White supremacist evicted from Jewish neighborhood in Australia

JTA – A man in Melbourne accused of taunting his neighbors with anti-Semitic abuse was evicted from his apartment.

Adam Schipkie, 28, was ordered by a government tribunal from his local council flat Thursday after residents, including some Holocaust survivors, complained.

One man, a son of Auschwitz survivors who did not wish to be identified, said he worried about retaliation. “He knows where we live,” Melbourne’s Herald Sun quoted him as saying.

Residents of the flat in Caulfield, a leafy suburb heavily populated with some of the city’s 50,000 Jews, said cars had been etched with swastikas. But Schipkie blamed his acquaintances and said they, not he, had struck fear into his neighbors.

Schipkie denied he was a white supremacist. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he told the newspaper.

Nina Bassat, the president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, said: “In a country which prides itself on its multiculturalism, it is regrettable that people should experience anti-Semitism and racial abuse.”