DVIR ABRAMOVICH: To prevent another Bondi, don’t be an onlooker

On the morning of 10 November 1938, people in Berlin walked to work past broken glass.

The night before, across Germany and Austria, hundreds of synagogues had been set alight. Some 30,000 Jewish men were being loaded onto trains for Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Jewish shops lay open to the street. The fire brigades had been told to protect the buildings next door, and only those.

Then the regime did something that tells you more about those days than the fires do. It billed the Jews for their own broken glass: a fine of one billion Reichsmarks, and their insurance payouts taken by the state.

Last night was the 88th anniversary, and I want to use it gently, because the people I most want to reach are not Jewish. You are the neighbours. You always were.

Here is what I have learned about that morning after. Most Germans were not the men with torches. Most were the people on the footpath. Some approved, some were ashamed, many were frightened, and almost all of them kept walking. The head of Germany’s Jewish community said last year that the persecution was made possible by the looking away of many. The onlookers did nothing.

The world kept walking too. Four months earlier, 32 countries had met at Evian in France to discuss the Jews trying to flee Hitler. Australia’s delegate told the conference that we had no real racial problem and were not desirous of importing one. After the pogrom, The Argus asked what was to become of the wandering Jews, and answered its own question: nobody wants them. Our Cabinet met on 30 November and agreed to take 15,000 refugees over three years, half the number our man in London had proposed. The war closed the sea before the quota was ever filled.

And then one small group of Australians did not keep walking. On 6 December 1938 a delegation of William Cooper’s Australian Aborigines’ League walked from Footscray to the German consulate in Melbourne to protest against the persecution of the Jews. The consul would not open the door. They were denied the rights of citizens in their own country, and they went anyway. It was one of very few such protests anywhere in the world.

I tell that story because it answers the question people ask me most often, which is what they are supposed to do. Cooper’s people did not stop the Holocaust. They did the thing in front of them.

Now let me be careful, because this is where anniversaries go wrong. Australia in 2026 is not Germany in 1938. We have a Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion, which is the opposite of a state pogrom. We have new laws against hate groups, security funding for synagogues and schools, and new Holocaust teaching that education ministers agreed last week. No government here sends the fire brigade to stand and watch.

The comparison I am making is smaller, and I think truer. It is about the morning after.

Eleven months ago, on December 14, 15 people were killed at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach. The royal commission’s interim report records that ASIO had warned, publicly and repeatedly, of a heightened risk of terrorism amid rising anti-Semitism. Six days before the attack, the community’s own security body emailed NSW Police that a terrorist attack on the NSW Jewish community was likely. The police have not been able to produce a written risk assessment for that night. The commission has made no finding yet. It reports on December 18.

Warnings were given. What was done with them is the question the commission must now answer. Not malice. Not 1938. But the morning after starts with that question.

And the footpath? Witness after witness has told the commission about the bystanders: the colleagues who said nothing, the arts bodies and schools that went quiet, the people who watched. In June and July this year the Scanlon Institute found that 18 per cent of Australians now hold negative views of Jewish people, up from 8 per cent four years ago. The survey was taken after Bondi.

But Bondi also gave us our Cooper. A Muslim shopkeeper, Ahmed al Ahmed, ran at a gunman that night and wrestled the weapon from him. He did not wait for a finding. He did the thing in front of him.

So here is my ask, and it is not to the Government. It is to you.

In the five weeks between tonight and the Bondi anniversary, do one thing. Ask the Jewish colleague you have been avoiding how this year has been, and let the answer take as long as it takes. If a joke lands in your group chat, say that it did. Come to the community’s Chanukah gathering on December 6, which is open to all Australians. If you are a parent, read your children the story of the walk from Footscray. In 2022, only one Australian in six knew who William Cooper was.

None of that is heroic. It is the size of thing that was missing on November 10, 1938, when ordinary people decided the glass on the footpath was somebody else’s problem.

Eighty-eight years on, the glass is ours.

The morning after is now.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is the chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission