https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/05/my-house-was-attacked-by-anti-semites/
AN INTERVIEW BY BRENDAN O’NEILL
Anti-Semitism has exploded in Australia since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Synagogues have been set alight. The offices of pro-Israel politicians have been ransacked. Even a Jewish childcare centre was set on fire and covered in racist graffiti. Perhaps most infamously, two Australian nurses openly boasted on camera about wanting to kill Israeli patients.
Alex Ryvchin, CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, was caught up in this wave of hate. In January, the house where he and his family used to live was attacked by anti-Semitic thugs. Alex joined the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss what has gone wrong in Australia. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.
Brendan O’Neill: What happened when your old family home was attacked?
Alex Ryvchin: My wife woke me up at about five in the morning and told me that our old house was hit. She showed me this footage, which was taken by our old neighbours across the street, showing an inferno right in front of our old house.
We lived there for five years and it was a really beloved family home. We bought that house because of my grandfather. He had been an engineer in Kyiv, but couldn’t find work when we first migrated to Australia, because he had health issues and couldn’t speak English. The only useful thing he could do was drive a bus for a Jewish social club of Holocaust survivors. The club would give him $5 a day, and that’s all he was able to earn at that time. I would go with him before and after school, and we would drive up and down this beautiful winding road in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. On one side, you can see views of Sydney Harbor, and on the other side you’ve got the Pacific Ocean. I remember how my grandfather would look at the houses on that road. To him, it was like a utopia. It was everything that he knew he personally would never have, but that he thought he could create for his family in Australia. So when I saw a house on that street for sale, we had to buy it. That house represented a great deal to me.
When more CCTV footage of the attack came out, you could see two guys get out of a car. They had a can of petrol, which they poured like a fuse across the width of the street, leading up to cars parked in the driveway. They lit it and these cars just ignited. They targeted one car in the driveway of the adjoining property, which was still owned by a Jewish couple in their 80s. They daubed it with ‘Fuck Jews’ on one side and ‘Fuck Israel’ on the other. I thought that was very poetic. It’s like two sides of the same coin.