At the funeral of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of the 15 victims of Sunday’s terrorist attack in Bondi, Rabbi Ritchie Moss stood before the assembled crowd and urged the community to honour Schlanger by “being so much more Jewish, more proud, more loving”.
On the same day, a Jewish bakery in inner-city Sydney closed its doors, apparently for good, saying that in the wake of the Bondi attack “one thing has become clear – it is no longer possible to make outwardly, publicly, proudly Jewish places and events safe in Australia”.
The two events sum up a tension facing Australia’s Jewish community as it reels from the senseless attack on a Hanukah celebration at Bondi beach: how to protect the safety of its community after being the targets of Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack, while also remaining proudly, visibly Jewish.
Rabbi Alon Meltzer, the associate rabbi at Bondi Mizrachi synagogue, was at Schlanger’s funeral. As he left, he called his 13-year-old daughter Daliah.
“Among the tears of describing how that funeral was, I said to her, ‘Our most important thing is to never give up our Yiddish culture, to never give up our Judaism and to ensure that we stay proud forever and ever and ever. Otherwise this will all be for vain.’
“Her response back was an unequivocal ‘yes’.”
Down at the vigils at Bondi beach late at night, he has been encouraged to see Jewish people expressing their faith publicly.
“I’ve seen people with kippahs [head coverings] on, people singing together … I think for the most part, there is a level of pride – and people are going to continue that.”
That being said, for Meltzer, the events in Bondi have also forced a reckoning with the very real danger that his community faces.
He is the director of programs at Jewish not-for-profit Shalom Collective, which runs community events – “everything from a 10-person gathering all the way through to a 4,000-person food festival”.
“We are asking the questions already as we think about: what does 2026 look like now? Two weeks ago, we had our year plan signed off and we’re now obviously having to re-evaluate … We’ve already had potential food vendors for the Jewish food festival say that in order to attend, they would want to make sure it’s an indoor venue.
“I just opened a meeting with members of our team … and I started that by saying, the reality is that this [attack] could have been [at] any one of our events. I’ve never thought about doing this and having been putting my life on the line.”
Pride in Jewish faith
All those who spoke to Guardian Australia agreed the events of Sunday do not exist in a vacuum.
“We are in fear for two years,” says Judy Gaspar, 78, who came to Australia 60 years ago with her parents, both Holocaust survivors. They swapped their apartment in Budapest for passports and permission from the Hungarian government to leave the country.
When pro-Palestinian encampments were set up at the University of Melbourne, she says her grandchildren were too afraid to go to campus. She knows a lot of elderly Jewish people, particularly those living alone, who “are scared … and they actually don’t go out”.
“And … you can’t go to the city because they are demonstrating every week,” she says of the pro-Palestinian marches that have taken place each Sunday in Melbourne.
“The only thing we want from the government is not to be hated. The hate should be stopped. I don’t want somebody who doesn’t know me from a bar of soap to hate me because I’m born Jewish.”
Daliah, Meltzer’s 13-year-old daughter, says receiving antisemitic comments from strangers in the street is common, particularly when she and her friends are “walking on Shabbat, dressed up nicely”, or if she is seen wearing her school uniform in public (she attends a Jewish school).
“At the start of October 7th, we all got very scared and a lot of us didn’t feel safe going out in our school uniform … so a lot of us would get changed and then we realised it’s not worth it, they can tell if we’re Jewish anyway, so we may as well not hide it.”
Sunday’s attack has had an acute impact on her.
“I was actually at a barmitzvah, where I was paid to do hair, when I found out,” she said. “I was freaking out and I couldn’t … I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
A number of people from her school community were victims of the shooting. Her friend was shot, the father of one of her classmates was killed, as well as the husband of her favourite teacher from primary school.
“I don’t understand how we’re going to be able to go back to school and everything is going to be normal,” she said.
But in the immediate wake of the horror, she has found great strength and pride in her Jewish faith. She has been down to Bondi Pavilion each night to sing with her youth group.
“Yesterday we all went and we had guitars and it was really beautiful and we all bring our candles to light in memory,” she says. “It really makes me think about how much I love being Jewish, how much I would never swap it.”
Daliah has found the sea of flowers at the pavilion, left in tribute to the victims, overwhelming and encouraging – particularly because in Judaism it is stones and not flowers that are left at memorials.
“It’s crazy to see how many flowers are there considering that none of these are put down by Jews,” she said. “It’s had such an impact on me knowing there are so many people there for us.”
Healing together
But for many Jews in the last few years, as antisemitic attacks have risen dramatically, the feeling has not been one of solidarity from the broader Australian community, but of profound isolation and lack of support at best, and outright hostility and violence at worst.
“Jewish people feel ally-less,” said Shoshana, a 30-year-old Sydney Jewish woman who did not wish to give her surname.
Shoshana represents the dilemma faced by so many Australian Jews.
She is a prominent Jewish woman, who writes about Judaism with a large following online. However, she does not feel safe to share her full name or any details that could identify her online, where she receives “constant, unchallenged” antisemitic trolling.
She says that navigating how to safely express one’s “public Judaism” is not a new dilemma.
“The reality of hiding one’s Jewish identity in Australia has been around for much longer than two years. It’s a running joke that the only thing more recognisable than a Jew in a kippah is a Jew in a baseball cap that’s hiding his kippah,” she says.
“My whole adult life, I’ve had to think about how and when I talk about or express my Jewish identity. Not always out of fear of physical danger, but also in social interactions with new co-workers, talking about certain things too loudly in public.”
She says the first time she remembers experiencing antisemitism was around the age of five when two men harassed her father for wearing a kippah at a service station on Bondi Road.
“Vigilance in public has literally always been part of my experience as an Australian Jew – it’s just the reality we live in.”
But in the wake of an atrocity like Sunday’s attack, she says she is hearing of people who want to express their Jewish with renewed confidence.
“Some people take on more mitzvot [commandments] such as keeping Shabbat, or wearing tefillin [boxes containing scrolls with verses from the Torah], and some wear their Magen David [Star of David] necklaces,” she says. “People want to reaffirm their identity, to feel proudly and defiantly Jewish in the face of adversity.
“Jewish leaders aren’t asking Jewish people to be visibly Jewish just for the sake of having more Jews in the public eye. They’re reminding them that even in the darkest moments of our history, our Jewishness – our faith, our culture, our values, our unity – guided us through to the other side. Our community is in pain together but it will also heal together.”
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and Griefline on 1300 845 745. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
