‘We are builders by nature’: Hakoah tops out

The Sydney Jewish community marked a major milestone on Friday with the topping-out ceremony for the new Hakoah Club at White City.

Hakoah president Steven Lowy cast the rebuild as an act of defiance in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.

“The Jewish community, as you know, have gone through an incredibly difficult time … but we don’t cower, we don’t step backwards, we confront it head on. We are builders by nature,” he said.

He noted Hakoah was one of three major community projects under construction, alongside the Sydney Jewish Museum expansion and a new high school at Moriah College.

“We’re building all of this in the face of great adversity, so we can make our community much stronger in the years to come,” he said. “That’s how the Jewish community deals with adversity.”

The project, some 17 years in the making since the old Bondi club was sold in 2009, is expected to open in the second quarter of 2027.

It will include a floodlit synthetic football pitch, multi-use courts, swimming pools, a gym, function spaces and both kosher and non-kosher dining.

Lowy said the club, which once had upwards of 11,000 members — a quarter of them non-Jewish — would again become the communal hub for Sydney’s Jewish community and “a beacon of social cohesion”.

He also paid tribute to Hakoah major donors Isaac Wakil and Stanley Roth, both of whom had recently passed away.

As part of the ceremony, a Norfolk pine was planted on the site. Lowy said the tree was chosen because the species is found at Archer Park, near where the Bondi attack occurred, in recognition of “the pain and suffering of those families”. As the tree grew, he said, so too would the community.

NSW Premier Chris Minns spoke of how in Vienna, the Nazis seized a Jewish sporting club called Hakoah in 1938, the same year refugees fleeing Austria and Germany arrived in Sydney and founded their own Hakoah. “

You can seize a building, you can even erase a name from the record books, but you cannot take a community’s strength,” he said.

Minns said the club had faced dark days — the 1982 bombing and the Bondi attack — but the response had never wavered. “Every single time the answer was the same. You build, you don’t stop,” he said.

Federal member for Kingsford Smith Matt Thistlethwaite, representing the Prime Minister, said he could think of no greater symbol of the strength and resilience of Australia’s Jewish community.