Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Anti-Semitic Violence Rises 5% as Australia Jews Report More Violence

Anti-Semitic incidents in Australia rose by five percent over the previous 12-month period, according to a new report.

Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australia Jewry, released data this week showing that during the 12-month period from October 2011 until September 2012, there were 543 incidents of “racist violence” against Jewish Australians documented by Jewish organizations.

“These incidents included physical assaults, vandalism and harassment,” Jones said. “This was a five percent increase over the previous 12-month period, and 42 percent above the average of the 22 years previously for which I have maintained a national database.”

Jones said the most disturbing incidents included the smashing of synagogue windows, verbal and physical assaults of Jewish school students, Jewish people being pelted with eggs and other objects while walking to synagogue, and comments yelled at Jewish people in Australian streets such as “Hitler didn’t do his job properly,” and “It’s a pity that the Germans didn’t burn the lot of you.”

While he said that the effect of anti-Semitism on the quality of life of individual members of the 110,000-strong Australian Jewish community who have been targeted “should never be minimized,” he stressed that modern Australia is “less engaged in pondering whether Jews are legitimately ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ than virtually any other Christian (or Muslim) majority state.

“Each day, there are millions of social interactions between Jews and Australians who are not Jews, and they are unexceptional and unlikely to involve confrontation or conflict,” he added.

The annual report on anti-Semitic incidents in Australia is usually released in early December. This year, however, it was delayed and released to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.