New South Wales police encouraged a Jewish man to abandon a case against a man who made antisemitic slurs, death threats, and performed Nazi salutes at him in public because the investigation would be “a lot of wasted effort”, the antisemitism royal commission has been told.

Jewish Australian Nir Golan gave evidence on Tuesday, telling commissioner Virginia Bell that police had encouraged him to drop any action because “there’s not much that they could do and the case would ultimately get thrown out”.

He said that in October 2023, he was wearing a kippah as he walked through Bondi Junction, when a man wearing military-style clothing “approached me and started shouting and getting in my face very aggressively”.

“He appeared very coherent at the time and deliberate in his actions, and started calling me all sorts of racial slurs, among them ‘dirty Jew’. He started doing a Nazi salute, and … a gun finger at my forehead, imitating like he wanted to kill me.”

When Golan took his phone out to record the man, telling him he would report the abuse: “This enraged him, and he started getting physical. No one intervened, unfortunately, except for an American tourist who jumped in. That tourist ended up getting bashed pretty badly.

“I broke down and started shaking uncontrollably and crying again. No one came to my aid. No one came to help. No one came to do anything.”

Golan said he filed a report to police.

“I followed up a few times with the police, and I was told that at the time, a Nazi salute was not illegal. So I said: ‘OK, this man threatened to kill me’, and I was told that the CCTV did not have audio,” he said. Golan said he sent police video and pictures of the assailant.

“I was eventually told by the police that there’s not much that they could do and the case would ultimately get thrown out, and it would be a lot of wasted effort for nothing and [I was] encouraged to drop it.”

‘We are not responsible’

The second day of the inquiry heard from Jewish Australians who said they were being unfairly targeted and held responsible for the actions of Israel.

Vic Alhadeff OAM, the former chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, told the commission antisemitism was once marginalised in Australia, but had become normalised and emboldened with an “unashamed brazenness”.

He told the commission on Tuesday that, as antisemitism surged across Australia, he grew “disillusioned” by the silence from friends he had worked alongside for years as part of a longstanding interfaith dialogue group.

When he finally had a meeting with a leader from another faith group: “The person on the other side of the table said to me, quote: ‘But look what’s happening to the Palestinians in Gaza?’

“My response was: ‘You have to be made of stone not to care about what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. However, why are you holding me responsible?’”

Alhadeff, also formerly the chair of Multicultural NSW, agreed Jewish Australians were unfairly being held responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.

“This issue goes to one of the issues which is informing a lot of the antisemitism, which has been rocking this country … for the last two-and-a-half years: holding Jewish Australians accountable for what is taking place on the other side of the world.

“Jewish Australians have no agency in what the Israel Defense Force does, or indeed what the Israeli government does. And yet so much of the manifestation of antisemitic incidents and attacks is interlaced with, and references, what is taking place on the other side of the world. We are not responsible.”

Tali Pinsky moved from Israel last year to work at an Australian university.

She told the commission Australians were generally “very welcoming” but that there was often a conflation of the state of Israel with Jewish people, that Jews were criticised for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“Jewish and Israeli people are personally targeted and blamed for the actions of the Israeli government in a way that citizens of other countries involved in conflicts are not.”

“We felt that the victims [of the Bondi massacre], because of them being Jewish, are not considered to be truly Australians in a sense. And so they weren’t … mourned as Australians.”

Australia more dangerous for Jews

The inquiry also heard from Jewish parents who said they feared for the safety of their children, who grow up facing a rising tide of antisemitic abuse, graffiti and attacks.

The inquiry was told Jewish children in Australia faced antisemitic abuse at school, see swastikas daubed on walls and witness classmates perform Nazi salutes: they live with antisemitism “all day, every day”, a Sydney Jewish mother has told a royal commission hearing.

The woman, known as Dina before the commission, said Australia had become a more hostile, more dangerous place for Jews, most horrifically demonstrated by the Bondi massacre in December in which 15 people were shot and killed.

“And it’s impossible for children not to internalise that they are living through that reality.

“They hear antisemitism around them all the time … they see the stickers … they see the graffiti, they know about Bondi. It’s become part of their psyche.”

Dina said the Australian Jewish community was “living a very different reality” to the non-Jewish community and that the Bondi massacre was the violent manifestation of unchecked antisemitism across Australia.

“The reality is, they came to kill us. We just weren’t there. And it’s living with that truth that makes it very hard to feel safe as a Jew in Australia.”

In evidence before the committee, Natalie Levy said her daughter was one of only two Jewish children at a government school in Sydney.

“She sees swastikas etched all around the school, children saying ‘Heil Hitler’ and putting up their hand in a salute. She sees things that no 15-year-old should see,” Natalie said of her daughter.

Levy told the commission that antisemitic rhetoric had become normalised.

She said she had been called “kike”, a “dirty Jew”, a “dirty Jewish pig”, a “baby killer”, a “baby eater” and “genocidal” on social media.

Another Jewish mother, pseudonymised as AAP and giving evidence from Victoria, said her children had come home from school telling her they didn’t want to be Jewish and that they were being bombarded with antisemitic content on social media.

“These are some of the things that the kids have shown me: ‘we owe Hitler an apology, the Nazis should have finished them off’; ‘Jews are controlling the government’; ‘Israel has no history, only a criminal record’.”

AAP gave evidence that slurs against Jews were commonplace at her children’s school and that her children told her they were frightened to attend a recent street food festival organised by a Jewish community group in Melbourne.

The royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion was established after December’s Bondi massacre, in which two alleged Islamic State-inspired gunmen allegedly shot and killed 15 people and injured 40 others as they attended a beachside Hanukah event.

The first fortnightly block of hearings is focused on defining antisemitism, its historical and contemporary manifestations, and its current impact on Jewish Australians.