Security funding gap
Security funding is failing to keep pace with rising threats facing the Jewish community.
Jewish philanthropy can not be expected to carry the cost of protecting the Jewish community, as Commonwealth funding, despite significant, fails to keep pace with rising threats, the Royal Commission has heard.
ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim outlined a three-year, $124 million funding agreement between the Department of Home Affairs and the ECAJ, running from May 2026 to June 2029. But he said the community was always behind.
“The amounts that we’ve requested are always estimates based on what has occurred up to the point where we provide that estimate. So in a sense, we’re always playing catch up because the costs keep increasing and the level of need for security measures keeps increasing.”
Counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC took Wertheim through the evolution of Commonwealth security funding since 2007, including a $25 million emergency grant after October 7, 2023, and a further $32.5 million following the Adass Israel synagogue firebombing in 2024. The current funding round has attracted 192 applications.
Wertheim pushed back against claims that ECAJ could spend the funds without oversight, saying the assertion that the organisation is at liberty to allocate the funds as it sees fit is an “outrageous falsehood” that has fuelled antisemitic commentary online.
The Dor Foundation chief executive and JCA allocations committee chair Tahli Blicblau told the commission the Jewish community faced the most serious threat environment in its history, driven by four converging radical ideologies including Islamic extremism, the extreme far right, radical elements of the far left, and conspiratorial movements.
Blicblau, a former principal intelligence analyst with the Community Security Group NSW, used the analogy of a walled garden to describe the pressure on communal giving, with security as the wall and religious, cultural and educational causes as the garden.
Over the past three or four years, she said, “There has been a need to invest far more heavily in the wall than the garden.”