Junior Jewish footballers face constant on-field abuse, royal commission hears

Junior Jewish footballers are being subjected to vile antisemitic abuse so frequently that a Melbourne league has had to hire a private investigator to cope with match day incidents.

With its players, parents and club officials left to carry the burden of dealing with weekly abuse for the past two traumatic seasons, the Ajax (Australian Jewish Amateur Association) Junior Football Club has appealed for leagues and the AFL to take on leadership roles.

In an emotional address to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Ajax club president Daniel Onas said players as young as seven were being targeted with antisemitism, ranging from a refusal to shake hands to Holocaust-themed abuse.

“As a club, it shouldn’t be our responsibility to be the key player in finding a better way to resolve these issues,” he said.

“It can’t be Ajax’s responsibility to manage or drive that. It needs to be owned by the leagues, and that goes all the way to the top. Peak sporting bodies really need to drive the agenda to give it the importance and understanding that it needs.”

Ajax plays in Melbourne’s South Metro Junior Football League (SMJFL), and has more than 750 players aged from seven to 18 playing in male and female competitions.

Onas told the royal commission that antisemitic incidents were rare before October 2023, and when they did occur, they were handled between officials and parents without a need to escalate to the league.

Fearful there may be a rise in antisemitism following the October 7 attacks, Ajax worked with CSG Security Group during its 2024 preseason to run training sessions with the parents of players on how to de-escalate situations that might arise.

During that season, Onas said the club had dealt directly with other teams to try to resolve an average of one antisemitic incident a week. Six incidents were formally reported to the league, including one at an under-14s match when an opposition player allegedly asked an Ajax player if he was Jewish, before telling him, “Hitler should have finished you off.”

In another reported incident, under-12 Ajax players were allegedly confronted with “F— the Jews” after the final siren of an August final.

Onas said the most serious antisemitism occurred during an under-18s final in 2024, when a string of incidents included players being called “you F-ing Jews”, parents being called “Jewish dogs”, and an opponent trying to take a kippah off the head of an Ajax player.

“These are kids who would have spent that whole week thinking about what they’re going to do in that game to progress to the last game of the season and instead of being able to focus on that, we’re instead forced to deal with that level of abuse, and it actually spilt over with one of the parents being targeted,” Onas said.

“Our players should be able to expect to turn up and play a game of sport, a game of football that they love, without having to deal with any sort of vilification as a result of these incidences.”

With parents and volunteers exhausted at the end of the 2024 season, Ajax wrote to the SMJFL saying it could no longer be left to club administrators to try to prove incidents had taken place and resolve issues among themselves.

From the start of the 2025 season, club-to-club resolutions were removed, and all incidents were dealt with by a private investigator. The SMJFL reiterated its zero-tolerance stance and introduced a more robust vilification policy and management process.

Eight antisemitic incidents were reported during the season, and Onas said the club was satisfied the league’s handling of incidents had improved, particularly with the appointment of a private investigator.

But with the 2026 season just three rounds old, Onas told the royal commission Ajax players have already been subjected to a further two incidents.

“The challenge is around the education of the kids,” he said. “Because we can deal with sanctions, and we can deal with process, but unless steps are put in place to drive understanding and really make the players, participants, coaches, opposition parents, umpires and administrators of the game understand the significance of antisemitism and how it plays in sport … we will continue to see more incidences.”

The SMJFL was contacted for comment.

During the royal commission’s fourth day, Dani Valent, a food critic who writes for The Age, also read a deeply personal essay about her experience as an Australian Jew after October 7.

She recounted hiding her Star of David necklace in fear, holding back on publishing an Israeli restaurant review, and of feeling the need to be vigilant.

“The rhetoric around the Hamas attacks and the Israeli response has been like screams in my face, footfalls chasing me from behind, when the only conversations I can have are quiet and horrified,” she said.

Valent said she chose to appear before the royal commission for her father, “who survived the worst expression of Jew hate”, and for her relative, who lost a friend at the Bondi Beach terror attack on December 14.

Former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, who was born in a displaced persons camp in Austria, where his parents had fled after escaping the Nazi regime, also appeared.

In his evidence, Gawenda claimed that holding strong views about Israel in the current climate could be detrimental to the career of a journalist.

He told the commission he disagreed with current approaches by media outlets to covering social cohesion issues in Australia amid the conflict in the Middle East.

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