Early on Tuesday morning, Mottel Gestetner awoke to distressing news. Sometime during the night, a mural at a prominent Melbourne intersection carrying a “Bring Them Home Now” message for Israelis held hostage by Hamas had been crudely painted over.

Gestetner wasn’t offended by the fresh “Free Palestine” message daubed in black, white and red paint. As the Jewish business manager explains, he supports a free Palestine, especially one free from the tyranny of Hamas.

The freshly painted sign conceals a tribute to Israeli hostages that was created in the heart of Melbourne’s Jewish community.

Yet he is dismayed that whoever painted the sign had no apparent compunction erasing the faces of women and children who are either dead or, at best, living through a horrific ordeal. The location of the late-night patch-over, the corner of St Kilda Road and Carlisle Street, is in the heart of Melbourne’s bagel belt.

“It is not the message, it is the place,” Gestetner says. “It was pasted over a community effort to come together.”

In the western Sydney suburb of Wakeley, an Assyrian Orthodox bishop was ambushed on Monday night at his pulpit and stabbed multiple times, allegedly by a Muslim youth, in what NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb has designated a terror attack. She said she believed there were elements of religiously motivated extremism.

The attack triggered a riot, with parishioners of the Christ Good Shepherd Church turning violently on police. At one point the mob threatened to march on Lakemba, the centre of Sydney’s Muslim community.

The imam of the Lakemba Mosque, Jamal-Ud–Din El-Kiki, spoke of the growing unease. “We’re very tense. We’re concerned about how this will pan out.”

Parishioners confront police after the stabbing of Assyrian Orthodox bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Assyrian Christians, like Jews and many Australian Muslims, are a people displaced by war, hatreds and persecution. In 2015, when Islamic State was rampaging through Syria and Iraq, the Australian government offered more than 4000 Assyrians sanctuary here through a special refugee intake.