We Jews in Sydney Have Feared This Day for Years

In the end, two years and two months later, my daughter was driving to the hospital to bring my father Hanukkah lights. When she arrived, they were moving my father out of the ward into the hallway, they were getting the addicts up and out, they were clearing the wards, getting ready for the ambulances screeching up and down the arteries between the Pacific Ocean and Sydney Harbour.

At 7:47 p.m. on December 14, 2025, two gunmen opened fire on Jews at Bondi Beach gathering at a Chabad celebration to light the first Hanukkah candle. The gunmen killed at least 15 people, and they injured nearly 40, in a premeditated, choreographed terror of a type and a scale that Australia has never seen before. Mass shootings have happened, rarely, but never a racially religiously motivated attack on one group, executed with precision. Bondi Beach emptied, and the blood remained.

My father came home from hospital. My student Chaya was shot and takes my father’s place in the ward, she and others.