Bondi Beach is Australia’s playground, our piazza, and the mother church of our national religion: the worship of sun, sand, and salt water.
Bondi is where millions of us learn to swim, to surf, to parade up and down the sands; where we rinse off our stress in the Pacific Ocean and suck in great gulps of sea air; where we bring interstate and overseas visitors to skite about our good fortune; where we thrill in our inheritance.
We are jealous of these prerogatives. Australia’s beaches belong to all of us, we believe. A few years ago, when a local businessman tried to reserve an area of the beach for patrons of an exclusive new club, he was met with charges of elitism and forced to withdraw.
In addition to being democratic, our beaches, Australians think, should be safe. We pioneered the world surf-lifesaving movement; volunteers patrol our beaches and rescue swimmers in distress. Our first lifesaving club, established more than a century ago, is in Bondi.
If Bondi belongs to all Australians, it’s also true that it has long been a rich center of Australian Jewish life, with synagogues and mikvahs and kosher butchers and delicatessens and Judaica stores and community clubs. For our Jewish citizens, who have given so much to our country, Bondi has been not just a place of refuge, but a place to thrive.
[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]
This is why Australians are angry and heartsick at Sunday’s despicable act of terror, in which two shooters—carrying long arms and dressed in black—launched an assault on a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi’s wide sands. Fifteen people were murdered, including two rabbis, a 10-year-old girl, and a Holocaust survivor. May their memory be a blessing. Dozens were wounded; hundreds will never recover completely. Australia is changed forever.
This atrocity demands the strongest possible response from our leaders. We trust that the arm of justice will be long and that it will reach out to punish all the guilty—not just the surviving terrorist, but anyone who organized or enabled the attack.
This was our worst mass-casualty event in 30 years. The fact that the dead terrorist was a licensed firearms holder with six guns will compel the rewriting of the gun laws introduced after the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996.
The Bondi attack follows a two-year epidemic of anti-Semitism in Australia. This has included a shameful demonstration on the steps of the Sydney Opera House a few days after the October 7 attack on Israel, and the firebombing of synagogues and child-care centers. It has left many in the Jewish community feeling abandoned.
Hanukkah is the festival of light, celebrated with the lighting of candles. Darkness nearly extinguished the light on Sunday, but there were also small flares of hope and redemption. There were the surf lifesavers who ran from their nearby clubhouse, even as the shooting continued, to provide CPR and pull the wounded to shelter.
And there were the heroics of Ahmed al-Ahmed, a 44-year-old father of two, an immigrant from Syria, and a Muslim, who owns a tobacco store in an outer suburb of Sydney. Ahmed abandoned his cover behind a parked car to tackle and disarm one of the terrorists. He is recovering in the hospital from his bullet wounds.
Ahmed joins a righteous list of heroes—at the Bataclan, at Manchester Arena, and on board United Airlines Flight 93—who ran toward the danger instead of away from it. The Talmud teaches that whoever saves one life saves the world entire. Ahmed al-Ahmed saved scores of lives on Sunday.
Now the rest of us—led by the Australian government—must keep our Jewish community safe and help it heal.
We will swim again at Bondi. We will not give up ownership of its sands.
