One of the Oldest Evils Perpetrated Against Jews
As overt antisemitism becomes increasingly normalized, the hate crimes will continue to pile up.
Shortly after 4 a.m. on Friday, two people in masks were spotted dousing the main entrance of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest and busiest shuls, with gasoline. Moments later, the building was set on fire and rapidly became an inferno. At that very early hour, only a few men were in the sanctuary; they had come to study before morning prayers began two hours later. They realized what was happening when they heard glass shattering and were able to get out of the building through a rear door, though one suffered burns to his hand and two had to be hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Had the arsonists struck an hour later, far more people would have been inside. There is no telling how many might have died.
The damage was massive. Much of the interior was gutted. Many religious books were turned to ash. It took 60 firefighters and 17 trucks to put out the fire. At least six Torah scrolls — the most venerated objects in Jewish worship; each one typically takes 12-18 months to write — were damaged by heat and water.
Inside the Adass Israel synagogue
Adass Israel was founded after World War II. Many of its first congregants were European immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Rebuilding their lives following the Nazi nightmare in which one-third of the world’s Jews were murdered, they would have remembered only too vividly the smashing and burning of synagogues across Germany and Austria in November 1938 — the Kristallnacht pogrom that foreshadowed the genocidal whirlwind to come.
To Jews of that era, born in a world where antisemitic violence and destruction was not only routine but often promoted by political and religious leaders, it would not have come as a bolt from the blue that Jew-hating arsonists would attack a synagogue. Not so for the 21st-century Jews of Melbourne, some of whom naively believed that in civilized societies, such atrocities are no longer possible.
There had been no shortage of reminders for Australia’s Jews, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them.
“I'm shocked, just absolutely shocked,” Benjamin Klein, an Adass Israel board member, told Australia’s 9News TV network. “We didn't think it will happen here in Melbourne to us. We’re a quiet community. We have our heads down, we don't bother anybody, we wish everybody well.” Klein is an Orthodox Jew, but there was a similar reaction from less religious Australian Jews. Benjamin Preiss, a Melbourne newspaper editor and a self-described “largely secular” Jew, wrote in a column Monday that even as he was covering the burning of the Adass Israel synagogue, “I struggled to believe that anyone in Australia would so brazenly target a place of peaceful prayer. The fact that there were people inside at the time of the attack makes it all the more sickening.”
Yet there had been no shortage of reminders for Australia’s Jews, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them. Just two days after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, a mob of Hamas supporters rallied in front of the Sydney Opera House, waving Palestinian flags and yelling “... “Gas the Jews.”
Last week the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported that almost 2,100 anti-Jewish incidents had occurred in the 12 months following Oct. 7 — a fourfold increase from the year before. “With a few honorable exceptions,” the council noted, “the response from political and community leaders, university executives, and civil society has been tepid at best. The result has been a ratcheting up of antisemitism from hateful words to steadily more serious hateful actions.”
Such as screaming antisemitic slogans outside Jewish schools. Or vandalizing Jewish homes. Or physically assaulting Jews in the street. Or torching Adass Israel.
The burning of synagogues is one of the oldest evils perpetrated against Jews. Long before there was a Third Reich or a modern state of Israel, those who hated the Jewish people often expressed that hatred by setting ablaze the places where Jews gathered to pray.
The historian Robert Wistrich, in his sweeping history of antisemitism, “A Lethal Obsession,” describes the fourth-century Church father St. John Chrysostom, who “justified the burning down of synagogues” on the grounds that they were “a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews ... a gulf and abyss of perdition.”
Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Ambrose of Milan, shared that view. When a synagogue in Mesopotamia was burned down in 388 at the instigation of the local bishop, the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered that it be rebuilt at the expense of those responsible. An outraged Ambrose argued forcefully that the order should be rescinded. No Christian should be punished for burning a synagogue, he declared, since any building where Jews worshiped was “a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which G-d himself has condemned.”
When the First Crusade reached the Holy Land in 1099, recounted Simon Sebag Montefiore in “Jerusalem: The Biography,” they fought not just the ruling Muslims but also the beleaguered and powerless Jewish community. “The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire,” Montefiore wrote. “The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name.”
“First, set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.” – Martin Luther
