Our book began after my coma. It ended with Rabbi Schlanger’s murder at Bondi Beach

It is late evening in Sydney, and Nikki Goldstein’s voice breaks as she shares the story of the man to whom she feels she owes her life.

Four years ago, against all the odds, Rabbi Eli Schlanger helped her to survive. Six months ago, he himself was cruelly taken – killed by a terrorist at the ‘Chanukah by the Sea’ party he helped organise every year.

Back in 2022, Goldstein was 57 years old and chronic lung disease had pushed her into a ‘white out’ – where the air in the lungs is replaced by fluid.

She tells Jewish News: “I turned up at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney with what I thought was quite a bad chest infection. It had happened to me several times, so I thought a couple of days of IV antibiotics and I’ll be home, but very quickly the doctors looked worried, and they sent me to the ICU.”

After about 24 hours there, “with all sorts of drugs and machines”, the head of the ICU told her: “You’re really struggling to breathe. If we don’t intubate you, you’re going to be dead in an hour”.

“That”, recalls Goldstein, “really focuses the mind.”

Having sent a few last messages before being put into an induced coma, her desperate husband Rowan and 19 year-old daughter spotted Rabbi Schlanger in a hospital corridor and asked him to pray for her.

“We are not a religious family”, she says.

“My husband’s not Jewish. I haven’t brought my daughter up to be Jewish, so she’d never met a rabbi before.”

Having been advised to get her affairs in order, the family were “really preparing for the worst, and so when they saw the rabbi, my husband just leapt up, literally strode across the room, just called out ‘Rabbi!’, and to his surprise, Eli turned around and came to Nikki’s bedside.

“Rowan said: ‘My wife is Jewish, we’re not good Jews, but if this is her last day on earth, she would want Jewish prayers’. And Eli said, ‘What’s her Hebrew name? And Rowan went, ‘No idea, I don’t know’. And then Eli said, ‘What about her mother’s Hebrew name’, and Ro shrugged his shoulders, a total blank.”

Rabbi Eli asked Nikki’s family if he could blow the shofar. They had no idea what it was.

“So he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a shofar and explained, ‘this is a ram’s horn, it’s an ancient Jewish spiritual tool, and it acts as a kind of spiritual defibrillator'”.

Standing beside her bed, Rabbi Schlanger blew the shofar and prayed. One day later, against all the odds, Nikki began recovering. Doctors and the rabbi, euphoric, called it a miracle.

As she got stronger, Goldstein and the Chabad rabbi who had prayed for her formed an unlikely but beautiful friendship.

Goldstein recalls: “He just came into the room, and pulled up a chair next to the bed. He was very open, almost childlike in his incredible enthusiasm for life. He said ‘that was a miracle’. I’d never met a rabbi before, so I laughed it off, and he went, ‘No, no, it was a miracle’. Not like a medical miracle, but a miracle from God.”

Discovering she was a journalist, he became convinced they should write a book together.

I said: “I’m a secular Jew, you’re a rabbi. Why don’t we do ‘Conversations with my Rabbi’? He said ”Good, but I’ve got this idea to scaffold the conversations around the Noahide laws (laws of Noah)’ And I said, ‘How many Noahide laws are there?’ And he went, ‘Seven’ and I said: ‘Seven laws, seven chapters, done.’ And that’s how it started.”

Together they set out to write a book; they began recording their conversations exploring life, spirituality, morality and how to live with compassion, courage and integrity in an increasingly fractured world.

They completed six of the seven chapters, recording their last conversation on the 10 December. Rabbi Schlanger was dead four days later, brutally murdered in the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, alongside 14 others.

Devastated but determined, with the support of the Rabbi’s family, Nikki completed the final chapter and vowed that his legacy and mission to bring light, love and moral clarity into the world, would not die with him.

“I think he felt very deeply that the miracle had bound us in a way that was very profound. I absolutely believe, with every fibre of my being, that Eli petitioned God on my behalf for my survival. He had a hand in that happening. People with lung disease like mine don’t survive when they have a white out. So it became very clear to me when Eli was murdered. This is what I’m here for. This is the next chapter of my life. I’ve got this treasure in my hands, which is six conversations out of seven that he wanted very, very badly to be shared with the world.”

Helping to complete the last chapter, “ironically”, Nikki says, “on establishing courts of justice”, was Eli’s father in law, Rabbi Yoram Orman of Sydney’s
Beth Din.

“It was only two weeks after Eli was killed, and how he stepped up to work through his grief in order to do that chapter with me? I’m truly in awe.”

On her personal mission to complete the book, Goldstein says: “I feel a responsibility to him. I feel a responsibility to his family, and I acutely feel a responsibility to his children. The baby was only two weeks old when he was killed, and that baby won’t know his father, and yet later in life there will be a portal into what his dad deeply and profoundly believed.

“But also Eli was very clear with me that the book can’t be negative, it’s got to be positive. He felt the Jewish world needs love and light and healing, and when we talked about antisemitism, he said, ‘I want to combat it with light. I don’t want to combat it with hate. So that is our mission. That’s what we’re here to do.”

• Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World