'It’s really just an embarrassment'

Note: On December 11 I was contacted by an anti-Zionist activist who pointed out several factual errors. I have updated the piece to correct these.

They also raised some broader concerns about the piece. While I do not agree with all of them, I believe they are worth including here:

“It appears as if you began writing this article with the fundamental premise in mind that you are a committed anti-Zionist, who asked yourself how this community fits into the Zionist discourse, rather than with sympathy for the Adass community who has just been victim of an arson attack. I do not regard you as alone in making these mistakes and you are far from the worst offender.

“I believe that greater sensitivity when discussing child sexual abuse — and the arson of the synagogue — would go a long way. It is primarily up to the victims to decide to what means they want to use it. [Dassi] Erlich opposed using her campaign for anti-Zionist means. Indeed, her sisters who were involved in the campaign and were also victims of Leifer are committed Zionists who regularly post as such on social media. Dassi has also expressed condolences to the synagogue on social media, without making further comments tying it in to her own traumatic experiences in the community.

“We should follow Erlich's lead in not making this arson attack, or her campaign, about anything more than what it was actually about.”

Yaakov Aharon’s December piece for Michael West Media, ‘Adass Israel synagogue is not your political football’, is also an excellent read on this topic.

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The firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue has already provoked an outpouring of commentary, much of it in bad faith, patently stupid or both. Labor Premiers Chris Minns and Jacinta Allan have tacitly laid blame for the attack on the pro-Palestinian movement by flagging potential bans on protests outside places of worship.

Such bans would do nothing to stop antisemitic attacks — antisemites don’t typically foreshadow hate crimes by standing peacefully near their intended targets with slogans on cardboard signs. Nor would they functionally impede the pro-Palestinian movement, which has no history of protesting outside synagogues for the simple reason that the target of their anger is the Israeli state, not the Jewish religion.

I don’t want to rake over all the aspects of this that are already doing the rounds online, like Dave Sharma’s blatantly racist dismissal of “a fictitious Islamophobia which [is] not going on” or Sarah Ferguson’s braindead interview with Jillian Segal last night. Instead I want to focus on an aspect of the whole thing that I haven’t seen much mention of.

The Adass Israel congregation against whom the attack was directed is quite distinct from Melbourne’s (and Australia’s) wider Jewish communities. In Crikey this week, Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance founder Nomi Kaltmann wrote:

“The Adass Israel community is Haredi (ultra-Orthodox). They are tight-knit and visibly Jewish, with their distinctive long beards, curled sidelocks and traditional fur hats worn on the Sabbath and Jewish festivals. Despite their prominent Jewish identity, they remain apolitical. Unlike many other synagogues that prominently display Israeli and Australian flags, Adass Israel is non-Zionist, rooted in a longstanding theological stance that Jewish people should not create a country until the time of the Messiah, so they do not officially recognise the State of Israel. This community is as far removed from the Israel-Gaza conflict as any Jewish group in Australia can be.”

Hours after the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu blamed it on the “extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia,” citing Australia’s recent United Nations vote in favour of a ceasefire and stating that “anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitism”.

Adass Israel has not responded directly to Netanyahu’s comments. Being Haredi, the synagogue does not have a website or social media presence — many Haredim do not use modern telecommunications or the internet. Netanyahu’s involvement has certainly raised awareness of the synagogue — a fundraiser to help Adass Israel rebuild the shul has already raised more than $600,000.

But it’s grimly ironic that Netanyahu has set himself up as a defender of the Adass Israel congregation, given the long and horrific history between the two. There are few incidences more illustrative of the contempt in which the Israeli government holds not only the Australian government, but Australia’s Jewish community.

Adass Israel is the congregation at the centre of the Malka Leifer child sexual abuse scandal. In August 2023, Leifer was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexually abusing sisters Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper. Erlich and Sapper were students at the Adass Israel School, where Leifer was a teacher and later principal from 2000 to 2008. Their older sister, Nicole Meyer, also states that Leifer sexually abused her. (Leifer was found not guilty of charges relating to Meyer.)

In 2008, Adass Israel leaders helped Leifer flee to Israel after the sisters told them of Leifer’s abuse. Leifer spent the next 13 years living freely under the protection of Israel’s political and legal system. Despite a years-long campaign by the sisters and repeated requests by the Australian government, Israel resisted and undermined every attempt to have Leifer extradited. Members of Israel’s government actively worked to bolster Leifer’s lie that she was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Personal pleas from Australian politicians to Netanyahu that Leifer be sent back to face justice in Australia went ignored.

Under the Israeli state’s protection, Leifer was even able to settle in Emmanuel, a Haredi settlement in the West Bank where she allegedly continued to sexually abuse young girls.

The Israeli effort to shield Leifer from justice was led by Yaakov Litzman, Israel’s former health minister. Litzman’s United Torah Judaism party, which represents conservative Haredim in Israel, provided crucial support for Netanyahu to form several right-wing coalition governments between 2009 and 2021. Leifer and Litzman are of the Gur sect, a Hasidic Haredi dynasty originating in Poland that wields enormous influence in Israeli politics.

In 2019, Netanyahu reappointed Litzman to the health ministry despite growing evidence that Litzman had pressured state health and prison officials to provide leniency to ten ultra-Orthodox sex offenders, including convicted rapists and child abusers. Leifer’s false claim that she was medically unfit to stand trial was only uncovered when hidden cameras planted around Emmanuel by private investigators captured footage of Leifer living a normal life.

Under a plea deal reached in 2022, Litzman admitted to pressuring Israeli Health Ministry officials to falsify their psychiatric evaluations of Leifer, delaying her extradition for years and allowing her to move freely in the community. Charges of obstruction of justice were dropped, allowing Litzman to avoid being found guilty of “moral turpitude” — a designation that would disqualify him from public office for seven years. Resigning from the Knesset, Litzman was given an eight-month suspended sentence and fined a little over AU$1200.

When Erlich began campaigning to raise awareness of the abuse she had suffered, she encountered indifference and resistance from Australian Zionist groups. In 2020, a Times of Israel article recounted how Erlich was invited to speak at an event organised by a prominent Zionist group “whose organisers repeatedly reminded her beforehand to stress to the audience that she does not pass judgment on the entire State of Israel, despite the repeated delays in the Leifer case”.

“It felt like they, in a way, were using me to raise money,” Erlich said in the article. “There were a lot of organisations that paid lip service to my cause, but weren’t really willing to do much beyond that.”

“I was very naive when I started the campaign and could not understand why I was encountering so much resistance. Growing up in the Adass community, which is strongly anti-Zionist, I had no idea of the extent to which the wider Jewish community was in a completely different place.”

Note — Erlich’s Times of Israel quote continues below:

“Erlich said some advised her to join forces with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, as such activists would be able to amplify her message regarding ongoing injustice taking place in Israel. ‘But that wasn’t what the [Bring Leifer Back] campaign was about,’ Erlich said, explaining her decision to resist such advice. ‘Combating sexual abuse is its own issue and we didn’t need another platform to hang ours on.’

It wasn’t until the sisters found wider public support through the Bring Leifer Back social media campaign that prominent Australian Zionist organisations began backing it more openly. Even then, the campaign made little headway. Then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull raised the Leifer case with Netanyahu during a visit to Israel in October 2017. According to Labor MP Josh Burns, Netanyahu had seemingly forgotten about it when then-Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews raised it with him again two months later.

In a 2019 opinion piece in Haaretz, Israeli journalist and former Australian Jewish News associate editor Chemi Shalev (note: the original piece misspelled Shalev’s name as ‘Shami Chelev’) — who has described Australia’s Jewish diaspora as “traditionally, cohesively and sometimes annoyingly the most pro-Israel Jewish community in the world” — laid out the sense of bewilderment and betrayal many Jewish Australians felt during and after the Leifer scandal:

Statements made in Israeli media at the time by prominent Australian Zionist figures are revealing. Besides voicing their own frustration with the Israeli government’s actions, they spoke candidly about how the scandal made it more difficult to defend Israel in Australia.

“It’s really just an embarrassment because we want to go out and celebrate Israel’s successes, but this puts us in a very difficult position,” Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler (note: the original piece incorrectly attributed the below quote to AIJAC national chairman Mark Leibler, Jeremy’s father) told The Times of Israel in 2020.

“There has been an unwritten rule: everyone is free to express their views, but we don’t criticise Israel on security issues, as we’re not living in Israel or serving in its army. But that does not extend to all other issues.”

“The general mainstream attitude is that the establishment [groups are] an additional mouthpiece and defender of the State of Israel and the government of the day,” former Executive Council of Australian Jewry vice president Manny Waks said in the same article.

While Leifer was finally extradited in 2021 and is now behind bars, the contempt with which Netanyahu and his government treated her victims and the many Jewish Australians who fought tirelessly for justice on their behalf left a mark.

For his part, Leibler told The Times of Israel he was optimistic that the bond between Israel and Australia’s Jewish diaspora would survive the scandal.

“People who picked up the phone called to say how mad they were about this, but at the end of the day they still wrote that check because Israel as a whole is far bigger than one issue,” he said.

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

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