Young boy pinned to the ground, beaten, shown pictures of Hitler
A 10-year-old boy was pinned to the ground, beaten and shown a photo of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the royal commission into antisemitism was told on Tuesday.
The horrific attack was committed by a classmate from the same public primary school in Sydney and after the school failed to act, the boy’s parents took their concerns to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
“This was a year five student, a 10-year-old, who was subjected to very severe antisemitic bullying. He was physically pinned to the ground and punched numerous times,” the organisation’s chief executive Michele Goldman told the commission.
“He was shown a photograph of Adolf Hitler and was told that ‘He’s my idol. Watch your back if you snitch’. And he was told that this other boy’s greatest regret was ‘that World War II had ended’.”
Goldman said by the time her organisation was made aware of the problem, the boy was being held home from school by his parents who feared for his safety.
She added, her group engaged with the school, which committed to further teacher training, an excursion to the Sydney Jewish Museum and to access the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies’ teaching resources. However, by the next semester, the bullying resumed. The boy was taken out of class and home-schooled.
“Even before the summer of terror, over the space of 2024 we had been contacted by members across the community in relation to incidents that were happening in schools, on university campuses, in workplaces, reports about what was happening online, and so we saw the intensity of antisemitism growing in all spaces,” she told the commission.
“The summer of terror took it to another level we saw then where hateful speech and graffiti and symbols was now being elevated to acts of violence.”
The commission also heard about the experiences of Jewish women in Australia who felt betrayed by the wider women’s rights movement.
National Council of Jewish Women of Australia vice president Shirley Leader said her organisation had seen misogyny in the form of the denial of proven sexual assaults of Israeli women who were held hostage following Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Jewish women have reported to us that they find this particularly harmful because a lot of the denial that they have seen has actually come from the women’s sector, so-called feminists in Australia, who have sought not only to keep silent about the sexual assault of Israeli women, but have sought to deny it and even to mock it,” Leader said.
“This has been of great harm to Jewish women who have seen that their solidarity with Israeli women is absolutely being trashed by the women’s movement.”
Leader also shared first-hand accounts of those who took part in her organisation’s research on the lived experience of Jewish women in Australia.
“The driver of a car deliberately accelerated as my family was on the crosswalk, hurled antisemitic slurs at us and deliberately aimed the car at our granddaughter in a pram,” one response read out by Leader said.
“We are exhausted by the attacks, and we are exhausted by the hypervigilance that is required for us to make our way through our daily lives. We also know that our detractors are actually counting on that exhaustion and are hoping that we will kind of pack up our bags and leave the field,” she said.
“But this is existential for us. This is about our ability to live our lives openly as Jewish women in Australia with the same rights as all other women, and so we will continue.”