Jewish kids at a youth summer camp were “crying because they were scared that someone was going to come and murder them in their sleep” following the Bondi terror attack, while Jews in wheelchairs suffered physical assaults in antisemitic incidents in Melbourne in 2024, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has heard.
A Jewish youth camp leader from Sydney in her early 20s detailed the sharp contrast between the nature of the camps and activities she attended with the same youth movement group growing up compared with now.
The camp leader – who gave evidence on Wednesday under a pseudonym – said children were no longer free to wear Jewish paraphernalia on their way to and from camps and other events, which these days mostly occurred behind security within the gates of a synagogue.
She said groups used to host days at the pool, trips to the movies and picnics in parks, and kids would attend protests wearing the youth movement’s identifying jerseys and participate in Clean Up Australia Day, but safety concerns meant those kinds of events in public places could no longer take place.
The camp leader said children in the group had disclosed “a lot of really traumatic experiences” that had happened at their non-Jewish schools, and it was “heartbreaking” that students often didn’t understand that the antisemitic treatment they received was not OK.
“One instance was on a recent camp a year 12 student shared with me that upon receiving her school captaincy, her photograph was photoshopped by her peers to have payot (sideburns that Orthodox Jewish men wear) and ‘Jew Jew Jew’ written on it and it was circulated around the school,” she said. “The school couldn’t do anything about it because they couldn’t find where it originated so they didn’t know who to get in trouble.”
The camp leader spoke of the difficulties of a summer camp that took place shortly after the December Bondi Beach terror attack, where “many [children] who usually would just be homesick were suddenly crying because they were scared that someone was going to come and murder them in their sleep”.
‘Horrific’ attacks
Naomi Levin, CEO of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, gave evidence to the royal commission of “really horrific incidents” that took place on the streets of Melbourne’s CBD during the weekly pro-Palestine protests.
The worst, Ms Levin said, was in August 2024 when an anti-racism rally and pro-Palestine protesters clashed outside the Victorian parliament.
“It was the worst day we have ever experienced here in Victoria for antisemitic incidents,” she said.
“There were Jewish individuals in wheelchairs who suffered physical assaults, there was a level of vitriol against Jewish people who were peacefully demonstrating that was outside what we’d ever seen before, and there was a perception that police didn’t step in and didn’t do what was needed to be done, and that continued at future protests.”
Ms Levin said government funding for security had, at different points in time, been “more dependent on the election cycle than the needs”.
“What we’ve seen over the past few years is very ad hoc funding. So after an incident there’s an injection of funds but it all has to be spent in a pretty short space of time … or it can’t be spent on particular needs, it has to be directed into one area,” Ms Levin said.
The royal commission also heard evidence from a Victoria Police commander that the force did not have “reliable” data to draw on regarding the prevalence of antisemitic incidents.
“That’s our biggest issue … there are mechanisms to work through antisemitic incidents, but it’s just not that reliable,” acting commander Kelvin Gale of Victoria Police’s crime and counter-terrorism group said of the available data.
The force’s assistant commissioner, Chris Gilbert, agreed that better data would be an “advantage” but he said Victoria Police was in a “very strong position” regarding its ability to assess risks to the Jewish community regardless.
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