The Adass Israel congregation in Melbourne held a funeral on Tuesday, not for a person, but for two truckloads of religious texts that had been burned in a terrorist attack earlier this month.

On the same day, the government of Victoria, the Australian state with the largest Jewish population, moved to ban protests at places of worship, the use of terrorist flags and symbols and face masks during demonstrations.

Yet, with the crackdown on incitement coming only after the December 6 firebombing of the synagogue in Victoria’s capital and not during the previous year — which saw regular anti-Israel protests, campus encampments and a 316% increase in reported antisemitic incidents — some in Australia’s Jewish community are saying these steps may be too little, too late.

The number of antisemitic events in Australia spiked this month, and the response from the authorities, especially in Victoria, has been viewed as lackluster by much of the Jewish community, leaving them feeling vulnerable.

A day after the firebombing, Melbourne’s Beth Weizmann Jewish Community Centre received a bomb threat that state police viewed as serious. 

A car was set ablaze in Sydney — a crime also eventually declared a terrorist attack — and vandals repeatedly targeted Jewish homes in the city with messages such as “Death 2 Israiel” and “Kill Israiel” (sic) sprayed on homes, leading Sydney Police to increase patrols.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel warning for Jews going to Australia, saying that “in failing to act against the demonization of Jews, Israel and Zionism on the streets of Australian cities, the Australian government has allowed violence against Jews and Israelis to be normalized. Moreover, authorities have failed to take necessary measures to protect Jewish communities from increasingly belligerent and violent targeting by Islamists and other extremists.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called antisemitism “evil” and “completely abhorrent to who we are as Australians” after the recent events.

Yet, the Albanese government has also been accused of having policies towards Israel and Israelis that contributed to the Jewish community’s vulnerability.

Australia barred former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked from entering the country because she might “incite discord in the Australian community” due to her opposition to a Palestinian state. In addition, IDF reservists seeking to attend their 100-year-old grandmother’s birthday were kept out of the country while the Home Affairs department vetted their military service.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong compared Israel with Russia and China — which Australia has long viewed as a threat — in a lecture, and rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the bombing of the Adass Israel synagogue that “this reprehensible act cannot be separated from the anti-Israel spirit blowing from the Labour government in Australia.” 

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“Until October 7, this was really the goldene medina,” Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, told Jewish Insider, using a Yiddish phrase meaning “golden land” that usually refers to the U.S. 

Out of over 26 million Australians, 100,000 are Jewish. Like many Diaspora populations, they punch above their weight in business, politics and the arts, Leibler said, noting that “in Victoria, the arts are entirely built off of Jewish philanthropy.”

About half of the Australian Jewish children attend Jewish schools, and the community has a high level of solidarity and is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, influenced in part by the fact that they had the highest proportion of Holocaust survivors than any other Diaspora community, Leibler said.

Josh Burns, a member of the Australian Parliament from the Labor party who is Jewish and represents a heavily Jewish district in Greater Melbourne, told JI that “Australia has been a safe haven. My grandmother came from Nazi Germany and my grandparents fled Europe.” 

Since Oct. 7, however, there has been a sharp increase in open antisemitism, with over 2,000 antisemitic incidents, including dozens of assaults. That data, gathered by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, includes incidents up to the end of September. There is also a sense among Australian Jews of an explosion of antisemitic events in recent weeks.

“There’s the practical reality,” Leibler said. “Many people walk around with a kippah and are openly Jewish without fear, though they are far more circumspect than at any other time. But the psychological layer is very severe, in part because of actual incidents like the firebombing [of Adass Israel] and the subsequent bombing of a car in [Sydney suburb] Woollahra.” 

Some Australian Jews involved in left-leaning causes and circles have also had the same experience as American Jews who felt alienated from friends after Oct. 7.

Burns’ office was attacked earlier this year, with windows smashed, “Zionism is fascism” painted across an image of his face and fires lit. 

“A lot of vitriol and vilification has been directed at me,” he said. “The far right in Australia comes after me, but most of the daily vitriol comes from the left of Australian politics, and I think that’s something we need to reflect on. I certainly have been confronting it.”

Burns called himself a “proudly progressive Australian” and said that “part of what it is to be a progressive is to respect all people … Obviously, I have strong views on the Middle East, but it is clear that the Jewish community cannot be a target.”

“Through the professional prism, I experienced a sense of betrayal and abandonment,” said Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. “There are Jews who dedicated their entire live to progressive causes … and those groups were accusing Israel of genocide. At best there was total silence from the beneficiaries of our philanthropy towards their Jewish friends. I never thought I’d witness anything like it … I viewed the trauma. Friends completely abandoned them.” 

Leibler is a partner in the prominent Melbourne law firm founded by his father, which has been involved in pro bono representation of Indigenous Australians for decades, and also has many Jewish clients and facilitated their philanthropic donations to non-Jewish causes, giving him a front-row seat to this dynamic.

“I am regularly, openly accused of being a genocide supporter,” he recalled, noting that a partner in another law firm was recently fired for accusing him of “weaponizing antisemitism” on the same day as the attack on the Adass Israel synagogue.

“Through the professional prism, I experienced a sense of betrayal and abandonment,” Leibler said. “There are Jews who dedicated their entire live to progressive causes … and those groups were accusing Israel of genocide. At best there was total silence from the beneficiaries of our philanthropy towards their Jewish friends. I never thought I’d witness anything like it … I viewed the trauma. Friends completely abandoned them.” 

Australia has also seen weekly anti-Israel protests in major cities. Most weeks, “there are more people protesting across Australia, and particularly in Victoria, than there are Jews in Australia. At their peak, there were 100,000 in every [state] capital city,” Leibler said.

There are eight times as many Muslims as Jews in Australia, which Leibler said is a “a big part of the explanation for what we’re experiencing, both politically and in a physical sense” as a very small minority.

Leibler said that when the protests began, “I thought this is going to backfire. It’s really un-Australian. It puts off most Australians, we know that from polling. I didn’t know their tactics of intimidation would be so effective in all aspects of society … It’s everywhere.”

David Southwick is the deputy leader of the center-right Liberal Party in Victoria, and represents the same district as Burns, but in the state legislature.

Southwick told JI that a turning point for the Jews in Melbourne came on November 10, 2023, when a Palestinian-owned burger shop was burned down and Muslim organizations blamed the Jewish community. 

“Within four or five hours, the police ruled out a racial motivation for the fire, and made that public. An hour later, the Islamic body still blamed the Jewish community,” Southwick said. “That night, a whole lot of left-wing activists went out hunting for Jews outside a synagogue. Rocks and bottles were thrown. No arrests were made, there were no consequences, and it turned into weekly protests.”

Southwick said that since then, the city has been “hijacked by pro-Palestinian activists with signs that ‘all Zionists are terrorists,’ ‘from the river to the sea, put Jews in the [trash].’ Their aggressive antisemitic slogans and slurs are left unchecked week in and week out. They are holding the city ransom. Businesses have to shut down, and public transportation is diverted, and these people have been able to get away with it.”

“The government’s response is it wants to tone things down, not increase the temperature, but all it has done is allow far-left activists to keep pushing further and further,” he said. “As a Jewish member of [state] Parliament representing the largest Jewish area in Australia, Caulfield, I have raised this time and time again and the response has been very minimal.” 

In Victoria, Leibler said, “nothing was done for 12 months about people marching in the street shouting ‘globalize the intifada.’ When Adass [was firebombed], people asked if I was shocked and I said no. This isn’t the Australia I grew up in — in university I wore a kippah and never experienced antisemitism — but [the state government] didn’t do anything about antisemitism on the streets.” 

That Adass Israel is a non-Zionist Hasidic synagogue, whose leaders and congregants are very visibly Jewish but have said in interviews that they don’t recognize Israel as the Jewish state, “shifted the mindset of many Australians,” that anti-Israel activism metastasized into antisemitism, Leibler said. “The tactics of intimidation are starting to become less effective … but it shouldn’t have come to this.”

Burns said that “since the synagogue attack, there has been a huge effort from the government to crack down” on antisemitism.

“It shouldn’t have gotten to this point, but we are in a position now where people are taking it seriously both at the state level and the federal level,” he added. “The prime minister has really ramped up support for the Jewish community. It was a turning point and the government is throwing serious resources at trying to combat antisemitism.” 

The Victorian premier’s proposals to tighten the laws regarding protests only came after the state government “recognized a void and failure in leadership at a state and central level has definitely contributed to antisemitism,” Leibler said. 

“The government keeps providing more funding for guards outside synagogues and community centers, and we say that’s great, but we shouldn’t need more guards and higher walls,” said David Southwick, the deputy leader of the center-right Liberal Party in Victoria. “We should be able to roam freely like everybody else and not have to be locked up in a ghetto.”

“I don’t believe anyone in the Australian government is motivated by antisemitism, but that doesn’t absolve them from being responsible,” he added.

Southwick noted that Victoria’s legislature is currently on its Christmas recess and the steps announced on Tuesday are only supposed to be brought up in February, which he said is too late.

“I welcome any changes to ensure the community is safe. We have been calling to bring back Parliament and introduce the laws immediately,” he said.

In addition, Southwick said, “the government keeps providing more funding for guards outside synagogues and community centers, and we say that’s great, but we shouldn’t need more guards and higher walls. We should be able to roam freely like everybody else and not have to be locked up in a ghetto.”

Southwick also has a specific policy prescription called “move-on laws,” which allow the police to give a 10-minute warning for someone to move, or they will be arrested. Victoria had those laws in the past, and they were effective in reducing harassment of Jewish and Israeli businesses by activists, he said.

Burns is the chairman of the Human Rights Committee in the Australian Parliament and is leading an inquiry into antisemitism on university campuses, which he said have become “a hotbed of frankly unacceptable behavior and targeting of Jewish students. There is work that needs to go on to reform the way universities have managed that.” 

He also favors stronger hate speech laws.

Though there has been a more than fourfold increase in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7 in New South Wales, where about 44,000 Jews live, mostly in and around the capital, Sydney, Southwick said their response was much better than in Victoria.

“If you want to protest [in New South Wales], you have to have a permit,” Southwick said. “If people look like they’re going to do the wrong thing or the route goes outside a school or religious institution, they won’t give a permit unless they alter it. That makes a big difference.”

Southwick recounted that when hostage families visited Australia in December, the entrance to their hotel was blocked off by protesters and they had to spend hours in a police station, rather than have police escort them to the hotel. When they went to Sydney, however, the police accompanied them wherever they went.

From an outside perspective, however, Sydney did not seem that great to Jerusalem Post columnist David Weinberg, who described a visit to Australia this month in which he took Shaked’s place speaking at an event. 

With about 100 protesters outside a fundraiser for the Technion in Sydney, police instructed attendees to “remove all signs of Jewish or Zionist identity like kipahs and jewelry including Magen David necklaces and hostage solidarity pins, turn your bags inside out so that no Israel-related logos are visible, and exit the synagogue through the back door in groups of ten people at controlled intervals.”

At the federal level, the Albanese government drastically changed its position on Israel from that of the previous prime minister, Scott Morrison. Australia went from a reliable pro-Israel U.N. vote to consistently voting against Israel, among other shifts.

Southwick said that “traditionally, the Labor Party have been friendlier to Israel, but in recent times, because the Greens have been chasing the left-wing activist vote, the young vote and the Muslim vote, the Labor party is chasing the Greens because they don’t want to lose those strongholds.” And the Greens, he said “bring motions against Israel every week,” rife with false claims about the Jewish state.

Netanyahu’s accusation that Canberra’s policies against Israel motivated antisemites received mixed responses.

Leibler argued that, while he does not think antisemitism is behind the reversal in foreign policy, “there is no question that when you have a government that knowingly abandoned decades of bipartisan support for Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself … that fuels antisemitism.”

The Albanese government’s policies “legitimized the slurs” against Israel, he said. For example, Canberra’s response to the International Criminal Court’s warrant to arrest Netanyahu on war crimes charges was to say the Australian government “respects the independence of the ICC and its important role in upholding international law,” but it “hasn’t spoken out and said this accusation is a blood libel detached from reality. That legitimizes the blood libel that Jews are genocide supporters,” Leibler said.

Responding to a question about student protesters who have called for an intifada, Australian Education Minister Jason Clare said that he’s “seen people say that those words mean the annihilation of Israel. I’ve seen people say that it means the opposite.” Leibler said Clare “contributed to the insecurity and intimidation of Jews on campus.” 

“It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the Middle East,” said Josh Burns, a member of the Australian Parliament from the Labor party who is Jewish and represents a heavily Jewish district in Greater Melbourne. “It’s a dangerous precedent to be able to justify somehow what’s happening in Australia. The Jewish community in Australia cannot be held responsible for what is happening on the other side of the world.” 

Leibler called on the federal government to “acknowledge the link between the incitement we see on the street and this rhetoric, the stain of genocide … Fine, be critical of certain aspects of the war, but the fundamental failure to differentiate between a liberal democracy fighting proscribed terrorist organizations makes the Jewish community feel unsafe, with justification, in my view.”

“I genuinely believe[s] we could have had the same number of antisemitic incidents, but if the Jewish community felt we had leaders capable of demonstrating moral clarity and leadership in relation to Israel and its right to defend itself, we would have felt much safer and wouldn’t have had the same sense of vulnerability,” he said.

Burns called to separate the conversation about Israel from the antisemitic attacks in Australia. “It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the Middle East,” he said. “It’s a dangerous precedent to be able to justify somehow what’s happening in Australia. The Jewish community in Australia cannot be held responsible for what is happening on the other side of the world.” 

Burns was skeptical that the way the Albanese government speaks about Israel is a motivating factor behind antisemitic attacks in Australia.

“I think we have to deal with the facts in all of this,” he said. “We need to be able to have mature conversations about foreign policy. The Israelis themselves are a vibrant democracy with huge disagreements among different aspects of Israeli society and that’s a healthy thing.”

At the same time, “if people do disagree, we need to be able to disagree respectfully and not target Jewish Australians. That is an illegitimate approach.” 

Burns said that Australia “has been a wonderful place to grow up and be a Jewish person. I’m an MP — there is no limit to what I can do or achieve being a Jewish Australian.”

“Most Jewish Australians want to get back to that vibrant, multicultural place that everyone knows,” he added.

Southwick said that “Victoria has been the most inclusive, multicultural state, probably in the world. People of all countries and backgrounds and nationalities have been welcomed and we are known for embracing people of different backgrounds.”

“That has all broken down since Oct. 7, especially for our community,” he said.

However, Southwick applauded the Jewish community for “getting quite strong in saying we’ve had enough of this, rallying together and saying we are not going to hide.” 

Ultimately, Leibler said he feels safe in Australia, where Jewish life has “a lot more in the positives than in the trauma.”

“There are parts of society that I don’t recognize and didn’t know existed. That reinforced the sense that Jewish destiny is not in the Diaspora, it is in the State of Israel,” he said, but at the same time, added that he “never felt a conflict between Zionism and being a proud Australian Jew and I still don’t think there is one. Ultimately, we are people who always understood the centrality of Israel to Jewish life, wherever you live, and this is further proof of that.”