Remember me
“Before you see the news, there’s been a shooting in Bondi Beach. I am absolutely fine and safe in the hills xxx”
I went to bed last night excited for the first night of Chanukah. I woke up to the message above on the family WhatsApp group. My sister is currently in Sydney. By whatever fate or luck or deity exists in this universe, she was not at the candle lighting on Bondi Beach when two gunmen opened fire on a crowd of more than 1,000 people gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of lights, killing at least 12 and resulting in 29 people being taken to hospital, including a child. She was invited to visit extended family on the other side of the city. She was not the victim of what has officially been declared a “terrorist incident”, the deadliest shooting Australia has experienced in nearly three decades, described by the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as “an act of evil antisemitism”.
And all I can think about as I wander about in a daze today alternating between staring at the fresh packet of Chanukah candles I bought for tonight and doomscrolling news updates on my phone is that she could have been.
I don’t know how to process this, this sense that world events are closing in on the Jewish community worldwide in a way that is so at odds with the first 32 years of my life. I don’t know how to process the reality that antisemitism – not the vague sense of suspicion and occasional arch comment about tightness with money or global influence I have always lived with but the bloodier, more vicious kind – is not confined to an era of history I was fortunate enough to have avoided, but is here, now, targeting people like my sister. People like me.
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Because whatever you think of the war in Gaza, of Netanyahu and the IDF and Hamas, this is not about Israel. This is about Jews. It was Australian Jews shot at on Bondi Beach on the first night of Chanukah, not Israelis. Just like it was British Jews stabbed and run over in the Manchester synagogue attack on Yom Kippur in October. Just like it is Jewish pupils threatened and harassed in their uniforms, Jewish schools doused in red paint, Jewish businesses vandalised.
And tonight is the first night of Chanukah, a festival celebrating resilience and victory in the face of existential threat. (But then, so many Jewish festivals celebrate resilience and victory in the face of existential threat – maybe that tells you something.) We light candles to remember the miracle of the holy oil lasting for eight days, and the more fundamental miracle that we have survived to light candles at all.
I’m not sure if I ever understood that as a child. Chanukah was latkes and dreidels and eight nights of presents. It was my father barricaded in the kitchen all day frying kilos of potatoes, and my mother creating a fire hazard by insisting everyone have their own Chanukiah, resulting in a table blazing with over a hundred candles. It was singing songs in a language I didn’t know. I never looked up the translations. I just knew they were about joy and brightness and hope.
Today, I looked them up.
Banu cho-she-ch leh-ga-rehsh / Beya-deinu ohr va’esh / Kol echad hu ohr katan / V’chu-lanu ohr eitan.
We come to chase the dark away / In our hands are light and fire / Each individual light is small / But together the light is mighty.
For five years now I have celebrated Chanukah with my non-Jewish stepdaughters. I have taught them the story of the Maccabees and the songs with words they don’t understand, taught them it is part of my heritage and it can be part of theirs too, if they want it to be. I have experienced such joy sharing it with them. I have never told them of the darkness behind it. I never thought I needed to. Then last year, we went to a children’s Chanukah party at my local synagogue. I clocked the security: the guards, the gates, the metal detectors. For the first time I stopped to wonder what else I was sharing with them. The risk. The hatred. The possibility of violence.
And I banished that thought as irrational and hyperbolic. And today my sister was one change of heart away from being on a beach where two gunmen’s hatred of Jews drove them to murder strangers. I read about a man who was there and lost friends and family in the attack, describing how he consoled a four-year-old girl “with her face painted like a lioness” at the scene. The lion is associated with Judah Maccabee, the hero warrior-priest of the Chanukah story. “People planned to massacre that little girl and people like her.”
I wonder if the people marching through London weekend after weekend chanting “globalise the intifada” can see the link. I wonder if they realise that slogan is a call for violence against Jews, wherever they may be in the world and whatever their position on Israel. The hopeful part of me wants so desperately to believe they do not. A smaller, darker part – the part that led me to stop wearing in public the pendant with Hebrew writing on it I was given as a Bat Mitzvah present – has concluded they don’t care. That at least some of them believe random Jewish lives are expendable for the sake of some greater cause. Or perhaps that by dint of our heritage and our history, we simply deserve it. That’s certainly what some of the posts I see on social media seem to suggest. Social media is not the real world, I try to remind myself. But there is no getting away from the fact that there are real people behind the accounts. And real people with guns at Bondi Beach.
My sister is safe. She had her “sliding doors” moment. In a just very slightly altered universe, I can picture her spotting a flier for an event called “Chanukah by the Sea 2025”, with live entertainment and activities for children – for children! – and deciding that, ten thousand miles away from home, this was where she wanted to be. To feel close to us, to her community. Chanukah is all about giving thanks and there is nothing in the world I am more thankful for than that she wasn’t there. But next time, she might be. Or I might be. And the terrible realisation is dawning on me that there will be a next time. The security gates are outside the synagogue for a reason. This is not paranoia. This is reality.
Tonight, I will light candles with my stepdaughters. I will try to be hopeful, and keep out of my mind what it is I might be passing on to them. I will try not to let the growing understanding that there are people out there who want people like me destroyed because of a god we may or may not believe in spoil the celebration. I will try to be resilient.
Kol echad hu ohr katan / V’chu-lanu ohr eitan.
[Further reading: Manchester and the jihadi war against Jews]
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