By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC

5 May 2026

Public hearings commenced this week at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, and we will be hearing a great deal about the threats facing Australia’s Jewish community. And rightly so. But with all the coverage about what has gone wrong in Australian society such that so many Jews feel so fearful, I wanted to contribute a slightly different perspective — or add another layer to people’s understanding of Australian Jewish life.

What’s it like to be an Australian Jew?

The first word that comes to mind is comfort. Being Jewish in Australia is, for me, feeling like I’m home. I remember sitting in my dormitory room at the end of a gap year, listening to my American roommates map out their next decade. They would fly home for a few weeks, sleep in their childhood bedrooms, then pack up their lives and head off to college where they would live away from their parents for the next four years. After that, they would most likely take a job in new city. They weren’t really planning to return home; rather, their whole lives would involve new places, new people, new cities — an entire life in transit.

I remember thinking at the time how completely different our lives were likely to turn out. For I too went back to Melbourne, but it wasn’t a pit-stop. I returned to my parent’s house, and slept in my childhood bedroom for the next few years as I went to university a few kilometres away. Eventually, I moved into an apartment that was a two-minute drive from my parents’ house. I hung out with my friends from the two Jewish schools I’d attended. I spent time volunteering and giving back to the community that had nourished me — including a stint as a youth movement leader, helping kids I’d known since they were born, and providing support to young adults with disabilities.

Over the next decade and a half, I ended up spending most of my time in the same two square kilometres in which I’d been born. And if I had known, at the end of that gap year, that this is what awaited me, I couldn’t have imagined anything better.

That’s the thing about Australian Jewish communities. With approximately 100,000 Jews dispersed across the wider Australian population of 27 million people, our communities are small, tight-knit and very stable. If you go to a Jewish school, your friends and people you know don’t just disappear after graduation. Many of them hang around. You’ll see them at synagogue, at the shops, at events, at birthday parties, and at pick up and drop off once you all have kids. There’s no clean break, where everyone goes off and becomes anonymous members of communities somewhere else. Most of us just stay here. 

It’s hard to explain just how tight-knit Australian Jewish communities are to someone who hasn’t grow up in one. My best friend from grade four is still my best friend. We were inseparable as kids, constantly being moved to opposite ends of the classroom and getting into the kind of trouble that only ten-year-olds with too much energy and not enough supervision can generate. That was twenty-four years ago. And yet we still hang out regularly.

Most Australian Jews are born into a handful of suburbs and stay connected to them for most of their lives. In Melbourne, that’s places like Caulfield or East St Kilda. In Sydney, it’s Bondi or St Ives. Unless you make a deliberate break, that’s likely where you’ll stay. Sure, a few people move overseas or interstate, and a decent chunk might even move to Israel. But the rest? They are right where you left them, whether that’s two years later or twenty.

A friend of mine who married an American and comes back to Melbourne every year or so, says every homecoming to Melbourne feels like walking back into a room where no one has moved anything while you were gone. The same faces at synagogue, the same person behind the counter at the kosher shop, the same neighbours — slightly greyer, maybe a few more wrinkles in tow, but otherwise exactly as you remember it.

Being an Australian Jew means having all your creature comforts right where you want them. There’s the kosher grocery store that has stayed in the same family for decades. There’s the drycleaners who know your parents and grandparents. There’s the park that may have had its equipment updated, but it’s the same place your parents and grandparents also played. There’s the synagogue with the same rabbi, forty years on, who may have celebrated your father’s bar-mitzvah. Everyone knows everyone — or at least, it feels that way.

I love the closely connected nature of my community, but like all tight-knit communities, there are sometimes downsides.

When you live in a small community, you are known. People know your parents, your siblings, your history. They remember that you had a wild stage decades earlier, when you were fourteen. Also, sometimes it feels that there’s not a lot of room to reinvent yourself. If you’ve been here your whole life, people have seen every version of you.

Privacy can also be scarce when you breathe the same air and bump into the same few hundred people across the same few streets. Sometimes it can feel that the community is cliquey in the way tight communities often are — not unfriendly exactly, but not necessarily looking for new additions either. Everyone already has their group. Their school friends are still here, their cousins live around the corner, their social calendar fills itself. If you’re an outsider trying to get in, can take patience. 

Despite some of these downsides, on any given day for most of my life, being an Australian Jew felt like a tremendous blessing. Everything you need, all the familiarity and comfort, is right there. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. 

And maybe that’s what makes this moment feel so unsettling. Because for so many of us, this has always been home in the fullest sense of the word. And so to hear, day after day at the royal commission, stories of Australian Jews who no longer feel safe here, who think twice before wearing a Star of David or sending their children to Jewish schools, is despair inducing. It forces a question I suspect many Australian Jews never expected to ask: What happens when the place that has always felt like home starts to feel uncertain?

There’s an undeniable feeling of comfort that goes along with being part of this community. Like knowing that whatever else in the world changes, this corner of the world will probably look more or less the same next time you see it. To me, that’s everything. And even with the ordeal the Jewish community is currently going through, I hope we are able to stay this way. 

Nomi Kaltmann is an Australian journalist and lawyer. She is a proud member of Melbourne’s Jewish community.