Pearls and Irritations

The Adass Israel synagogue in Ripponlea, Melbourne was firebombed this week in a horrific attack.

When this synagogue was set ablaze, the incident also took a match and gasoline to our news cycle. The debate around antisemitism was already primed to blow.

Only a week before the Executive Council of Australian Jewry had published a report, claiming antisemitism had quadrupled over the past year.

Meanwhile, a synagogue in Melbourne and another in Sydney hosted events which promoted Israel’s forever war, and subsequently faced protests.

NSW Premier, Chris Minns, responded to this series of events with a promise of “urgent” law reform which bans protests outside places of worship.

But what does the Adass Israel community say, and why are Australians not taking notice? In short, the community known simply as Adass are not very talkative, so there is not much to quote from. This is a deliberate reflection of their beliefs.

It is to the shame of our Jewish community and Australia’s political culture that this did not prevent the political vultures from swooping in before the fire had even been extinguished.

The blame game

Everyone is looking for someone else to point a finger at.

Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who is wanted for charges of war crimes, tweeted:

it is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia, including the scandalous decision to support the UN resolution calling on Israel “to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible”, and preventing a former Israeli minister from entering the country.

Without a hint of irony, Australia’s ruling class nodded along to the remarks of the leader of the self-appointed Jewish State. As of March 2024 – only six months into Israel’s war against the mosques of Gaza – Al Jazeera had reported that over 1000 mosques had been destroyed.

Some anti-Zionists were equally guilty of rushing to speculate, eager to push back against the narrative stacked against them. It was the Nazis whodunit, they had said. No, it was an inside job by the Zionists. Others invoked Mossad.

Any and all public speculation about the perpetrators and their motives is equally offensive.

When the police cuff the responsible terrorists, we can be sure that Adass will remain effectively silent, while the politics continues to play out.

“We are a very quiet community”

Over 1,000 people attended a vigil at a park near the synagogue on Sunday. Jews from the community, and non-Jews from outside of it, gathered to express their solidarity by draping themselves in Israeli flags, posing with politicians, and dancing for the cameras. The problem was that not a single Adass member was in sight.

Benjamin Klein, the secretary of the synagogue, spoke to Fairfax Media several times this week, in a sharp contrast to the community’s usual desire for privacy.

“We are a very quiet community. We are not involved in politics, we don’t have Israeli flags. We pray for Israel, we pray for peace. We don’t recognise the state per se but we don’t protest for or against. We really don’t get involved. We are busy trying to do the right thing by God. That is what our mission is and that is what we focus our lives on.”

It is exactly because they keep to themselves that they have remained an enigma to other Jews, let alone to those who are not Jewish at all.

Everything in their lifestyles is carefully curated to ensure that they remain laser-focused on studying Torah for most of their waking hours. Owning mobile phones is only granted if it is a tweaked model with vetted and restricted internet access.

Despite their name, Adass [meaning ‘Congregation of’] Israel is not a Zionist community. Throughout history, going back to the Torah itself, Jews have referred to themselves as the ‘Children of Israel’. By contrast, the founders of the Zionist entity only decided upon the name ‘Israel’ two days before declaring independence in 1948.

While Adass is its own community – arguably its own sect – that is unique to Melbourne, they are quite small. With their members numbering only 2,000 people and their private lifestyles, it leaves very few published works to quote from. The Adass community began as a melting pot of different Hasidic groups – namely Satmar, Vishnitz, Belz and Munkatcher sects – who each have their own ideologies regarding politics and Zionism. What unifies Adass’s diverse ideology is that they do not see Israel as central to their identity, while the majority of today’s Jews do.

Of the different Hasidic sects that birthed the Adass community, the most notable work on Zionism and politics is ‘Vayoel Moshe’ (1961) by Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the founder of Satmar. Teitelbaum prosecutes the case that Zionism is an abomination to G-d and a reincarnation of the golden calf.

[Jews were] faced with a severe and bitter punishment: the work of the Satan succeeded and the Zionists achieved a heretical state. [page 13]

This terrible abomination that we face in the form of the Zionist state, which violates the severe oaths that Hashem [G-d] has placed upon us, and furthermore leads the innocent astray and inculcates heresy and denial of the Torah throughout the world. [page 41]

While some Satmarer [plural term for Satmar Jews] do live in Israel and in West Bank settlements, they continue to identify as non-Zionists. They live a life of civil disobedience, avoid taxes, and are beaten by police for dodging the draft.

Polarising approaches

In Rabbi Norman Lamm’s essay. ‘The Ideology of the Neturei Karta: According to the Satmarer Version’ (1971), he describes Satmar’s non-Zionist ideology as “religious quietistic apoliticism.” While Lamm is a rabbinic authority and peer-reviewed, it is worth noting that he comes from a Modern Orthodox and Zionist sect, which is shunned by the ultra-orthodox subjects of his paper.

Lamm points out that the creation of a Zionist entity is an inherently political action, whereas Satmarer espouse the beliefs that any “political initiative is a gesture of defiance of the divine Redeemer [G-d]; it is an act of arrogance, and is ‘cynical’ or dog-like.”

Therefore, Satmar’s acts of protest are not against Zionism, but against politics itself. Their acts of protest are conducted quietly, with their message directed only toward other ultra-orthodox communities.

Satmar are not to be confused with the Neturei Karta sect, who are openly political and who revel in the spotlight they receive as visibly ultra-orthodox Jews at protests in New York and London.

In December 2006, Neturei Karta members attended a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. The sect’s leader, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, later attempted to clarify that the group does not deny the Holocaust. But the damage was already done, and it is hard to deny that the group deserved condemnation at that moment.

What followed was months of protests, threats, and abuse against Neturei Karta, until, in April 2007, their main synagogue was destroyed in a fire. Initially the NYPD declared the fire suspicious, but later walked it back. Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss remained defiant. “There’s no question,” Weiss said, “that the issue [of arson against the synagogue] is to stifle the opposition to Zionism.”

In 1995, Adass was also targeted by arsonists in a separate incident.

In both cases, it is unclear what, or if, the police investigations had concluded.

In November 2023, a contender for Satmar’s now-contested leadership, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, condemned Neturei Karta’s political activism. Teitelbaum accused Neturei Karta of associating with Palestinian terrorists, self-indulgence, and desecrating God’s name.

However, Teitelbaum’s strong words were not enough to stop Satmar and Neturei Karta from reuniting for further protests. In May 2024, the ultra-orthodox publication, Shtetl, reported on a series of protests co-organised by the two sects occurring outside Zionist synagogues in Monsey, New York.

Let them mourn in peace

When a Torah is damaged beyond repair, Adass buries the scroll and proceeds with a funeral. Each scroll costs roughly $135,000 and takes 18 months for a specialised scribe to write.

The secretary of Adass, Benjamin Klein, told the Sydney Morning Herald that at least two or three Torah scrolls had been burned.

“It’s like burying a body,” Klein said. “The whole community comes, the rabbi speaks, people tear their clothes as a sign of mourning, and the men fast for 24 hours.”

But neither the ruling class who have paid tribute, nor you and I, will receive an invite to the funeral.

They forbid themselves from watching the six o’clock news. They do not care for world leaders condemning the arsonists with scripts read from a teleprompter.

They do not mingle with the mainstream Jewish community, let alone the pro-Israel lobby.

Adass Israel are not allies of the pro-Palestine movement and they do not pretend to be. They consider it forbidden to engage with the politics of the Palestine protests every Sunday in Melbourne CBD.

They want the film crews to stop peering through their windows.

They want to be left alone.

They probably don’t want me, or anyone, to write yet another article about them. Despite this swirl of contradictions, I have done my best to represent them kindly in this article, while remaining acutely aware that I am also not above these politics.

To the Adass community, all of these politics is less kosher than a bacon sandwich. Unfortunately this has not stopped Labor and Liberals, and Zionists and anti-Zionists alike from force-feeding Adass a diet of politics while they fast and mourn.