A 15-year-old boy playing Minecraft with schoolmates. A father of three walking to a bus stop during rush hour. A volunteer with an ambulance service working on duty at a music festival. A university student in a shared house with two of her best friends.
It was in these otherwise mundane moments that Australian Jews were subject to brazen antisemitism, something they thought would not happen in their country, witnesses told a public commission this month.
There were insults, profanities and ugly stereotypes hurled at them, in person and online. They were spat on, egged, threatened and intimidated. Swastikas scratched into trees, Nazi salutes on the street or in class, and graffiti scrawled on school walls made them question whether Australia was a safe place for Jewish people.
For the past two weeks, dozens of Jewish Australians have taken to the witness stand to attest to the antisemitism they’ve experienced, which they said intensified after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed. They testified as part of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, a wide-reaching public inquiry into December’s Bondi Beach massacre, in which two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, killing 15.
Cumulatively, the testimony was possibly the most comprehensive account of the charged reality Australia’s Jewish community has said they had been living with in the lead-up to the attack, which authorities say was carried out by gunmen inspired by the Islamic State.
“What is happening in Australia today is not a faint echo of a distant past,” said Peter Halas, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, who said that, for the first time since his childhood in Hungary, he has felt afraid to wear his Star of David in public in recent years. “For those of us who lived through the 1930s and the 1940s, it is something we recognize, and that recognition is frightening and cause for alarm.”
What has led to the sharp rise in antisemitism — and whether enough was done about it ahead of the Bondi killings — is at the heart of the inquiry, which will deliver a final report in December. Australian Jews are not alone in describing a spike in experiences of being targeted for their heritage or faith — Jewish communities in the United States and in Europe also say they are on edge amid increasing antisemitic attacks.
In Australia, those who testified included young teens and an octogenarian; Orthodox Jews and largely secular Jews; musicians, a paramedic, a cookbook writer and corporate professionals. They recounted experiences in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania. Hateful remarks and acts came from strangers on the street, people they thought of as friends, and colleagues and bosses, they said.
“I don’t think Jewish kids should be scared to live normally like other kids do. It’s not fair,” a 13-year-old whose name was not disclosed said in a recording that was played before the commission. The girl said she had started tucking her Star of David necklace behind her clothes “in case someone antisemitic sees it” and that her friends wear T-shirts over the uniform of their Jewish school before getting on a public bus.
Nir Golan, a 45-year-old father of three and an Orthodox Jew, testified about how on a beautiful afternoon in Sydney in late October 2023, he was transferring from the train to a bus. A stranger on the street unleashed a flurry of racial slurs at him, including “dirty Jew,” while doing the Nazi salute and miming firing a pistol at his forehead, Mr. Golan said.
“I went into shock and I remember asking myself, ‘Did I just hear that? Is this actually happening in broad daylight in today’s time?’” he said.
He added: “I felt very vulnerable and that feeling has not left me since then.”
A 15-year-old boy who lives in Perth told the commission about a litany of insults that boys he knew at school repeatedly directed at him relating to his Jewish identity, while playing Minecraft and over Discord. Recently during a basketball game in the schoolyard, he heard a group of kids yell out, “Hitler was right to kill them all,” he testified.
His mother, who also testified anonymously, said she was most heartbroken by how much her son seemed to have normalized and accepted the abuse as a part of his school life.
The accounts given at the public hearings — overseen by a veteran justice, Virginia Bell, and streamed live online — were only a fraction of the more than 9,600 written submissions that poured into the commission, the vast majority of them from Jewish Australians describing their experience of antisemitism.
Even as the hearings went on, there were reminders that antisemitism was an ongoing problem rather than an issue in the rearview mirror.
Last week, outside the building where the commission was meeting in downtown Sydney, a man was photographed wearing a T-shirt with a swastika and the words “Antisemitism, Proud to be accused. SPEAK UP!” A 68-year-old man was later arrested and charged with behaving in an offensive manner and displaying a prohibited Nazi symbol, according to the police.
Over the weekend, a woman at a girls’ netball game in Sydney yelled expletives about Jews and said they should be “eradicated,” according to reports. The police said a 42-year-old woman was facing charges for offensive language.
Andrew Markus, an emeritus professor at Monash University who has run a longitudinal survey of Australian attitudes over the past two decades, testified that negative attitudes toward Jews rose from 9 percent in 2023 to 15 percent in 2025.
Negative views toward other faith groups also rose in the same time period, Mr. Markus said. The group subject to the highest percentage of negative perceptions are Muslims, rising from 27 percent in 2023 to 35 percent in 2025, he said.
Even before the massacre in Bondi, Australia had seen a spate of high-profile antisemitic attacks that involved arson or vandalism of Jewish businesses and institutions. Last year, authorities in Australia said that Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had been behind at least two of the incidents, and severed diplomatic ties.
Jillian Segal, who was appointed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to act as a special envoy to combat antisemitism in 2024, testified before the commission last week, saying antisemitism was “an illness that has morphed and mutated over time.”
The latest and fastest growing type of antisemitism is one that conflates criticism of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza with hostility toward Jewish people in Australia, Ms. Segal said. That form of antisemitism, which also co-opts and draws from age-old tropes, is particularly “pernicious” because it has become “almost fashionable,” she said.
It is a situation with no easy fix, and what is needed is education and leadership across all sectors, she said. With the Bondi tragedy, there appears to be belated recognition of the Jewish Australian voices that had been sounding the alarm all along, Ms. Segal said in her testimony.
“There’s been a realization that what the Jewish community was experiencing and complaining about and that they were seeing, wasn’t a collection of isolated incidents,” she said. “It wasn’t an exaggeration. It was very real and very dangerous for the country.”
Laura Chung contributed reporting.
