More than 24 hours on, the Jewish community is still locating the missing and counting the dead.
Among them is a prominent local Rabbi, Eli Schlanger, who only a month ago had welcomed his fifth child.
“The family broke. They are falling apart,” his brother-in-law Rabbi Mendel Kastel told reporters after a sleepless night. “The rabbi’s wife, her best friend, [they] both lost their husbands.”
The youngest victim is a 10-year-old named Matilda, whose only crime was being Jewish, says Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the main body for the Jewish community here.
“A man who I knew well, in his 90s, survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, only to be slaughtered standing next to his wife at a Hannukah event on Bondi Beach.”
Mr Ryvchin says he is somehow both numb and distraught. “It’s our worst fear, but it’s also something that was outside the realm of possibilities.”
His organisation has been warning about a spike in recorded antisemitism incidents since Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. But, Mr Ryvchin says, authorities didn’t heed the alarm.
“I know these people. They get up every morning to try to keep Australians safe. That’s all they wanna do. But they failed, and they will know it better than anybody today.”
