Antisemitism royal commission LIVE: Commission ‘appalled’ by protester; concerns after primary students taunted at museum; teen’s emotional plea to ‘help us’

The royal commission is streaming its hearings live. Watch at the link below:

Cherny is talking about a conversation he had with a non-Jewish friend after Cherny gave a speech at his daughter’s bat mitzvah.

“He came up to me after and sort of said, ‘Dean, I need you know that, if it comes down to that, we’ve got a farm and we’ll take you and we’ll hide you.’

“I just think, we need to stop and think about that happening in Australia in 2025. That people are thinking like that … I broke down and cried. I needed to leave the function and just, you know, compose myself.”

Dean Cherny, a Melbourne born and raised, father of two daughters, is a proud Australian and proud Jew.

Until the Bondi attack, he didn’t feel the last two descriptions were mutually exclusive.

“They were just sort of joined,” he is telling the commission now. “I was an Australian Jew, but now I sort of feel that I need to, in various situations, sort of separate those two because I’m unsure as to how the Jewish side of things will be received.”

Cherny now works with Jewish community security group, CSG, which protects Jewish schools and synagogues.

We’re now hearing from a Melbourne mother, who is also speaking anonymously as witness AAU.

She is currently providing more details about the incident teacher Blake Shaw referred to, which we reported earlier this morning, where students from a Jewish primary school were approached by older students who chanted “Free Palestine” while on an excursion to a Melbourne museum in July last year. Her son, who was in year 5, was on that trip.

She made a report through Victoria’s Department of Education Report Racism email address.

“I wanted to make sure that they underwent an educative process to understand the impact that their words had on our children,” the mother said. She was told the department would investigate the incident.

After following up several times, the mother was informed by the department that, due to confidentiality requirements, she was not permitted to know about the consequences of the behaviour.

Meanwhile, a man wearing an antisemitic T-shirt has been moved on by NSW Police after he turned up outside the CBD building where the royal commission is being conducted. Police are investigating the incident.

In a statement, the commission said: “The Royal Commission is appalled that such an item of clothing was worn in the vicinity of our hearing venue.

“Safety of witnesses is paramount to the Royal Commission. We want to reassure witnesses and those wishing to engage with the Royal Commission that safety protocols are in place.

“The Royal Commission is determined to investigate antisemitism in Australia without fear or intimidation.”

We’re back from morning tea.

Blake Shaw works at a Jewish primary school in Melbourne. He is now giving evidence about a school excursion to a museum he was on with his students in July 2025.

While his students were at the museum, five or six students from another school, likely a high school, came up to his students and began to chant “Free Palestine”.

When Shaw confronted the teacher of the students about it, he says he “shrugged it off and scoffed at the suggestion of what I had said, which was obviously quite insulting and belittling”.

“I said, ‘These students are 10 or 11 years old. They don’t need to be dealing with this right now’.”

Shaw says he then heard the same students say “Free Hezbollah” as they passed through the museum.

As the Jewish mother and her two children finish giving evidence about their lived experiences of antisemitism, commissioner Virginia Bell asks them: “You say that you’ve experienced people holding you as personally responsible for events in Gaza. And do I take it that those people have no idea whatever your views on that topic might be?”

The Jewish university student responded: “Yeah, I think they just see you’re Israeli, therefore … you are fully responsible, and you need to make a full-blown political statement on the situation. Even the fact that we went [to Israel], my friends were horrified. They were like, ‘You’re going to this horrible country doing all these horrible things’.”

The other daughter said: “Being Jewish is, again what my mum said, having a target on your back. Especially because I don’t look like the average Australian … but I will never stop being proud of who I am.”

The commission is now taking a 15 minute morning tea break.

A Year 10 student and her mother are currently outlining her experience of being Jewish at a Sydney public school.

The student says she often hears the phrase “I hate juice”, which she understands to be a direct reference to her Jewish heritage. Other times, fellow students say slurs to her.

“I try to stand up for other Jewish kids who get bullied because sometimes they don’t openly refer themselves to being Jewish.

“On the bus one day, I heard another student calling another student, bragging about how he made a Jewish kid cry.”

When her mother raised concerns with the school’s deputy principal, the mother says it was “like talking to a brick wall”.

“He just kept repeating, ‘Yes, we have a zero tolerance to racism’ … I eventually confronted him, and I was like, ‘I’m very aware that you seem to not actually be willing to use the word antisemitism.’”

“You can’t fix what you can’t name.”

The Tasmanian teacher is giving evidence about how she noticed a significant change in the attitude of students towards a Jewish member of the community following the October 7, 2023 attacks.

An elderly Dutch man attended the school in the north of the state each year to talk with year 10 students about the Holocaust, in line with their history curriculum, and was well received.

But after the attacks, the teacher is explaining, students became “boorish” and “very rude” to the man.

“Despite staff trying to tell the students, ‘we have a visitor, he’s speaking about his experiences of the holocaust,’ this was kind of brushed aside by the students,” she says. “They were asking him questions about the conflict between Israel and Hamas and making comments to the effect where they were essentially blaming him for what was happening over there.”

“It was essentially a whole room of grade 10 students against one person who was just trying his best to educate students.”

The commission’s focus today will be on schools and aged care, and began with a moving recorded testimony from a 13-year-old Sydney girl who was at Bondi Pavilion on the night of the December 14 massacre for a friend’s bar mitzvah.

The girl, who cannot be identified, told in devastating detail how her friends were left terrified after that day, scared of the sound of balloons popping or fireworks.

She said her friends were too scared to go to sleepovers because they did not want to be separated from their parents and that her father wanted her to take self-defence classes so she can defend herself.

“I don’t think Jewish kids should be scared to live normally like other kids do ... I hope the royal commission can help us.”

After a slight delay, the stream has begun for the day-three hearings. Given the number of anonymous witnesses, there’s some complexity in what we can bring you today.

We’re hearing now from an anonymous teacher in Tasmania who is not Jewish. She is the second witness to appear today and is speaking about how the history curriculum and some prescribed English books interact.

In Tasmania, many students read the historical fiction book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in year 9, and only study the Holocaust in history classes in year 10. The book, she says, is “historically inaccurate” and fuels misconceptions about the Holocaust.

“It centres on German suffering rather than the Jewish victims,” the teacher says.

She’s detailing how there is a “cognitive dissonance” stemming from the contents of the book and the historical facts.