In the beginning, the Sydney police issued a warning. Jews: Do not go to the city. Do not go to the Opera House. Stay at home.
My mother and I were on our way to the Opera House when we read the emergency warning on our phones. We are Jews. We are law abiding. We turned around and went home. What would people have said if they had told Christians to stay home, prohibited them from going to the city and the Opera House?
This was October 9, 2023, the beginning of a journey for Sydney Jews that ended this past Sunday, when two gunmen who were motivated by Islamic State ideology opened fire on a Jewish celebration at Bondi Beach.
That night two years ago, I asked a builder to survey our basement, to see if we could shelter from a mob there. The builder looked around and frowned. “What’s the problem?” she asked. “Won’t the police protect you?” I was confused; why would the police do that?
I am a fifth-generation Australian. On my mother’s side, the ancestors arrived in 1858, fleeing Tsarist persecution. My mother graduated from the Methodist Ladies’ College and her mother from the Presbyterian Ladies’ College. Their manners were fit for the queen’s table. My father survived Hungarian fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist communism before disembarking at Sydney Harbour in 1957. There was no running water in his mother’s kitchen, or queens’ table manners.
My parents met in Australia and settled between the Pacific Ocean and Sydney Harbour. Bondi Beach is on the Pacific side. On the harbour side are many little beaches. All year, our windows are open to the ocean breeze and the trees are ever blue-green. In this paradise, four generations of our family live with our neighbors in peace.
The night the police warned Jews not to go to the city, a mob was marching from the Town Hall to the Opera House, and when they arrived at the iconic white sails, they rioted, chanting Gas the Jews and Fuck the Jews.
Soon afterward, the Sydney police pulled Jews in to show what they were doing to protect us. The officer presenting was charming, in that Aussie bloke way, offhand, confident. The police had eyes on people, they said, and any odd move this way or that could arouse suspicion. Sounded right. There is zero tolerance for illegal immigration in Australia, and they need an extensive apparatus to keep that up. Why not use it for monitoring antisemitism? Concluding, the officer shared a secret: In their extensive experience, Australians can’t be bothered with elaborate evil. “Australians are too lazy for the really hot stuff,” he told us. We left the session more relaxed and continued on with our lives.
And got used to Fuck the Jews scrawled everywhere. A Melbourne synagogue was firebombed. Jewish members of Parliament had their offices ransacked. Cars were bombed and sprayed with the repeating message. A nursery school was burned down. Near our house, the former home of a community leader was vandalized and defaced. Jews who came together online for support were doxxed and lost their jobs and livelihoods.
What had the Jews of Sydney done to deserve this? Germans in the 1930s had an excuse. They endured economic collapse and mass unemployment, but Sydneysiders? They are among the richest people on earth, with full employment and fuller bellies, in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. What excuse did they have for getting rid of Jews?
In one speech, Sydney imam Sheikh Abdul Salam Zoud of Lakemba called Jews the “criminal, barbaric, tyrannical enemy,” reminding his audience that “the Prophet Mohammad, the Righteous Caliphs … none of them conquered the world by peaceful means, negotiations, concessions or understandings. They conquered it through jihad for the sake of Allah.” I understood. That was the reason.
And we continued on with our lives.
This was not the Australia I grew up in. It was becoming unrecognizable. Also, deeply familiar. My father tells us of his European childhood as testimony and warning: of the beatings on the way to school; the prohibition on Jews doing business or shopping in the market; the ghetto where Jews were stuffed until they were sent in cattle cars to death; and after liberation, hiding and faking under communism, so the authorities would not discover my father was a Jew. These were relics of the past, we thought.
After October 7, 2023, violence erupted against Jews in Sydney and over the world as if it belonged, as if it were normal. Which it is. Violent antisemitism, in a thousand guises and with a thousand excuses, is the human condition. Which is how the state of Israel came to be born, so Jews could live outside the human condition of antisemitism. It failed. Instead of blood libels or inquisitions or crusades of faith, we now have the state of Israel as the reason for ... what? Fuck the Jews in Sydney.
My answer to the Hamas October 7 terrorist attack on Israel was to become a schoolteacher. On the first day, the head of school brought me in. “This is your new teacher, Morah Chaya,” she said to a class of girls. Chaya is the Hebrew translation for my name, Viva. The words both mean “Live!” “Another Chaya?” said a student with an enormous smile. “Every second girl at this school has that name!” And so they did. Chaya Mushka was the rebbetzin of the late Chabad Rebbe. After she died, one girl in each Chabad family was given the name. And this was a Chabad school.
I taught my students to plant trees and build houses, about the Exodus from Egypt and the miracle of Purim with the Persians and the miracle of Hanukkah against the Greeks, and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the Spanish flourishing and expulsion. I taught them to stand and say, “Shalom” (peace), when they came in and when they went out. They gave me no peace, which was their job, and my job was to try to teach them what the word means.
In the beginning, my mother and I were driving to the Opera House and turned around and came home, because we were Jews.
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.
Bondi Beach holds the things people left behind and will never collect. Bikes and strollers, swim gear, dinner, odd shoes, cutlery, volleyballs: ordinary things belonging to ordinary people on an ordinary summer night in December. A continuous stream of mourners brings flowers and pays homage, vigils of memory and prayer.
On the first night of Hanukkah, many lights were extinguished. On the second night of Hanukkah, the Opera House lit a blue menorah on its shimmering sails. Two candles burning, the emblem of Chabad.
Lives hang in the balance still, including my student Chaya and Ahmed Al Ahmed, an Australian citizen and Muslim who took hold of one gunman by the neck and wrenched the weapon from him, before being shot himself. He saved many, at the risk of himself.
No, we are no longer continuing on with our lives. Terrorists are not lazy. Nor are antisemites. Nor are we. We all have work to do.
Teaching children—that’s where I begin. What about you?
