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An elderly Jewish man jeered at while telling year 10 students about the Holocaust. Jewish primary school students taunted by older students saying “Free Palestine” and “Free Hezbollah” at a museum. Jewish children being greeted by Nazi salutes in the classroom.
On its third day of hearings, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion heard from more than a dozen witnesses, many anonymised to protect their safety, about their lived experiences of antisemitism in schools and universities, as well as other social and community groups.
While the hearings took place in an office block near Wynyard, a 68-year-old man was moved on by NSW Police for wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on it.
He was later arrested at Manly Police Station, where he was charged with behaving in an offensive manner in a public place and displaying a prohibited Nazi symbol in a public place. He will appear before Manly Local Court on May 27.
Several parents, all anonymous witnesses, gave evidence about their children being forced to confront Nazi salutes, swastikas being placed around schools, and racist slurs. A year 10 student from a Sydney public school spoke of regularly hearing “I hate juice”, a reference to Jews, throughout the school.
Among the antisemitic incidents detailed at Wednesday’s hearing was an incident that occurred during a Jewish primary school’s excursion to a Melbourne museum when five or six high school-aged students from another school approached the children and began saying “free Palestine” and “free Hezbollah”, according to evidence provided by 20-year-old Blake Shaw, a learning support teacher and sports coach who used to attend the school.
When the mother of one boy who was on the excursion reported the incident to the Department of Education’s racism reporting service, she had to push multiple times for a response and action, she told the commission, anonymously. “They wouldn’t progress my complaint. I was unable to make a complaint,” she said.
“Casual” antisemitism has been growing in schools since Hamas’ attacks on October 7, a teacher from north-west Tasmania, also kept anonymous, told the commission. She criticised the state’s history and English curriculum, which has students read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in year 9 for English before learning about the Holocaust in history classes in year 10. The “historically inaccurate” book fuels misconceptions about the event, she said, because it “centres on German suffering rather than the Jewish victims”.
She said there was an elderly Dutch man, who had attended the school each year to talk to students about the Holocaust and had always been welcomed by students. But after the October 7 attacks, the students became “boorish” and “very rude”, “asking him questions about the conflict between Israel and Hamas and making comments to the effect where they were essentially blaming him for what was happening over there”.
“It was essentially a whole room of grade 10 students against one person who was just trying his best to educate students,” she said.
Dean Cherny said he had never felt a conflict between being a proud Australian and a proud Jew. But “now I sort of feel that I need to, in various situations, sort of separate those two because I’m unsure as to how the Jewish side of things will be received”, he said. He works for the Jewish security group CSG.
Commissioner Virginia Bell often asked follow-up questions to witnesses as they finished providing evidence. “You say that you’ve experienced people holding you as personally responsible for events in Gaza. And do I take it that those people have no idea whatever your views on that topic might be?” she asked a Jewish university student.
“Yeah, I think they just see you’re Israeli, therefore … you are fully responsible, and you need to make a full-blown political statement on the situation,” the student replied.
Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Foundation of Australia, was the final witness for the day. He had attached to his written submission to the royal commission “page after page” of antisemitic abuse directed at him by email, social media and voicemail messages.
Commissioner Bell asked him whether he could appreciate there was a “difficult line” between delegitimising Israel and “the views that may be conscientiously held by non-Jewish Australians of goodwill, who are trenchantly critical of actions of Israel, even against the Hamas attack?”
Leibler responded: “It is perfectly acceptable to criticise Israel’s conduct of the war. It is not legitimate, it is not acceptable, and it does cross the line, to describe the Jewish right to self-determination as something that is inherently evil or immoral, that our identity, the core of who we are, is evil.”
Antisemitism in Australia is “painful, not just as a father, it’s painful as an Australian”, he said. “It’s not how I grew up. It’s not how I want anyone’s children to grow up, Jewish or not Jewish. And it feels like it happened very quickly. It doesn’t feel irreversible to me, but I also don’t … see an immediate pathway to addressing it.”
The hearing will continue on Thursday.
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Anthony Segaert is the Parramatta bureau chief at The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously an urban affairs reporter.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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