Yom HaShoah, Australia, and the Jewish historical signature
Jews arrive wounded, displaced, or half-destroyed; they do not merely persist, but rebuild in a way that radiates outward
Just before making my way to the 2026 Yom HaShoah commemoration at Moriah College on Monday night (the event was performed again on Tuesday night at Masada College), I happened to watch a 20-minute film released in 2024 embedded on the Sephardic-focused website of the Jewish History Alliance, based in Miami.
The short film’s title was 1506: The Lisbon Genocide. I must admit that despite my knowledge of Sephardic history—which I consider above average for someone whose ancestry is 100% Ashkenazic (according to DNA analysis)—I was unaware of that episode.
Yet over a three-day period, 3,000 Portuguese Jews were slaughtered with Hamas-degree barbarism. Those grim statistics were sharpened by the narrator’s opening remarks: “1506, Lisbon: The capital of the Portuguese Empire had benefited for centuries from the industrious Jewish community to which the Kingdom’s prosperity was largely due.”
Indeed. How typically Jewish of those poor Jews.
Some two hours or so later, I learned another fact: In 1986, Tommy Tycho, MBE, AM z” l, a musician and survivor-refugee from Budapest, had been commissioned to “reinvigorate” Peter Dodds McCormick’s 108-year-old Advance Australia Fair in time for the 1988 national bicentennial celebrations.
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