fields before being executed and whole families burned alive in their village homes. This revealed an undercurrent of inhumanity in our society we didn’t think was there.”

Mr Ryvchin said he saw ‘the same perverse relish in the online influencers and celebrities who doxxed hundreds of Jewish Australians, putting their livelihoods and their lives in danger”.

A dossier of anti-Semitic acts compiled by ECAJ reveals how widespread and commonplace attacks on Jews have become, including against the elderly and children and especially online where an army of anti-Jewish trolls have attacked Jewish individuals, organisations and institutions.

But Mr Ryvchin said that, amid all of these horrors for the Jewish community, it also received lots of support from non-Jewish Australians.

“I know many of our fellow Australians understand (our situation) and we have been uplifted by the daily messages of support we receive. It has made us love this country all the more,” he said.