This is not the community my father – or my daughter – knew

The western Sydney suburb of Bankstown has taken on a whole new meaning for me since nurses Sarah Abu Lebdeh and Ahmad ‘Rashad’ Nadir spewed their virtual venom and murderous intent at me and my people last month.

Bankstown used to be the place where my father roamed as a four-year-old Jewish migrant from Palestine, and the home of the synagogue where he was bar mitzvah in 1947. My great uncle Harold Smith was the architect who designed it.  

They called themselves “New Australians” then, those Jewish migrant who came off a boat with no English and a suitcase full of nothing. They opened delis like Frank Lowy did, and took in boarders like my grandmother did, and collected Argentine ants and cow manure for pocket money like my father did.

When that wave of New Australians had worked hard enough to move up and out, a new wave of migrants arrived from some other war-torn place, like Vietnam or Lebanon.

Bankstown has seen race hate before. In 1991 the Bankstown Synagogue was firebombed, during a rash of five attacks on synagogues in Sydney. It never reopened. That attack was an example of the Jew hatred that flourishes especially in places where there are no Jews (any more). It’s so much easier to hate people whom you don’t know as schoolmates, neighbours or work colleagues, and so don’t recognise as humans just like yourself.

Bankstown bookends the generations above and below me in my family. My daughter – also born in Israel - worked as a midwife at Bankstown Hospital for three years.