Bondi Beach attack shatters life for Australia’s Jewish residents

SYDNEY — The sense of anger is palpable among members of the Jewish community in and around Bondi Beach as it reels from the attack on a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people.

Much of their fury is directed at the government, which has been accused of failing to heed warnings about antisemitic threats ahead of the Dec. 14 attack. But there has also been sadness and soul-searching about the place the community has in a neighborhood well known for its Jewish roots, and in Australia’s wider society.

Linda Royal said her parents fled Poland after the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1939, arriving first in Lithuania. They landed in Sydney two years later, aided by illegal transit visas issued by a Japanese diplomat.

“Like many migrants, they came to Bondi because it was working-class and inexpensive,” she told NBC News last week close to the site of the shooting, on a hill where thousands of flowers had been laid in tribute to the victims.

In the years since her parents’ arrival, Royal said, the Jewish community has swelled in the neighborhood and its surrounding suburbs, first with Holocaust survivors and later with refugees known as refuseniks from countries in the former Soviet Union, some of whom had been denied permission to emigrate to Israel.

“There was a huge sense of community,” Royal said. “The Jewish community sticks together. We’re constantly unfortunately on the run from persecution.”

Australia’s worst mass shooting in decades has “completely ripped us apart,” she said. “It’ll never be the same again.”

Authorities have identified the two suspects as 24-year-old Naveed Akram and his 50-year-old father, Sajid Akram. The elder Akram was shot dead at the scene, while his son was charged last week with 59 offenses, including terrorism and 15 counts of murder, after waking up from a coma.

Investigators have said the pair were inspired by the ideology of the Islamic State terrorist group. Two homemade ISIS flags were found in the younger suspect’s car, police have said. ISIS has praised but not officially claimed the attack, referring to it in an official publication as “Sydney’s pride.”

As well as sadness about the attack, “there’s a great deal of anger, a great deal of rage,” Alex Ryvchin, the co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said via phone on Tuesday.

“There’s a sense that not only was the writing on the wall, but the community explicitly and repetitively told the government what was going to happen,” said Ryvchin, who was born in Ukraine before he moved to Australia as a child.

The shooting was “a clear escalation from violent slogans and aggressive street protests and abuse of Jews on the streets, to harassment and vandalism of Jewish property and then finally the firebombings,” he said, referring to several arson attacks on synagogues in recent years. This “was always going to end in murder, and that’s exactly where we are,” he added.

Ryvchin, whose former home was daubed with antisemitic language and cars were set alight earlier this year, said both Australia’s federal government and provincial leaders in the state of New South Wales had failed to act on proposals to curb antisemitic violence.

These included more visible policing and a clampdown on pro-Palestinian protests that had become increasingly aggressive and turned people against the Jewish community, he added.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose poll numbers were found by The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper to have plunged by 15 points in the wake of the attack, said Tuesday that his government would address hate speech and gun control and work with states on new laws.

New South Wales, where Bondi is situated, debated tougher gun laws on Tuesday. The state’s leader is also trying to ban the display of terrorist symbols and curb protests. Other states have indicated they’ll try to follow suit.

But while they were welcomed by some, others were critical of the hasty way the government tried to bring them in. Antony Loewenstein, a journalist and author who serves on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia, a progressive group that advocates for “Palestinian freedom,” said: “I think they’re an absolute abomination.”

“They are rushed, not thought through, and they’re arguably unconstitutional,” he said, adding that he thought they would be challenged in court.

Three activist groups representing those in support of Palestine and Indigenous Australians have said they’ll challenge the proposed laws in Australia’s high court.

Loewenstein also disputed Ryvchin’s claim that pro-Palestinian marches in Australia, some of the largest of which have taken place in Sydney, had incited violence against the Jewish community.

Australia is home to many “progressive Jews who are deeply against Israel’s mass slaughtering in Gaza” and oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Lowenstein said.

“The truth of the matter is that there is literally no connection that we are aware of between the murderers, these two men, father and son, and the pro-Palestine movement. Zero,” he said. “We are worried and scared, of course, by the direct targeting of Jews but also deeply concerned that our fears are being weaponized in the service of deeply antidemocratic and draconian policies,” he added.

Others like Ryvchin are calling for a Royal Commission, or a major public inquiry into the attack. It is necessary so “Jewish people can walk down the street without fear and maybe next year we can get together again, as we have every year, and kindle the Hanukkah flames and hopefully not do it with police snipers on roofs,” he said.

Albanese has so far resisted calls to do this, saying he wants to avoid a drawn-out process and that Royal Commissions haven’t held after similar incidents.

Whether it takes place or not, back in Bondi, Linda Royal said things would not be the same again.

“We now associate this place with yet another place of a Jewish massacre, and that can never be taken away,” she said.