The Blogs: The Rebbe Won: Jewish Pride After Bondi

In the aftermath of the terror attack at Bondi Beach—where a jihadi father and son murdered fifteen Jews celebrating Hanukkah—grief spread across Jewish communities everywhere.

As the details emerged, the heartbreak deepened and the meaning of the moment grew heavier. A Holocaust survivor. A ten-year-old girl newly arrived from Ukraine. A Chabad rabbi whose home was open to all. Murdered for being Jews. In 2025. On Hanukkah.

And with that grief came a familiar fear, one Jews have learned to recognize across generations: would Jewish life retreat, once again, into the shadows?

And yet, what followed was not retreat.

That very night, the neighboring Chabad in Dover Heights refused to cancel its menorah lighting. From Cambridge to New York, Chabad rabbis and rebbetzins continued lighting menorahs in city squares.

Jews gathered for hastily organized vigils across continents. A video circulated of a young man—a survivor of the massacre—lighting Hanukkah candles from his hospital bed in Sydney.

My friend Rabbi Daniel Epstein, the rabbi of the Mizrachi community in Melbourne, urged his community to recite the words we say on Hanukkah—bayamim hahem bazman hazeh, “in those days, in our time”—as a prayer, asking God to protect us in these days.

When I read his message, I heard not only a prayer, but a demand. In those days, God acted—but Jews also acted. They refused submission. They stood. They fought. Bazman hazeh asks us whether we will do the same.

Responding to terror with public Jewish presence—with visibility, resolve, and pride—is not a natural instinct.

More than any other figure in modern Jewish life, the Lubavitcher Rebbe prepared Jews for moments exactly like this.

Over the past days, one thought has returned to me again and again: the Rebbe won. Thank God the Rebbe won.

Today, public menorah lightings feel almost ordinary. This year alone, more than 15,000 were scheduled worldwide, Bondi Beach among the first.

But this visibility was once bitterly contested.

When the Lubavitcher Rebbe launched his Hanukkah awareness campaign in 1973—encouraging every Jewish household to light a menorah and calling for public menorah lightings—he encountered resistance from civil libertarians, and, strikingly, from Jewish institutions themselves.

Many worried that visible Jewish religious symbols in public spaces would endanger the hard-won separation of church and state. Groups like the American Jewish Congress, the ADL, and the ACLU challenged cities that permitted menorahs on public property.

Their concern was not frivolous. After decades spent fighting Christian dominance in the public square, they feared that Jewish displays would weaken the constitutional wall they had worked to uphold.

What followed were years of legal battles that went far beyond zoning or permits. In Chicago in the late 1980s, Chabad was required to post a $100,000 litigation bond—paid by an anonymous donor—to keep its menorah standing in Daley Plaza after city officials, facing legal threats from Jewish organizations, sought to block the display.

Similar disputes unfolded nationwide, culminating in a Supreme Court case over a public menorah in Pittsburgh.

That decisive case began in 1982, when Chabad placed an 18-foot menorah beside a Christmas tree outside Pittsburgh’s City-County Building. Four years later, the ACLU sued the city over religious displays on public property—including both a nativity scene inside the courthouse and the menorah outside.

In 1989, the case reached the Supreme Court. Nathan Lewin—a Holocaust survivor who argued the case pro bono—represented Chabad. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion ruled in favor of the menorah and, remarkably, quoted the Hanukkah blessing itself.

But what made the Rebbe’s vision radical was not only legal persistence. It was philosophical confidence. He argued not only as a rabbi, but as an American Jew deeply proud of Judaism and deeply confident in America’s capacity to hold a proud and public Judaism.

In a 1981 letter to the Jewish community of Teaneck, New Jersey, he explained that the public menorah “has been an inspiration to many, many Jews,” awakening “a spirit of identity with their Jewish people and the Jewish way of life.”

In this country, he insisted, there is no reason for Jews to hide their Jewishness as if it were incompatible with American life. On the contrary, public Jewish presence was “fully in keeping with the American national slogan e pluribus unum”—the belief that the public square is enriched, not threatened, when distinct communities appear openly within it.

The Rebbe rejected a posture many Jews had internalized: that Judaism belongs in private spaces but not public ones. Pirsumei nisa—publicizing the miracle—was never a ritual technicality. It was a philosophy of Jewish dignity.

“Jews,” he wrote, “either individually or communally should not create the impression that they are ashamed to show their Jewishness, or that they wish to gain their neighbors’ respect by covering up their Jewishness.”

The Rebbe was right. The candles worked. They still do.

The Rebbe’s victory was never only legal. It was moral. It was not only about Hanukkah. It was about what it means to be a Jew.

His response to Hitler, to antisemitism, to hatred, was not retreat but expansion—more Jewish presence, more responsibility for one another, more insistence on Jewish joy.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who credited the Rebbe with changing his life, put it: if the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, the Rebbe resolved that Jews would search out every Jew in love.

This is why Chabad rabbis light menorahs in Mumbai, Paris, and Sydney—even when it makes them targets.

This last Sunday, a video circulated of Rabbi Eli Schlanger (hy”d), the Chabad rabbi of Bondi Beach, speaking about responding to antisemitism with light. It was not rhetoric. He lived it. He was murdered while living it.

On the first night of Hanukkah, I met a Chabad shaliach—a relative of one of the rabbis killed in the attack. He said the same thing, without drama: the response must be more Jewish presence. Not hiding. Not shrinking. Not going underground.

I am not Chabad. But I am profoundly grateful—for the Rebbe’s Torah, for his shlichim (emissaries), and for the way he reshaped Hanukkah from a private ritual into a public Jewish moral stance.

The Rebbe won not only because he prevailed in court, but because he trained generations of Jews to respond to terror without self-erasure.

And in this deeper sense, we all won—because he won.

When Jews gathered after Bondi Beach not in concealment but in public commitment, when candles were lit rather than extinguished, when fear did not have the final word—we were living his answer.

May the memories of those murdered at Bondi Beach while celebrating Hanukkah be a blessing.

And may we be inspired by their memory to answer hate as Jews always have: not by retreating from the world, but by insisting on our place within it.