The Anti-Defamation Commission has welcomed a plan to expand teaching of the Holocaust, Jewish life and antisemitism in Australian schools, and urged education ministers to make the content compulsory in every school when they meet in November.

“Six million Jews were murdered, and our national curriculum gives them a single mention in Year 10 history,” said the commission’s chairman, Dr Dvir Abramovich. “One line for the greatest crime in human history. That is not education. That is erasure by omission.”

Dr Abramovich urged ministers not to water the proposal down, pointing to evidence before the Royal Commission that students at a public school had competed over who could trip the most Jewish classmates. “When ignorance runs that deep, a recommendation is not enough. It must be compulsory,” he said.

“David Gonski said this content ‘has to be clearly mandated and mapped’. He is right,” Dr Abramovich said. “Every state. Every school, government, Catholic and independent. Every teacher trained to teach it.”

A Jewish child should walk into a classroom to learn history, not to become its next lesson.Dr Dvir Abramovich, ADC Chairman

The proposal by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, endorsed by the antisemitism education taskforce led by David Gonski, would have high school students study Jewish life in Europe before World War II, the causes and consequences of the Holocaust, and how groups supported, opposed or responded to Nazi policies, The Australian reported. The Holocaust currently receives a single mention in the Year 10 history syllabus.

Dr Abramovich pointed to England, where the government last week accepted all 27 recommendations of a review that found three in five Jewish pupils aged 16 to 19 had experienced or witnessed antisemitism. “If England can say yes to all 27, Australia cannot say maybe,” he said.

“After Bondi, after fifteen people were murdered at a Chanukah celebration, Holocaust education cannot be an elective,” he said. “My message to education ministers is simple: you decide in November. Make it compulsory, because a Jewish child should walk into a classroom to learn history, not to become its next lesson.”