By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in The Australian Financial Review

26 January 2026

“Like many Jews in Australia, I am the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but until recently, that felt like part of my family history rather than something that shaped how I thought about my own safety in this country.

My grandfather, Joseph Kaltmann, came to Australia after his parents and his brother and sister were murdered in concentration camps, and after he became the only survivor of his immediate family. He chose Australia because it was far from Europe and because he believed it was a place without entrenched antisemitism, a place where Jews could build ordinary lives without always looking over their shoulders.

After he arrived here as an orphan in the 1950s, he rebuilt his life, including marrying, having children, including my dad, and becoming deeply loyal to this country because of the new start it had given him. He used to call Australia the goldene medina, the golden land, not because he thought it was perfect, but because it was safe, and because safety, after what he had lived through, felt like an extraordinary gift rather than a basic expectation.

I think about that now, and I wonder what he would make of the Australia we are living in, where antisemitism is no longer something that exists on the margins, and where Australian Jews have been murdered in the worst terrorist attack in this country’s history.

This year, when I mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, I will do so with feelings that are hard to separate, because I still love this country and feel proud to be Australian, but I also feel shaken in a way I have never felt before, and I know that something has shifted in how safe many Jews now feel here.

For most of my life, I did not think antisemitism was something I would have to worry about. Growing up in Melbourne, I assumed antisemitism was a relic of olden days, and that while it was something we studied and commemorated, it was not something that would affect our lives in Australia. I never thought I would attend the funeral of my friend Sheina Gutnick’s father, Reuven Morrison, after he was murdered for being Jewish on Bondi Beach, and I never thought that this would happen at a gathering for Hanukkah, a festival most Jews celebrate for the light it brings into the world, rather than violence.

Since then, many things that once felt straightforward no longer do. I never used to think twice about attending my kids’ Jewish schools, about public Jewish celebrations, about community events, and now I know that many parents, including me, are quietly running risk assessments before attending these locations in a way that we never had to make before. This does not mean we expect the worst, and it does not mean we think Australia is about to become something unrecognisable, but it does mean that we are more alert and more aware, and that is not a neutral change.

So, when I think about how to commemorate the Holocaust this year, it is not only as a historical tragedy, but as a reminder of how quickly antisemitism can move from being tolerated to being normalised, and from being normalised to being acted upon. I do not believe that Australia is on the same path as Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and I want to be careful and responsible in how I say that, but I also no longer believe that violence against Jews is unthinkable here, and that realisation sits heavily with me as both a Jew and a parent.

There is also a personal dimension to this remembrance that I did not expect, which is a sense that I have lost something I did not realise I still had, which is the belief that my children would grow up with the same uncomplicated confidence I had about being Jewish in Australia. I do not want them to inherit fear, and I do not want them to feel that their identity is something that needs to be hidden or managed, but I also cannot pretend that the Australia they are growing up in now is the same one I grew up in.

My grandfather believed in this country, especially after knowing what it looked like, when his country of birth, Czechoslovakia, decided that Jews were expendable. I still believe in Australia too, and I still believe that it can be a place where Jews live openly and safely, but belief now feels less passive than it once did, and more like something that requires vigilance and moral clarity from the broader community, not just from Jews ourselves.

This Holocaust Remembrance Day, I will be thinking not only about the family members my grandfather lost, whose absence still echoes through our family decades later, but also about the kind of country we want to be now, and about whether we are willing to take antisemitism seriously before it hardens into something that is much harder to confront.

I will be marking the day with grief, with love for this country, and with a new and unwelcome awareness that history is not as distant as I once believed, even here.”