Bondi royal commission: On the first hearing day, regular Jews describe lives of fear and isolation

A teacher who performed a Heil Hitler salute. A Jew frog-marched away from an anti-Israel protest for carrying an Israeli flag. Five-year-old children taught what to do in a terrorist attack.

The first witnesses at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on Monday morning presented a snapshot of Jewish life in Australia today: fear, isolation and pessimism about a country once considered around the world as a haven for Jews escaping the horrors of Europe in World War II.

Apart from Alex Ryvchin, a prominent Sydney Jewish leader, the dozen chosen to speak on day one — and set the tone for the year-long inquiry — were not drawn from the professional advocates who have dominated the anti-Semitism debate since the Bondi massacre on December 14.

Some had their identity hidden, including a young woman called AAK who decided she was never going to hide her religion. After 15 people were killed at the famous beach, a friend she had fallen out with over the war in the Gaza Strip sent a conciliatory message stating: “I love you.”

“Dead Jewish people don’t need love,” AAK said she replied. “Live Jewish people need people to listen to them.”

Among those who ran for lives on that day was the five-year-old daughter of Stephanie Swartz, the president of Mount Sinai College, a Jewish primary school in Maroubra, a middle-class suburb in Sydney’s east.

The school has expanded its use of security guards, strengthened its physical defences and decided some excursions are too risky for students who might be identified as Jewish.

One of the challenges is how to teach the desperately young children what to do if men come with guns to kill them, especially for those, like Ms Swartz’s daughter, who have gone through the experience in real life.

“Having these drills is very anxiety provoking and overwhelming for them,” Ms Swartz said. “Have to take steps to make sure they aren’t retraumatised.”

Marched away

One witness, a South African-born businessman identified as AAL, temporarily moved the inquiry to the place and time many Jews see as the moment their collective lives changed in Australia: the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023.

He had taken a water taxi to the famous building to see a show. At intermission he emerged to what he called “a wild maddened crowd” burning something on the forecourt.

“The police that were there had their backs to them,” he said, referring to a group of men who appeared to be celebrating Hamas’s attack on Israel the day before.

The police weren’t entirely passive, though. Three were “frogmarching a man in discomfort” away from the protest, he said. What may have been an Israeli flag was furled up under his arm. “The police said: ‘This is for his own safety. He could be inciting violence,’” AAL told the inquiry. “But I said, ‘the violence is there’; where there was a flag burning.”

Later, the NSW Police Force would determine the protestors were not chanting “gas the Jews,” as some heard in recordings of the night, but “where are the Jews?”

Among Jewish leaders there is great hope that commissioner Virginia Bell, a former High Court judge, can help other Australians understand how hostile Jews feel the world has become since the war between Hamas and Israel unleashed global protests.

By sharing stories of daily Jewish life in a country that regards itself as peaceful, tolerant and law-abiding, they hope to trigger empathy for a community of little more than 100,000 men, women and children.

Anecdotes are useful for influencing public opinion. But they are examples of a problem, not the cause. “Radical Islam is the root cause of this problem,” the South African businessman said.

Another witness, a mother of four, said she and her husband emigrated from Britain, where two Jews were stabbed on a London street last week, because they feared an increase in anti-Semitism accompanying the “rise of radical Islam”.

“Guess what?” she said. “We were right.”

Which places Ms Bell in a dilemma: can or should she blame one religion for what is happening in Australia?