(JNS) Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday spotlighted a report describing a pandemic of antisemitic behavior by Australian healthcare workers against Jewish patients. It called the investigation by The Australian a “deeply troubling picture and should serve as a wake-up call.”
“We call upon The Australian government to confront antisemitism forcefully,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted to social media. “No Jew should ever feel compelled to hide their identity to receive medical care in an Australian hospital.”
The ministry included a link to The Wentworth Report, which quoted large sections of an article by Megan Goldin in The Australian detailing numerous examples of antisemitic behavior by staff toward Jewish patients in Australia’s medical facilities.
The article interviewed 30 doctors, nurses, midwives and health professionals who said that since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, anti-Israel activist healthcare workers were “turning hospitals and medical clinics into ideological war zones instead of safe spaces.”
Those interviewed by The Australian cited the case of Elon Glassberg, former surgeon general of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose scheduled appearance at a medical conference in Perth last year was canceled after anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened to protest. They said it was just one high-profile example.
“Anti-Israel activism began almost immediately after the Oct. 7 massacre when the protests that unfolded in Australian cities spilled into the wards and staff rooms of hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities,” Goldin reported.
Medical staff wore protest symbols to work right after the attack. They covered bathroom stalls and hallways with stickers, including a Star of David with a red line through it.
“At the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropists, such stickers were stuck to the bedside wall of an elderly Jewish patient in the hours before he died,” she reported.
They also spouted antisemitism and support for terror groups online.
“Doctors and nurses were posting Nazi symbols and little caricatures of Jewish people but using the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jews’,” Jewish pediatric neurologist Carly Debinski told The Australian. “They were so virtuous and obsessive about vilifying Jewish people.”
Debinski has since moved to Israel.
Nearly three years later, the online hate continues. Jewish members of Facebook groups are ejected or vilified if they speak about Israeli hostages or the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7.
At a Melbourne hospital, a Jewish intensive care unit nurse, who requested to remain anonymous, resigned despite more than 10 years on the job because management refused to address the staff’s online hate speech.
“If these people are willing to share these things on social media, imagine how they treat a [Jewish] patient face-to-face,” she said.
Double standards
A Jewish healthcare worker at a Melbourne teaching hospital was physically accosted by a colleague from Ireland, demanding she apologize for the Gaza war. When a complaint was made, the hospital’s human resources department refused to take action. That same HR department had weeks earlier transferred a staff member in the same unit for mimicking a foreign accent.
No action was taken in a complaint against a doctor who described Jews as “loathed slime” online and posted a Hitler quote. Complaints about numerous other doctors who posted antisemitic, pro-Hamas content were also closed.
“That pattern was repeated across the country as hospitals and healthcare regulators tolerated conduct against Jews that would have triggered disciplinary action if the conduct had targeted any other minority group, say numerous medical professionals who experienced this double standard,” The Australian reported.
Midwife Sharon Stoliar told The Australian that the same Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) staff, which ignored complaints about blatantly antisemitic and pro-terror posts by pro-Palestinian healthcare workers, acted against Jewish staff targeted by “baseless complaints.”
Painful IV insertions
Charlotte Frajman, 64, daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, said that a Muslim nurse lost his kind demeanor when he saw on her hospital records that she was Jewish.
“When it came to putting in the cannula [IV], he took four attempts. It was incredibly painful,” Frajman said. “I was bruised for weeks. You would have thought he was a trainee nurse, not the senior nurse in charge.”
When the same nurse again took four attempts to insert cannulas during subsequent visits, Frajman didn’t know what to think. “Then the Bankstown nurses thing came out, and my husband and I looked at each other and we said: ‘Oh my God.’”
Frajman referred to a Feb. 2025 incident in which two Muslim nurses who worked at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney were arrested after threatening Israeli patients in an antisemitic rant online. Charges were brought against them but in June, the judge ruled the video inadmissible, making a conviction unlikely.
“If I can’t have my Jewish religion on my medical records then it’s time to leave Australia because we are no longer safe here,” said Frajman.
“The needles, it is a story that keeps repeating,” says Nurit Hadad, a New South Wales-based mental health nurse counseling victims of antisemitism. “This is the easiest way to hurt people. They say: ‘I’ve done my best but I just couldn’t find a vein.’”
Orit Brand pleaded with a hijab-wearing radiographer to stop after failing eight times to insert an IV into her vein at a Melbourne hospital. Another staff member who was called inserted the IV at the first attempt “with no pain and no bruising.”
While malice is difficult to prove, in the case of Brand and Frajman, hospital protocol called for a maximum of two attempts by the same staffer.
Jewish medical students describe being ostracized by fellow students. Many of those interviewed withheld their names because they worried about their safety and future job prospects.
Mental health is the medical field with the most antisemitism, The Australian reported. A Queensland-based psychotherapist called on Israelis to kill themselves in one post. A psychiatry department academic at a Australian university compared lines at food distribution centers in Gaza to Holocaust gas chambers.
Mental health nurse Hadad panicked when a colleague draped a keffiyeh over an adjacent desk after Oct. 7.
“If someone is coming with a keffiyeh to a workplace, Australian people who have nothing to do with Middle Eastern culture … it’s a statement of violence,” said Hadad. “It represents the people trying to kill me.”
Hadad asked her managers to ban protest symbols in the workplace. After months of feeling unsafe at work, she quit her job.
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