Melbourne Synagogue Fire: One of the Oldest Evils Perpetrated Against Jews

Shortly after 4 a.m. on Friday, two people in masks were spotted dousing the main entrance of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest and busiest shuls, with gasoline. Moments later, the building was set on fire and rapidly became an inferno. At that very early hour, only a few men were in the sanctuary; they had come to study before morning prayers began two hours later. They realized what was happening when they heard glass shattering and were able to get out of the building through a rear door, though one suffered burns to his hand and two had to be hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Had the arsonists struck an hour later, far more people would have been inside. There is no telling how many might have died.

The damage was massive. Much of the interior was gutted. Many religious books were turned to ash. It took 60 firefighters and 17 trucks to put out the fire. At least six Torah scrolls — the most venerated objects in Jewish worship; each one typically takes 12-18 months to write — were damaged by heat and water.

Inside the Adass Israel synagogue

Adass Israel was founded after World War II. Many of its first congregants were European immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Rebuilding their lives following the Nazi nightmare in which one-third of the world’s Jews were murdered, they would have remembered only too vividly the smashing and burning of synagogues across Germany and Austria in November 1938 — the Kristallnacht pogrom that foreshadowed the genocidal whirlwind to come.

To Jews of that era, born in a world where antisemitic violence and destruction was not only routine but often promoted by political and religious leaders, it would not have come as a bolt from the blue that Jew-hating arsonists would attack a synagogue. Not so for the 21st-century Jews of Melbourne, some of whom naively believed that in civilized societies, such atrocities are no longer possible.

There had been no shortage of reminders for Australia’s Jews, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them.

“I'm shocked, just absolutely shocked,” Benjamin Klein, an Adass Israel board member, told Australia’s 9News TV network. “We didn't think it will happen here in Melbourne to us. We’re a quiet community. We have our heads down, we don't bother anybody, we wish everybody well.” Klein is an Orthodox Jew, but there was a similar reaction from less religious Australian Jews. Benjamin Preiss, a Melbourne newspaper editor and a self-described “largely secular” Jew, wrote in a column Monday that even as he was covering the burning of the Adass Israel synagogue, “I struggled to believe that anyone in Australia would so brazenly target a place of peaceful prayer. The fact that there were people inside at the time of the attack makes it all the more sickening.”

Yet there had been no shortage of reminders for Australia’s Jews, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them. Just two days after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, a mob of Hamas supporters rallied in front of the Sydney Opera House, waving Palestinian flags and yelling “F*** the Jews” and “Gas the Jews.” Last week the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported that almost 2,100 anti-Jewish incidents had occurred in the 12 months following Oct. 7 — a fourfold increase from the year before. “With a few honorable exceptions,” the council noted, “the response from political and community leaders, university executives, and civil society has been tepid at best. The result has been a ratcheting up of antisemitism from hateful words to steadily more serious hateful actions.”

Such as screaming antisemitic slogans outside Jewish schools. Or vandalizing Jewish homes. Or physically assaulting Jews in the street.
Or torching Adass Israel.

The burning of synagogues is one of the oldest evils perpetrated against Jews. Long before there was a Third Reich or a modern state of Israel, those who hated the Jewish people often expressed that hatred by setting ablaze the places where Jews gathered to pray.

The historian Robert Wistrich, in his sweeping history of antisemitism, “A Lethal Obsession,” describes the fourth-century Church father St. John Chrysostom, who “justified the burning down of synagogues” on the grounds that they were “a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews … a gulf and abyss of perdition.” Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Ambrose of Milan, shared that view. When a synagogue in Mesopotamia was burned down in 388 at the instigation of the local bishop, the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered that it be rebuilt at the expense of those responsible. An outraged Ambrose argued forcefully that the order should be rescinded. No Christian should be punished for burning a synagogue, he declared, since any building where Jews worshiped was “a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which God himself has condemned.”

When the First Crusade reached the Holy Land in 1099, recounted Simon Sebag Montefiore in “Jerusalem: The Biography,” they fought not just the ruling Muslims but also the beleaguered and powerless Jewish community. “The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire,” Montefiore wrote. “The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name.”

“First, set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.” – Martin Luther

Martin Luther, the central figure of the Protestant Reformation, was one of history’s great antisemites. In an infamous 1543 treatise, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” he offered his “sincere advice” for dealing with “this rejected and condemned people, the Jews.” His list of recommendations began: “First, set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.”

In the Muslim world, too, synagogues have been burned to the ground again and again: in Persia in 1839, in Cairo in 1945, in Algeria in 1956, in Istanbul in 2003, in Damascus in 2013, in Tunisia in 2023, and in numerous other instances.

Even when Jewish communities have ceased to exist, the synagogues they leave behind have been destroyed by arsonists. In 2005, Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip, unilaterally turning over the entire territory to the Palestinian Authority, dismantling the 21 settlements that had been built there and removing the 9,000 Jewish residents who had lived in them. But they left the synagogues intact. The buildings were both sacred and beautiful, and Israelis didn’t have the heart to flatten them. It was thought that even if the former synagogues would no longer be used for Jewish prayer, the Palestinians could put them to good use — as community centers, perhaps, or office facilities, municipal buildings, or schools.

But upon taking over the land that Israel had voluntarily relinquished, the very first thing the Palestinians did was to put the synagogues to the torch. “Gaza's night sky turned orange as fires roared across the settlements,” the Associated Press reported. “Women ululated, teens set off fireworks, and crowds chanted ‘God is great.’ ”

What happened last week in Australia has happened in the United States and Canada, too. Congregation Beth Israel in Gadsden, Ala., was firebombed by a Nazi sympathizer in 1960. The similarly-named Beth Israel synagogue in Austin was burned in 2021. A Vancouver synagogue was doused with fuel and set on fire this past May; fortunately the damage was confined to the front doors and no one was hurt. Six months earlier, Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue in suburban Montreal.

There will be more. As overt antisemitism becomes increasingly normalized, the hate crimes will continue to pile up. More Jews will be menaced and assaulted, more antisemitism will be pumped into social media, more cities will experience “Jew hunts” — and more synagogues will go up in flames. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, to borrow Yeats’s phrase. Our world is deeply disordered and increasingly out of control. Something truly frightful is coming. Jews, as always the canary in the coal mine, are the first to be targeted. But they won’t be the last.

This op-ed originally appeared in “Arguable,” a weekly newsletter written by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.