Long before Bondi massacre, Australian Jews lived with a sense of peril

SYDNEY – In Rebecca Di Veroli’s 33 years of growing up Jewish in Australia, a sense of precarity had always been in the background, as much a part of life here as the sun, surf and sand.

Armed guards stood outside every synagogue, every day care centre, even the Jewish nursing home where she visited her grandfather. Towering walls surrounded the grounds of the Jewish schools she attended. Her father, whose family fled Poland in the midst of a pogrom, forbade the family from attending Jewish gatherings, particularly in open spaces like parks.