Masked men set fire to a house in Melbourne storied synagogue. In Sydney, a synagogue had a red swastika spray-painted along the fence, a day care center was set on fire and scrawled with anti-Semitic graffiti under the cover of night.
Anti-Semitic attacks in recent weeks have stunned the Jewish community in Australia, home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. There are no reports of major casualties, but violence has increased dramatically tensions reverberate From the war in the Middle East, which also fueled episodes of Islamophobia in Australia.
News of the fire and blatant graffiti has unsettled a nation that prides itself on being a multicultural and tolerant society and where a third of its population is foreign-born.
Authorities now say they are investigating whether there was international involvement in the attacks in Sydney and Melbourne, the country's two biggest cities in recent months.
The latest attack took place at a daycare center in Sydney on Tuesday morning. In statement on TuesdayThe head of the Australian Federal Police said his agency was investigating whether “foreign actors or individuals” paid local residents in Australia to carry out some of these acts. However, he did not provide any evidence or further details.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated that investigators are looking into the possibility that some of the criminals may have been motivated by financial rather than ideological motives.
“It is now unclear who and where the payments are coming from,” he said.
The specter of foreign intervention has added a new dimension to anxiety in Australia's small but well-established Jewish community. Police have not said if or how the more than half a dozen attacks since October are related.
In December, the Australian Federal Police established a task force to investigate violence and threats against the Jewish community. State police in New South Wales, where most of the attacks took place in the greater Sydney area, said they had arrested and charged nine people in connection with the crimes.
A 33-year-old man has been arrested in connection with an attempted arson attack and graffiti in Sydney's Newtown neighborhood on January 11 when red swastikas were spray-painted on the fence of a synagogue, authorities announced on Wednesday. .
State Premier Chris Minns said officials were cracking down on what he called “widespread anti-Semitism and violence in our community”. He added that the crimes were “a deliberate attempt to strike terror into the hearts of the people living in this state.”
Julie Nathan, director of research at the Sydney-based Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an umbrella organization of Jewish groups in Australia that has tracked and documented reports of antisemitism since 1990, said what made the latest attacks different was their frequency and severity.
“We've had terrible graffiti, vandalism of cars and buildings, but nothing consistent at this level,” he said. “It happens in a few days.”
The former home of ECAJ co-chair Alex Ryvchin was vandalized last week.
Mr Rivchin said the house his family had recently moved into was specifically targeted. A portion of the duplex, he said, was only his former residence splattered with red paint. The other half of the building is neglected. Cars on the road and in front were vandalized with anti-Jewish slurs.
“It hurt to go there and see the walls I had painted, the house we loved,” she said.
But Mr. Rivchin said he was not shocked by the incident because it felt like a natural progression of increasingly overtly anti-Semitic and brazen attacks since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed. Gaza Strip.
“We wake up every day and we don't know what's going to hit,” he said. “Not just vandalism and aggression, but fire explosions.”
While the rise in attacks was troubling, it did not reflect a broader trend, said Andrew Marcus, professor emeritus at Monash University's Center for Jewish Civilization, which tracks Australian attitudes to immigrants and each other in a long-running national survey.
“A small segment, a minute segment, causes fear, anxiety and headlines,” he said. “It's a big problem, but you can't jump out of it to say there's a big change in Australian public attitudes.”