In Melbourne, masked men set fire to a storied synagogue. In Sydney, a synagogue was defaced with red swastikas spray painted along the fence, while a day care center was torched and scrawled with antisemitic slurs under the cover of night.
A rash of antisemitic attacks in recent weeks has rattled the Jewish community in Australia, home to the largest proportion of holocaust survivors outside Israel. There have been no reports of major casualties but the violence represents a dramatic escalation of tensions reverberating from the war in the Middle East, which has also spurred Islamophobic episodes in Australia.
The reports of arson and explicit graffiti have unnerved a nation that prides itself on being a multicultural and tolerant society and where a third of the population was born overseas.
Now, the authorities say they are investigating whether there was international involvement in the attacks in recent months in Sydney and Melbourne, the country’s two largest cities.
The latest attack was on the day care in Sydney, which was reported early Tuesday. In a statement Tuesday, the head of Australia’s federal police said that his agency was investigating whether “overseas actors or individuals” had paid locals in Australia to carry out some of these acts. But he did not give evidence or further details.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated that investigators were looking into the possibility that some of the perpetrators had acted out of financial incentives rather than ideological motivations.
“Now, it’s unclear who or where the payments are coming from,” he said.
The specter of foreign involvement has added a new dimension to the anxiety that has been brewing in Australia’s small but deep-rooted Jewish community. The police have not said whether, or how, the more than half a dozen attacks since October are related.
In December, the Australian Federal Police set up a task force to investigate violence and threats against the Jewish community. The state police in New South Wales, where most of the attacks have taken place in the greater Sydney area, said they have arrested and charged nine individuals in relation to the crimes.
On Wednesday, officials announced the most recent arrest, that of a 33-year-old man in a case of attempted arson and graffiti on Jan. 11, when red swastikas were spray painted on the fence of a synagogue in the Newtown neighborhood of Sydney.
The state’s premier, Chris Minns, said officials were cracking down on what he called “rampant antisemitism and violence in our community.” The crimes, he added, were a “deliberate attempt to strike terror into the hearts of people that live in this state.”
What made the recent attacks different was their frequency and severity, said Julie Nathan, the research director at the Sydney-based Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an umbrella organization for Jewish groups in Australia that has been tracking and documenting reports of antisemitism since 1990.
“We have had terrible graffiti, vandalism of cars and buildings, but nothing consistently at this level,” she said. “This is every few days.”
The former home of Alex Ryvchin, the co-chief executive of the E.C.A.J., was vandalized last week.
Mr. Ryvchin said it was apparent that the home — which his family had recently moved out of — had been specifically targeted. Part of a duplex, it was only his former residence that had been splashed with red paint, he said. The other half of the building was left untouched. Cars in the driveway and in front were vandalized with anti-Jewish slurs.
“It was quite harrowing, to go there and see the walls I’d painted myself, the home that we loved, formed such memories in,” he said.
But Mr. Ryvchin said he wasn’t shocked by the incident because it felt like the natural progression from the increasingly openly antisemitic language and brazen attacks that have followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel and the ensuing war in the Gaza Strip.
“We wake up every day, and we don’t know what’s going to be hit,” he said. “Not just vandalism and harassment, but fire bombings.”
The increase in attacks, while worrying, did not portend a broader trend, said Andrew Markus, an emeritus professor at Monash University’s Australian Center for Jewish Civilization who has tracked Australian attitudes toward immigrants and one another in a long-running national survey.
“A small segment, minute segment, is causing fear and anxiety and headlines,” he said. “It is a major problem, but you can’t jump from that to say that there has been a major shift in Australian public attitudes.”
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