Antisemitism royal commission LIVE: Security at Sydney school ‘tripled’, muck-up day ‘jokes’ about Hitler and Bondi shooter costumes

Among the 12 witnesses slated to give evidence at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in Sydney today are Peter Wertheim of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and SBS board member Dr Vic Alhadeff, former chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

You can watch the hearing live here from 10am (AEST).

A Melbourne mother is giving evidence under the pseudonym AAO. She was born in Melbourne and “raised as a Jewish girl in Australia”.

She told the commission she had an experience at the Australian Open in Melbourne this year of sitting next to a woman who started “ranting about Jewish people and how terrible they are”.

She said the woman was saying “the job that they did in Bondi wasn’t good enough, and they should have killed more, and the Jews are the worst”.

“I just feel it was deep-seated; the hatred. I don’t where that would have come from and why it was present on that day.”

She reported the incident to police, and the woman was removed from the tennis.

Kovi Paneth tells the commission that nobody in the Jewish community is surprised that the Bondi terrorist attack happened.

“Antisemitism has gotten real,” he said. He said clients had suggested to him that they believed before that massacre that he was being “melodramatic” about antisemitism, but they now understood.

Melbourne resident Kovi Paneth is now giving evidence. He comes from a family of Holocaust survivors.

“I am orthodox Jew; I am visibly orthodox. I wear a yamaka [skull-cap] all day,” he said.

His children don’t wear their Star of David necklaces in public “out of concern and fear”, he said.

He said a man asked his daughter on one occasion if she was a “dirty f—ing Jew”

“That’s just reality for our children in Melbourne in 2026,” he said.

Joshua Gomperts, an observant Jew in Victoria, is now giving evidence. His grandparents lost their parents in the Holocaust.

His first experience of racism in Australia was when he was about 13 years old, coming home from synagogue wearing a black hat. Another “youngish-person” in his street screamed antisemitic slurs and threw a glass bottle at him.

“I didn’t really know how to process it,” he said.

While walking with his family to synagogue on another occasion, “a group of people [threw] eggs at us” while screaming antisemitic slurs, he said. This was not the last time this happened.

In 2020, he was working as an ambulance transport attendant. He said he arrived to pick up a man, aged in his 90s, in a hospital emergency department.

Nir Golan said he still wore his kippah (scull-cap) in public, but hidden under a baseball cap.

He said the Bondi terror attack had had a profound effect on his family. It was a “devastating but not a surprising escalation” in antisemitism, he said.

“It’s completely changed how we act in this country,” he said. “I am now coming forward very publicly. It is time that we stand up.”

He said his family had been targeted online by social media groups with “vile and disgusting and threatening comments” because he was speaking out.

It is a criminal offence to interfere with witnesses giving evidence before the royal commission, Bell said.

Sydneysider Nir Golan is now giving evidence. He has been living in Australia since 2020 and says he and family are “very proud Australians”.

His family are orthodox Jews. He was born in Israel and grew up in the United States, and “fell in love” with Australia during his university days.

He said he was called a “dirty Jew” in the street by a man in Sydney “in broad daylight” in 2023 when there were “many people around us”. The man made a Nazi salute and pointed his fingers shaped like a gun in his direction.

“No one intervened unfortunately except for one tourist, an American tourist,” Golan said. The tourist was bashed by the man, he said.

The fear he felt after the incident had not left him, Golan said.

You can read more about his evidence here.

The next witness is Lea Levy, who grew up in Paris and migrated to Australia in 2015 in her 20s.

She is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors but “grew up in a secular Jewish family”.

“I did not receive a Jewish education,” she said.

She said she was called a “dirty Jew” by one student repeatedly at school but was “lucky” that this was the extent of antisemitism she experienced in her childhood.

In the early 2000s antisemitism increased, however. She started to feel unsafe at night in Paris amid attacks on men wearing their kippahs (scull-caps) in the street and terrorist attacks on Jewish people causing numerous deaths. This motivated her family’s move to Australia.

A Monash University academic has told the royal commission of her failed attempts to have antisemitic social media posts, including images likening Jews to a plague of rats, removed from Meta-owned Facebook.

Israeli-born Tali Pinksy, who is a permanent Australian resident, told the commission she had made several reports about posts that had infiltrated her social media feed, only for delayed responses from Facebook and other platforms.

Pinksy said the response “was almost always the same standard response … it does not violate the community standards.”

“I bring it [social media] up because I think it’s not necessarily the main driver of antisemitism, but it’s certainly a great amplifier, and I think it’s a very actionable part of what’s going on, ” Pinksy said.