The Anti-Defamation Commission, Australia’s civil rights organisation fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate, has condemned the sickening antisemitic abuse allegedly hurled at a Jewish shoe repairer in Melbourne’s bayside suburb of Brighton, who says a customer refused to pay for her repairs because she “would not pay a filthy Jew”, then threw cash at him for his “grave” and his “funeral”.

Dmitry, who has run his shop since 1993, told the commission’s chairman, Dr Dvir Abramovich, that the woman came in on 16 October to collect two pairs of repaired shoes, including a pair of designer boots. She examined them for faults, found none, put them in her bag and refused to pay the agreed $100.

When he found her in a nearby shop across Church Street and asked to be paid, he says, she told him she would not pay a “filthy stinky Jew”. She later followed him towards the shopping centre, shouting in Russian and Ukrainian: “Go, Jew, to your f***ing Sara!”

A long-serving security guard at the plaza intervened and warned her that he would call police if she did not pay. According to Dmitry, she laughed at the guard, then threw a $50 note at him, saying: “This $50 is for your grave, you f***ing Jew.” A second note followed: “One more for your funeral.” She called him a “filthy Jew” again before leaving with a receipt.

The abuse took him straight back to his childhood in Kyiv, Dmitry said, “when being Jewish meant being singled out, humiliated and abused by other boys at school”.

“That evening, I came home shaking,” he said. “This was never simply about a $100 shoe repair. It was about being told that I was not worthy of payment because I was Jewish.”

His first instinct was to stay silent. It was his wife, Inna, who encouraged him to speak out. “For a long time, I thought the best thing to do was to keep quiet and move on,” he said. “I want to be able to go to work, serve my customers and live my life without being humiliated or threatened because of who I am.”

Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, who has spoken with Dmitry and his family, said: “A Jewish man asked to be paid for the boots he had just repaired, and he was called filth. ‘Filthy Jew.’ ‘Stinky Jew.’ Words chosen to strip him of his humanity and treat him as dirt to be scraped off the soles of the very boots he had mended. That is dehumanisation in its rawest form, spoken out loud and without a flicker of shame.”

“Talk of a Jew’s grave and a Jew’s funeral is the language of violence,” Dr Abramovich said. “It tells a man that somebody has pictured him dead and enjoyed the picture. Dmitry grew up in Kyiv, the city of Babi Yar, where Nazi killers shot more than 33,000 Jews at the edge of a ravine in two days. He knows exactly where words like these can lead.”

Talk of a Jew’s grave and a Jew’s funeral is the language of violence.Dr Dvir Abramovich, ADC Chairman

“Antisemitism in Australia has exploded with a ferocity I never believed I would see in this country,” he said. “And the most terrifying part is how casual it has become, as if abusing a Jew were one more errand on a shopping list. That is what normalised Jew-hatred looks like: said in the open, with a smile, by people who expect to walk away untouched.”

“His children, born and raised in this country,” Dr Abramovich said, “looked at their father and could not believe what they were hearing. In a few minutes, a grown man was made to feel like the frightened, humiliated schoolboy he once was. That is the real damage of this hatred. It reaches inside a person and tears open every wound he thought had closed.”

Dr Abramovich called on Victoria Police to identify the woman, investigate the incident as the hate incident it appears to be, and use every law at their disposal. “She wanted to pay for a Jew’s funeral,” he said. “If these allegations are proven, she should pay for her hatred in a courtroom instead.”