Jillian Segal has flagged education and training as an essential tool to fight hate during her second appearance at the royal commission examining anti-Semitism.
In a report released in 2025, the special envoy called for Holocaust and anti-Semitism education to be put in place in national and state school curriculums.
Speaking at the inquiry on Thursday, Ms Segal said the education should be rolled out further.
"We should touch people in primary school and in secondary school ... even touch being a tolerant, helpful young person in preschool, and we need to not only be high school, but university and TAFE," she said.
The idea is under consideration by an anti-Semitism education task force attended by Ms Segal and led by David Gonski, who is due to face the royal commission on Friday.
The special envoy also highlighted the needs of teachers being overlooked in favour of student outcomes.
Ms Segal said she was first confronted by the issue at a teacher's forum hosted by Victorian billionaire John Gandel's philanthropic foundation a few years ago.
"They explained to me that the most difficult thing for them was answering questions from students that they didn't have the knowledge ... that was even in relation to Holocaust, but (also) how it morphed into anti-Semitism," she said.
The inquiry also heard from Michael Zervos, who provided an example of a successful anti-discrimination program for primary and secondary schools.
The Courage to Care program, which has reached to more than half a million students nationwide, focuses on bystander training and calling out discrimination of all kinds.
"We now call them 'upstanders', who had the moral courage to actually take some action and combat that discrimination and that racism," Mr Zervos said.
Courage to Care is an initiative created by B'nai B'rith, which describes itself as an international Jewish community service organisation committed to combating anti-Semitism, promoting Jewish unity and continuity, and "staunchly" defends the State of Israel.
It's a connection Mr Zervos said he had had to defend.
"Our focus is on behaviour, so we are not an advocacy organisation. We're not a political organisation ... we know what our role is. We'll leave that to other organisations," he said.
It was earlier revealed students at Australia's largest Jewish day school have given up reporting incidents of anti-Semitism due to their frequency and the lack of consequences for perpetrators.
John Hamey was head of Sydney's Moriah College from 2011 until 2018 and appeared at the royal commission on Thursday.
He shared frequent incidents of Jewish students being targeted by pupils from other schools and members of the public.
When visiting other schools, students would throw coins in front of them to see whether they would pick them up "because they were Jewish", the inquiry heard.
"There were often taunts that invoked the gas chamber and statements along the lines of 'Hitler should have finished the job'," Mr Hamey said.
Students were being worn down by frequent traumatic incidents, which got brushed off as "just something that they had to deal with and they had to get on with", the former principal said.
"It was not necessarily something they would report because they would say, 'well, nothing would happen', or there'd be no serious outcome or consequence for the perpetrators of that anti-Semitism."
Outside of Jewish institutions, Mr Hamey said most teachers were not well informed about Jewish cultural life or equipped to identify anti-Semitism.
"Because it's too politically contentious, they will minimise those actions and just deal with them as ... one-off incidences or just a simple form of bullying," he said.
6°C