In Australia, a new Holocaust museum doubles down on its mission after Oct. 7
Because many of the Queensland Holocaust Museum’s visitors have never met a Jew, its strategy of outreach takes on added importance in its quest to educate on racial tolerance
MELBOURNE — With just a handful of small synagogues in Brisbane and a Chabad House in the state’s remote north, the Jewish community in Queensland, Australia, has historically been overshadowed by larger and more established Jewish communities in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth.
But this past August, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, made the long trip north from Canberra to visit Queensland’s first-ever Jewish museum — a Holocaust museum in Brisbane that had just opened its doors in late June.
Queensland is usually known for its iconic Great Barrier Reef and top-notch surf beaches. Its small Jewish community numbers just 5,000 among a wider population of 5.5 million.
With Jews accounting for just 0.1 percent of the state’s population, most Queenslanders will never meet a Jew and are likely to have a limited understanding of Jewish culture and tradition. For that reason, the Queensland Holocaust Museum aims to have an outsize impact in educating one of Australia’s fastest-growing populations.
“The need for this museum and the education it provides has never been more relevant than in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel,” said museum board member Danny Berkovic. “Educating the Australian public about where the extremes of social intolerance can lead has real relevance given the backdrop of the conflict in Israel.”
On October 7, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 240 more to the Gaza Strip. The magnitude — and the sheer brutality with which entire families, women, the elderly, and even infants were murdered in cold blood — led Israel’s government to vow to end the Hamas terror group and the threat it poses to innocent Israelis. But in the wake of the ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip to dismantle Hamas and bring the Israeli hostages home, antisemitism has skyrocketed around the globe — and Australia is no exception.
“Here is a state in Australia, where a lot of the population may not have had a chance to meet Jewish people, and there is a lot of misinformation about the Holocaust,” said Berkovic. “We hope the museum will help to educate Queenslanders about one of the most tragic chapters in human history, and also more generally, about racial tolerance.”
Berkovic does not doubt the strategic importance of the museum in Queensland.
“Over 80% of the Jewish population [in Australia] live in Sydney and Melbourne. If we focus all our Holocaust education in these cities, we are missing a chance to educate large numbers of Australians who may not be thinking deeply about racial intolerance,” Berkovic said.
Applying lessons of the Holocaust
Jason Steinberg is the president of Queensland’s Jewish Board of Deputies. In part, it is thanks to his dogged efforts over the past decade, that the Queensland Holocaust Museum became a reality. A born and bred Queenslander, Steinberg works at a global engineering and consulting firm but has spent years volunteering as a leader in his small community.
“If people understand the Holocaust and how it impacted Jewish people and other communities, they can apply it in their daily lives to be respectful of others, and support multiculturalism,” said Steinberg.
This vision accelerated in 2019, when Australia’s Jewish former treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, announced that he wanted to establish Holocaust museums in every single Australian state and territory. In addition to AU$3.5 million ($2.3 million) provided by the federal government, the Queensland Holocaust Museum has been funded through a mix of local grants including more than AU$4 million ($2.6 million) from Queensland’s state government and the Brisbane city council.
“I think I’m in a lucky position to be able to have advocated for our community for the first-ever Holocaust museum,” said Steinberg. “We have also been very lucky that space for our physical museum [has been provided] by the Catholic Archdiocese in Brisbane,” he said, referring to the prime location the museum sits on in the capital’s downtown.
While originally it was estimated that Queensland was home to only a few dozen Holocaust survivors, the small team at the museum has now identified more than 200 and is actively highlighting the stories of survival and resilience in Queensland’s community. The museum will also serve as an educational institution and will raise awareness about human rights, as well as foster dialogue on genocide prevention.
“The community of survivors, they are so honored that their family’s heritage is now immortalized in this museum, and it is also very emotional for the descendants,” said Steinberg.
Three-pronged approach
The museum is comprised of three components — a physical museum in Brisbane; a traveling museum that will visit regional areas across the state, such as Townsville; and an online museum highlighting the stories of Queensland’s Holocaust survivors.
The impact of the museum is likely to be felt far and wide in the enormous state.
Rabbi Ari Rubin heads the Chabad House in Cairns, a tropical holiday destination in Queensland’s far north. In 2023, he wrote an op-ed for the major local newspaper decrying antisemitism after a worker of a well-known local traffic control company drove around Cairns displaying an electric traffic management sign saying, “Jews did 9/11.” With an estimated 500 Jews among the city’s 150,000 residents, the perpetrator of such a hateful message had likely never even met a Jew.
Rubin is excited for the traveling museum to make its way to his locale and help educate locals.
“I really want the non-Jewish kids in the schools to get a taste of education about the Holocaust,” he said.
He is aware that his own children and others in his community have experienced harassment for being Jewish, and he is hopeful that the education offered by the traveling museum will make a difference.
“I know children that suffer for being bullied for Jewish and hide their Judaism, so I hope this will improve things for them,” he said.
With Queensland set to host the 2032 Olympics and net migration set to double the population by 2046, the strategic importance of Queensland within Australia is likely to keep on growing.
“The Queensland population is spread across major cities and a vast outback. Our online museum will help to deliver Holocaust education to those people who are unable to visit our physical museum in Brisbane or our traveling museum,” Berkovic said. “I don’t think anyone would want to ignore a population that’s going to be [more than] 10 million people by 2060.”
