Why the Jewish community must stand with Indigenous Australians

On Anzac Day morning, as the sun climbed above Martin Place, Pastor Ray Minniecon, a 75‑year‑old Kabi Kabi and Goreng Goreng elder, a grandfather, an Anglican pastor, and one of Sydney’s most quietly devoted servants of the public good, stood before thousands of Australians to deliver the Acknowledgement of Country at the dawn service. He was met with booing.

Ray did not flinch. He paused, drew breath, and continued, honouring Australia’s war dead with the same grace and dignity he has shown throughout a lifetime of service. The applause when he finished was loud and sustained. But the booing had already done its damage. It echoed, as acts of public racism always do, far beyond the moment itself.

The Jewish community knows this echo. Not as abstract history, but as lived inheritance. We are a people who understand, in our bones, what it means to be shouted down in a public place and told, without words, that you do not belong. What happened at Martin Place is not someone else’s problem. It is ours.

A Holocaust survivor’s bequest and a partnership born from mutual pain. 

Tom Rona was a Holocaust survivor and a member of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. He had survived the unsurvivable.

He understood, as only those who have been systematically erased can understand, the urgency of preserving memory before it is lost. When he died, his estate was directed toward something permanent and from that bequest the Rona Tranby Trust grew.

Named in honour of Tom Rona and Tranby College in Glebe, a pioneering institution in Aboriginal adult education, the Trust was founded on a simple conviction: that the Jewish community’s hard‑won expertise in recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors could be offered in a partnership with First Nations Australians, to help preserve the oral histories of their elders before those voices are gone forever.

The parallel is deep. Both people know what it means to have history weaponised against them, to have their stories dismissed or denied, to fight for the right to exist and to be remembered. Both know the invaluable worth of an elder’s voice and the devastation of losing it.

Standing on holy ground.

The Rona Tranby Trust was able to send Uncle Ray to Israel for the centenary commemoration of the charge at Beersheba, a moment that belonged to him in a manner few outsiders fully appreciate.

Ray’s Grandfather, Private James Lingwoodock, served in the 11th Light Horse Brigade in World War I. His brothers Sonny and Phillip served in Vietnam. Three generations of his family gave their bodies, and in some cases their spirits, to the defence of this country.

Ray went to Beersheba not as a guest, but as a descendant, bearing with him the stories of the Coloured Diggers, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men who answered Australia’s call to arms and who were so often absent from the official telling when they came home. Placing him on that ground, at that commemoration, was precisely the kind of act of recognition the Trust exists to make possible: making sure that those who have been rendered invisible are seen, honoured and heard.

What Anzac Day’s ugliness demands of us.

The booing of Ray Minniecon was not a random act of rudeness. It was organised racism, directed at a sacred ceremony and site, by people determined to deny Indigenous Australians their rightful place in the national story.

Ray said it came from “a very dark space” and that for many of his people, it was simply “just another Saturday in Sydney.”

That phrase should stop us cold. If this is the surrounding noise of First Nations daily life, then the Jewish community has a particular responsibility to say: not on our watch. Not while we have a voice, resources and a memory long enough to know exactly where organised contempt for a people leads.

We did not survive the twentieth century to be bystanders in the twenty‑first.

What solidarity looks like in practice.

There are three things the Australian Jewish community can do.

Support the Rona Tranby Trust. The oral history recording program is doing
vital work, but runs, as Ray himself does, on determination and goodwill. It needs funding, volunteers and the institutional backing of our community’s networks. Every elder whose story is captured is a victory against erasure. Every story lost is irreversible.

Speak out. What happened at the dawn service was racist. Say so, clearly and publicly, in synagogues, communal organisations and everyday conversations. The Jewish community’s voice carries moral weight in this country. Silence in the face of racism directed at others is not neutrality; it is complicity.

Build real relationships. Not transactional gestures of goodwill, but the
kind of sustained, respectful partnership the Rona Tranby Trust embodies. Get to know the Ray Minniecons in your city. Attend an Acknowledgement of Country and mean it. Learn whose land you are on, and something of what that land has meant to its people across tens of thousands of years.

Memory is the act of resistance.

When Tom Rona survived the Holocaust, he bore with him knowledge most people never have to confront: that civilisation is fragile, hatred is patient and that the only answer to both is an unrelenting devotion to human dignity. He left behind resources so that knowledge could become action.

Ray Minniecon stood at a dawn service and was booed. He kept speaking. His grandfather’s people were taken from Vanuatu in the blackbirding trade. His parents told him to run when the black cars came. His brothers came home from war damaged or in body bags. And still, Ray has spent his life in service to others, building schools, marching for the Coloured Diggers, sitting with the broken, lighting up the darkness with extraordinary, quiet generosity.

Two people who have known persecution, displacement and the fight to have their stories told. The least we can do is show up for each other, and for Australia, both communities have worked so hard to build.

Roland Gridiger OAM is a Sydney lawyer, holocaust survivor at the Sydney Jewish Museum and a Trustee of the Rona Tranby Trust.