By Ron Hoenig*
I am a child of people who survived the Holocaust.
My parents were refugees from Hungary. Hungary was a very anti-Semitic country and it was the first European country to introduce specifically anti-Semitic legislation in the 20th century. In 1920, the Hungarian government first introduced legislation that limited the percentage of Jews who could attend university. This was only the first of a series of laws that discriminated against Jews. But while the Hungarian regime was very proudly antisemitiic, it refused to participate in the Axis plan to murder or liquidate all Jews, until it was occupied.
Once the occupation started in March 1944, the Germans and their Hungarian allies swiftly transported all the Jews in the countryside and regional cities. Suddenly 500 thousand people were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Only Budapest remained relatively untouched until October, 1944, when the fascist Nyilas (Arrow Cross) government took over.
In 1944, my mother’s parents lived in Kiskunfelegyhaza, some 70 kilometres southwest of Budapest. My grandfather, Chaim Ezra Berkovits was a dealer in haberdashery. He and some fellow Jews used to hire a cart and horses and sell material used for making clothes at markets all around Hungary. Chaim Ezra and his wife, Blima, had eight children. Three of them were young women who already lived in Budapest: their eldest daughter, Helena, the next oldest daughter, Dori and the middle one, Gizi, my mother. My mother’s older brother, Avraham, was forced to work for the Hungarian army.
In July, Chaim and Blima and my mother’s two younger brothers and one younger sister were taken to Auschwitz and murdered. The two older sisters who were transported from Budapest survived after being taken first to Bergen Belsen and then to Theresienstadt. And one of them, Ida, was either shot to death or froze to death in the death march to Stuthof a few days before the end of the war.
My mother was more fortunate; she did not look Jewish. She survived because a non-Jewish Hungarian man named Janos Zornanszky provided false papers for her, found her accommodation and a job and he and his family looked after her at the end of the war.
My father survived because, like many young Jewish Hungarian men he was in forced labour, first for the Hungarian army and then for the Todt organization. His parents and many relatives were murdered.
You could say that I have the Holocaust in my bones. I am not unusual, particularly among Australian Jews of my generation. I was born in Israel, but I grew up in Melbourne, a city with a population of 60 thousand Jews, most of them “survivors” of the Shoah from east and central Europe, who escaped to the end of the earth in order to find a refuge from the anti-Semitism of Europe.
Now, we are experiencing a rash of antisemitic acts that would have shocked my parents. So, of course, the situation in Sydney and Melbourne, the largest centres of Jewish population in Melbourne is very personal to me.
It is deeply disturbing to reflect on the recent spate of antisemitic hate crimes in Australia. These crimes include attacks in Sydney on a childcare centre near a Jewish school and synagogue; on the former home of a prominent Jewish person, the graffiti and burning of cars and vandalising and daubing of swastikas on two synagogues in one week. In October 2024, the Adass Israel synagogue was fire-bombed and more recently, an attempt was made to fire bomb the East Melbourne Synagogue and a violent demonstration took place in front of a restaurant in inner-city Melbourne. There was also an episode of high schools students shouting at younger children at a Jewish day school. These attacks follow a year of escalating hate crimes on the Jewish community.
I keep fighting the fears of antisemitic persecution within me.
Melbourne is the home of the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. The total Jewish population in Australia was about 117 thousand in 2021, the time of the latest census – a similar number to Germany, but Australia has a total population of 25 million, much smaller than Germany. Jews form about 0.4 percent of the population, and about 80 percent of the Jewish population lives in Melbourne and Sydney. But we are an ageing population, because we have fewer children and there is less immigration of Jews, we have only grown 1.4 percent since the previous census. The first generation of postwar Jewish migrants has mostly gone. Their children, my generation, are getting older. Our children are in their 40s and 50s.
My parents found a land where Jews could live in freedom, and maybe, flourish –Australia , half a world away from all that pain and misery and death. Australia was a land where anti-Semitism was nowhere near as important as “football, meatpies, kangaroos and Holden cars”. These people did not seem to know or care about the rest of the world. Or history. They cared about being comfortable. She’ll be right, mate. They were strange and uncouth but they really didn’t seem to mind if you were Jewish. Life was getting easier. And if something went really wrong, there was always Israel, still threatened by Arabs but secure enough that if the whirlwind picked up speed and threw you our of your adopted country, you could always go there.
The 1950s and 1960s were a time when my parents were able to start rebuilding their lives. They developed the strength to enjoy their survival and to put the memory of the past into deep freeze in their hearts. Perhaps they believed that work and keeping your head down would keep you alive, and more importantly, keep your children alive and begin to prove that Hitler was wrong – that a Jewish community would survive beyond the whirlwind of hatred he created.
Australia is now a multicultural and multiethnic society, but it has a deep racism at the core of its history. The country was founded on the attempted genocide of the Indigenous Australian people. And there was a profound racism against non-White people. The first act of Parliament that was passed in 1901, when the six former British colonies united in one federation, was one making illegal immigration by Asian and other coloured people. Australia was to be a place for whites only.
When it became clear after the Second World War that the nation would only survive with a massive immigration program. The postwar Australian governments were happy to encourage the immigration of people from Britain and Northern Europe and attempted at first to discourage immigrants from Italy and Greece. They were not considered white enough. British people were welcomed and could migrate to Australia for 10 pounds. Refugees from Eastern Europe were considered safe and were selected for their physical characteristics as “Beautiful Balts” and because they would be reliably anti-Communist. Among them were collaborators with the Nazis. They could come to Australia and work for two years for the Government and then remain.
Many Australians were very unhappy about Jewish settlement. They wanted farmers and laborers, not businesspeople. Besides the survivors of the concentration camps looked pretty weak. Jews could only migrate to Australia if they were sponsored by relatives, who had to guarantee that they would not be a burden on the public purse.
But despite that, the Jewish community worked together to bring many Jews, who were able to settle in Australia from 1945 onwards and they and their descendants have established a very comfortable community. Jews also were among the strongest supporters of changes in the situation of Australian Indigenous people and have been active in refugee politics and progressive politics and in the support of the arts and culture and intellectual life in Australia.
I am a mainly secular Jew. I was raised in a household where I knew in my bones that we were Jewish, but there were very few signs of Jewish culture in our household. Although my parents lived in a block of 12 apartments, many of whose owners were Jewish, we never had a mezuzah on the door. We never lit Shabbat candles. I don’t think we had a menorah in my childhood homes. My father was an atheist and my mother was very angry with God for the loss of her family. We never went to synagogue. My father didn’t even come with me when I had to go to the Orthodox synagogue to rehearse for my Bar Mitzvah. My Bar Mitzvah certainly didn’t have any religious meaning for me. My parents did it for social reasons. I don’t know how unusual we were in Melbourne’s Jewish community. I certainly felt unusual.
But the other secular religion in the Jewish community was Zionism and Israel. Zionism and the love of Israel are woven deeply into the fabric of Jewish life in Australia. And we weren’t part of that either. Most Jewish houses in Melbourne that I visited as a child had a little blue and white money box in which the family collected money for Israel. We didn’t have a box like that.
My parents weren’t Zionists. They went to Israel in 1948 because that was a way out of the Displaced Persons camp in Degendorf, but I don’t think they enjoyed the experience and they were waiting to see who would sponsor them: my mother’s brother was already in New York. He had also been in the DP camp in Germany but he managed to be accepted into the United States. My father’s brother was already in Melbourne. He had been in forced labour at Mauthausen, but, after the war, he managed to get to the US and then found his way to Melbourne. Sponsorship from Melbourne came first, so we went to Melbourne. It was a long way from Europe and my parents, especially my mother, never wanted to see Hungary again.
October 7, 2023 has brought a number of things to an inflammatory meeting point in Australia. The word Zionism has come to mean vastly different things to the majority of Jews and to progressively minded non-Jewish people, and some Jews. For most Jews it has come to stand for survival of the Jewish people after the Shoah. Especially in Melbourne and Sydney, the Shoah and the narrative of extermination are in our blood.
For many progressive non-Jews Zionism has come to mean the last gasp of colonial European power after the Second World War. To Jews, Israel is a lifeboat when the situation in the Diaspora becomes unbearable; to the progressive left, it has come to mean an oppressive regime, led by a rightwing reactionary government, armed to the teeth and foisted on the indigenous Palestinian people by the major imperialist powers.
I don’t think it’s an accident that countries like Australia, The United States, New Zealand and South Africa which are truly settler colonial states have been convulsed by this passionate wave of pro-Palestinian feeling. There is a core of deep and often unacknowledged guilt over the way we Europeans took the land from our Indigenous peoples in order to settle here. It is only too easy to draw a similarity between the genocidal behaviours towards Indigenous people by British colonists that lie at the heart of these societies and the accusation of genocide by Israel in Gaza.
In Australia, it’s hard to explain the historic reasons why both Jews and Palestinians have a genuine long-term religious and cultural claim to the same land. It’s too easy for people who do not understand the complex history of Jewish displacement from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries to say Jews who are the descendants of those born in Poland or Russia belong in Eastern Europe and should go back there.
Whatever the truth about the sins of the Israeli military or the reactionary nature of the Netanyahu administration or whether or not the enormous loss of life among the residents in Gaza is a genocide or not a genocide, Jews as citizens of Australia, or of Hanover are not at fault.
Some of us are rabid in our support of Netanyahu and the forces pushing him further to the right; a few of us are strongly supportive of the cause of the Palestinians. Most Australian Jews are, at least, critically supportive of Israel and some are passionately Zionist; most of us are desperately sad about the situation of the Gazans.
The events in Gaza seem to have a moral weight that cries out for solutions. Many on the left, including Jews, fear that they will be seen by future generations as bystanders, who allowed what they see as the genocide of the Palestinians to proceed.
The lessons of the Holocaust are being mobilised against the Israeli state. The paradox is so hard for Jews to hear that it seems like an attack on them. Some Jews respond that the media are biased against Israel, and perhaps Jews. Interestingly, the left believes that much of the media is biased towards Israel.
However, we now live in a world where we have introduced the concept of news customised to the reader. We are all reading fragments on social media, most of which reflect back to us the world as we would want it to be. We choose the news that reinforces our prejudices. We don’t even share the news world with one another. It’s the perfect recipe for endless conflict when you can’t even agree on the basic facts, not to mention every individual’s bias. When these worldviews collide with ingrained prejudices and stereotypes, the stage is set for conflict and sinister interpretations.
As Jews, we are responsible for and to one another, and therefore we are implicated both in the positive and negative actions of other Jews and the State of Israel. Because of this I am terribly torn. As the child of survivors, I feel the existential fear that many of my fellow Jews feel, but I also know that the other side of that fear is a belief that the rest of the world can be ignored because precious few of them lifted a finger to save us in the past, and so the condemnation of Israel by much of the world, the human rights and legal establishment can only be antisemitic.
I don’t believe that.
But I do believe that, as citizens in Australia, Jews are not liable; we are not accountable. If the administration of Israel or the Israeli military, or the settlers on the West Bank have committed sins or crimes, the Jews in the streets of the Diaspora are not accountable to anyone. The enormous toll of civilians in Palestine can not be sheeted home to ordinary Jews in the streets of Melbourne or Sydney. The destruction of buildings in Gaza can not justify attempts to burn synagogues in Melbourne and Sydney.
Attempts to burn synagogues are not part of a reasoned discussion of the terrible fate of people in Gaza. Burning cars in front of businesses engaged in supplying arms to Israel is not going to change the lives of people in Gaza. Nor can the terrible plight of children in Gaza condone attacks on children at Jewish schools by other young people who go to another high school.
A passionate belief in the right to life and peace of the people of Gaza is not an excuse for confrontation with children at a Jewish school. The cause of justice for Palestinians does not excuse violence against Jews in the street in Australia. Jews, no matter what their beliefs, are not proxies for the government of Israel or the IDF. Just as individual Muslims and mosques are not proxies for terrorists or the Islamic state or the Iranian Islamist regime.
And there have been over the past 20 months Islamophobic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and antisemitic hate crimes in our major cities including racist anti-Arab graffiti in Sydney; planting a homemade bomb in front of a Sydney home flying the Palestinian flag; the setting alight of a truck bearing the Palestinian flag which belonged to a man of Palestinian heritage in Melbourne and a similar incident in Adelaide, where a bus belonging to a Muslim school was set alight. Not to mention countless attacks on Muslim women because they are most visible.
Too often in Australia the battle against anti-Semitism becomes an excuse for Islamophobia. There has been in Australia a strong Islamophobic strain among politicians of the Right. It started before 9/11 and it became a staple of the right wing of our conservative party, especially in connection with asylum seekers and religiously inspired terror, until the Christchurch massacre, when 50 Muslim worshippers were murdered in a mosque in New Zealand by an Australian rightwing fanatic.
It’s sad that in Australia cordial relations and dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims reached a crisis after October 7th. It is sadder that this conflict between Israel and Palestinians is partially to blame for the left in Australia refusing to offer support to the Jewish community after October 7, leaving the field open to right wing Christians, whose interest in us may be purely transactional.
There is so much pain in Jewish and Muslim communities in Australia because of family connections and solidarity between Australians and people in the Middle East – Australian Jews and their families and communities in Israel and Australian Muslims and their families and communities in Palestine and Gaza that blind each community to the suffering of the other. This is a great tragedy and I hope that soon it may be possible to heal that breach in mutual compassion. It doesn’t have to be that way.
One of my major inspirations is the organisation The Parents Circle Families Forum, which brings together relatives of Israelis and Palestinians killed in attacks by the other side. Another is Standing Together. It’s important that we learn more from these people who find common cause in grief and conflict rather than the easy path of mutual hatred and suspicion, which only creates new generations of terror. We should learn and hear more from the peacemakers than the warmakers.
We still have much to learn.
My thanks to Prof Dr Ursula Rudnick for inviting me to speak to this assembly Of Begegnung Christen und Juden in Hanover and for translating and producing copies in German.
*Dr Ron Hoenig is the Chair of the Australian Council of Christians and Jews.