NSW Police investigate anti-Semitic graffiti at Maroubra, Sydney

A home near a Jewish primary school is among the latest targets in a spate of anti-Semitic attacks sweeping Sydney.

Graffiti reading “f**k the Jews” and other anti-Semitic messages was discovered scrawled on a house near a Jewish primary school in the Sydney suburb of Maroubra on Thursday morning.

The graffiti is written onto a residential property on Hannan Street, next to the Mount Sinai College and close to a childcare centre that was firebombed last week.

Anti-Semitic messages were also scrawled at the Westfield Eastgardens shopping centre in Sydney’s east.

NSW Police told NewsWire it was investigating multiple anti-Semitic graffiti attacks on Thursday morning.

“Eastern Beaches Police Area Command is investigating after offensive graffiti was reported at two sites at Maroubra and Eastgardens about 6.45am today,” a police spokesman said.

“South Sydney Police Area Command is investigating off offensive graffiti was reported at East Lakes about 7am today.

“Inquiries are ongoing.”

Ofir Birenbaum, a consultant for a software company, lives 10 minutes away from Maroubra.

“I see today kids walking up from that school, asking their teacher, ‘why do they hate Jews’,” he told NewsWire on Thursday morning.

“The teacher just tried to as quickly as possible get them away from the graffiti.”

He said Australian Jews were angry about the increasingly febrile and dangerous environment.

“It feels like, ‘I told you so’ moment,” he said.

“Racism in general, and anti Semitism, it doesn’t start with violence.

“It starts with words. It starts with good people being silent.

“It starts with tolerating what we see in our streets.

“The flags and the chants, what we see in our universities.”

The graffiti insults comes just a day after it was revealed the police had foiled a potential mass casualty attack possibly directed at Jewish Australians.

A member of the public alerted the police to a caravan at Dural, a rural suburb in outer Sydney, which was found to contain explosives and a list of Jewish targets.

The explosives could have produced a 40m blast zone, the police said.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry Peter Wertheim, speaking on Thursday morning, warned traditional Australian values were “slipping away” in the onslaught of attacks.

“The feeling in the Jewish community are, not only one of understandable concern and anxiety, because of the repeated nature of these attacks, but increasingly one of anger,” he said.

“I think it’s an anger that is shared more widely by a very large number of Australians, who have had a gutful of these events.

“They bring shame on our country. They demean us as a nation.

“Not only in the eyes of people overseas, but more importantly in our own eyes, because they do not represent our national values and who we are as a people.

“And we are angry because we are seeing the Australia that we have been fortunate enough to live in ourselves, a land of freedom, fair mindedness, civilised norms of behaviour, and the rule of law, is starting to slip away from us, and from our children and from future generations.

“And the authorities and our civil society leaders seem to be powerless to arrest the trend.”

He said he “feared for the future” of Australian society and called for a change in the country’s arts, cultural and university sectors, which he said had helped foster “hateful ideologies”.

“We need more action, we need firmer action, but above all, we need a change of attitude within the institutions of our society, from which these hate ideologies have found a home.

“This witches brew of extremism, whether it’s of the political right or of the left, or of a religious source.

“We need a change of attitude by our universities, we need a change of attitude by our writers’ festivals, our arts and culture centres by social media platforms, in fostering these hateful ideologies that result in violent actions in the name of freedom of expression. That kind of thinking has now proved its invalidity.”

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the “full might” of the country’s security state was investigating the incident

“We condemn unequivocally this act,” he said.

“The full might of the AFP, ASIO and NSW Police are being utilised in this major investigation by the Joint Counter Terrorism Team.

“The NSW Police have people in custody and continue with other agencies, including those involved in AFP Special Operation Avalite to investigate threats, violence and hatred towards the Australian Jewish community, and take action and hold people to account for crimes.

“Hate and extremism have no place in Australian society.”