By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in Ha’aretz
16 September 2025
“MELBOURNE – On a warm winter’s day at his home in Melbourne, Australia, Menachem Vorchheimer is buzzing with energy. It is just after 10 A.M., but the 52-year-old Orthodox father-of-four is already deep in conversation about the lawsuits he filed the day before. Five fresh cases have been lodged with the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), each tied to alleged incidents of racial and religious vilification against Australian Jews.
VCAT is not a court; it is a civil justice body that can hear and resolve cases without the expense or formality of going to court. While VCAT is more commonly associated with landlord-tenant disputes or workplace discrimination, its human rights list hears cases involving racial and religious vilification. According to Vorchheimer, he has filed 13 cases total since the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing war in Gaza: 11 with VCAT’s human rights division, and two with the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Vorchheimer positions himself not as a legal nuisance but as a man determined to hold powerful institutions to account. Five of Vorchheimer’s VCAT cases concern the usage of the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” by pro-Palestinian protest leaders and their supporters, including former Australian Greens party lead Adam Bandt. VCAT recently declined to grant an interim injunction against the use of this phrase on the basis that doing so could prejudice the outcome of Vorchheimer’s other pending cases.
One of these pending cases is against Palestinian Australian activist and businessman Hash Tayeh for deploying the phrase and allegedly inciting hostility towards Jews. In a social media post, Tayeh described Vorchheimer’s VCAT cases as a “fixation, and an attempt to silent dissent of Israel,” and accused him of “weaponizing legal processes to intimidate.”
Vorchheimer also has an active claim against the Victorian government, arguing it breached racial vilification laws by failing to act despite being “expressly aware of incitement to hatred against Jews since October 2023.” Other ongoing cases target the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, the Islamic Council of Victoria and Victoria Police, among others.
In June, Vorchheimer settled a case against the activist group Free Palestine Melbourne, which falsely blamed “Zionists” for a fire at Burgertory, a restaurant founded by Tayeh, in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Caulfield South. Vorchheimer successfully argued that the group’s actions “incited hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of Jewish people” based on race and religion.
For Vorchheimer, the equation is simple: “I am not behaving in a vexatious or crazy way. A person has a right to raise concerns about the war in the Middle East and Gaza … [but] I have a concern with the language that is used and vilifies, incites hatred and makes it difficult for people to coexist in this country,” he said.
Vorchheimer feels strongly that there have been significant instances of vilification against Jews and that authorities have taken inadequate action to protect the community.
“Under Australian law, freedom of speech and the right to protest are not absolute. They are subject to certain caveats [that do not allow you to] racially and religiously vilify. As long as racial and religious vilification are happening, I will need to be open to [filing] more cases. Am I hoping the government will take action against hate preachers? Yes, I am hoping the government will enforce the law and not leave it to an individual to do so,” he said.
Not his first rodeo
To understand what drives Vorchheimer, it is impossible to separate his determination from some of his most painful life experiences. He was born in Sydney to an Australian-born mother and a German-born father who survived the Holocaust. “My mum is born post-war in Australia, my dad is born pre-war in Germany. He was sent away on a Kindertransport [to England], and experienced life-changing events,” he said.
Vorchheimer studied at Jewish schools in Sydney and later Melbourne. In 1988, when Vorchheimer was 14, his father was struck by a car and suffered critical brain injuries. For three years his father drifted in and out of a coma, often between life and death, before passing away six weeks before Vorchheimer’s final exams.
“One of the big turning points for me in school was when my dad was in a coma for a period of time. I could say my name is John – he didn’t know who I was,” he said.
Vorchheimer went on to study accounting, completing undergraduate and master’s degrees in finance, though the profession never suited him. “I don’t like processing peoples tax returns,” he quipped.
In 2006, Vorchheimer faced another life-changing event. One November evening, while walking to synagogue in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of St Kilda East with two of his young children, he was verbally harassed and physically assaulted by members of a local Australian football club. The players hurled antisemitic abuse at him; when he confronted them, one struck him in the face, leaving a deep bruise and cut under his eye, while another grabbed his yarmulke and hat. The driver of their bus, he would later learn, was an off-duty Victorian police officer.
Although the assault made front-page news in the Herald Sun, one of Australia’s largest newspapers, months passed without charges. Vorchheimer refused to let the matter drop: He sought legal advice, rallied community support from his local Member of Parliament and combed through legislation himself.
Discovering that police officers remain bound by their code of conduct even while off duty, he was introduced to Dyson Hore-Lacy, one of Australia’s most eminent lawyers specializing in cases against the state. Suspecting reluctance within Victoria Police to investigate one of their own, Vorchheimer ultimately sued the Premier of Victoria and Victoria Police. In response, two of the football players and the police officer who was involved were charged and convicted in 2008.
“It took two years to settle that case. It showed me that if you rely on the justice system to do what needs to be done, it won’t be done. It also showed me the dirty nature of politics; there are people with vested interests that look out for each other,” he said.
Around 2012, Vorchheimer began considering formal legal study. He was part of a small team that drafted submissions to a commission that ultimately led to Yeshivah Melbourne and Yeshivah Bondi being the only Jewish institutions called to testify and answer the commission for their historic failure to protect Jewish children in their care.
Soon after the commission concluded, in 2016, Vorchheimer enrolled in a Juris Doctor at the University of Melbourne, formally beginning his path to becoming a lawyer. He graduated in early 2023.
With his graduation only a few months before October 7, and with rising antisemitism in Australia, Vorchheimer soon sprang into action. “My father’s lived experience is antisemitism. If I take my father’s history, and all the rest of it, when something happens, you don’t lie down and say ‘this is fate,'” he said.
One-man band
Vorchheimer does not yet know whether his cases will succeed, but he remains unwavering in his determination to pursue them. He prepares and lodges all matters himself, representing his own interests in VCAT. Outside of this, he manages his family’s investments and does not hold a formal day job.
Although he is a one-man band working outside of Melbourne’s mainstream communal bodies, Vorchheimer is not without advice or support from local Jewish institutions. “I do engage with them, I have positive rapport with them. I’m not going to use names. If I email them, they all respond,” he said.
“Menachem saw the inadequacy of the official responses to some high-profile instances of antisemitism and decided to take on the offenders himself through the civil courts, and he is representing himself,” Daniel Aghion, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said in a statement sent by text message. “This is not for the faint-hearted. Being your own lawyer might not be the wisest thing to do, but you have to admire his courage.”
But independence comes at a cost. Vorchheimer has received death threats, leading him to scrub his home address from the internet. Recently, he was shown screenshots of people discussing “taking him out” while he was on one of his daily runs.
“In any scenario there is a risk, but every risk is a calculated risk. That’s the territory. That’s the consequence,” he said. “But at the same time the cost of not doing something is much greater.”