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A few years ago, the young Jewish children attending an annual youth camp in NSW cried at night because they were homesick.
But after the Bondi terror attack, the children were crying for a different reason, a Jewish youth group leader said in her evidence to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on Wednesday.
“Many 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,” said the leader, who was granted the pseudonym ACV to protect her identity.
“It was very, very real.”
The commission continued its hearings into security issues in the Jewish community, with ACV telling the commission how things had changed since her own childhood spent attending similar camps.
For today’s children, there are no pool days, movie days or picnics, and participants can no longer wear Jewish paraphernalia. Many of the youth group’s activities are now held within a secure synagogue.
“Parents are a lot more concerned about the safety of their young people, and we think a lot more carefully about where and when we host events,” ACV told Commissioner Virginia Bell.
“Parents don’t want to send their kids somewhere where they’re not going to be safe … There is a real threat that someone could want to harm us if we are not protected.”
At the holiday camps, leaders have the children turn off location settings on their phones “so that no one can come and find the campsite”, ACV said.
“In their final camp as a participant they [used to] get a day out, and they go and explore the town or go down to a river. But we don’t do that any more simply because, why would we risk that?”
The commission also heard the count of antisemitic incidents recorded by the Jewish community had leapt to record numbers last year – part of a broader escalation since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza.
But three witnesses from Victoria Police confirmed they find it difficult to collect and collate information about racially motivated attacks. The LEAP (Law Enforcement Assistance Program) police database relied on individual officers to identify incidents motivated by racism and there was no data type in the system to allow figures to be obtained.
“There are mechanisms to work through antisemitic incidents, but it’s just not that reliable,” said Kelvin Gale, the acting commander in Victoria Police’s counterterrorism investigation services.
Police assistant commissioner Chris Gilbert, who is in charge of the Southern Metropolitan Region where most of Melbourne’s Jewish community lives, said, “we’re obviously clearly looking at ways to improve the connectivity of our systems – and not just the capture of that information, but the usability of it”.
Gilbert said community engagement between Victoria Police and Jewish groups, including its security groups, had stepped up since 2023 and jumped again since the Bondi Beach terror attack, “which sees us now deploying more than we ever had before”.
Naomi Levin, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, said there had been 564 reports of antisemitism in Victoria last year – the highest ever. She’s the latest of a number of witnesses who have observed an explosion in hostility towards her community since 2023.
The hardening of security at Jewish sites had meant the community had closed off to the world for safety reasons.
“We’re creating unwelcome facades on our Jewish community facilities,” Levin said on Wednesday. “I think it creates an impression of our community that couldn’t be further from the truth, that we want to be closed or locked in.”
It had also affected community members, she said.
“When Jewish community events finish, it’s … ‘head to your cars quickly; don’t loiter’. This limits the opportunities we have with social ties … we’re losing the opportunity to have those informal opportunities … It will ultimately weaken the fabric of our community.”
The third day of the royal commission’s fifth block also heard from Deakin University associate professor and terrorism expert Josh Roose, who has researched how and why terrorists choose their targets.
Before moving into a closed session to discuss more sensitive topics, Roose told the commission he had studied 100 terrorists across a number of plots and attacks between 2004 and 2024.
The overarching finding was that, when it came to choosing a target to attack, “terrorists are rational actors”, meaning they were deliberate in their choices.
First, there was a “symbolic component” to their attacks which by definition involved delivering a political or religious message, Roose said. Secondly, there was a pragmatic component.
“Certain sites, for example, might appear too difficult to reach and would be bypassed in favour of a potentially more vulnerable event where they can maximise lethality and their message.
“The target really is ultimately selected on a number of factors, including access, familiarity, security and the weapons available, and ultimately, their capabilities,” he said.
Drawing a distinction between fixed targets and “events”, he said the latter were more difficult to defend.
Both the site of the event and the group meeting there might carry symbolism for terrorists, Roose told the commission. This involved hardening infrastructure as well as developing “a deeper intelligence picture”, good communications and partnerships between different related organisations, and patrols – “people actually moving around the perimeter”.
“That’s a lot easier to achieve with a fixed site where it’s already well known … it’s much more difficult to establish with an event,” Roose conceded.
No particular mention was made of the attack on the Hanukkah by the Sea celebration at Bondi Beach in December last year. Bell has previously made it clear these issues will not be canvassed in detail so that the commission did not prejudice the trial of one of the suspects.
The youth camp leader, ACV, said she thought the more Australians knew about the history and culture of Judaism, the safer her community would be.
From kindergarten, she said, Australian students should “be taught the actual accurate history of Jewish people and Jewish culture, and accurate representation of Jewish people”.
“People really don’t understand what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be a minority in Australia, and I think that is a major failure of the education system,” she said.
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