Australian Jews have experienced one of the sharpest and most violent rises in antisemitism and hatred in the world, according to Australia's peak Jewish community group.
The Executive Council of Australia Jewry (ECAJ) said there were 1,654 reports of anti-Jewish incidents recorded by the community in the 12 months to October 1.
The incidents were logged by volunteer Community Security Groups, official Jewish state roof bodies, and the ECAJ.
The council's chief executive, Alex Ryvchin, said it was a near-record number of incidents — second only to the 2,062 incidents recorded the previous year.
"The Australian Jewish community, statistically and experientially, has faced the sharpest decline in our physical security of any Jewish community anywhere in the world," he said.
"It has shocked the Jewish world.
"It shows that we're in an extremely febrile, volatile and unpredictable state."
Victoria recorded the highest number of incidents, followed by New South Wales and Western Australia — states with the largest Jewish communities.
The most common incidents were of verbal abuse, including racial slurs, harassment, intimidation and gestures such as Nazi salutes.
But they also included the firebombing of Melbourne's Adass Israel Synagogue in December 2024, which was later ruled to be a terrorist act, as well as a spate of arson and graffiti attacks targeting Sydney's Jewish community.
The 'human toll' of antisemitism
Mr Ryvchin said the data showed antisemitism remained at "deeply troubling levels" in Australia.
"It's easy to look past numbers and statistics and not see the human toll of it," he said.
"But we're talking about instances of school kids being abused and called the most repugnant, horrific things in the streets.
"We're talking about people being physically assaulted, we're talking about Holocaust survivors waking up to see Jewish institutions daubed in Swastikas.
"Every one of those incidents affects someone materially in a profound way — it affects their sense of self, their sense of belonging in Australian society."
According to the report, a group of teenage boys was verbally abused by several people at Melbourne's St Kilda Beach, with one woman throwing on ice-cream at them and calling them "baby killers", while another person shouted "Hitler should have gassed you all".
The report said in Sydney, a pig's leg was thrown into a Kosher Jewish business at Waverley in August and several people in a car yelled "Heil Hitler" to people leaving a synagogue in Perth in October last year.
There was also a report of a Greens supporter yelling at a Jewish woman at a voting booth on the Gold Coast, accusing the woman of "killing innocent babies".
The report also included ASIO allegations of antisemitic attacks in Sydney believed to have been carried out by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp via a proxy of criminal networks and incidents allegedly carried out by the growing neo-Nazi movement.
Mr Ryvchin said it was clear the range of anti-Jewish incidents spanned the "spectrum of extremism".
"You have incidents orchestrated by a foreign regime, by Iran, you have incidents carried out by organised crime, you have incidents carried out by far right actors and those on the far left and those who appear to have no firm ideology at all," he said.
"We're not dealing with one movement or one organisation alone — we're dealing with something that is taking hold throughout our society and throughout our cities."