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. 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.” Youngsters react as they leave the site of an attack by gunmen at Bondi Beach on Sunday evening. Photo: AFP 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.
OpinionOpinion
For some Australian Jews, Bondi shooting feels inevitable after thousands of antisemitic incidents
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