Senior leaders in the Jewish community say excluding teachers or students from school on the grounds of sexual preference would not be a policy of any Jewish school.
The executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim, said he was not aware of any Jewish school in Australia that had done so.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week said he would amend the Sex Discrimination Act to remove an exemption given to religious schools that allows them to discriminate against gay students and teachers if homosexuality was prohibited by doctrine.
His statement was seen as controversial, partly because it came just 10 days away from the tightly contested byelection in Wentworth, Sydney, which has a large population of Jewish and gay people.
Mr Wertheim said no Jewish school would deny a place to a student or refuse to employ a teacher on the grounds they were gay, any more than because they were non-Jewish.
He said there were “plenty of Jewish schools which employ non-Jewish people, including even as school principals”.
Andrew Watt, principal of Emanuel School in Randwick, in the Wentworth electorate, said his school did not tolerate discrimination in any form.
Read the article by Robert Bolton in the Australian Financial Review.