Jewish Community Accidentally Raises $10,000 For Yes Campaign While Shutting Down Anti-Gay Ad

Craving some heartwarming postal survey news to balance out all the other stuff?

Last week, a misleading ad opposing “Transgender Marriage” appeared in Australia’s largest Jewish newspaper, Australian Jewish News. So hundreds of readers rallied together to crowdfund a response and ended up accidentally raising more than $10,000 for the Yes campaign in the process.

The original ad that sparked the response made a number of misleading comments about the same-sex marriage postal survey, including claiming that a Yes vote would require “all schools to accommodate children transitioning back-and-forth across multiple genders (‘transgenderism’)” among other things.

Liam Getreu was one of the people who saw the ad and found its attempts to mislead people into voting No offensive.

“People were quite horrified by it,” he told Junkee. “I saw it on a Wednesday night at dinner with my family, and people’s jaws just dropped. It was very out of place in the Australian Jewish News — the discourse in the Jewish community is much more tolerant.”

To demonstrate that tolerance, Getreu started a crowdfunding page to finance an ad expressing the Jewish community’s support for the LGBTQI+ community. It reached its goal of $7000 in just 32 hours, and went on to raise over $11,000 with over 200 donations.

It was an “amazing result”, according to Getreu, but it got even better — due to an anonymous donor offering to cover the cost of the ad at the last minute, the revenue from the crowdfunding campaign was donated to the Yes campaign.

The new ad ran in Australian Jewish News on Thursday, and read “we’re proudly Jewish. We’re proudly supporting LGBTI Australians in the campaign for marriage equality. We’re voting yes.” It then listed the names of those who chose to support the ad with a donation.

Getreu told Junkee the response to the ad he’s received from the Jewish community has been “absolutely amazing”.

“I think because of the timing of the ad, at a time when Jewish families are gathered in order to celebrate the New Year, there was a real outpouring of support,” he said.

“Everyone is so happy to show a positive side and message out of the Jewish community. It’s actually been remarkable — I can’t tell you how many emails and texts and calls I’ve got saying they’re so happy there’s a voice of Jewish support for marriage equality.”

Getreu also said that despite a lot of prominent discourse at the moment associating religion with the No campaign, support for marriage equality was actually quite intuitive for many Jewish Australians.

“Judaism is kind of an all-encompassing identity that’s much broader than religion,” he said. “I think in this way, people really see equality and standing up against discrimination and oppression in the broadest sense as a very, very Jewish concept.”

“Not to speak on behalf of all people, but from my perspective that’s what Judaism is — it’s about equality and standing up against oppression. For many Jewish people, I think marriage equality is a no brainer.”