Updated ,first published
A young Jewish student on a bus was told that Hitler should have “gassed them all” and another was subjected to Nazi salutes by her English teacher, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has heard.
On the first day of public evidence in Sydney on Monday, the commission heard that an independent Jewish school in Sydney, Mount Sinai College, prepared its students for terrorist attacks with “simulations and evacuation drills” and now looked “more like a prison than a primary school”.
The commission, headed by former High Court judge Virginia Bell, opened its first block of hearings with evidence from Jewish-Australian witnesses who spoke of their lived experience with antisemitism.
Holocaust survivor Peter Halasz, the 86-year-old co-founder of the iconic Australian swimwear brand Seafolly, was born in Hungary and had long been a “proud Australian citizen”. But he felt “deep obligation to speak while I still can”, “not with bitterness but with urgency”.
He said the rise of antisemitism was no longer “a faint echo of a distant past”, and this recognition was “frightening and cause for alarm”. His son Anthony also appeared and said he was seeking citizenship from Hungary, the country his father had fled, as a safety net in case he needed to flee Sydney amid rising rates of antisemitism.
Zelie Heger, SC, one of a team of counsel assisting, used her opening address to detail some of the most egregious examples of antisemitism provided to the commission, many of which involved children.
“Overt abuse is not just by adults towards adults. The perpetrators of abuse have been both adults and children and, in one terrible incident, one small student told a Jewish student that Hitler should have gassed them all,” Heger said.
Heger told the commission the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, marked a “significant turning point for antisemitism in Australia”.
Also assisting the commission is Richard Lancaster SC, who outlined plans for future hearing blocks, including an investigation of the circumstances that led to the Bondi Beach terror attack in December last year. There will be “a particular focus on antisemitism on social media” he said, and the role it may play in radicalisation.
Universities and other public institutions will also feature in future public hearings.
Sheina Gutnick, the daughter of Bondi Beach terror attack victim Reuven Morrison, was the first witness.
“Bondi holds many complicated and conflicting feelings for me,” Gutnick told the commission.
“It was somewhere where my parents had started their history together, somewhere I had spent many days in my childhood, I had beautiful memories there with my family, I had spent a lot of time there with my children during school holidays.
“And now Bondi holds a really heavy weight in our community’s heart.”
Stefanie Schwartz, president of the board of Mount Sinai College in Maroubra, told the commission that the school which she attended 35 years ago now had a strong focus on security.
The college is an independent Jewish day school with about 400 students. Schwartz said it played a vital role in preserving Jewish identity, tradition and culture.
“It’s a sad reality to think that we are in a situation where parents are paying to keep their children safe at an Australian school,” she said.
She said students participate in “simulations and evacuation drills” to prepare for terrorist attacks. “I would imagine most schools would have a regular fire drill; something like that. At our school we do that, but we also have evacuation drills in the event of a terror attack.”
The youngest students at the college are two years old because there is an early learning centre, Schwartz said, and the oldest are only 11 or 12. She said the campus now “looks a lot more like a prison than a primary school”.
A number of witnesses asked to appear anonymously, including one grandfather, known as AAL, who detailed the experience of his teenage granddaughter at a “non-Jewish school”.
AAL told the commission that his granddaughter was subjected to a substitute English teacher “performing several Hitler salutes” in the classroom.
“My granddaughter was 13, 14 at that stage and left the classroom, deeply shocked”. He said “to the principal’s credit, she invited my daughter and my granddaughter to talk to her and praised her for being brave.”
Ultimately, after losing several friends, his granddaughter left the school and was enrolled in a Jewish day school “which is also a little confronting to go past armed guards as she goes to school, but she is much happier there”.
Rabbi Benjamin Elton from The Great Synagogue, and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin also appeared.
Ryvchin told the royal commission about the attack on his former eastern suburbs home in January 2025. The Dover Heights house was splashed with red paint, while two cars were firebombed and daubed with anti-Jewish slurs.
“I could see the despair in our neighbours; in our broader community,” Ryvchin said. It marked the first time a private home and individual was targeted, he said.
The Downing Centre Local Court heard this year that the attack was orchestrated by overseas masterminds, while the local actors were motivated by financial gain.
Elton, who has led the synagogue since 2015, told the commission that antisemitism had “run riot” in Australia and it had “not been checked” nor stopped after the Bondi terrorist attack.
The “time for evading or muddying the issue is over”, he said.
“The answer cannot be ghettos for our own protection,” Elton said, stressing that this was impractical and immoral.
Elton told the commission that in July 2024, a large banner reading “Sanction Israel” was paraded across the full width of the CBD synagogue’s facade. Free Palestine stickers were affixed to the front gates.
“Hatred for Israel becomes hatred for Jews because now Jews are identified as responsible for Israel, and then that hatred eventually leads to violence,” he said.
Commissioner Bell asked Elton whether he would view a sign calling for sanctions of Israel being displayed outside Parliament House as antisemitic. The rabbi responded, “No, I would not.”
Ryvchin, who arrived in Australia from Ukraine as a young boy, said there had been “soaring antisemitism” since October 7, 2023.
“There are things happening in this country that should never have happened … my family fled the Soviet Union to be as far physically as possible from that, but the things we’ve seen in this country replicate what happened there: the rampant street abuse, the violence, the denigration, and the sheer relish with which it’s inflicted on the Jewish people so often.”
Bell last week handed down her interim report, which focused on NSW Police and security agencies and possible failures that may have led to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, in which 15 people, most of them Jewish, were killed on the first night of Hanukkah last year.
The royal commission has so far received more than 7500 submissions, most from NSW, followed by Victoria.
The commission is using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
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Alexandra Smith is a senior writer and former state political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
