Holocaust survivor Nina Bassat, a board member of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum Foundation and former president of both the Jewish Community Council of Victoria and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, testified Wednesday before Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Holocaust survivor Nina Bassat, a board member of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum Foundation and former president of both the Jewish Community Council of Victoria and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, testified Wednesday before Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
In testimony published in part by The Australian Jewish News, Bassat sharply criticized the conduct of the country’s political leaders since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and warned against the use of the term “genocide” in discussions of the war in Gaza.
She warned that unless Australians could see one another as human beings rather than members of opposing camps, the country would be unable to rebuild the social cohesion it had lost.
For 74 years, she said, Australia had been “a paradigm of multiculturalism,” where people’s backgrounds and religions did not matter and they could simply “get on” with one another.
“But that changed abruptly after October 2023,” she said. “We’ve [Australian society] become very divisive. We’ve put labels on each other. We no longer treat each other as just another human being.”
Bassat was in Israel on October 7, 2023. Two days later, she watched footage of the pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Sydney Opera House and said she struggled to understand how it could take place while Israel was still dealing with the aftermath of the Hamas attack.
“I was shattered, and I couldn’t understand it,” she testified. “I just cannot understand how it could have happened.”
Israel had not yet had time to bury its dead, she said, and was already facing condemnation.
“I couldn’t understand that lack of empathy. I was shattered by the lack of humanity,” Bassat said.
In response to the atmosphere that followed, Bassat joined about 100 other Australian Holocaust survivors in signing an open letter in November 2023 calling on Australians to condemn antisemitism and hatred.
“The atmosphere was so incredibly reminiscent of the rhetoric of Germany in the 1930s,” she said.
Bassat said many in the Jewish community had felt “betrayed” by what she described as the near-total absence of voices from the federal government, state governments and local authorities condemning antisemitism after October 7.
Asked about the idea that silence and inaction are “the best friends of evil,” Bassat agreed and compared it with people who lived near the crematoria during the Holocaust and said nothing.
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