Antisemitism royal commission LIVE: Daughter of Bondi terror victim, Jewish leaders give evidence

Thank you for reading our live coverage of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in Sydney.

Sheina Gutnick, the daughter of Bondi Beach terror attack victim Reuven Morrison, Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin and Rabbi Benjamin Elton from The Great Synagogue are among today’s witnesses.

Toby Raphael, vice-president of Newtown Synagogue, is now giving evidence.

He said the Australia he arrived in from England as a child in the 1980s is not the Australia he lives in today.

“I was treated as an equal person. No one cared that I was a Jew,” he said of his childhood. He lived around the Balmain area in Sydney’s inner west and it was a “nice lifestyle”, he said.

He encountered a protest at the University of Sydney in April 2024 after he went to synagogue for Passover. He stopped to find out “what it’s all about” and was wearing his yamaka (skull cap).

He said someone yelled at him “You dirty f—ing pig Jew” and “spat in my face”. Nobody helped him.

Asked how he felt after the attack, Raphael said: “Shell shocked. I was in trauma. I couldn’t believe it. I was probably quite livid, to be honest.”

He was also asked about the daubing of swastikas in red spray paint on the synagogue’s new front fence. Police discovered evidence of attempted arson, the royal commission heard.

National Legal Aid has “established a national legal service to support individuals to engage with the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion”, it said in a statement on Monday.

“Funded by the Australian Government, the Royal Commission Legal Assistance Service will also provide advice and referral options for those considering involvement, including making voluntary submissions.”

The service can be contacted on 1800 976 198.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton says antisemitism has “run riot” in Australia and it had “not been checked” nor stopped after the Bondi terrorist attack.

The “time for evading or muddying the issue is over”, he said.

“The answer cannot be ghettos for our own protection,” he said. He said this was both impractical and immoral.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton says his congregants are also wary of booking taxis or Ubers to the synagogue directly because of safety concerns.

“They will never put in the address of the synagogue,” he said.

Instead, they would put in a different address, such as a nearby cafe.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton, chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney, is now giving evidence.

He said that “Free Palestine” stickers had been placed on the front of the synagogue.

“We do not have a foreign policy; we do not have jurisdiction in that part of the world,” he said.

He said a man had yelled at him, “Jew, go home”, outside the synagogue. On another occasion someone in a van yelled an antisemitic slur at him.

The synagogue had also received abusive phone calls, he said. The message to staff was “we’re coming to get you”, he said.

“We really are being asked to serve as surrogate security guards, even though that is not what we were employed to do,” he said.

Alex Ryvchin is telling the royal commission about the attack on his former eastern suburbs home in January 2025.

The Dover Heights house was splashed with red paint, while two cars were firebombed and daubed with anti-Jewish slurs.

“I could see the despair in our neighbours; in our broader community,” Ryvchin said. It marked the first time a private home and individual was targeted, he said.

In December that year, further down that same road, there was “a horrific massacre that has transformed us all permanently” at Bondi Beach, he said.

The Downing Centre Local Court heard this year that the attack was orchestrated by overseas masterminds, while the local actors were motivated by financial gain.

The court found one of the men convicted over the attack knew it was a “deliberate tactic to divide Arab and Jewish communities”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin is now giving evidence.

He tells the royal commission there has been “soaring antisemitism” since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

He fled the Soviet Union as a child with his family in 1988. He said he saw the “terror return to my parents’ eyes” as a child in Randwick when their neighbour shouted at them, “Hitler didn’t finish the job. I will finish it for him.”

But he said this was an isolated incident until more recently. Antisemitism would pursue the Jewish people “wherever we go”, he said.