DVIR ABRAMOVICH: The anniversary of the Adass Israel Synagogue bombing presents Australians with a key test

One year ago today, I woke up to images I never thought I would see in Australia.

A synagogue in Melbourne, its roof collapsed, its walls blackened, its sanctuary turned into a skeleton of charred beams and ash.

Fire trucks. Smoke. People standing on the street in shock, some of them elderly, holding each other and crying. It was the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, one of the spiritual homes of a community built by Holocaust survivors, and someone had come in the dark and tried to burn it to the ground while a man was inside praying.

At the time, we didn’t know who did it. We only knew that a line had been crossed. And now, one year later, we know something even more unsettling, that the attack was not only an act of anti-Semitism, but orchestrated by Iran, a reminder that even here, on the far edge of the world, Jewish Australians can be caught in someone else’s hate.

For many of us, that night marked the end of an illusion.

Jews in this country have always lived with a certain double awareness. We know our history. We know that in Europe it began with slogans and ended with chimneys.

But we also believed, genuinely, gratefully, that Australia was different.

This was the place our parents and grandparents fled to, the place of refuge, sunshine and safety on the other side of the world. We told our children, “Here, it cannot happen.” And for many of us, a thought we never wanted to have slipped in: We were wrong. It can happen.

I often think of the survivors watching those images. Men and women who survived camps, ghettos and pogroms, who built new homes in Caulfield and Ripponlea and East St Kilda and thought they had left the flames behind.

Suddenly, the television showed a house of prayer built by their generation, standing open to the sky, smoke pouring out. It is hard to imagine how that felt.

That is the emotional scar of that night: the sense that history, which we thought belonged to another continent and another century, had reached across oceans and set a match in Melbourne.

And yet this is not only a Jewish story. It is also an Australian one.

Because when someone attacks a synagogue here, they are not only telling Jews they are unsafe. They are testing what kind of country we are prepared to be. Are we the sort of democracy that treats an attack on one minority’s sacred space as an attack on all of us, or as a problem for “that community” to manage?

On one level, the attack was meant to send a simple message: you are not safe here.

On another level, though, a different message pushed back. It came in the form of neighbours who refused to look away, Australians who understood that an attack on a synagogue is an attack on the kind of nation we tell ourselves we are.

As a Jewish Australian, I carry both impressions. The fear that something fundamental had broken that night. And the conviction that something precious emerged as well: a clearer understanding that antisemitism is not an abstract idea, but a real danger that tests our character.

So what do we do with that, one year on?

Part of the answer is obvious. We need to take security and anti-Semitism seriously, not only when a building is on fire, but in the quieter months when the news cameras have moved on. That means real resources for community protection, not just statements.

But there is a deeper layer here too. In moments like this, a society has to ask itself: what story are we telling about who belongs? When someone sees a Jewish building burn and shrugs, what have we failed to teach them about shared humanity? When we allow anti-Semitic jokes, slurs or conspiracy theories to pass as “just opinions”, what are we signalling about which Australians count and which do not?

The one-year mark is not just about looking back at the charred walls. It is about looking inward and asking what kind of country we want this to be for our children and grandchildren.

A year on, the building will rise again. The question is whether we will.

This anniversary is an invitation. To remember, to mourn, and to recommit.

To say that in this country, attacks on synagogues, or mosques, or churches are not just news items; they are tests of who we are.

And that next time, for there will always be a next time, somewhere, we will be ready not only with police and fire engines, but with a society that instinctively knows how to stand with those under attack.

That, more than anything, is how we honour the night Adass burned: by making sure the message that endures is not fear, but the determination that this will remain a place where Jews, and all others, can live openly as themselves, under the same sky, without having to wonder if history has followed them all the way to Melbourne.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is Chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission