Jewish students in Sydney returned to school on Friday with a heightened security presence, days after police said they foiled a planned antisemitic attack in the city using a trailer filled with explosives.

Sydney restaurateur Judith Lewis couldn’t save the mezuzah, a framed parchment inked with Hebrew prayers, that was hanging in her family’s café when arsonists set it alight in the early hours one Sunday in late October.

Australian police believe explosives found on Sydney’s outskirts were evidence of a deadly escalation in a campaign of antisemitic arson and graffiti crimes that has been waged in major cities for mon