Five former students of Brighton Secondary College are suing the state of Victoria over what they allege was years of anti-Semitic bullying and discrimination at the government school and chronic negligence by its principal and some teachers in their duty to protect them.
The Federal Court on Tuesday accepted a request to suppress the names of more than 20 other students alleged to have victimised the five students over several years, before an expected hearing later this year. The boy claims he reported the alleged attack to staff at the school’s front office, including the name of the boy who held the knife to him, but the event “went entirely un-investigated and unpunished”.Within three to four weeks, “too scared … to remain at the school”, the boy had transferred to Liebler Yavneh College, an independent Jewish school in Elsternwick.
A boy who began to wear a kippah or skullcap to school claimed it was regularly torn off his head and sometimes tossed around as a Frisbee. “To the best of the respondents’ knowledge, the antisemitic acts were small in number and done by a small number of students.” This included, it is claimed, pulling a student who had “started growing facial hair in accordance with Jewish tradition and law” in front of other students and questioning why he was not shaving; addressing one of the students in Hebrew in class and making anti-Israel comments during lessons.For example, the study of the Holocaust graphic novelmerely “opened up a whole new chapter for anti-Semitic jokes”, including referring to the Jewish students as rats.