Days after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, killing some 1,200 people and sparking the devastating war in Gaza, an inverted red triangle was spray-painted on the front of a Jewish bakery in Sydney.
It was the first of a string of antisemitic incidents in Australia.
Sixteen months and thousands of arson, firebombing, graffiti and hate-speech incidents later, the head of the nation’s main intelligence agency declared that antisemitism was his number one priority in terms of threat to life.
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Sunday’s shooting attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens, brought to reality a fear that many Australian Jews say they have been living with: that they are no longer safe in the country that was supposed to protect them.
“This is the worst fears of the Jewish community,” Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told Sky News. “It’s been bubbling under the surface for a long time, and now it’s actually happened.”
Australia’s Jewish diaspora is small but deeply embedded in the wider community, with about 150,000 people who identify as Jewish in the country of 27 million. About one-third of them are estimated to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi.
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