The Royal Commission into Antisemitism in Australia, led by Virginia Bell, is quickly learning some uncomfortable truths. For example, in hearings that began Monday, Jewish groups informed the commission that in the year following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Jews in Australia endured 2,062 antisemitic incidents and that Jewish parents feared sending their children to school.

An Australian Jewish writer, Michael Gawenda, described the shift in attitude toward him before and after the worst massacre to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

“For me, friendships ended,” he wrote to the commission. “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 … 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.”

Gawenda said that promotional events for his book, “My Life as a Jew in Melbourne,” were canceled.

“Bookshops, it seemed, were keen to have me,” he explained. “But after October 7, these were canceled, mostly on the basis that staff at the bookshops did not feel safe to have a Jewish book featured this way.”

An anonymous witness wrote that Australia was no longer “golden.”

“We never expected synagogues to be burnt down. We never expected Jews to be hunted on Bondi Beach,” she wrote. “We really didn’t expect this sort of thing in this country: this was the safest place in the world and it was golden. And it is not any more, there is so much fear and so much anxiety.”

She said that her family no longer felt safe in Australia and planned to move to Israel.

Alex Ryvchin, chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said his childhood home was firebombed in January 2025.

“That was January; by December on that same road, three kilometers down, there was a horrific massacre that has transformed us permanently,” he said. “We were on a path to catastrophe.”

He said that death threats continue to plague him.

The daughter of a Bondi Beach victim also testified to the commission.

“Antisemitism was allowed to come into the open,” said Sheina Gutnick, whose father, Reuven Morrison, was killed in the attack on Bondi Beach.

So far, nearly 6,000 people have submitted reports of their experiences to the commission. Hearings are expected to continue until May 15.