Five Essential Insights from the Initial Week of the Royal Commission Hearings on Antisemitism

Reports of public harassment, vandalized schools, and a pervasive fear of openly displaying Jewish identity were prevalent during the initial week of The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion hearings.

During this first week, the focus was on the daily experiences of racism and discrimination faced by Jewish Australians. Commissioner Virginia Bell listened to numerous accounts, many shared anonymously due to concerns about personal safety. These testimonies provided a stark picture of the challenges faced by the community.

Though the witnesses varied in their backgrounds, ages, and locations, recurring themes became apparent. These insights were gathered in response to the inquiry initiated after the Bondi terror attack in December 2025.

Outlined below are five significant insights from the hearings.

Targeted in public

One notable testimony came from a Jewish Year 10 student, speaking under a pseudonym, who recounted how classmates had performed Nazi salutes during lessons on “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,” a novel centered on the Holocaust.

The daughter of a Bondi terror attack victim said she had been walking through Westfield Bondi Junction with her baby when a man pointed at her Star of David necklace and called her a “f—ing terrorist”.

Another man told the inquiry he’d been approached and abused by a man on Sydney’s Oxford Street shortly after the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel.

The man used racial slurs, including “dirty Jew”, performed Nazi salutes and made a gun-like motion at the forehead of the man, who said he was wearing a Jewish kippah (skullcap) at the time.

Despite the abuse occurring in broad daylight on a busy street, the witness said only one other person — an American tourist — attempted to intervene, and he was assaulted in the process.

Another person, using a pseudonym, said “a lot of us don’t feel safe” in Australia anymore.

“We don’t feel welcome anymore. We thought that things might be challenging. We never expected synagogues to be burned down. We never expected Jews to be hunted on Bondi Beach. We really didn’t expect this sort of thing in this country.”

A need to hide one’s identity

As a result of the increasingly common experiences of abuse in public places, numerous witnesses told the inquiry they felt the need to hide their Jewish identity.

One witness described wearing his kippah under a baseball cap.

A teenager told the enquiry she was now “scared” to wear her Jewish jewellery in public, instead tucking it behind her clothes if she wore it at all.

Another woman, who grew up in Hungary — where public displays of Jewish identity could “bring violence or arrest” — said after 66 years in Australia, she now felt the need to hide again.

“I found myself for the first time since childhood afraid to wear my Star of David in public. I found myself for the first time since I fled Hungary feeling that my identity was something I should hide.”

A mother told the enquiry she didn’t allow her children to wear their Stars of David in the community and that they had toned down their Jewish visibility out of fear.

The Bondi attack’s deep scars

Many witnesses told the inquiry that, although antisemitism had increased since 7 October 2023, the Bondi terror attack was a profound escalation in anti-Jewish hatred that had left deep scars.

The attack sent shockwaves and grief through a tight-knit community for whom the beach has long been a focal point.

However, after the 15 December massacre that left 15 people dead, the place is now a site of trauma for many.

One woman told the inquiry her daughter now “thinks about dying” every time she visits the beach.

A teenager who was locked down at a Bat Mitzvah — a Jewish coming-of-age ritual for females — during the attack said she lived with “constant nightmares”.

Another woman, whose parents met at Bondi, said the place that was once full of “beautiful memories” now held a “really heavy weight in [the] community’s heart”.

One man told Commissioner Bell: “It changed the course of my life, and it changed the course, unfortunately, of so many other people’s lives.”

 “I go to Bondi Beach a lot. You see the menorah and the memorial that just sits there. You are reminded of it all the time.”

Parents worried about their children

Parent after parent told the inquiry that, while they were distressed by what they experienced every day, they were deeply anguished by the thought of their children growing up in a world where they did not feel safe.

They described the heightened security at Jewish schools, from paid security guards and barbed wire to security cameras.

One woman, the school board president of a Jewish school in Sydney, said the institution looked more like a “prison than a primary school”.

The school was graffitied last year with text branding Jews as “terrorists” and “dogs”.

“The fact that this is being felt by the youngest and the most vulnerable — our children — is frankly devastating,” she said.

As one father asked the commissioner: “Why do kids have to go to school like that? Is it because they’re Jews?”

“It’s not right. Why do I have to go once a term to help on security at the school? Standing there, watching, looking, looking […] This is the world that the Jews of Australia live in now and it needs to change,” he said.

Conflation of Judaism with support for Israel’s war in Gaza

Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel — in which militants killed 1,200 people and took another 250 people hostage — marked a significant turning point for antisemitism in Australia, counsel assisting the commission Zelie Heger SC told the inquiry.

Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza — which has killed more than 72,000 people and injured more than 172,000 — has been labelled a genocide by an independent United Nations commission which does not report on behalf of the UN as a whole, a description that the Israeli government stridently rejects.

It has also inspired an upswelling of Pro-Palestinian support, including weekly protests in major Australian cities attended by a wide range of people, including current and former Labor and Greens parliamentarians.

However, the inquiry heard that political opposition to Israel’s military effort had become conflated with antisemitism in some parts of the community, which equated being Jewish with supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Vic Alhadeff OAM, a non-executive director at SBS, told the inquiry that “so much of the manifestation of antisemitism incidents and attacks is interlaced with, and references, what is taking place in the other side of the world”.

In response to his concerns about rising antisemitism, Alhadeff said a representative from another faith group told him: “But look what’s happening to the Palestinians in Gaza”.

“My response was: ‘You have to be made of stone not to care about what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, however, why are you holding me responsible?’”

“Jewish Australians have no agency in what the Israel Defence Force does, or indeed what the Israeli government does.”

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has reported more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, a threefold increase on the year before.

The data does not include instances of online hate and points to what ECAJ — Australia’s peak body of Jewish organisations — considers a significant escalation in antisemitism following October 7.

One woman told the inquiry she had had “free Palestine” yelled at her, followed by “F the Jews”.

A teacher’s aide gave evidence that a group of Jewish year five students were targeted during an excursion to Melbourne Museum by a group of older teenagers who encircled them, and started laughing, saying, “free, free, Palestine”.

The royal commission’s first public hearing block will continue until 15 May, with a second hearing block slated for the end of the month.

— With additional reporting from the Australian Associated Press.

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