Security challenges on the road back to safety

Speaking with a latitude he says he did not have as Australia’s attorney-general and as a cabinet minister, Mark Dreyfus made it clear to the Royal Commission (RC) this week that Australia needs broader protection from hate speech at the federal level.

The longstanding MP for the Melbourne seat of Isaacs was the opening witness in the Commission’s Hearing Block 5.

This phase is examining the security aspects of the rise in antisemitism – the financial, cultural and psychological burden of transforming a Jewish community accustomed to an open, Western democratic society; moving it behind high walls and advanced electronics, a corps of community security volunteers and a net of police patrols.

The RC was told it’s an experience that no other Australian faith or cultural community has been forced to endure. The survivor heritage of a large percentage of the Jewish community in Australia deepens the fear and pain.

Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Synagogue in Sydney became emotional during his testimony when he spoke of a pastoral visit with an elderly Holocaust survivor whose early years had been affected by the horrors of persecution and whose final days were “under that same dark cloud”. And Dr George Foster, president of Southern Sydney Synagogue, described a “golden age” for Jews in Australia that he fears is ending.

This sense of foreboding was captured by testimony from Jason Steinberg, president of the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, when he spoke of activists banging on a Brisbane bookshop window at a community event.

Rabbi Allison Conyer, representing the Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ), stated: “You can’t underestimate the impact of intergenerational trauma.” Detailing a litany of random slurs her congregants have endured in the streets, she observed, “It’s real, it’s scary, and it starts like this.”