Jewish students have told the Royal Commission that threats, intimidation and university inaction left students afraid to attend classes, silenced after making complaints and traumatised by their experiences.
Three current and former leaders of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students gave evidence in Melbourne on Tuesday about antisemitism at Monash University and the University of Sydney.
Their testimony followed evidence on Monday from former student Liat, who described being subjected to Nazi gestures, abuse and intimidation while studying at university.
AUJS president Jeremy Suss told the commission that a confrontation after a Jewish event at Monash forced the organisation to change its safety procedures.
Suss, a third-year student, said four people approached him while he was packing up after a Sukkot event held on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas-led attacks.
They began questioning him “quite aggressively”, stood close to him and spoke about “killing or exiling all of Israel’s population”.
They also told him: “We see all of you at your lunches every week.”
“I found it incredibly confronting,” Suss said.
“I have ensured members at our AUJS events were no longer packing up on their own.”
Suss also recalled attending a campus event with two Jewish friends, including one wearing a kippah, when a speaker gestured towards them and said: “These people disgust me.”
He said AUJS had been forced to devote increasing resources to recording incidents, arranging security and helping distressed students through university complaints systems.
“It is a new constant task to be walking students through the difficult processes of following up from their awful experiences on campus,” he said.
“We have many students that have waited months to hear back from (the university regarding) incidents. Sometimes they are outwardly dismissed after that. Sometimes they never hear back.”
Suss said Jewish students frequently told AUJS they no longer trusted their universities to deal with antisemitic incidents fairly or effectively.
He said Jewish social events were being classified as high risk under “opaque criteria”, sometimes leaving Jewish student groups responsible for the hundreds of dollars for security.
One kosher lunch held for a Jewish festival was judged to be high risk despite having no political material or Israeli flags, he said.
Suss also described the personal consequences of accepting a leadership position in a Jewish student organisation. Several former AUJS leaders had been doxxed, including through the publication of their workplaces.
He called it “a really distressing reality” that holding office in the country’s Jewish student union could be portrayed as “an inherently immoral or nefarious act”.
Suss said universities often allowed complaints to drag on while considering whether behaviour satisfied a formal definition of antisemitism, rather than deciding whether it breached existing rules against harassment, bullying or doxxing.
He accused universities of avoiding difficult decisions until public pressure made further delay impossible.
“At every point where there’s any political or reputational cost that may happen in taking action on antisemitism, they’ve waited for legal advice, they’ve waited for external review,” he said.
“When public pressure reaches a point that they can’t delay any longer, that’s only when we’ll see change.”
AUJS chief operating officer Joshua Kirsh then described fearing for his safety at the University of Sydney during the 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.
Kirsh, who studied for a degree from 2024 to 2025 and served as AUJS President, said the encampment created a “febrile atmosphere”.
“I felt very worried about my safety going on to campus,” he said.
Kirsh recalled sitting in a class when he heard loud chanting outside.
“The tone of it sounded very aggressive to me,” he said.
“I just remember feeling like, should I stay in class? Should I make alternative arrangements for my safety?”
The university provided alternative entry and access arrangements, but Kirsh said he remained concerned about entering the campus.
He also described an incident during a lecture in which a student claimed that Jews possessed excessive power.
A guest lecturer had discussed research in which participants were asked: “Do Jews have too much power?”
The lecturer said he did not believe the proposition was true. Another student responded that Malcolm Gladwell had proved empirically that “Jews have all the power” and that it was a “golden age” for Jews.
The lecturer ended the discussion.
Kirsh said his immediate reaction was: “What if this person finds out I’m Jewish?”
He lodged a formal complaint because he wanted the incident recorded as part of the university’s broader understanding of Jewish life on campus.
“I felt that it was important that that incident be reflected in the university’s understanding of what campus life is like for Jews,” he said.
The university found there was “insufficient evidence that the student had intended to make a discriminatory comment” and counselled the student about the effect of his words.
Kirsh received an apology but said it treated the conflict in the Middle East as the source of the problem rather than acknowledging the nature of the statement.
He was then told the complaint was confidential and that speaking about it could amount to academic misconduct.
“This is the first time I’ve spoken publicly about what happened because I feel safe to do that in this environment,” Kirsh told the commission.
“I don’t feel I could have done that anywhere else, even after having graduated at the university.”
Kirsh said the confidentiality requirement placed “quite an unfair burden” on complainants and prevented students from comparing similar experiences.
“Imposed silence means that if anyone else wanted to compile a picture of what is happening on campus and connect the dots between different incidents, it would be difficult to do that,” he said.
He said Jewish students sometimes emerged from complaints processes feeling worse than they had after the original incident.
He described “institutional failures that compound other institutional failures”, creating an “appalling cycle of trauma and retraumatisation for Jewish students and staff at universities”.
Former AUJS national vice-president Paris Enten told the commission that she faced antisemitic abuse on her first day of face-to-face classes at Monash University in March 2021.
Enten, the granddaughter of three Holocaust survivors, said she stopped to speak with socialist students who were distributing flyers about a refugee rally.
She told them she understood socialism because she had spent time on a kibbutz in Israel. One student replied that the group was antizionist and asked whether she was Jewish.
“I of course said yes, because I didn’t think that anybody would have an issue with it,” Enten said.
Another student began chanting: “We won’t stop until people like you are kicked off campus.”
Other students joined in and asked whether she enjoyed “killing Palestinians”.
“They didn’t know if I was a Zionist, so I believe it was because I was Jewish,” Enten said.
She described feeling “quite upset and devastated” by the encounter.
“This idea that someone would hate this beautiful community around me was really, really foreign,” she said. “It was unbelievable.”
Enten reported the incident through Monash University’s Safer Communities unit.She said the university identified students from CCTV footage but took no disciplinary action because the footage was unclear, there was no audio and those involved denied her account.
A year later, Enten approached the same group after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and signed a petition supporting reproductive rights.
She told them she was pleased they had found an issue on which they could agree. They crossed out her name.
Enten said antisemitic statements were also made during her classes without intervention from teaching staff. During a subject on the modern Middle East, students described Holocaust survivors as “inherently genocidal” and argued that they should have been prevented from entering British Mandate Palestine.
She said the professor did not intervene.
Enten also described disturbing behaviour during a Monash Holocaust study tour of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic.
She said students filmed TikTok dances in concentration camp car parks and disputed whether Jews were the Holocaust’s main victims.
Her mental health began “deteriorating rapidly”, particularly after the establishment of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Monash.
Enten lived close to the university and said she could hear protest chants from her apartment.
She told the commission she became “clinically traumatised” towards the end of her degree.
Enten accused Monash University of knowing that its policies were inadequate and “actively choosing every day to do nothing about it”.
The Melbourne hearings are examining the experiences of Jewish students and academics, the prevalence and impact of campus antisemitism and the responses of Australian universities, with several vice-chancellors due to appear in the next few days.