Shortly after 4 a.m. on Friday, two people in masks were spotted dousing the main entrance of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, one of Australia's largest and busiest shuls, with gasoline. Moments later, the building was set on fire and rapidly became an inferno. At that very early hour, only a few men were in the sanctuary; they had come to study before morning prayers began two hours later. They realized what was happening when they heard glass shattering and were able to get out of the building through a rear door, though one suffered burns to his hand and two had to be hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Had the arsonists struck an hour later, far more people would have been inside. There is no telling how many might have died.
The damage was massive. Much of the interior was gutted. Many religious books were turned to ash. It took 60 firefighters and 17 trucks to put out the fire. At least six Torah scrolls — the most venerated objects in Jewish worship; each one typically takes 18 months to write — were damaged by heat and water.
Adass Israel was founded after World War II. Many of its first congregants were European immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Rebuilding their lives following the Nazi nightmare in which one-third of the world's Jews were murdered, they would have remembered only too vividly the smashing and burning of synagogues across Germany and Austria in November 1938 — the Kristallnacht pogrom that foreshadowed the genocidal whirlwind to come.
 The gutted interior of Melbourne's Adass Israel Synagogue. There is a long and painful history of antisemites putting Jewish houses of worship to the flames. |
To Jews of that era, born in a world where antisemitic violence and destruction was not only routine but often promoted by political and religious leaders, it would not have come as a bolt from the blue that Jew-hating arsonists would attack a synagogue. Not so for the 21st-century Jews of Melbourne, some of whom naively believed that in civilized societies, such atrocities are no longer possible.
"I'm shocked, just absolutely shocked," Benjamin Klein, an Adass Israel board member, told Australia's 9News TV network. "We didn't think it will happen here in Melbourne to us. We're a quiet community. We have our heads down, we don't bother anybody, we wish everybody well." Klein practices strict Orthodox Judaism, but there was a similar reaction from less religious Australian Jews. Benjamin Preiss, a Melbourne newspaper editor and a self-described "largely secular" Jew, wrote in a column Monday that even as he was covering the burning of the Adass Israel synagogue, "I struggled to believe that anyone in Australia would so brazenly target a place of peaceful prayer. The fact that there were people inside at the time of the attack makes it all the more sickening."
Yet there had been no shortage of reminders for Australia's Jews, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them. Just two days after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, a mob of Hamas supporters rallied in front of the Sydney Opera House, waving Palestinian flags and yelling "F*ck the Jews" and "Gas the Jews." Last week the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported that almost 2,100 anti-Jewish incidents had occurred in the 12 months following Oct. 7 — a fourfold increase from the year before. "With a few honorable exceptions," the council noted, "the response from political and community leaders, university executives, and civil society has been tepid at best. The result has been a ratcheting up of antisemitism from hateful words to steadily more serious hateful actions."
Such as screaming antisemitic slogans outside Jewish schools. Or vandalizing Jewish homes. Or physically assaulting Jews in the street.
Or torching Adass Israel.
The burning of synagogues is one of the oldest evils perpetrated against Jews. Long before there was a Third Reich or a modern state of Israel, those who hated the Jewish people often expressed that hatred by setting ablaze the places where Jews gathered to pray.
The historian Robert Wistrich, in his sweeping history of antisemitism, "A Lethal Obsession," describes the fourth-century Church father St. John Chrysostom, who "justified the burning down of synagogues" on the grounds that they were "a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews ... a gulf and abyss of perdition." Chrysostom's contemporary, St. Ambrose of Milan, shared that view. When a synagogue in Mesopotamia was burned down in 388 at the instigation of the local bishop, the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered that it be rebuilt at the expense of those responsible. An outraged Ambrose argued forcefully that the order should be rescinded. No Christian should be punished for burning a synagogue, he declared, since any building where Jews worshiped was "a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which God himself has condemned."
When the First Crusade reached the Holy Land in 1099, recounted Simon Sebag Montefiore in "Jerusalem: The Biography," they fought not just the ruling Muslims but also the beleaguered and powerless Jewish community. "The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire," Montefiore wrote. "The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ's name."
Martin Luther, the central figure of the Protestant Reformation, was one of history's great antisemites. In an infamous 1543 treatise, "On the Jews and Their Lies," he offered his "sincere advice" for dealing with "this rejected and condemned people, the Jews." His list of recommendations began: "First, set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn."
In the Muslim world, too, synagogues have been burned to the ground again and again: in Persia in 1839, in Cairo in 1945, in Algeria in 1956, in Istanbul in 2003, in Damascus in 2013, in Tunisia in 2023, and in numerous other instances.
Even when Jewish communities have ceased to exist, the synagogues they leave behind have been destroyed by arsonists. In 2005, Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip, unilaterally turning over the entire territory to the Palestinian Authority, dismantling the 21 settlements that had been built there and removing the 9,000 Jewish residents who had lived in them. But they left the synagogues intact. The buildings were both sacred and beautiful, and Israelis didn't have the heart to flatten them. It was thought that even if the former synagogues would no longer be used for Jewish prayer, the Palestinians could put them to good use — as community centers, perhaps, or office facilities, municipal buildings, or schools.
But upon taking over the land that Israel had voluntarily relinquished, the very first thing the Palestinians did was to put the synagogues to the torch. "Gaza's night sky turned orange as fires roared across the settlements," the Associated Press reported. "Women ululated, teens set off fireworks, and crowds chanted 'God is great.' "
What happened last week in Australia has happened in the United States and Canada, too. Congregation Beth Israel in Gadsden, Ala., was firebombed by a Nazi sympathizer in 1960. The similarly-named Beth Israel synagogue in Austin was burned in 2021. A Vancouver synagogue was doused with fuel and set on fire this past May; fortunately the damage was confined to the front doors and no one was hurt. Six months earlier, Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue in suburban Montreal.
There will be more. As overt antisemitism becomes increasingly normalized, the hate crimes will continue to pile up. More Jews will be menaced and assaulted, more antisemitism will be pumped into social media, more cities will experience "Jew hunts" — and more synagogues will go up in flames. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, to borrow Yeats's phrase. Our world is deeply disordered and increasingly out of control. Something truly frightful is coming. Jews, as always the canary in the coal mine, are the first to be targeted. But they won't be the last.
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A Social Security parable
My recent column on the myths that obscure the truth about Social Security drew a lot of response, much of it angry or scornful. Many Americans, having been told for so long that the Social Security taxes withheld from their paychecks are saved in a "trust fund" that will cover their benefits when they stop working, simply refuse to believe that no money has been set aside by the government for their retirement.
As I wrote, however, the Social Security trust fund is just an accounting fiction. The money workers contribute to Social Security is spent by the federal government when it is received, just like all other tax revenue. The supposed assets of the trust fund are merely IOUs from the federal government to itself. The Treasury "borrows" funds paid to the Social Security Administration, which receives US bonds in exchange. But when borrower and lender are the same, an IOU is meaningless. When those bonds are liquidated to pay future benefits, it will all be an act. The government will get the money to repay what it owes Social Security the way it gets money to pay for everything. It will have to raise taxes, cut spending, or take on even more debt.
Which wouldn't be a problem, except that Social Security is far and away the biggest item in a federal budget that is already wildly out of balance. And as long as Americans keep clinging to the myth that they are "owed" retirement benefits because they "paid into" the system, the more devastating the coming collapse will be.
 Social Security is an unsustainable government spending program, and it grows more so as time passes. |
Of course, I also heard from readers who welcomed my column, several of whom told me that they themselves have tried to make similar arguments in their conversation or correspondence with others.
I was particularly taken with what Augustus P. Lowell described to me as a "snarky" parable he wrote almost two decades ago to explain how Social Security works. It appeared in his occasional blog, If I Were King of the Forest (to which I've now subscribed), and I share it with his permission.
My wife and I are worried about having enough money for a comfortable retirement. With the state of the economy and of the world as they are, we have been quite anxious. So we've come up with a plan:
We have a little bit of extra money we can set aside every month for the future. We like to think of it as our "retirement trust fund." Rather than risking it in the stock market or making do with the miserly returns at a bank, we invest that money in loans to our young children — we call it "buying personal bonds."
We set our children's personal bonds to pay something like 4 percent per year above the inflation rate (depending on market conditions), so our retirement account will grow at a comfortable rate. And, of course, since at the moment we are managing the bonds and the bond sales for our children, we choose how to spend the money we have lent them. We usually try to spend it on something that benefits them, like food or rent or family vacations or insurance or a new car. In other words, something for the family.
Best of all, it is a safe investment. We are raising our children with a moral sense of obligation to always fulfill their promises and obligations. We are providing them the best education available so they should have no worries about employment. Those retirement assets are backed by what we like to call "full faith and credit," meaning the future income of our honorable and talented progeny. When we need the money to retire, we will simply liquidate the bonds and ask our children to pay back the money we've lent them. They should have plenty of income to do that. There's nothing for them to worry about.
All in all, I'm quite content with my plan. I've even given it a name. I call it "Social Security."
That is the system in a nutshell. Retirement benefits for the old aren't paid out of savings. They come from the earnings of the young. As with all pyramid schemes, those who get in early make out just fine. Those who join later get shafted.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Who is responsible?," Dec. 13, 1999:
Something remarkable occurred in Seattle last week. The chief of police resigned. In the aftermath of riots that disrupted the World Trade Organization, caused millions of dollars in damage, and blackened the reputation of Seattle's police, Chief Norm Stamper did the stand-up thing and stepped down.
The marvel of this resignation is that it was unforced. Stamper was not pushed out; Seattle's mayor says he tried to talk Stamper out of leaving. But the chief understood that it will be easier to repair the police force after the WTO debacle if someone new is at the helm. And perhaps he felt that this was a matter of honor — that since something went so badly awry on his watch, he deserved to pay a penalty.
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The Last Line
"Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America." — Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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