It took place at Bondi Beach

It is difficult to put into words the enormity of the massacre at Bondi Beach for Australian Jews and Australians in general. It has been compared to October 7. That analogy is apt in terms of the proportion of Australian Jews who were murdered or wounded: 15 murdered and 37 wounded out of 120,000. Like in Israel on October 7 2023, everybody knows somebody killed or injured, or knows somebody who knows somebody.

But actually, the Bondi Beach massacre was even worse than October 7, for three reasons.

First, the Bondi Beach massacre was not an invasion; it was a father and son driving from one suburb of Sydney to another to commit mass murder of their fellow Australians, just because they are Jews. Furthermore, they used legally obtained shotguns and rifles in a country which has very strict gun controls and where gun violence is rare.

Secondly, the Bondi Beach massacre took place after two years during which Jew hatred and vilification became normalized in Australian public places and discourse, and Australian Jews begged their political leaders to stop it, but they were largely ignored. Every Australian Jew says the same thing – they are shocked, but not surprised by the massacre at Bondi Beach.

Just two days after October 7 2023, while bodies and body parts still lay on the ground and in smoldering houses and cars in southern Israel, the New South Wales state government and police allowed an anti-Israel protest to take place on the steps of the iconic Sydney Opera House at the same time that they lit up the Opera House sails in blue and white in solidarity with Israel, told Jews to stay away for their own safety, and didn’t arrest or prosecute anyone from the hundreds chanting “Fuck the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews?”. This was followed by hundreds of marches and protests across Australia calling to “Globalize the Intifada” (that is, terrorist attacks on Jews outside of Israel) and “From the River to the Sea” (that is, ethnic cleansing/genocide of 7.5 million Jews in Israel).

1654 anti-Jewish incidents were recorded by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry in the 12 months between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025 – almost five times the average annual number in the 10 years before October 7 2023 – including arson attacks on synagogues and a kosher cafe; graffiti attacks and vandalism; verbal and online abuse, harassment and intimidation directed at Jewish children and adults, Jewish owned businesses and Jewish institutions; and physical assaults on Jews.

The Australian government did practically nothing to support and protect its Jews – it even failed to respond to the detailed report and recommendations of its own Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal AO, which it received in July 2025. In this toxic climate of Jew hatred and vilification – and with Australian authorities largely ignoring the pleas of Australian Jews for two years – the massacre at Bondi Beach was inevitable.

Thirdly, well, it took place at Bondi Beach. How can I describe just how significant that is? What Bondi Beach represents for Sydneysiders in general and for Sydney Jews in particular? When I say the word “Bondi”, it evokes for me powerful and warm childhood memories of long, hot summers on the beach in the Australian sun, sand between my toes, hours swimming in the waves, diving underneath them, riding them to the shore, listening to days of cricket on the radio, of feeling Australian, free, and safe.

But as Sydney Jews as well, Bondi Beach was home. It was our place. We lived close by, the Hakoah Jewish soccer and social club was 200 meters away, the Gelato Bar, a little piece of our parents’ Jewish Budapest, was on the promenade, the concrete steps to the sand where we met our friends were known by all as “the stairs of Jerusalem”, and we brought our kids to play at the park overlooking the beach and then for a meal at Katzy’s, loved by everyone in Bondi for its amazing kosher pies, also just up the road. Even when, by the 1990s, we were well aware of terrorist threats to the Jewish community, and there were armed guards outside my children’s Jewish kindergarten and school in Sydney, we never in a million years felt unsafe as Jews in the public places of Sydney – and certainly not at our Bondi Beach.

For all these reasons, on the first day of Chanukah, I felt utterly despondent about the future of Australian Jewry.

But since then, things that I have seen and heard have given me hope. The Bondi Beach massacre was so terrible and so shocking – 15 people murdered, including a 10 year old girl called Matilda – the most Australian name possible – and an 87 year old Shoah survivor, Alex Kleytman, and an 82 year old survivor, Marika Pogany – that it seems to have actually woken up my non-Jewish Australian compatriots to what Australian Jews have had to endure. They seem to finally understand what “Globalize the Intifada” means for Jewish Australians and ultimately for them as well.

A neighbor a few doors down from my wife’s parents brought them flowers and sobbed; a person I hadn’t seen in years somehow found my number and said that he wanted to show support for the Jewish community and I am the only Jew he knew; people have put up signs on their fences in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors; a Jewish family who survived the massacre and have a large permanent chanukiah/menorah in front of their house didn’t light it because their children were afraid, but they were urged by their Christian neighbors to light it the next day; hundreds of surfers paddled out at Bondi Beach to form a giant circle to express how they are embracing the Jewish community; and so on; and so on.

It was exactly 50 years ago that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, instituted public menorah lightings, like the one at Bondi Beach which was the target of the terrorists on the first night of Chanukah. The Rebbe did this not only to publicize the miracle of the oil that lit the menorah in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem for eight days 2,200 years ago, but also to emphasize the timeless and universal message of Chanukah as a call to illuminate the world with the light of goodness and loving-kindness. For Australian Jews and Australians in general, the world has changed forever; there will now always be the time before the massacre, and the time after the massacre. But the goodness and loving-kindness that has been expressed by ordinary Australians towards Australian Jews in the wake of the massacre at Bondi Beach shows that a little light can overcome much darkness.