MELBOURNE, Australia — Two Somali refugees touched down at the Melbourne Airport on a blustery winter night in June 2025. The pair, Naima, whose arm was severed by al-Shabaab terrorists, and Feisal, had been granted asylum in Australia.

Greeting the two Muslims was a group of six Jews.

The lifelong friends were gathered by Nicole Schlesinger, a Jewish woman living in Melbourne, who had heard about an Australian government program that matches volunteers with newly arrived refugees. In addition to welcoming them, the Australians would be tasked with fundraising and helping secure housing.

The friends were initially concerned a Muslim family wouldn’t be comfortable with support from a Jewish group; it turned out that for Naima and Feisal, it was a non-issue.

In time, they would come to consider each other as one extended family.

The mixed-faith friendship, recently featured on the popular television program “Australian Story,” is a rare positive account of Jewish-Muslim ties at a time when these relationships have been placed under extraordinary strain.

Rabbi Ralph Genende, a Melbourne-based cleric who serves as interfaith liaison and coordinator at the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and has worked in interfaith relations for decades, believes that the Muslim-Jewish relationship is at its lowest point in living memory.

“The current state is precarious. Previous relationships have broken down, and there is hostility particularly from the Palestinian Muslim community. There is fear, pain, trauma and mistrust on both sides of the Jewish-Muslim divide,” he told The Times of Israel.

Since the bloody Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, and the terrorist attack at a Hanukkah gathering in Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December 2025 — the deadliest such attack in the country’s history, and the second-deadliest mass shooting — trust between many Jewish and Muslim communities has frayed, even as individuals on both sides continue working to preserve dialogue.

In the past several years, Australian Jews have experienced the most significant surge in antisemitism in the country’s modern history. Synagogues have been firebombed, Jewish schools and childcare centers have required unprecedented security, Jewish-owned homes and businesses have been vandalized, and hundreds of incidents including threats, harassment and intimidation against Jews have been documented across the country.

The aftermath of the Bondi shooting, which claimed 15 lives, has seen further acts of antisemitic violence that have deepened the sense of insecurity felt by many Australian Jews. The Royal Commission into........

© The Times of Israel