When a beach paradise became a Jewish crime scene
As families lit candles from Sydney to London, terror struck a Jewish celebration on Australia’s most iconic beach
My wife’s first call early on Sunday morning was to her sister Claire in Sydney, who lives with her family in a community close to Bondi.
They were all safe, thank goodness, after the terror attack yesterday. But a friend of my nephew Jonathan was among the dead.
Like thousands of Jews in Australia and across the globe, he was celebrating the traditional public lighting of the Chanukah lights, one of the most uplifting and joyous of festivals in the Jewish calendar.
Tragically, in his case, it was on Bondi Beach.
A moment of glad family celebration, which had been greatly looked forward to by the children of the community, had been desecrated by gunmen splattering the beaches with bodies and blood as the sun went down.
My sister-in-law Claire, her husband Cecil, a former Israeli paratrooper whose parents are Holocaust survivors, and their children and grandchildren were themselves evacuated from nearby Coogee Beach, just along the coast from where the devastation was unfolding.
As the scale of the attack became known, all they could do was retreat home and watch the television, hoping for snippets of information. With the death toll mounting, calls, texts and WhatsApps from family, friends and acquaintances across the world flooded in.
Along with other Jewish Australians, our family there have faced gruesome antisemitism since the horrendous Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October, 2023.
The Holocaust (Shoah) means that despite the concentration of Jewish people in Israel, we are a community scattered to all four corners of the earth.
Australia may seem far away from the death and destruction of 7 October and the Gaza war. But Jews, synagogues, and community centres there – and Jewish people going about their daily business in the centre and suburbs of Sydney — have experienced two years of mendacious abuse and hostility.
Our family there tells the story of being chased down in their own modern beach community by a thug covered in swastikas, threatening harm. He had picked on the wrong person, my brother-in-law, who was brave and articulate. He stood firm and reasoned with the potential assailant, who walked off.
In Britain, we tend to think of Bondi Beach and the surrounding areas as havens for beach lovers and a surfing paradise. We see pictures on the TV news during the Christmas season of Aussies frolicking in the surf and partying over barbecues. Many of us look on in envy as we cluster around the fires and brave the sleet and rain for a brisk walk.
But Sydney also has a wonderfully diverse Jewish community. Some, like my brother-in-law, are exiles from apartheid-era South Africa. Others, like Claire, were drawn to Australia by fabulous opportunities — in her case, as a seasoned teacher, to set up a Jewish nursery school in Brisbane, Queensland, before migrating to Sydney later on.
We were last there for the wedding of our niece, where the canopy, or chuppah, was erected on a surfing beach in the brilliant sunshine. The ceremony was moving, with my nephew Ilan sweetly playing the violin and me, as a visiting family member, being invited to chant the Sheva Brachot – the seven blessings.
The wonderful words of that sixth blessing, sung in Hebrew, thanking the Lord for creating ‘joy and celebration, for bridegroom and bride, rejoicing, jubilation, pleasure and delight, love and brotherhood, peace and friendship’, came flooding back to me yesterday.
How could such a magical, tranquil, partying beach nearby at Bondi have become such a scene of outrageous racial violence?
Bondi, we soon discovered, was not just a town of ice-cream parlours and bottle shops but a place where members of the Jewish community live, pray, shop and eat. We enjoyed heritage Ashkenazi restaurants where the distinctive flavours and comfort food of Eastern Europe, chicken soup, salt beef and spiced stuffed carp, had travelled all the way to New South Wales. Nearby, there were Mediterranean-style Israeli restaurants serving hummus, shakshuka and kebabs.
In Coogee we awoke to the sounds of beach-volleyball players on the sands, training before the beating sun became too hot. I visited the small synagogue quietly tucked away off a high street, close to shops selling high-fashion beach and surf wear. I was greeted with enthusiasm by the South African rabbi and elderly community as the tenth person to arrive — the necessary quorum for a full service.
The community, I learnt, had been established by survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen. They had moved as far away from the horrors of the killing fields and death marches as they could travel. The shock and pain which they (if they are still with us) and their descendants must feel at the anti-Semitism, mayhem, random shootings and killings are hard to imagine, their quietude and escape invaded by the oldest of hatreds.
At the synagogue, as a visiting stranger with the right skills, I was invited to lead the prayer service.
Doing so reminded me of my father, himself a refugee of the Holocaust, his brother Philip, a cantor and rabbi, and the biblical life stories of my own family members who were survivors.
These include my father’s late sister Rosie, who had made it from Auschwitz to Adelaide, where her British-trained husband had been the community rabbi.
On Sunday evening, on the other side of the world in North London, we gathered with my daughter, her husband, grandchildren and wider family to kindle the first Chanukah light. As I write, the scent of the latkes, the spiced potato and onion cakes fried in oil, wafts up the stairs.
It should be joyous to commemorate the victory of the Jewish Maccabee heroes over their Greek oppressors and the rededication of the Temple more than two thousand years ago. But it will be hard to banish thoughts of unprovoked killings in Sydney and the traumas suffered once again by the families living nearby.
Attacks on innocent Jews and bystanders, as they pray and celebrate, have become all too common from Manchester to Bondi. They are an abomination which, shamefully, still goes unchallenged by our political leaders as our community suffers again and still again.
- Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail
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