Antisemitic incidents in Australia dropped by 20 percent in the past year but remain at unprecedented levels compared to the period before October 7, 2023, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) reported Wednesday, according to JNS.
Between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, ECAJ documented 1,654 incidents, down from 2,062 the previous year. Despite the decline, the figure is still five times higher than the annual average recorded in the decade before Hamas’s attack on Israel.
The report warns that serious incidents - including arson attacks on synagogues, preschools, and other Jewish institutions - have reached their highest level since ECAJ began tracking.
“The total number of reported antisemitic incidents in Australia has continued at unprecedentedly high levels for a second consecutive year. We are now at a stage where anti-Jewish racism has left the fringes of society, where it is normalised and allowed to fester and spread, gaining ground at universities, in arts and culture spaces, in the health sector, in the workplace and elsewhere,” said ECAJ president Daniel Aghion KC.
“In such an environment, Jews have legitimate concerns for their physical safety and social well-being in Australia,” he continued. “Together, we must do all we can to combat this scourge which is why hosting the J7 here in Australia for the first time has never been more important.”
Incidents of antisemitism in Australia in the last year include the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in September that the Iranian government was behind that attack, as well as another attack against the country's Jewish community. Australia last week listed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Days after the arson at Adass Israel, a car was set on fire, and two properties were vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, which has a substantial Jewish population.
In another incident, the words "F- the Jews" were spray-painted on a car in Sydney.
In early January, the Southern Sydney Synagogue in Allawah, a suburb of the city, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti.
A day later, the Newtown synagogue, located in Sydney’s inner west, was vandalized with red swastikas that were spray-painted across the building’s front wall.
In July, a Melbourne synagogue was set on fire while worshipers were inside. The arson occurred on the same night as a disturbance at a Melbourne Israeli restaurant, which sustained extensive damage.
An Australian judge ruled recently that the man who set fire to the Melbourne synagogue was motivated by mental illness, not antisemitism.