Melbourne Holocaust Museum reveals toll of hate

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) has laid bare the daily strain of antisemitic abuse on its staff and volunteers in its submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Lodged in May, the submission reports that staff field one to two antisemitic or hateful comments daily on Facebook, on top of abusive emails, letters and phone calls.

After the Bondi terror attack, the museum brought counsellors onsite through an employee assistance program, who recorded “acute distress, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, heightened anxiety, and emotional overwhelm” among staff.

The climate has also made recruitment harder, with prospective employees seeking reassurance over their physical and emotional safety. In 2024, one newly appointed employee resigned after a single day, while a volunteer was unable to finish a shift after reading a hateful comment left in the Memorial Room guest book.

MHM CEO Breann Fallon confirmed the toll was a constant.

“Sadly that is something that we do face every day, whether that be a phone call or a letter that comes through,” she said, pointing to mental health training and the assistance program as safeguards.

“There were a couple of examples where people couldn’t make it through their shift, or one person only lasted a day.”

Yet she stressed the team’s resilience. After Bondi, staff were told they could work from home, “but everybody came in because they wanted to be together,” she said, adding that the abuse only sharpens the museum’s resolve.

The submission also charts the cost of operating under threat. Annual security spending soared from $19,244 in 2020 to $291,054 in 2025 – what the museum called “not a temporary spike, but a structural shift in the baseline cost of operating a public-facing Jewish institution in Australia”.

The museum, which educates around 30,000 secondary students each year, is calling for ongoing national funding and formal recognition as national infrastructure, arguing Holocaust education is “essential civic infrastructure” rather than “a peripheral cultural activity”.

Fallon said the institution sat “on the front lines every single day”, working with students and corporates alike on critical thinking, empathy and democratic resilience.

Among seven recommendations, MHM proposed a National Holocaust Education Standards Framework, a dedicated security funding stream for at-risk institutions, and antisemitism training embedded across the public sector, including law enforcement.