Victorian paramedic Joshua Gomperts told the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that a firefighter threatened to “skin” him with a hunting knife during a music festival in Victoria, ABC Australia reported.
The royal commission was established following the Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney on Chanukah, when 15 people were murdered following an alarming surge in antisemitism in the country since the October 7 massacre. The commission’s interim report raised serious concerns about the conduct of New South Wales Police, saying that they were warned about the potential for an attack at the Jewish event but chose not to act.
Gomperts, 33, recounted multiple instances of appalling antisemitism he has experienced in Australia from the time he was a teenager, when he was attacked and injured with a glass bottle while wearing a kippah.
As an adult, apart from working as a paramedic for St. John Ambulance, Gomperts volunteered with Hatzolah in Melbourne between 2021 and 2025.
While volunteering at a festival, a firefighter turned to him and made a remark about his Jewish identity. He then pulled out a large hunting knife and told him, “I would skin you the way my family skinned yours in the camps.”
The comment was overheard by the police, who responded to the incident.
Gomperts, 33, said that he experienced antisemitism on the job again when he was called to transport a patient to the hospital. As he was reading the patient’s medical notes, the patient, a man in his 90s, performed a Nazi salute. Gomperts asked the patient why he had done so, and he responded that he was an “old Nazi” and didn’t want a Jew touching him.
Gomperts said he and his colleague left the scene, and another team took over.
He added that although his colleague at that scene was “appalled” by the patient’s actions, he had experienced antisemitism from other colleagues. At another emergency incident, a colleague asked him, “As a Jew, how can you support the killing of babies?”
Gomperts also recounted the antisemitism he experienced in university when he requested to reschedule an exam due to a conflict with a Jewish holiday. He was asked to meet with the university board, who informed him that they could not reschedule the exam for religious reasons.
“I was quite shocked, and I sought legal advice,” he said. After informing the university that he had hired a lawyer, his request was approved. When he arrived at the university for the rescheduled exam, he discovered that four other students would be taking the test with him. To his surprise, the four students, who had rescheduled the exam due to conflicts with family events, told him that their rescheduling requests were accommodated without issues, and they had not been asked to meet with the university board.
Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Reuven Morrison, H’yd, who was murdered in the Bondi Beach attack, testified: “In December 2024, I was walking down the street with my baby. A man pointed at my Star of David necklace and called me a ‘terrorist.’ I felt shocked, exposed and unsafe. No one intervened. I constantly consider whether to even pick up an online order in person, depending on the neighborhood where it is located, because of attacks that have occurred in certain places in Australia.”
Some of the Jews who testified to the commission did so anonymously due to fear of antisemitic backlash.
On Monday, a Jewish man testified that his granddaughter’s teacher performed several Nazi salutes during a lecture. The school administration was aware of the incident but did nothing. “My granddaughter is [no longer] at the same school … she lost a number of friends and [experienced] bullying,” he said. “I have to think very, very seriously if this is the country for my grandchildren unless the root cause of antisemitism … is stamped out.”
A Jewish woman who lives in Melbourne said that she is moving her family to Israel because a “war zone is a safer place” than Australia. She said that her children, who attend a Jewish school, have been the targets of students from another school.
“It got to the point where things were said such as, ‘Are there any Jews on this bus? If there are any Jews, we should burn it down … I can smell Jews,’ while looking directly at my son, his friend, and my daughter.”
Another woman, Natalie Levy, said she enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Bondi Beach, with antisemitism an “olden-day concept” that had been “the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.”
In contrast, she said that her children’s Jewish school looks more like a prison than an elementary school due to the heavy security required, with its gates protected by four police officers, two CSG NSW officers, and two parents. Even with the heavy security presence, the school building’s walls have been graffitied with swastikas.
Sydney father of three, Nir Golan, testified that he stopped wearing a kippah in public after experiencing a frightening antisemitic incident in 2023 in Bondi Beach. He recounted how a man wearing “military-style clothing” shouted antisemitic slurs at him, performed a Nazi salute, and made a finger gun gesture to his head. Golan also doesn’t allow his children to wear their kippas in public.
Principal of independent Melbourne Jewish school Bialik College, Jeremy Stowe-Lindner, said his students often experience antisemitic slurs and gestures, offensive graffiti, and abuse.
“They will normalise quickly the abnormal,” he said.
Other Jews testified to the commission about living with constant daily fear, with some saying that their children are still traumatized by the Bondi Beach massacre.
Former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, was promoting his book My Life As a Jew In Melbourne when the October 7 massacre occurred in 2023. The resulting surge in antisemitism has a profound effect on his life, professionally and personally.
“Bookshops, it seemed, were keen to have me. But after October 7, these were cancelled, mostly on the basis that staff at the bookshops did not feel safe to have a Jewish book featured this way,” he said. “I did not get invited to any of the major writers’ festivals, not Melbourne, not Sydney, and not Adelaide.”
On a personal level, he said that “friendships ended.”
“People I mentored did not contact me, not even when the physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions were growing, when it was clear that Jew hatred was becoming more pronounced.
“I had lived my life in the public sphere, as an Australian journalist and editor and later as a journalism educator, but I was being reduced to a Zionist supporter of a genocidal Israel.”
(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)
