By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in the Herald Sun

12 January 2026

On the eve of this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, I don’t think I have ever felt more uneasy about the future of Jews in Australia. My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor who came here in the 1950s searching for safety, and a life not shaped by terror. Australia was meant to be a lucky country, a country where Jews could not only survive but thrive.

Growing up, I absorbed that assumption without question. Antisemitism existed, of course, but it felt sporadic, something that was rare and unfortunate

Since Jews were massacred on Bondi Beach during Chanukah, that certainty has cracked. I find myself wondering, in a way I never previously allowed, whether Australia is still safe for Jews. My grandfather chose this country because it promised an ordinary life, not vigilance. I think about how devastated he would be to see Jewish schools, synagogues and community spaces turned into fortresses, guarded and fenced, and to know that Jews can now be murdered simply for celebrating their faith in public, on one of the most iconic beaches in the country.

The Holocaust is so vast that it can feel abstract, and it can sometimes feel difficult to think that something of such a magnitude could ever happen again. But the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers, it began with incitement, with vilification, with normalised contempt of Jews, with assaults that were tolerated or minimised, with laws that narrowed Jewish lives, with ghettos and camps and only then industrialised murder. That slow tightening is embedded deeply in Jewish memory.

To feel even the faintest echo of that vulnerability here, in the country my family loves and has contributed to, is profoundly sobering.

I know most Australians are good people and abhor antisemitism. But at the same time, my community was the only one that was burying our dead over the summer holidays, and that grief and trauma will stay with us forever.

So how will I mark Holocaust Remembrance Day this year? I will think about whether there is a Jewish future in Australia. I will remember my grandfather and the family he lost, his parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, lives erased long before I was born continue to shape my own.

As a child, the Holocaust felt like something enormous and distant, a universe away from my own. I never imagined I would feel even a flicker of what it means to be targeted for being Jewish in Australia. Yet now, in the shadow of the country’s worst terrorist attack against Jews, history feels closer than it ever should.