Yom HaShoah, Australia, and the Jewish historical signature

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.

His daughter, Vicky Tycho had been invited by the event’s organisers—the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies—to address the audience. She referred to McCormick’s original—the only version ever produced—as “a tired piece of music.” Being unfamiliar with any version of the anthem other than Tycho’s rearrangement, I searched for the original version on YouTube. Vicky’s description was rather too kind. The melody was the same but the music and singing were so old as to be cringeworthy. The lyrics were replete with anachronisms.

As Vicky’s address was the final one of the evening, the audience was already gearing up to sing Advance Australia Fair followed by HaTikvah, as is customary. Little did we know that we would be treated to the fully instrumentalised version, courtesy of the talented Chutney Unplugged duo of Ben Adler (violin) and Paul Khodor (piano) and the skilful trumpeting of Rafi Owen that Tycho’s score demanded—for 20 seconds—before Sasha Fisher’s rousing voice led the audience for the anthem proper, not once but effectively twice—the words of the only verse that is ever publicly sung giving way to those of the second verse—and we all cheerily sang those words, never having even seen them until that instant.

Sasha then smoothly code-switched to the Hebrew of the anthem’s Israeli counterpart. Still stunned, the audience followed suit. On this particular occasion—one when the two anthems are traditionally juxtaposed—the Australian one might have had a slight edge over the Israeli one. For me, at least, it’s difficult to imagine that happening again, But now that I’m aware of Tommy Tycho’s role in our anthem, who knows?

A Hungarian Jewish former refugee responsible for the standard version of the Australian National Anthem, instantly recognisable to 26 million people? Just as it happened that the organisers of Monday night’s event chose the theme “Survivors in Australia: Rebuilding Lives”, so did it happen that I saw 1506: The Lisbon Genocide immediately before the commemorative event.

What was so striking about that juxtaposition was not merely “Jewish contribution,” in the bland civic sense, but a deeper and more paradoxical pattern: Jews are repeatedly shattered by a society or expelled from one society, then become disproportionately generative in another; and the receiving society is often marked by them far beyond its own awareness of the fact.

Tommy Tycho is an unusually elegant instance of that. Not because he was simply a successful émigré musician, but because the contribution sits at the level of national symbolic identity. It doesn’t get much better than that. A survivor helps give musical life to the anthem of the country that received him. That is not just “migrant contribution.” It is almost emblematic.

The Lisbon introduction gives the darker historical foil. The same civilisation that materially benefited from Jewish industriousness could turn murderous with astonishing speed. So one gets a recurring structure: Jewish presence enriches; Jewish absence is then produced by violence; the loss is then half-forgotten by the host culture, while the Jews who survive begin again elsewhere.

What moved the audience was that the event managed to show “rebuilding” not as sentimentality, nor as triumphalist schmaltz, but as something quintessentially Jewish: the capacity to resume historical life after rupture, and to do so in ways that leave permanent marks on the world around us, often without fanfare and often without recognition.

It is broadly true that countries which made room for Jews often benefited disproportionately from Jewish industry, literacy, commerce, medicine, law, finance, music, and intellectual culture; and it is also broadly true that when such lands turned on their Jews, they often impoverished themselves morally, culturally, and not infrequently materially as well.

The pattern is real enough, and although it may have been unintentional on the part of the organisers, one could nevertheless apprehend it not merely a sociological fact but a civilisational one. That fact is not new in and of itself; indeed it has existed for millennia. But rarely does it express itself in the way it did on Monday night.

The organisers presented the literal theme: survivors came, rebuilt, contributed, flourished, and helped shape Australia. That is already true and important.

But a deeper form lay beneath the content; namely: this is not just something Holocaust survivors in Australia happened to do. It is a recurrent Jewish mode of being in history. Jews arrive wounded, displaced, or half-destroyed; they do not merely persist, but rebuild in a way that radiates outward. They restore not only themselves but something of the society around them.

That is the larger significance. So the evening was, in effect, a concentrated historical disclosure. In two hours, it disclosed something usually spread across centuries and continents.

On one level, the event provided the occasion and venue to hear a series of admirable postwar Australian stories. But on another level, the audience saw—consciously or otherwise—the ancient Jewish historical vocation writ small, meaning on-stage. Not abstractly, not in the language of slogans, but embodied in actual people, actual institutions, actual music, actual commerce, actual families, actual civic life.

One might invoke  לגוים אור—“A light unto the nations”—the biblical phrase from the Book of Isaiah. But one must not sentimentalise it. “A light unto the nations” does not mean that Jews were “chosen” to entertain or improve Gentile civilisation as a service industry. Nor does it mean that exile is somehow justified because good things come from it.

Rather, it means that where Jews live as Jews, build as Jews, think as Jews, and endure as Jews, something morally and civilisationally generative tends to occur around them. Not always immediately. Not always gratefully acknowledged. But repeatedly enough that it is unmistakable.

That is why Tommy Tycho is so resonant. It is not just that a Jewish survivor contributed to Australian culture. It is that a Jew who came from the wreckage of Europe helped furnish the sonic form of Australia’s national self-expression.

One could hardly ask for a more emblematic image of this recurring phenomenon. Whether the organisers or the audience were conscious of this deeper layer or not, they would have perceived the evening correctly, but possibly only at the first level: gratitude, admiration, memory, contribution, continuity.

The second-order significance was that the whole program, intentionally or otherwise, staged a transhistorical Jewish pattern. It showed Jews doing what Jews have so often done: re-entering history after catastrophe not as mere survivors, but as makers. This is not a report on the evening or even primarily a reflection on Australian Jewry.

Instead, it demonstrates something else that the commemoration revealed: that the Jewish contribution to host societies is not merely accidental, nor merely the sum of individual talents, but part of a deeper and recognisable historical phenomenon. Australia then becomes an especially vivid case study.

The real point is this: that Jewish covenantal and civilisational habits have repeatedly generated blessing beyond the Jewish community itself, even under conditions of exile, trauma, and radical dislocation. What the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies enabled was something seldom seen, which saw that truth become briefly visible in an unusually concentrated form.

The Board chose a theme. What the theme in fact did was disclose a structure. They no doubt intended remembrance, gratitude, and civic recognition. All perfectly proper. But the result exceeded the intention.

The evening did not merely recount that survivors rebuilt their lives in Australia and enriched the country. It inadvertently staged a much older Jewish historical reality: that Jews, even after devastation, do not merely resume existence; they regenerate communal, intellectual, commercial, artistic, and civic life around them.

That is why Australia is both central and incidental. It is central because the postwar Australian case supplied unusually dense evidence. It is incidental because the underlying phenomenon is not specifically Australian. Australia was the setting in which a transhistorical Jewish pattern became peculiarly visible. That visibility depended on concentration.

Normally this sort of thing is diffused across generations and domains and therefore passes unnoticed as a pattern. One sees the banker here, the jurist there, the physician elsewhere, the composer elsewhere again, and one files them as separate biographies.

On Monday and Tuesday night, by contrast, the theme gathered the evidence into one place and one sitting. It compressed centuries of Jewish historical behaviour into an intelligible tableau. That is what made it so arresting.

Dane Stern, David Ossip, Suzanne Green and their colleagues at the Board were obviously conscious of the empirical layer, but only they can say whether they were also conscious of the formal one. They knew they were showing how survivors helped shape Australian life.

Perhaps they knew, or perhaps they didn’t know that they were also showing the Jewish civilisational signature in exile: catastrophe followed not only by endurance, but by outward generativity. The key here is pattern recognition rather than instance identification.

The profundity of the event is that it managed to illuminate an old Jewish truth with unusual force: that the Jewish presence in a host society is not merely demographically noticeable or individually successful, but often structurally fructifying.

That is the Jewish historical signature. Not a mystical law but a recurrent pattern, a civilisational tendency. If one could perceive it, the night was a concentrated manifestation of a long Jewish historical form.

We must congratulate the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies on a magnificent and moving commemoration.

We salute the survivors who had the grit and the will to start new lives from scratch in conditions that were far from easy, and we salute those who shared their haunting memories with us this year, as we do every Yom HaShoah v’haGevurah.

Dr Andrew Lowy is a Sydney physician.