Sydney synagogue defaced with red swastikas, day after another synagogue vandalized
Home in city also daubed with antisemitic graffiti, police say they’re probing offensive comments on street poster; Australian PM: Abhorrent graffiti needs to stop immediately
A synagogue in Sydney was daubed with antisemitic graffiti, police said on Saturday, a day after the antisemitic vandalism of a separate synagogue in the New South Wales state capital.
Australia has seen a series of antisemitic incidents in the last year, including graffiti on buildings and cars in Sydney, as well as an arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne that police have ruled as terrorism.
In the latest incident, police said they were notified of graffiti on the synagogue, in the inner suburb of Newtown, early Saturday. Vandals had spray painted red swastikas outside the entrance.
A house in Sydney’s east, a hub of the city’s Jewish community, was also daubed with antisemitic graffiti, police said, adding they are also probing offensive comments on a street poster in the suburb of Marrickville.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the antisemitic graffiti, asserting that those responsible “should face the full force of the law.”
“The vile graffiti we’ve seen overnight, including at the Newtown Synagogue, is abhorrent and needs to stop immediately. Australia is a better place than this,” he said in a statement on X. “We made it illegal to use Nazi and other hate symbols because there’s no place in Australia for antisemitism. The people that committed these crimes should face the full force of the law.”
In the early hours of Friday, vandals had painted swastikas on another synagogue in a different part of Sydney.
“These people are determined to divide our community in two,” state Premier Chris Minns said.
“We will always call out these acts for what they are — monstrous and appalling.”
On Friday, a special police taskforce was set up to investigate an attack on the Southern Sydney Synagogue in the suburb of Allawah.
Images showed multiple swastikas painted on the building, along with a message reading “Hitler on top” and the partly obscured words “Allah hu Akbar.”
“[There is] no place in Australia, our tolerant multicultural community, for this sort of criminal activity,” Albanese said on Friday, referring to the Southern Sydney Synagogue incident.
Police said they had increased protection of synagogues around Sydney.
In December, several mask-wearing attackers set Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue ablaze, gutting much of the building. A congregant inside the single-story building suffered minor injuries.
The attack prompted the government to create a federal task force targeting antisemitism.
Australia has seen an increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since the start of a war between Israel and Hamas, which began when the Palestinian terror group led a devastating cross-border attack on Israel in October 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.
Some Jewish organizations have said the government has not taken sufficient action in response.
Jewish leaders say prejudice against their community has reached unprecedented levels, with most incidents reported in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s largest cities, where 85 percent of the nation’s Jewish population live.
A report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that Australian Jews experienced more than 2,000 anti-Jewish incidents over the past year, more than quadruple the number from the previous year.
A total of 2,062 incidents were recorded between October 2023 and September 2024, far more than the 495 incidents noted a year earlier. The total did not include antisemitic statements made on social media.
