It can happen here: For Jewish Australians, being relentlessly targeted is not just frightening — it is exhausting - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

11-07-2025

To many people, the events of last Friday — specifically, the simultaneous attacks on the Australian Jewish community on the Sabbath eve — felt like a turning point. To this broader sense, I want to add my voice, not as an echo, but as a caution.
I am a writer and policy analyst, a trained Holocaust educator, a descendant of the Shoah. I am also the daughter of a proud, Melbourne-born Australian, the sister of a former senior member of State Parliament, and a dual Australian-Israeli citizen. These aren't just biographical details — they are essential facts that shape how I see this moment. They give me a perspective that bridges lived history, national identity and political reality.
I've both witnessed and taught the dangers of hate, the courses that it runs (sometimes shrewdly), how silence enables it, how democracies can erode when it is ignored and when truth is avoided. I have also spent almost equal parts of my adult life in Australia and in Israel.
On Friday, 4 July 2025, around 5:45pm our family lit candles — the two regular ones in readiness for our Shabbat meal, plus an additional Yahrzeit candle to commemorate the fourth anniversary of my father's passing. At the same time, a group of 20 men, women and children sat down to pray before their meal, across town inside the East Melbourne synagogue.
A view of the damaged entrance of East Melbourne Synagogue, following an arson attempt on Friday, 4 July 2025. (Photo by Alex Zucco / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Our traditional Friday night tranquillity was disrupted by the news of an attempted arson attack on the front door of the 150-year-old synagogue on Albert Street, and that congregants were forced to flee through a back door.
As you'd expect, word travelled quickly across Jewish homes in Melbourne. I was outraged — but, as strange as it may seem, I was also relieved. Relieved that my father, Lou, had not lived to see this. That he didn't have to witness another attack on the Australian Jewish community, just six months on from the destructive firebombing at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea — this time, at his favourite synagogue, the oldest in our state and set in the heart of the city. East Melbourne Synagogue has long hosted Jewish lawyers at the annual ceremony marking the start of the legal year. Dad, a lawyer himself and father to Victoria's former Attorney-General, loved nothing more than the ritual of the legal gathering in the renaissance building.
Not long after, we learned of a violent protest that had taken place at a local Israeli owned restaurant, Miznon in Hardware Lane — with protesters chanting the same murderous slogan, 'death to the IDF', that was recently shouted from the big stage at Glastonbury. The protesters brought Kristallnacht into the streets of Melbourne, as my friend the artist Nina Sanedze aptly described the scene.
My father, Louis Pakula (1940–2021), aged 26, pictured here at his graduation from the University of Melbourne in 1966. (Supplied: Tammy Reznik)
21 months of incessant marches on the streets of Australian cities, using slogans that call for the destruction of the Jewish state and the eradication of the Jewish people, would have done my father in. I doubt he would have believed it possible, having grown up in the heart of post-war Australia's multicultural experiment during the 1950s and 60s. His children were raised as beneficiaries of that Australian ideal: long road trips, larrikin humour, the local primary school in a melting pot neighbourhood — layered, always, with the sounds of Yiddish and the weight of Jewish tradition and memory. Like many Jews born in the generation after the Holocaust, we lived in its shadow.
Of the three kids, I was the one who took that legacy most to heart. I visited the camps where family members were murdered, walked hallowed ground, breathed the history. I was the one most drawn to Zionism — initially, to the idea of a different type of Jew, resilient and resourceful. My dreams were realised when my sister and I first visited the land, as starry-eyed twenty-somethings, and later when I met the Israeli man who would become my husband and the father of my children. My older brother took a different path: a Jew in politics, though more often in footnotes than in headlines. He moved through the Union movement and public life with his Jewishness tucked quietly in the background.
And all these different expressions of life as Jewish people were possible in this land down under. Though far from being some utopia, Australia was the land of the fair go. This was the mantra that I heard daily in my job at the Holocaust Museum, as heroic survivors described to students the welcome that they received in Australia, the 'farthest place from the horrors of Europe'. Australia was also the first of the Western powers to welcome refugees from the Second World War, and thus became home to the second largest survivor population per capita, after Israel itself.
Police arrive on the scene at Miznon, an Israeli-owned restaurant in Melbourne, which was damaged after being targeted by protesters, on Friday, 4 July 2025. (Photo by Ye Myo Khant / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
In all those years of educating tens of thousands of students, the most common question I heard was: Do you think it could happen again? Could it happen in Australia? My answers would vary, but they usually incorporated on the factors that led to the rise of Nazism — economic downturn, societal division, widespread resentment, scapegoating, and so on. But that was then, right? Could society once more allow for the erasure of Jewish people from every level of society and every rank in public service, even those who had filled them with such dignity and devotion?
I am ashamed to admit, however, that I didn't see this coming. The cancellation of Jews from cultural spaces, the doxxing of hundreds, possibly thousands, a genuine feeling of unsafety in my own city. And then there were the scenes of celebration following Hamas's wanton killing spree on 7 October 2023, with some of my fellow citizens evidently exhilarated by the deeds of these 'freedom fighters'. And then came the graffiti on Jewish homes, the torched cars, the targeted businesses, the threats to Jewish politicians, the university encampments, the burning of synagogues.
In the nearly two years since the terror attack on kibbutzim and communities in southern Israel, the West's decent into the latest wave of antisemitic hatred has shocked Jews to the core. For many of us, the sheer volume of antipathy being directed at us is not just disappointing and frightening — it is exhausting and bewildering. Jewish university students, including my own children, discover that are expected to be the defenders of Israeli policy, and face intimidation from angry groups of students who have no desire to listen. They are forced to dissociate themselves with our homeland, deny themselves certain truths to fit into certain spaces, and feel increasingly as though they are strangers on their own campuses.
This is an experience that has been shared by other Australian Jews in other areas of life: hiding religious jewellery, staying away from certain postcodes, needing to remove identifying symbols. Just last Sunday, after the terrible events on 4 July, I joined with fellow Melburnian Jews at a 'solidarity' rally on the steps of State Parliament. After the rally concluding and I was making my way back to Flinders Street Station, I found myself rolling up the hostage poster that I had been carrying and tucked it into my bag. Why? I no longer felt safe in the city that I called home.
Special Envoy Jillian Segal and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attend a press conference on Thursday, 10 July, for the release of Segal's antisemitism plan. (Photo by Dan Himbrechts / AAP)
On Thursday, the Australian federal government was handed a landmark report recommending tougher measures to tackle antisemitism — including defunding universities, revoking visas and increasing oversight of cultural institutions. Written by Special Envoy Jillian Segal, the report responds to the surge in antisemitic incidents since the 7 October Hamas attacks. The report recognises what many in the Jewish community have long known: this is no longer about isolated incidents; it is systemic and hence demands a 'whole-of-society response'. It calls for urgent reforms across education, immigration, media and online platforms to drive antisemitism to the margins of society.
While it cannot repair the damage that has already been done, this report represents a welcome development. Nevertheless, most of the Jewish Australians I know remain on high alert. We await to see whether the Prime Minister will commit to implement the Special Envoy's recommendations.
The Jewish people are well versed in the practise of resilience; but if we continue to live in a constant state of fight or flight, many may, in fact, choose flight. And I don't mean this in the figurative sense. Many will seriously contemplate packing up and leaving for Israel. It would be a major blow if Australia allowed itself to continue down this path of lawlessness and unsafety, with the departure of the Jewish people as the consequence.
Tammy Reznik is a Melbourne based writer, commentator, certified educator and policy analyst.