‘If you empathise publicly with Jewish people, you get silence or outright hostility’

A proud Christian activist who has been arrested numerous times for her advocacy for gay and lesbian rights, media personality Julie McCrossin is unequivocal about what she describes as “the three drivers” which impel her to speak out in support of the Jewish people during the current upsurge in antisemitism.

“My lifelong friendship with Sophie Inwald – whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto –has influenced me most profoundly,” she tells The Jewish Independent. “I didn’t learn about the Holocaust from a school excursion to a museum or from class lessons, although I did do both.

“My Holocaust education was in a lounge room in Dover Heights. And from meeting Jewish people with numbers on their arms and hearing their stories of survival. And from travelling to Auschwitz with Sophie and her mother Irene, and sharing that remarkable experience with them.

“All this occurred in the context of both my parents serving in Bomber Command in the United Kingdom during World War II, my father as a pilot and my mother working at the same air force base. Sophie, whose grandparents perished, says the Holocaust for her was like water is to a fish; a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. We’re two girls who happened to sit beside each other at SCEGGS Darlinghurst (Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School), and we’ve been talking ever since. Our entire lives.

“So I have a deep understanding of the Holocaust, an emotional family connection,” says McCrossin. “The minute October 7 happened, I thought this is a classic pogrom and the intergenerational trauma will be unbelievable. That was the primary factor for me to speak out – to tell the Jewish community that someone who isn’t Jewish understands.