Every day for five weeks at school, a 13-year-old boy says he was greeted with abuse, including heil Hitlers and being called a “dirty Jew” – a reminder that members of his family were murdered by Nazis.
He’s one of three students at three separate Melbourne public schools who say they have experienced antisemitic bullying that was so extreme their parents are pulling them out. They encountered swastikas, Nazi salutes and even physical assaults and were called “Jewboy” or “dirty Jew” and sent memes involving Hitler.
Two of the students became withdrawn, refused to go to school and couldn’t get out of bed. Another said he no longer told people about his Jewish background.
Their families say the response from both the schools and Education Department did not go far enough to stamp out the behaviour, or treat the matters as seriously as they should have. One family decided to go to the police because they felt the school was not responding quickly enough.
Adi Rozen, the mother of 14-year-old Jewish student Jackie, who went to Brighton Secondary College and was in its Select Entry Accelerated Learning program, said the bullying was so bad her daughter sometimes would not get out of bed.
Jackie was in a STEM class with five girls and 15 boys and had planned to do the International Baccalaureate program earlier this year.
Read rhe article by Nicole Precel in The Age.