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Jewish children in Australia are growing up believing strong security is normal, the antisemitism royal commission has heard.
Senior leaders of synagogues and private Jewish schools have told the antisemitism royal commission they want state and federal governments to pay more to protect their communities from increasing threats of violence.
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion heard on Tuesday that schools and synagogues employed armed guards, had increased the resilience of buildings to attack, and screened everyone coming onto the premises to protect their students from harm. Dan Sztrajt, the principal of Melbourne Jewish school Mt Scopus, said about 30 per cent of the cost of security was met by state and federal government grants, and the rest by the community.
Grants could not be used to pay security guards, which was the largest expense, he said. The head of the Australian Council of Jewish Schools, Stephen Rothman, told the commission that “at least the recurrent expenditure on guards and other operational recurrent expenditures should be funded by the federal government”. Following the Bondi Beach terror attack, Mount Scopus College in Burwood has had an increased security presence.
Tyson Wodak, board president of Bialik College in Hawthorn East, told the commission parents at the school paid a security levy of $840 per student – up 230 per cent since 2022. The college also receives government funding, but he said it did not cover the full cost.
“In my view, a well-functioning society ought to provide security to its people as a core part of its orderly function,” Wodak said. Linda Emms, the principal of Sydney’s Emanuel School, agreed that grants to her school “come with conditions”.
“The grants that we got last year were specifically for capital infrastructure. We couldn’t use that for guarding costs … Every time there is a constraint of some sort put around these grants, it actually makes it hard for us as a school.
”In a block of the royal commission dedicated to hearing about security in the Jewish community, three rabbis from three different synagogues – including Adass Israel, which was burned down in 2024 in an alleged terror attack – spoke of the heavy burden of security on Jewish communal life in Australia. Adass Israel rabbi Benjamin Klein told the commission that some Jewish community members felt so unsafe that they refused to worship or attend events unless guards were present.
Some were leaving for Israel, he said.
“It’s weird because if you think about it, Israel is not necessarily a safe place … It’s quite a scary place. But they’re still picking themselves up from Melbourne and moving to Israel.
“Why are rational, successful accountants, lawyers, doctors … And the answer is they just don’t feel safe. ”Sztrajt, the Mount Scopus principal, spoke of his shock when the words “Jew Die” were painted on his school’s gates in 2024.
Quickly, he said, he was contacted by parents “who told me personally that they would not be sending their children to school” because the graffiti suggested “the school might be targeted, or that this demonstrates that the school doesn’t have sufficient security”. Sztrajt told Commissioner Virginia Bell that schools, including his own, began employing armed guards in 2015 and charged parents a levy to cover the cost.
Following the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, the cost of maintaining security had escalated dramatically, he said. Last year, Mount Scopus parents paid a levy of $1130 per student – up from $500 in 2022, which still fell short of covering the cost, Sztrajt said.
“The idea that government grants should not be used towards providing that level of much-needed protection has been problematic,” he said. He also said he spent 10 to 15 per cent of almost every school day worrying about security – not student wellbeing or teacher development, but “are we able to run this excursion? Can this happen? ” Sztrajt added: “It pains me tremendously to think of the horrendous opportunity cost that that security focus takes away from our school.
” Wodak, of Bialik College, said his school was one of three in the area but the only one facing these issues.
“The other schools, you can walk in at the weekend and play basketball or do whatever you like … I just can’t understand why we live in a country where one aspect of our community is expected to live under heavy security which it has to pay for in large part itself. ” Emms, the principal of Emanuel, is not Jewish and has worked in many schools in Sydney over 30 years.
She said she had “never seen any level of security in the way that we have to have them at the Jewish schools”.
“I think if there were more members of our community whose children had to face what my students face every day, I think the community would be in uproar because I think they would have a better understanding of what it is the Jewish community is actually living through. ” Rothman, of the Australian Jewish Schools Council, said the impact of this on children had become clear during the Bondi attack last December, at a bar mitzvah in the neighbouring Bondi pavilion.
“Each of the children at the school knew exactly what to do when the attack occurred … to go to the ground and go behind barriers. That’s because each of them, from the time of preschool, are trained in what you do in the case of an attack.
“That doesn’t occur in any other school or any child of three years of age, four years of age, five years of age, in any other community in Australia. ” Rabbi Levi Wolff, chief rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Sydney, arrives for Tuesday’s royal commission hearing in Melbourne.
Another witness, Rabbi Levi Wolff of the Central Synagogue in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, said of the situation at schools, “that is not normal, and we should never allow this to become Australia’s normal”.
“And when any Australian feels that they must hide who they are … by covering their kippah with a cap, or ensuring that they have an armed guard in front of their homes of worship, something has gone wrong for all Australians, not just for the Jewish community. ”Wolff spoke of the difference he noticed when standing outside St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Sydney just 10 days after the Bondi terror attack in December.
“I was struck by the absence of security. How this magnificent house of worship had its doors wide open, and people from all walks of life were able to just walk off the street with a knapsack on their back and come inside and pray and feel like nothing would go wrong,” Wolff said.
“Would that ever be a possibility ? Where there would be no armed guards, no bollards, no ongoing security screenings for every single person to be able to walk through? ”“I often hear people say, ‘I’m not anti-Jewish. I’m simply anti-Zionist’, and in the same breath they deny the Jewish people’s spiritual, historical and indigenous connection to their ancestral land.
“I mean, to me, it’s almost like saying, ‘I’m not racist against Aboriginals; Aboriginal Australians, I absolutely love you. I just simply don’t believe that you have any cultural or historical connection to this land’,” he said. Adass Israel members Benjamin Klein and Izzy Nussbacher outside the ruins of their synagogue last August.
The assertion of indigenous connection to Israel is politically controversial – pro-Palestinian protesters, and much of the political left, assert that the Zionist movement, which began in the late 19th century and culminated in the Jewish state of Israel, was a colonial project. Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights.
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