By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in The Times of Israel

30 May 2026

MELBOURNE, Australia — When 37-year-old father of three Heshy Adelist started his cleaning business around five years ago, he had carefully plotted how to make it profitable. Spending more than 1,000 pro bono hours scrubbing away antisemitic graffiti from walls, fences, schools and synagogues across Melbourne was not part of that plan.

Prior to the bloody Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, Adelist’s business, HGA Cleaning Solutions, was steadily growing. Based in Melbourne, Australia, where he has lived his entire life, he specializes in pressure cleaning, focusing mainly on windows and gutters. His days were mostly spent restoring apartment buildings, preparing homes for sale and washing down driveways until they sparkled.

Then came October 7, 2023, and almost immediately, Adelist’s phone started ringing.

As antisemitism surged across Australia amid the war in Gaza sparked by the Hamas onslaught, synagogues, Jewish schools, communal buildings and private Jewish homes around Melbourne were targeted with hateful antisemitic graffiti. Swastikas were daubed on fences and footpaths, and violent or profane messages such as “Fuck the Jews” and “Kill the Jews” were spray-painted onto fences.

Adelist received calls asking him to remove the graffiti because many in the Jewish community knew he had professional cleaning equipment and experience removing difficult stains quickly.

Despite spending an estimated 1,000-plus hours scrubbing the hateful messages off walls and fences across the city, Adelist has never charged for his work.

“I don’t want to be paid for that, it’s my mitzvah,” said Adelist, using the Hebrew word for good deed.

The beleaguered community has, since October 7, suffered one of the worst waves of antisemitism globally. The Times of Israel has reported that in the last three years, Jews in Australia have seen synagogues, schools and homes firebombed, two nurses threatening to kill Jewish patients in their hospital, and the discovery of a trailer filled with explosives said to have been intended to cause a mass-casualty event at a Sydney synagogue.

In December, terrorists opened fire at a Hanukkah event in Sydney’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 attendees in the worst terror attack in Australian history.

Adelist, whose father’s family survived the Holocaust and whose mother’s family survived the Farhud in Iraq, sees removing the graffiti as his community service.

“I arrive and assess the damage. Sometimes it can literally be rubbed off easily. Other times it’s a good 20 or 30 minutes of cleaning,” he said.

For months after October 7, Adelist was called to clean antisemitic graffiti almost every single day, including weekends.

“I remember for months in the first year, sometimes I would be gone all Sunday, and my wife was annoyed I wasn’t there to help her with the kids,” he said. “She used to say to me, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ but then she’d say, ‘Really, I know you do have to do this.’ She understood why I had to go.”

With several locations to cover at a time, Adelist would load his pressure hose, paint and cleaning equipment into his car and drive across Melbourne.

“If it’s a fence, I would paint over it. Sometimes I would use the [pressure] hose. When I drove to clean something, I brought all my work stuff with me, because sometimes it can be hard work,” he said.

His one-man cleaning service spread almost entirely through word of mouth. Several synagogues passed around his number, and community members would send him pictures of where they spotted the antisemitic graffiti.

“If it’s a private home, if it wasn’t the owner who called me, I would knock on the door and ask permission to clean it off, and 99 percent of the time they were very happy for me to get rid of it,” he said.

Adelist has also cleaned antisemitic graffiti off long stretches of fencing along Melbourne’s beaches and has returned multiple times to the same synagogues after repeat attacks. Even now, nearly three years after October 7, he estimates he is still called out to clean graffiti around once a week.

He has removed swastikas, anti-Israel abuse and pictures of rats with the word “Jew” among countless other hateful slogans.

The hate crime that ‘hit hard’

One job in particular has stayed with him.

A Jewish family living in an apartment block in the not particularly Jewish suburb of Clayton in Melbourne’s southeast woke up to find “Kill Jews” and “Jew Lives Here” sprayed across the building’s communal mailbox. They were the only Jewish family living in the apartment block, so the attack felt personal and targeted. When Adelist received the call, he immediately drove down to remove it.

“That job, it hit hard. It felt really close to home, and it was all over the news. Sometimes the graffiti targets Israel, but that job was one of the first anti-Jewish ones I saw. There was nothing about Israel — it was targeting Jews,” he said.

Despite the difficulties, Adelist says he would never limit his volunteering to removing only antisemitic graffiti. He has also removed anti-Muslim graffiti and says he would happily remove any other hateful graffiti that targeted any other group because of their religion.

“Where I live in Melbourne, it happens that most of the graffiti is mainly about Jews. Not many people are writing ‘Kill all Christians.’ Occasionally, I see that people do write Islamophobic stuff, but you don’t see it so much in these areas. But when I do see it, I always remove it. I’ve occasionally cleaned up ‘Fuck the Jews, Fuck the Muslims.’ Clearly, it’s someone who hates everyone,” he said.

His experience with cleaning so much antisemitism off the walls and houses of Melbourne led him to testify to Australia’s royal commission into antisemitism, outlining the effects of his volunteer work on his day-to-day life, as well as his experience of witnessing so much hate directed at Australian Jews.

There are signs, he thinks, that the worst of it has eased slightly. Security outside synagogues and Jewish events in Australia is much tighter than it used to be, and he suspects at least some of the vandals are more cautious about getting caught.

“I’m still busy, unfortunately, but since October 7, it’s definitely less and less. The police are definitely doing a bit more, but I think people are getting over the fad. Plus, with more security everywhere since Bondi, I think the random person who does graffiti is a little more scared than when they started doing it two years ago. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen,” he said.

For now, though, the calls still come. And when they do, Adelist gets in his car with his hose, paint and cleaning equipment and goes wherever he is needed, erasing at least some of the ugliness that has been daubed before someone else has to see it.