One year ago, I stood outside the Adass synagogue that was firebombed, and my heart broke into a thousand pieces. For a moment it felt as if history had torn a hole in the present. A place built by survivors who fled the worst evil the world had ever seen was lit by fire.

And the quiet truth is this: many of us thought this could never happen here. Not in Australia. Not in a city that prides itself on tolerance and easygoing decency. But it did. And something in every Jewish Australian cracked that morning. It was not just a building that burned, but our illusion of safety.

Later we learnt the hardest truth of all: this attack had been planned from afar, directed by Iran.

For Holocaust survivors, the sight of a synagogue in flames reopened wounds we thought time had sealed. The attack landed in a place beyond language. Many of them told me it was not the flames that frightened them most, but the feeling that the past they escaped had somehow found them again.

They came to Australia believing they had reached the safest shore on earth. To watch a synagogue burn here shook that promise in a way that cannot be undone. For younger Jews, it replaced a comforting story that Australia was immune to this hatred with the harsher reality that no country is guaranteed special protection from the darkness in people’s hearts.

“It was not just a building that burned, but our illusion of safety.

And since that morning, we’ve watched anti-Semitism keep surging across the country, not in whispers, but in open threats, vandalism, and a cruelty we once thought was unthinkable here.

Now, as the Adass community prepares to rebuild their sanctuary, the question is not just what kind of synagogue will rise, but what kind of country we will be around it. So what do we do now?

We show up. Not just for Jewish Australians, but for every community that wonders if their neighbours will stand with them when the world tilts.

We make it clear that places of worship are sacred, no matter whose prayers rise inside them.

We strengthen the bonds between communities, deepen the conversations that discomfort us, and build a culture where the safety of the smallest group is the responsibility of the whole.

That is how a country heals. That is how a country grows.

Because the real measure of a nation is not whether it avoids moments like this, but how fiercely it chooses one another when they come.