Australian police vowed to crack down on a series of antisemitic hate crimes after cars were set on fire and spray-painted with insults in an affluent Sydney suburb on Friday.
Two cars were set on fire and other vehicles painted with anti-Jewish slogans near the former home of a Jewish community leader. Police said a house was also sprayed with red paint in these latest attacks, which they said were hate crimes. The house once belonged to prominent Australian Jewish community lawyer Alex Ryvchin, and police are investigating whether the attack was targeted.
Ryvchin, co-head of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told reporters on Friday:
“This was my family home for many years. This is where my wife and I brought our youngest daughter from hospital. This is where we hid during the pandemic. I tell you that neither fire, vandalism, paint, threats or intimidation will stop me. I will continue to fulfil my duty to my country, my community and my people.”
NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley vowed to “hunt down” those responsible. He said:
“We will find you and we will put you in jail. What we are seeing on our streets is totally un-Australian.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said it was “a form of hatred and bigotry that has no place in Australia.”
Last December, unidentified men set fire to a car in the yard of a private home and wrote “Kill Israel” graffiti on the wall. Police announced they were looking for two male suspects, aged 20 and 15, who fled the scene. The incident took place in a suburb of Sydney, home to Australia’s largest Jewish community.
Anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic writings calling for the expulsion of Jews from Australia appeared on buildings and cars in one of Sydney’s most respectable neighbourhoods on the night of November 21. The New South Wales State Police recognised the incident as an “act of intolerance and ethnic hatred,” while the country’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that “there is no place for anti-Semitism in Australia.”
