Police officers at the scene of a deadly mass shooting attack targeting a Jewish community Hanukkah celebration near Bondi Beach, Sydney, on Dec. 14. The shooting in which 15 people were killed and 40 injured prompted the government to order a Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism. File photo By Mick Tsikas/EPA
Jewish Australians on Monday told a commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism in the wake of the Bondi Beach mass shooting that killed 15 Jews and injured 40 that open anti-Semitism in Australia meant they no longer felt safe.
Testifying on the first day of the phase II of the commission, which got underway Feb. 24, Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Reuven Morrison who died tackling the gunmen, was one of several witnesses who recounted incidences of coming under threat and the belief that warnings from the community over rising anti-Semitism were either not taken seriously or ignored altogether.
Gutnick, who said her parents, who arrived separately as refugees, married after meeting at Bondi Beach, told the Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion hearing that she lived in continual state of fear and felt unsafe in public places.
She said Bondi, where her parents started their life together and where she had beautiful childhood memories, and then with her own family, now “holds a really heavy weight in our community’s heart.”
“He was deeply proud to have moved to Australia and been an Australian citizen, and grateful for a nation that welcomed Jews when so many others turned them away at that time,” said Gutnick.
Morrison, 62, was shot dead as he threw bricks at Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed Akram, after they allegedly opened fire on a gathering to celebrate Hanukkah on Dec. 14.
Gutnick said she had seen hundreds of messages online saying she should have been killed alongside her father and that the attack was faked.
“I saw people trying to excuse and justify the events as only anti-Zionist. I felt as though anti-Semitism was allowed to come into the open. All of a sudden it was socially, morally acceptable for anti-Semitic comments to be made in public discourse,” she said.
Holocaust Survivor Peter Halasz, recalled how he was a small boy when his mother was caught and executed by the Nazis in his native Hungary in 1944 but that he survived due to “the extraordinary courage” of those around him.
“I lived through what hatred can do to people. What is happening in Australia today is not a faint echo of a distant past [but] something recognized and cause for alarm.”
Halasz explained that after fleeing Soviet-ruled Hungary for Australia he never imagined he would have to be fearful of wearing his Star of David in public again.
“Jews in Australia have become targets,” he added.
Witness, “AAL” testifying under anonymity, said he always felt safe until a substitute teacher at his granddaughter’s public school performed “several Heil Hitler salutes” in front of students and was not disciplined or fired.
“I have to think very, very seriously if this is the country for my grandchildren unless the root cause of anti-Semitism is stamped out,” he told the commission.
Several witnesses said the situation had begun deteriorating in 2023, after Israel’s military offensive in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, with anti-Semitic and threatening comments to their faces and their children targeted by bullies, as well as more subtle forms of discrimination.
Zelie Heger SC, counsel to the judge heading up the inquiry, Commissioner Virginia Bell, identified Oct. 7 as a “significant turning point of anti-Semitism.”
Heger said doxxing, graffiti, heckling and deliberate damage to synagogues were the most common examples.
One anonymous witness, a Melbourne resident originally from the United Kingdom, said her family was moving to Israel because “a war zone was a safer place” than Australia.
Historic May moments through the years
Wreathes are seen amongst the statues at the Korean War Veterans Memorial during Memorial Day weekend in Washington on May 27, 2023. Memorial Day, which honors U.S. military personnel who died while in service, is held on the last Monday of May. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
