Vorchheimer vs Victoria

One man's crusade against two-tier policing

Photos: supplied

Every journo wants their story to have news currency. But I could have lived without the awful turn of events that made this profile of Menachem Vorchheimer, a Jewish lawyer confronting the authorities for failing to tackle racist incitement, uncannily timely.

The piece, as you’ll read, opens with Vorchheimer confronting Jacinta Allan, the Premier of Victoria, a state that was home to the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, in the immediate aftermath of the Adass synagogue firebombing in December. “Have you lost control: yes or no?” he asked Allan at a press conference on the morning of the attack.

The day this profile was first published that question was being asked again, as the night before saw another potentially fatal arson attack against one of Melbourne’s oldest synagogues as people were inside after Shabbat service. That same night — exactly a week ago — thugs chanting “death to the IDF” assailed diners and rampaged through Israeli restaurant Miznon and a defence company with ties to Israel also had its premises vandalised. It felt like Groundhog Day.

I’ll have more to say about the fallout from that night. For now read about a man who has been doing more than any single individual to force accountability from the Victorian authorities, and many more besides, for imperilling the state’s Jewish community.

This is a slightly longer version of the profile originally published in The Weekend Australian.

**

“Have you lost control: yes or no?” The question, from a bearded Orthodox Jewish man, rocked the solemn press conference with Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan amid the scorched remains of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne’s Ripponlea.

Allan had announced: “We stand here to condemn in the strongest possible terms this hateful, violent attack on a beautiful, peaceful place of worship.”

Hours earlier, in the predawn of Friday, December 6, 2024, three people wearing balaclavas forcibly entered the house of worship, splashed accelerants and set the building on fire, even as congregants were inside.

Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt, but the attack was a new nadir in Australia’s unprecedented outbreak of anti-Semitism since the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel and subsequent Gaza war. Seven months after the Adass firebombing, at the time of writing, charges are yet to be laid.

The bearded Orthodox Jewish man, Menachem Vorchheimer, a lean 51-year-old father of four, was standing among the small crowd surrounding the Premier that Friday. Like others in the Jewish community, after hearing about the attack he had rushed to the site in solidarity.

Now he wrestled with his anger as Allan pledged an initial $100,000 to help rebuild the synagogue. Then she announced more police patrols of Jewish suburbs and, Vorchheimer recalls, “I’m thinking to myself – politely – are you f..king serious?”

He called out: “Is that not a sign that you’ve lost control in this state and that the Jewish community is now under real threat and that your government has ultimately failed?”

Heads turned.

“Let’s be clear,” he continued, “in November 2023 there was an attack on a synagogue and the Summary Offences Act gave Victoria Police the ability to charge them under that act but you didn’t use it and had you done that we wouldn’t be here today.” (The act includes a prohibition on disturbing a place of worship.)

“Let’s get a short, sharp, straight answer: have you lost control?”

She had lost control of her press conference, that much was obvious. Someone yelled, “Shame on you!” Allan turned to an elder from the synagogue, expressed regret about “the atmospherics”; he reassured her the community felt “comfortable and safe” with her government. Then she was led away.

But it was hardly the end of her government’s confrontation with Vorchheimer, a corporate trouble-shooter cum lawyer and veteran campaigner against anti-Jewish hate and extremism. And what he sees as the authorities’ systemic failure to tackle both.

**

The morning of the Adass firebombing, it was Vorchheimer’s wife who broke the news. Immediately, his “gut dropped”, he says.

Though he had spent most of his childhood in Sydney, he felt an affinity with the Adass community.

His father, known affectionately as Lou, had belonged to Sydney’s Adass synagogue; he was the guy who unlocked the shule every morning. “So when we used to come to Melbourne as a child, Adass is where I’d go to daven (pray). I still know lots of families there and I have a rapport with them.” A German Jew, Lou was one of 10,000 children sent to Britain on the Kindertransport rescue operation in the months before World War II. He became one of the early crop of computer programmers “back in the days of punchcards”. In the 1960s he was paid to migrate to Australia.

“I’ve always been alive to what happened to my father’s family,” Vorchheimer says. “The Holocaust didn’t happen out of nowhere, they (the Nazis) started with words.”

Vorchheimer’s mother, a former lawyer, is several generations Australian; her father was one of the Rats of Tobruk, a legacy from which he draws strength.

After the Adass firebombing, “I thought, OK, there’s been … a horrible event,” Vorchheimer says.

“But does that mean I open up my suitcase, put all my belongings inside, jump on the first plane? No. I think: let’s give the government an opportunity to respond. Let’s assume … they’re going to do the right thing.” Then, maybe, you pack your bags. As Vorchheimer’s court documents reveal, his family is getting passports ready, just in case.

His 13-year-old son has been abused in public; one time, at a 7-Eleven, an older man called him “a dirty f..kin Jew”. Vorchheimer is tagged online with an inverted red triangle, a Hamas military symbol.

In a complaint against Victoria Police to the state’s anti-corruption commission two months after the Adass attack – one of a firehose of actions he has launched post October 7 – Vorchheimer alleges systemic failures that have normalised anti-Semitism, “morphing into domestic terrorism”.

“Unchecked,” he writes, “murder could follow.”

Police having failed, in Vorchheimer’s estimation, to tackle anti-Jewish incitement, he’s stepped into the breach, suing prominent pro-Palestinian activists, sometimes several times, for alleged racial and religious vilification.

His most recent action is against Free Palestine Melbourne over a Facebook post to its more than 18,000 followers that “falsely asserted” the Adass synagogue attack was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by Jews “with no motive other than money”. (He claims the post incited comments such as: “It’s long been known that Jews commit seemingly ‘anti-Semitic’ attacks on themselves to further the victimhood narrative to their advantage.”)

He has sued Hash Tayeh, the activist owner of the Burgertory shop torched in November 2023. Also in his legal crosshairs: the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and its head Nasser Mashni, the Islamic Council of Victoria and, sensationally, former Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt and his party for their alleged involvement in rallies where anti-Semitism “is propagated”. And this inventory of legal actions may not even be exhaustive as he’s coy about the number of matters afoot at any moment.

“People are going to think I’m vexatious,” he says when pressed for details, “a meshigene” – Yiddish for crazy person. On the contrary: within the Jewish community he’s seen as a white knight. His suing Bandt was front page of The Australian Jewish News under the approving headline: “Taking Action”.

A month earlier the AJN editorialised that while the community was grateful for the establishment of dedicated anti-Semitism strike forces in Sydney and Melbourne, many Jews were nonetheless “second-guessing” assurances police had their backs. “Frankly, we feel that we are being gaslit.”

In May, amid a large anti-Israel rally, a half-dozen police were filmed putting a 75-year-old grandmother, a member of pro-Israel group Lions of Zion, in a chokehold: she was holding an Australian flag attached to an umbrella.

Like their global brethren from Toronto to London, many Australian Jews resent what they see as police ritually arresting individuals for “walking while Jewish” lest their presence inflame pro-Palestinian protesters.

Hence, Vorchheimer’s lone crusade against the “100 per cent two-tier policing” he insists has left his people vulnerable and disenfranchised.

“He’s a guy who seems to be a walking target,” according to one communal leader who is giving Vorchheimer “quiet support in the background”.

“For all that, he’s got a lot of guts. And the optics here are good because he’s the little guy … Lawfare clearly has its purposes. But you have to be judicious about the cases you bring because if you don’t win, the consequences for the community are disastrous.”

As it happens a Jewish community group last week had a win in the Federal Court against Sydney Islamic preacher Wissam (William) Haddad, found to have engaged in “fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic” speech. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry had brought the action after efforts to bring criminal charges failed.

Says Vorchheimer: “If I was a litigious person I’d have a hundred lawsuits at the moment. But the lawsuits I picked out, I think are very winnable.” The statement should keep his opponents – none of whom were prepared to comment for this piece – up at night.

On finishing the 2024 Melbourne Marathon

In the dining room of Vorchheimer’s home in Melbourne’s bagel belt stands a glass cabinet of silver Judaica; menorah, wine cups for ritual sanctification, candlesticks, plates for holy feasts.

For a pious man – media reports often wrongly refer to him as a rabbi – Vorchheimer is disarming. He swears, as you’ve probably noticed. He’s social-media savvy, posting videos of his politically charged hot takes. A marathon runner, he also talks like one, sprinkling quotes from Mark Twain and other writers as he goes.

On his dining room wall hangs a black-and-white photograph of an actual rabbi walking on a footpath, head down, thumb raised to eyebrow as if anchoring a mind deep in thought.

The moody photo is of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “the Rebbe” to adherents of the Hasidic Lubavitch movement, some of whom hailed him during his lifetime as the Messiah.

As Vorchheimer points out, the image is unusual; the stock photo of the Rebbe has him smiling and waving to the camera but, he says, “that’s too mundane. I don’t like the mundane.” Nor does the mundane like him – to sometimes tragic consequences.

Vorchheimer was 14, newly arrived in Melbourne, when his father, crossing the road on a Saturday night, was struck by a car. Lou spent 3½ years in hospital before he died.

“Sometimes it is necessary to look back in order to understand how best to go forward,” Vorchheimer wrote on the 25th anniversary of Lou’s death, “and remind us of who we are and the purpose for which we are here.”

He summoned that sense of purpose another Saturday 20 years ago. He was walking to synagogue in East St Kilda with his two children when a busload of drunks from the Ocean Grove footy club yelled through the window: “Go the Nazis!” “F..k the Jews.”

The bus stopped at a red light; Vorchheimer, incensed, charged at the door, demanding to know who was in charge.

A passenger grabbed his skull cap; another punched him in the face. Then the bus driver, Vorchheimer later told police, helped conceal the identity of the offender and tried to flee the scene.

The horrible episode was made worse by the revelation the driver was an off-duty senior constable. In the bitter two-year battle for justice that followed, Vorchheimer encountered a recalcitrant police union and police hierarchy disinclined to cross them. Not to mention “undermining and white-anting” from some Jewish community leaders who complained that “you’re embarrassing us”.

His injuries from the attack on the bus.

As part of their eventual settlement with Vorchheimer in 2008, Victoria Police – which, it must be said, has a long and close working relationship with the Jewish community’s security group – pledged in a deed of release to give their officers extra training and instruction about hate speech.

Vorchheimer invokes what he claims is this broken promise in his current actions against state authorities, lending to his legal proceedings a note of personal lamentation. As the state of Victoria and Victoria Police had promised him and his family they would uphold anti-vilification laws, their alleged failures “are particularly disappointing”.

At the 2008 settlement of his case against Victoria Police

In round two of Vorchheimer v Victoria, the state confronts a sharper and wiser adversary.

Before settling his case against the police, Vorchheimer spent time in New York, meeting police officers fighting anti-Semitism. They taught him the “theory of broken windows” a philosophy of policing that sees visible signs of disorder as encouraging more serious crime. The theme underpins his IBAC complaint: “Victoria Police’s failures represent an abandonment of core law enforcement principles, including ‘the theory of broken windows.’”

Then, in the early 2010s, as a member of the advisory council of the state’s Multicultural Commission, he was “a trusted police source” helping expose historical child sex abuse within Jewish institutions as part of the child abuse royal commission.

It was inevitable Vorchheimer would pursue a law degree, marrying what he describes as the corporate troubleshooter’s “knack of breaking down a problem to its constituent elements” with the Talmudic art of crafting an argument.

He enrolled in a juris doctor of law at Monash University. One day a faculty head called. Vorchheimer’s stomach lurched in anticipation. It turned out his stellar results had earned him a scholarship.

“I just remember that feeling that I’d done something wrong. But my wife always says that as an older student you tend to go over the top.” It was practice for what came next.

On October 9, 2023, the bodies of 1200 mostly civilian victims in Israel still warm, protesters outside the Sydney Opera House burned Israeli flags, some shouting “F..k the Jews”.

The following day the first of what became weekly anti-Israel protests took place outside State Library Victoria in Melbourne. A chant rang out: “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.”

As the Jewish community was reeling, Vorchheimer began lining up his ducks.

“I didn’t think I would end up where I am today,” he says.

On October 20, 2023, and again four days later, Vorchheimer wrote to Victoria Police chief commissioner Shane Patton to relay his concerns about officers failing to intervene as anti-Israel protesters marched in Melbourne with hateful chants and placards “including for the murder of Jews”. He reminded Patton that only a week earlier ASIO chief Mike Burgess had warned police that “we see a direct correlation between language that inflames tension (and) people who think violence is the answer”.

Vorchheimer wrote to police again on Friday, November 10, 2023, just hours after news broke of the firebombing of the pro-Palestine Tayeh’s Burgertory outlet in heavily Jewish Caulfield. While police stressed that they did not believe the attack was racially or politically motivated, activists on social media were blaming “Zionists”.

That afternoon Vorchheimer watched in growing apprehension as Free Palestine Melbourne foreshadowed a “rage against racism” rally at 7pm “outside the restaurant subject to the arson attack”. At 4.33pm – according to his claim against police – he wrote to chief commissioner Patton with his fears that the planned rally had “the propensity” to incite hatred and even violent attacks against the Jewish community. Later, the rally venue was shifted, allegedly on the advice of police, to Princes Park, opposite Central Shule.

What transpired that night made global headlines; more than 100 protesters confronted Jewish counter-protesters. Stones and bottles were hurled, pepper spray deployed and worshippers forced to evacuate the Sabbath service.

Vorchheimer claims police also failed to tackle incitement that undermined the Never Again is Now rally against anti-Semitism on the steps of the Victorian parliament in May 2024.

The night before the rally Tayeh, the Burgertory owner, posted a call on social media to “Crush Zionism” alongside an image of a stormtrooper boot bearing down on a Star of David. “Meet at Parliament steps at 11.30am to counter the Pro-Genocide/Zionist (rally) which is planned for 2pm,” the post read. “I do not recommend having your children present.”

The post deterred Vorchheimer’s wife and children from attending the event, he claims in a separate action accusing Tayeh of incitement. He went instead with friends. They turned up only to be “herded into an area cordoned off on all sides by a heavy police presence” to hold back anti-Israel gatecrashers. (Tayeh’s lawyer, Bernadette Zaydan, said it would be inappropriate to comment on matters currently before the court.)

“I remained fearful throughout and left prior to the conclusion,” Vorchheimer writes. Afterwards he claims he collated details of more than 50 reports of assault, abuse and theft from that day.

In one alleged incident pro-Palestine protesters surrounded an elderly woman in a wheelchair, stole her Israeli flag and set it on fire. He lodged his own criminal complaint against Tayeh “via the office of the chief commissioner”. No charges were laid for hate speech or incitement. Victoria Police said it had no comment on current “or possible impending litigation claims”.

The following weekend Tayeh allegedly “led and incited” a large group of people in Melbourne’s CBD to chant: “All Zionists are terrorists.” In March police charged Tayeh over the chant with four counts of “using insulting words in public” – a breakthrough, one imagines, that the legal pressure from Vorchheimer helped bring about.

The police action – four others have since reportedly been charged over the phrase – marks the first time a political chant has been deemed criminally insulting; anti-Zionists insist the movement represents a settler-colonial ideology that led to the displacement of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.

“But you can’t chant ‘All Zionists are terrorists,’ ” Vorchheimer says. “Because, say, my mother. God bless her, she can’t walk without the frame … But she’s fiercely Zionistic. She’s a terrorist? That phrase makes no delineation between the old and frail person who has no capacity to do anything of that nature and somebody on the other side. And that word (Zionist) is vilifying in any objective sense … because they use the word Zionist as a euphemism for Jew.”

He cites the case of neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell, charged with incitement against the Muslim community. In a 2015 protest against plans to build a mosque in the Victorian regional town of Bendigo, Cottrell had staged and filmed a mock jihadi beheading outside the council offices and published the footage online.

“Basically he was saying, ‘All Muslims are terrorists’.”

In his letters to chief commissioner Patton, Vorchheimer argued Victoria Police had failed to afford Jews the same protections at law as it had afforded the Muslim community in charging Cottrell. This was reprehensible.

After a court appearance in April, Tayeh told the waiting media and his supporters that the criminal charges against him had provided “a platform to expose the truth and to show the world the ugly face of the Zionist ideology”.

“By the will of God, we will win this case,” he said.

**

As for Vorchheimer, he’s leaving nothing to chance or even to God. From the pro-Palestinian activists in his sights he’s claiming $20,000 damages “for each and every occasion” they’ve uttered the phrase “All Zionists are terrorists” from the date of Tayeh’s arrest in July 2024.

“Let me be clear, I’d donate the money,” Vorchheimer says. “I don’t want a dollar for myself.”

He’s wearing the litigation costs for now but says “some have offered money if need be”.

For now he continues with his relentless warning letters to adversaries and officialdom, his FOI applications, his letters to Allan and Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny asking them to police the Parliament’s integrity oversight committee to ensure IBAC is adequately dealing with his complaint against police — a necessary measure, he writes, given the “systemic failures” in question.

Might he speculate on why the authorities are reticent about cracking down on anti-Israel rhetoric that seemingly veers into incitement against Jews? The question makes him hesitate.

“I think it’s political; can we say that? The political fear of upsetting the Muslim or left Israel-hating community. Labelling Muslims as terrorists after 9/11 was seen as something terrible that we should avoid. But Jews are a minority. It’s simple arithmetic.”

In his actions against the authorities he seeks declarations that hate-speech laws have been breached. He wants police who failed to crackdown on extremism disciplined, footage from pro-Palestinian rallies explored for potential charges including incitement and state institutions educated on the scourge of anti-Semitism.

“It’s what I want to leave my kids,” he explains, back in his dining room, “together with these.’” He waves at the Judaica items in his cabinet. It’s not simply that he wants to secure his children’s future in Australia – he’s modelling for them a defiant way of living. On that score, he’s probably winning; his eldest son is a lawyer and his daughter is studying to become one.

Future generations will note that his court documents, drafted during a fraught chapter for Australia’s Jewish community, tell an ancient story of resilience. Each includes this passage :

“I am of the Jewish race and religion. Israel is central to Jewish identity, belief and continuity. Intrinsic to my Jewish identity and Israel’s continual existence is the right of Jews to self-determination in their historical and ancestral homeland of Israel (‘Zionism’).

“Israel is also seen as central to Jewish continuity, particularly after the Holocaust … a place where they can go to escape anti-Semitism.

“Zionism does not preclude a two-state solution with a Palestinian state living alongside a Jewish state in peace. I pray for everlasting peace.”