I was born and raised in Australia, before moving to Israel in 2015.
I grew up as a true blue Aussie, or so I thought. My childhood was hours in the ocean, playing netball, and lazy Sunday barbecues. It was, in almost every sense, a carefree life in “the lucky country.”
When I wasn’t out and about looking, acting, and sounding like every other Australian, I was at my Jewish day school. The one with security guards outside. One guard wasn’t enough. Each family also volunteered one parent to a daily security roster. We implicitly knew that, as Jewish kids, we were targets.
For the most part, I socialised within the Jewish community. Netball was the one part of my life where I was the only Jew.
One day, a netball friend, Cassie, invited me over to her house. She had a beautiful home with a pool house. I was 12 or 13 and my first thought was, “Great. If I need to hide, maybe I could live in Cassie’s pool house.”
How unnatural that this was the natural thought of an Australian child, whose only enemies should have been mosquitoes, magpies, and sharks.
After October 7, Cassie (and her mum) were the only non-Jewish friends who reached out to me. They asked how I was doing, and how was the vibe in Israel. They said they felt the world had gone mad. They said they stood with Israel.
As I finally come up for air as an Israeli who has lived through the fear, heartbreak, and loss of this war for two years, it’s Chanukah.
At an outdoor community candle-lighting event identical to those I attended for 24 years growing up in Australia, the global intifada lands on Bondi Beach.
Many Jewish Australians are confronting the harsh truth that living in Australia is not an insurance policy against the dark, brutal side of antisemitism. Others are grappling with the feeling that this is not their Australia, and wondering where everything went wrong.
I feel the pain of Bondi Beach as both a local and an outsider.
I see what Israel and the rest of the world see: the writing on the wall, telling Australia’s Jews that it’s time for fight or flight.
But in my mind’s eye, I also see my sundowners at the beach. The eskies full of smoked salmon bagels (it is a Jewish event, after all). The warm summer air that comes with Chanukah in the southern hemisphere.
Where do we go from here?
What is the answer?
I don’t know.
But if I have one message for my Australian Jewish community, it comes from A. D. Gordon, the Zionist thinker and pioneer. He wrote prolifically about light versus darkness. The task is not to curse the darkness, he argued, but to add light.
Again and again.
Jews of the world, add light. Again and again.