By Byron Kaye and Pete Mckenzie
SYDNEY, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Days after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, killing some 1,200 people and sparking the war in Gaza, an inverted red triangle was spray-painted on the front of a Jewish bakery in Sydney, 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."
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.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling the Hanukkah shootings a devastating terrorist attack targeting Jewish people, said his government would "dedicate every resource to making sure you are safe and protected".
Amid constant reports of Jewish parents afraid to take their children to daycare and Jewish schools hiring extra security, the government last year appointed its first special envoy to combat antisemitism.
"Being Jewish, it's been a very challenging few years," said Terry, who gave only his first name and was at a nearby Hanukkah event that was put into lockdown.
"Maybe we need to move to Israel one day. The irony is that that's looking like the only real safe place in the world we can be as Jews."
Ryvchin's organisation logged some 1,600 anti-Jewish incidents in the year to September 30, about three times the number in any year before the Hamas attack and Israel's response, according to a report it published this month.
One of those incidents was antisemitic graffiti on Ryvchin's former home near Bondi Beach in January, the report said.
Other incidents included a childcare centre firebombed and emblazoned with antisemitic graffiti, also in Sydney's eastern suburbs, and two public hospital nurses who were sacked after being captured on a social media video-chat platform saying they would turn away Israeli patients.
"The inevitable has happened now," said Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Sydney Synagogue, speaking in Bondi. As a Jew in Australia, he added, "You're always looking behind you."
(Reporting by Byron Kaye and Pete McKenzie; Editing by William Mallard)
