If the puncher would not own up, he would gun for the target he could clearly identify – the off-duty policeman driving the bus.
HE didn’t see who threw the punch, but he felt it. His left eye was swelling fast and he felt woozy. It wasn’t until he heard an agitated onlooker yelling into a mobile phone, ‘Now he’s covered in blood’ that he realised he was bleeding so much, down his cheek onto his white shirt.
All he knew was that someone inside the mini-bus had snatched his hat and, worse, his yarmulka (the skull cap orthodox Jewish men must wear) and that when he’d demanded its return he’d been hit in the face.
What hurt most, Menachem Vorchheimer said later, was being attacked and humiliated in front of his children for no reason except being what and who he is. That made him angry. Months later, he still was. And a year after that, living in a different country, nothing has changed for him except the date. He is still angry and he still wants justice.
It started around 6.20pm on October 14, 2006, a Saturday – not just the Jewish sabbath but last day of one holy festival and the beginning of another, Simcha Torah, a time of rejoicing and prayer for orthodox Jews. It was also Caulfield Guineas Day, the beginning of another sort of festival, the Spring Racing Carnival, which has its own rituals: mostly involving betting, drinking and the wearing of brightly coloured garments and much fake tan.
Menachem Vorchheimer had been walking west down Balaclava Road from his home in East St Kilda: a slight, bearded figure in a black hat and coat, wheeling two of his three children – Yudi, six, and Simi, three – in a pusher. His wife, Shoshi, was home with the youngest while he took the other two to the Yshiva synagogue for the children’s program after ‘the usual long family lunch – three or four hours outside in the courtyard’.
The children had been looking forward to lollies, stories and seeing others their own age at the synagogue. This is how the family spent their holy day together.
Then the mini-bus full of rowdy passengers drove past, heading west. Young men were yelling. The young father heard ‘Go the Nazis’ and ‘F… the Jews’. He says one of them mimed a machine-gun sweep, as if to mow down passers-by, including him and his children in the pram. Some joke.
The only word Vorchheimer could see on the bus was ‘Christians’ and he wondered briefly if it were some weird ultra-Right religious group, cruising Melbourne’s Jewish district to persecute people like himself and his family. When he found out later it was the name of the bus line he smiled about the obvious Christians v. Jews joke. But, on the day, there was nothing amusing about what happened next.
Orthodox Jews do not drive on the sabbath and mostly live walking distance from synagogues, so the street was crowded with men dressed like Vorchheimer in black hats and coats and long beards, standing out like the Amish in Pennsylvania, apart from the absence of horse-drawn carts. Inevitably, this attracts comment and abuse – more in recent years than before, a trend that worries Jewish community leaders.
Often, on Friday nights and Saturdays, louts scream insults as they drive past. Usually, their targets ignore it because the abusers speed away.
This time it was different. The mini-bus was fully loaded and slow – and so were most of its passengers, apparently, because they made the mistake of yelling just as the bus was stopping at a red light.
Vorchheimer left the pusher on the footpath and went to the driver’s window, demanding to know who they were and if there was anyone in charge who could prevent the offensive behaviour.
He says the driver was surly and dismissive and refused to identify the group or its leader. ‘He just told me it was a charter bus.’ Passengers would later claim Vorchheimer kicked the bus in anger. If he did, he could hardly be blamed.
It might have ended with that. But the bus mob couldn’t let the exchange rest there: it would be too much like being rebuked and losing face, perhaps. As the bus moved off, a man leaned from a window and snatched Vorchheimer’s hat and yarmulka. He was mortified.
‘I went back to the footpath to the kids,’ he recalls. ‘Then a grey car flashed by and pulled in front of the bus to make it stop.’ As he hurried along with the pusher, he saw someone running towards the bus. This was a man he would later know only as ‘Keith’, who had seen the hat being grabbed and was angry about it.
Keith was not Jewish, just a good bloke who didn’t like what he was seeing, Vorchheimer said later.
By the time Vorchheimer reached the bus, someone else had joined in, too: the driver of the grey car was demanding the hat, his prized Italian Borsalino that had cost him $US180 on an overseas business trip. Someone threw it from the bus onto the footpath near the pusher – but the yarmulka was still missing.
Again he went to the driver’s window ‘to plead for my yarmulka’. Again, he says, the driver brushed him off – ‘and the rest of them were swearing at me’. He moved to the passenger side, and remonstrated with two young men through a window, demanding the yarmulka’s return.
That’s when the punch landed. He thinks whoever did it was hidden behind the two people he was arguing with. The only clue was that he thought the assailant was wearing a pink tie. He saw his yarmulka thrown on the ground and grabbed it. He had a broken cufflink and his eye stung.
Two women were comforting his sobbing children. A crowd gathered, circling the bus as the driver tried to reverse from the car blocking its path. Everyone who saw it thought it looked like an attempt to escape before police arrived. It was a logical enough conclusion.
Then Menachem Vorchheimer made his stand. He walked to the front of the bus and sat down in its way. That’s when the more sober passengers might have guessed that their mates had picked the wrong man. One who fights back … and who just happens to run a $60 million-a-year company.
THREE police cars came from St Kilda police station – which, like Sydney’s King’s Cross and Darlinghurst districts, is a place where young police learn fast from streetwise colleagues. In ‘the job’, as police call their work, to be stationed at St Kilda once meant being in ‘the St Kilda Police Force’ – a wry acknowledgment that for a long time the station represented the law in a traditionally lawless area, home of Melbourne’s red-light district, cheap boarding houses, tough pubs, strip joints and drug dealers, and all the ‘punters’ that various forms of vice lure from elsewhere. Added to this sometimes pungent brew was the multicultural mix, but especially the relatively high number of observant Jews who live in the area that some themselves refer to jokingly as ‘Jew Town’: overwhelmingly diligent, law-abiding citizens, but magnets for the sort of stupid, racist abuse that had bubbled over on this day.
The police soon found out that the mini-bus was chartered by a ‘punters club’ of players and coaches from Ocean Grove Football Club. They also learned something else: that the driver was an off-duty policeman. But this snippet would stay discreetly hidden until a reporter dug it up some days later.
In fact, the police used much discretion in the discharge of their duties. They did not breathalyse their off-duty colleague, presumably because he seemed sober. Nor did they take statements from his passengers on the grounds that they were probably not sober.
This makes sense, as statements from intoxicated people are useless in court. And, at that stage, it must have seemed unlikely that it would end up in court.
Traffic was banking up behind the besieged mini-bus, so it seemed smart to move it on quickly. No-one was volunteering useful information and it must have seemed easier to send the bus home than to take twenty people into custody to try to identify the culprits.
Senior Constable Jim Tzefer gave Vorchheimer his mobile telephone number and assured him ‘justice would be done’. Diplomacy and discretion, all at once.
The footballers had come to Melbourne that morning from their seaside hometown on the Bellarine Peninsula, about twenty minutes past Geelong, for a day of punting and drinking at Caulfield races – a classic example of the end-of-season trip, although it was not actually being run by the football club proper.
The driver, Senior Constable Terry Moore, was not a ‘local’ and did not belong to either the football club or the punters club. He was an acquaintance of an assistant coach, Craig Fagan, a casual connection that Moore must have cursed later when it struck him how much trouble doing a ‘favour’ had caused him.
The most senior figure on the bus was the playing coach, Matthew Sproule, recruited the previous season from Melbourne’s tough western suburbs competition. Sproule handled betting for the syndicate that afternoon. It hadn’t been a wild success – ‘We turned $200 into $100’, he joked later – but that would be the least of their worries. They might have been better off to punt more and drink less.
The group had been joined late that afternoon by another Ocean Grove player who had got to the races independently and hitched a ride home on the bus. Young, slightly built and likeable, with a few drinks on board he turns into what his family calls the ‘class clown’.
A son of former Baptist missionaries, he later admitted yelling insults. It’s hard to believe he was the only one. It’s also hard to believe, but nonetheless true, that his surname is Christian: meaning that a Christian called Christian travelling on a Christian’s mini-bus would end up in strife with non-Christians.
The bus left the car park around 6pm, skirted the racecourse and headed west down Balaclava Road through Caulfield towards St Kilda – normally a logical short-cut for anyone heading for the Westgate Bridge and Geelong.
But it ran through Melbourne’s orthodox Jewish heartland – on Saturday evening, when the streets would be full of people walking to worship dressed in clothes not seen in downtown Ocean Grove.
It would have been prudent for the driver to warn his rowdier passengers to shut the windows and behave. As it was, the white mini-bus attracted attention before it went past Vorchheimer and his two children. Aviva D., a professional woman old enough to have five children and cautious enough not to have her surname published, saw the bus cross Orrong Road around 6.15pm.
‘One guy was leaning with his chest out the window, and he yelled out a crude sexual reference,’ Aviva recalls. ‘Something like: “I’ll take you from behind”.’ She finds racist abuse worse than sexual harassment, as her mother is a Holocaust survivor. (Later that same night, she says, someone in a car shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and did a Nazi salute.)
Aviva was walking towards St Kilda. When she got to the Hotham Street intersection, she saw the white mini-bus stopped, surrounded by angry people. She wasn’t surprised. Later still, walking home, she saw police cars and an ambulance and heard about the assault – which is why she called talkback radio when the story broke a few days later. She wasn’t the only one.
Eli Solowiejczyk, too, had been walking near the same intersection as Aviva and heard racist abuse. He later made a statement to police about it and got in touch with Menachem Vorchheimer.
Michael Granek, a member of the congregation at the Mizrachi synagogue in Balaclava Road, began his usual half-hour volunteer security shift on the synagogue door at 6pm that evening.
About half-way through his shift he and the professional security man with him, a former Russian policeman who guards the synagogue every week, saw ‘a white mini-bus full of males hurling abuse’.
At the time Granek shrugged it off. ‘Drunks drive past and think it’s tough to call out “Effing Jews”,’ he says. ‘I don’t take it personally. It’s ignorance, alcohol, bravado in front of their mates, and it happens maybe three times out of four that I am on duty. But this time I heard shortly afterwards that someone had been bashed.’ He later contacted both the police and Menachem Vorchheimer.
The Christian’s bus from Ocean Grove was not the only mini-bus causing trouble in the area that evening – a fact that would lead to some confusion about the route it took, and led to understandable speculation that a bus full of racist rednecks was criss-crossing St Kilda looking for Jews to abuse.
Some of them might have been racist rednecks but they weren’t roaming St Kilda looking for easy targets to yell at. They were just picking on the ones they saw as the bus took its perfectly logical way from Caulfield racecourse towards the Westgate Bridge towards the Geelong Road and home to Ocean Grove.
A Caulfield man, Nathan, who wants to remain anonymous because of his work, was walking down Glen Eira Road – parallel with Balaclava Road —with his young son around 6.15pm when they saw a mini-bus full of men banging the vehicle’s sides. ‘They yelled “Fucking Jews” at us,’ he recalls.’ I would like to get them in a room and give them an earful.’
When Nathan heard of the assault on Vorchheimer, he assumed the group he had seen was responsible. But another witness, Yoshi Aaron, who works for Australian Jewish News, had noted details of a mini-bus in Glen Eira Road when its occupants yelled abuse at him and his wife: it was a Thrifty hire vehicle, registered 1377 NE. Not the Christian’s bus.
The fact there were two buses on different routes led some people to assume racist thugs were combing the district. As stated, there was no evidence of this. But what did happen was bad enough and Menachem Vorchheimer is not going to let anyone forget it.
THREE months after the battle of Balaclava Road he sits at his dining room table only a few hundred metres from where the incident happened, re-telling his story so far and mapping the campaign ahead.
He has a husky voice and speaks quietly, but lots: words rush out as new thoughts strike. On the table is a pile of papers and folders, notated for ready reference. A tiny scar is all that’s left of the cut eye. Feelings are harder to heal.
As he talks, his baby son climbs over him, gurgling happily. Vorchheimer is a fond father; his life revolves around family, faith and work. Each evening he tries to be home to see the three children before bedtime. Each morning he rises early to pray at dawn before going to work at his firm’s Dandenong South warehouse, where his 130 employees range across ‘maybe twenty’ nationalities. ‘I’m the only one with a beard and yarmulka,’ he says.
He has to make many overseas trips but dislikes being away on the sabbath, because that is time set aside for family and worship. Late in 2006 he left on a Sunday, as usual, and went to Hong Kong, Britain and Singapore but still managed to get home in time to spend the sabbath with his family. Of the five nights away he spent one in a hotel bed – the rest were on aircraft.
This fierce devotion to family could be a reaction to his own troubled childhood, though he speaks fondly of his father, Ludwig, whose influence lingers sixteen years after his death.
Ludwig Vorchheimer fled Germany to avoid the Nazis in 1938, aged sixteen, was interned in England as an enemy alien during the war, then lived in America before coming to Sydney in the 1960s. He married an Australian, Sarah Coleman, a convert to Judaism twenty years his junior.
Surviving the Holocaust turned Ludwig towards the strict orthodox Lubavitch sect. He raised his four sons the same way; they grew up straddling two cultures. Menachem, the second son, went to Sydney Boys’ High before being sent to Melbourne to a traditional Yshiva school.
The boys’ grandfather Norm Coleman played rugby league with St George and was a ‘Rat of Tobruk’ in the Australian Army in World War 2. The family descends from John Palmer, purser on the First Fleet flagship Sirius, later a commissary and magistrate in colonial Sydney.
The irony amuses Vorchheimer: he’s one of a tiny minority of Australians to trace their origins back to the First Fleet, yet is heckled by yobs no doubt because they think he looks ‘un-Australian’.
As a boy in Bondi, he followed Balmain Tigers (‘Benny Elias, Gary Jack’) and loved cricket: ‘I was a right arm spinner – like Greg Matthews. My best figures were four for six.’
His parents’ marriage ended bitterly. By 1988 the brothers had moved to Melbourne with their ageing father, leaving their mother in Sydney.
When Ludwig was hit by a car that year, he was badly brain-damaged and a bedridden invalid until his death three years later. The tragedy cast the boys adrift.
An early sign of the steel in young Menachem was when, at fifteen, he persuaded the Victorian Guardianship Board that he and his brothers and their invalid father should not be under the guardianship of their estranged mother. It was a tough call for a teenager to make but one his mother came to accept.
The boys were fostered by generous Melbourne Jewish families. Emmanuel Althaus, who took Menachem into his family, jokes about it (‘We were young and stupid – my wife was young and I was stupid.’) but admits it wasn’t easy to ‘civilise’ the ‘feral boy’ who had been doing the best he could for a long time. He is, however, pleased with the result of his tough love: a good education, good marriage and good career have turned the foster-son into the sort of success story any parents would be proud of.
Menachem says: ‘I had to mature fast and stand up for myself. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t had to do that.’ At 28 he became chief executive of a textile firm. Now, at 33, he has boosted the company’s growth in a way that suggests he will become a business giant.
Which meant that when he turned his sights on the Ocean Grove Football Club and the police force, as one of his targets concedes ruefully, ‘he certainly got everyone’s attention’.
A SWIFT, heartfelt apology by those at fault would have settled it. But Menachem Vorchheimer thought that the approach made to him was too little, too late, and too cagey to be convincing.
‘It’s like someone stepping on your foot,’ he says. ‘If they apologise, you forget it. But if they try to say they didn’t do it, or maybe it was actually your fault, then you can’t accept it.’
When his telephone rang on Monday, October 16, almost 48 hours after the incident, it wasn’t Ocean Grove calling. It was his local member of parliament, to say she had called a media conference. Vorchheimer had spoken to politicians on both sides of politics earlier that day. Each suggested going to the media to ensure that the police and the football club took him seriously.
The story was splashed on the front of the Herald Sun next day and got a big run on talkback radio and television. The news hit Ocean Grove hard – people there would still be talking about it months later. But no-one connected with the mini-bus contacted Vorchheimer that morning. And there was already a hint someone was trying to spin the story against him.
A reporter from the Geelong Advertiser, Ocean Grove’s nearest regional daily, called and asked what his ‘version’ of the incident was – as if there were some doubt about the facts. The question was absurd: it implied that a prosperous, peaceful, religious man pushing a pram would deliberately attack a bus full of footballers and contrive to have his hat stolen and his eye cut. For what?
Vorchheimer was livid. Someone was trying to smear him to protect the footballers. His suspicion hardened when he heard people were peddling a story that he had ‘tried something similar’ with Qantas. (This referred to a minor matter years before, when he had challenged Qantas for failing to provide a kosher meal ordered and paid for in advance.)
The next call was from Andrew Demetriou, head of the Australian Football League, making a gesture on behalf of the national game. Vorchheimer was grateful – but Demetriou’s urbane and well-timed diplomacy only underlined the deafening silence from the real wrongdoers, with the effect that the Ocean Grove Football Club now looked completely wrong-footed.
‘I said to Andrew “Thanks, but it’s not your job to fix this up. If you can find my phone number surely they can”,’ he recalls. The swift response from the AFL left its country cousins at Ocean Grove looking mean-spirited, apathetic and insular. All of which was unfortunate for the football club’s president, a local lawyer called Michael Vines.
Finally, late that night, Vines, telephoned Vorchheimer to offer an apology and assurances that he would try to identify who was behind the ‘alleged’ offences. Vines was well within his rights to try to protect the interests of his players and his club but what Vorchheimer interpreted as a faintly adversarial tone rankled him more each time they spoke.
Vines soon felt the same way about Vorchheimer. Months later, he commented: ‘In this country we have a legal system we follow’ – rather as if Vorchheimer were a conniving peasant fresh from some corrupt totalitarian state, not an urbane, highly educated Australian like Vines himself. It was, perhaps, an innocent but unfortunate slip.
Vines underlined the fact that the football club had no official link with the punters’ big day at the races. Like a principal whose students are caught shoplifting after school, he was stuck with a mess not of his making, half-blamed for something over which he had no control. He was keen to identify offenders but naturally wary of the club wearing any blame for what they’d done. Vines soon scared the younger players: one ashamed lad confessed to yelling taunts, another to grabbing the hat. The problem was that, initially, no-one would own up to punching Vorchheimer.
Vines argued that if a punch had been thrown, a seasoned courtroom veteran like himself would surely have uncovered it while cross-examining the players.
When he did not produce the puncher, he switched tack – urging Vorchheimer to accept that his eye was accidentally ‘scratched’ in the tussle. This would have neatly removed the threat of an assault charge, no doubt to the relief of all concerned at the football club.
The lawyer – and police – knew that as things stood then, if an assault charge had been laid it would not have stood up in court. But Vorchheimer wouldn’t accept the ‘punch-lite’ theory. From the first week, he saw that the chances of the affair ending with genuine remorse and a handshake were slipping away. If the puncher would not own up, he would gun for the target he could clearly identify – the off-duty policeman driving the bus.
He spoke to his friend Norman Rosenbaum – a Melbourne lawyer famous for his fourteen-year legal battle in New York over the race-hate killing of his brother Yankel in 1991. Rosenbaum said to get a criminal lawyer. He suggested a seasoned barrister, Remy van de Wiel, QC.
The urbane and wily Van de Wiel lives on the other side of the city, in Clifton Hill. He is not an especially religious man but he has the civil libertarian’s dislike of injustice, and the defence lawyer’s sharp and sceptical eye for any sign of police misconduct.
On the silk’s advice, Vorchheimer studied Acts, statutes and police regulations and concluded that as a police officer, the driver had failed his sworn duty to uphold the law and could be held to account for it. But when he pressed the point with Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe the meeting ended abruptly with Walshe insisting that Moore would not be suspended.
It seemed clear that given the festering issue of police working second jobs outside the force, the Government and police command would have preferred to sidestep a showdown with the pugnacious police union over Senior Constable Moore being punished for his alleged lapses as driver of the mini-bus. The other reason to avoid a brawl, perhaps, was that the Government and the police union were making a secret sweetheart deal – for better pay and new handguns – just as the Vorchheimer story broke, a few weeks before the Victorian state election.
Vorchheimer was bemused by the backroom politics and red tape tangled around the case: St Kilda detectives took over the inquiry from their uniform colleagues, the Ethical Standards Division re-investigated the entire affair to ensure the police ‘brotherhood’ was not looking after its own, and the Office of Police Integrity looked over everyone’s shoulder for the same reason. Even the Premier’s office had quietly bought into it.
An hour after the tenacious Vorchheimer ambushed Premier Steve Bracks on the eve of the November election, handing him a police statement outlining the assault, he got a soothing call from one Ari Suss – a former Bracks adviser now with the transport king turned developer, Lindsay Fox, but seconded back to the Premier’s staff for the campaign. Fox can afford to be a generous man when he wants to be.
Vorchheimer was polite but unmoved (‘Ari Suss is a good Jewish boy – but a politician’) by all the promises that everyone was doing their best to see justice done. He vowed to push until he gets a result. And that is exactly what he has done.
Why? It’s not about money or revenge, but manners and respect. And about the effect on his children.
His son revealed violent fantasies – of using a laser to shoot the people on the bus and of suffocating the driver. His daughter said they shouldn’t go to the synagogue any more because they might get hurt.
But the thing that hit him hardest was finding out that it was his son who picked up his hat and pushed it back into shape. ‘He wanted to help his Dad and that’s all he could do,’ he says. And for the first time in hours of talking, his voice chokes with emotion.
FOR someone who would once have been happy to settle for a sincere apology, Menachem Vorchheimer soon hardened in his resolve to see justice done because, he said, he felt as if he had not been taken seriously enough in the beginning. He reckoned insult had been added to injury and he wanted satisfaction. Because of his dogged persistence, and media coverage, the police force and the Victorian Government had to be seen to act.
It was politic to get results, and results soon came. The police’s internal investigators, the Ethical Standards Department, oversaw the investigation of the assault, with a senior ESD officer with lengthy homicide squad experience going to Ocean Grove to re-interview the football club witnesses.
Meanwhile, the Office of Police Integrity, attached to the Ombudsman’s Office, attempted to ensure that the police force investigated the involvement of one of its own: the bus driver Constable Terry Moore – a far more ticklish political problem for both the force and the State Government because of the touchy industrial relationship with the aggressive police union leadership.
The police were keen to nail the footballers for assault. The inference, perhaps, was that this might satisfy the aggrieved victim. If anyone assumed this, they had misjudged Vorchheimer. He wanted the bus-driving policeman’s head as well.
Not surprisingly, determined police investigators came up with a better result than the football club office bearers when it came to finding the main offender. Early in 2007, following publicity about the case, they charged three footballers with ‘various charges.
Simon Christian, 21, son of former Baptist missionaries who had served in Africa, was fined $1000 in April after pleading guilty to using insulting words (‘Go Nazis’ was one phrase) in a public place.
Despite a request from the prosecutor for a diversion order that the shamefaced youngster tour the Jewish Holocaust museum to acquaint himself with the Nazis’ handiwork, the Magistrate left it up to Christian to decide whether he would show his remorse by going to the museum with Vorchheimer.
But Christian was never the main police target. James Dalton, 28, a club captain, was charged with theft of Vorchheimer’s hat and yarmulka. And, after some keen detective work, Matthew Cuthbert, 23, was charged on three counts of assault and using insulting language. Meanwhile, the Office of Police Integrity found that Senior Constable Terry Moore could have prevented the attack.
When Dalton appeared in court in June, his lawyer requested a suppression order to hide his family name and address … on the grounds that the family was the target of race hate mail. The request was refused.
At the time of writing, Dalton and Cuthbert still have to face committal proceedings in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. If a magistrate finds there is a case against them, they will face trial.
IN MID-2007 Menachem Vorchheimer took his family to live for a year in New York, where he has relatives and friends and was able to land a job. He thought at the time that it would push the incident into the distance, and allow his children to forget the trauma of seeing him attacked. But he is amazed that in New York and in Europe, people he meets – many of them Jewish – recognise him as the Melbourne orthodox man who was punched and abused. There is no getting away from what happened.
But that is not the only reason that going to New York has not turned out to be a wild success. The truth is, the way he describes it in the first few months, they were all feeling a little homesick. His wife misses family and friends in Melbourne. And Menachem and his older boy want to go to the cricket and footy back home. Aussie rules, after all.
Down the street from the family’s house in Caulfield is the synagogue where a volunteer called Michael Granek has done security duty for several years. Each year it has become more common for people to yell abuse from cars. But he has noticed a strange thing in the months since the Vorchheimer case: the abuse has dropped away. Sometimes it pays to fight back.