Long Before Bondi Massacre, Australian Jews Lived With a Sense of Peril

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 center, 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.

“Come on, we’re in Australia. Don’t be ridiculous,” she recalled telling him.

Last Sunday evening at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, she found herself lying still atop her 5-year-old son under a food table, trying to shield his small body with hers as bullets landed around them. Nearby, a rabbi who had been doling out hot dogs a moment earlier had been hit in the chest and was struggling to breathe.

For members of Australia’s small and tightly knit Jewish community, the bloody attack on the Hanukkah celebration was their worst nightmare come true. Their longstanding fears had sharply escalated since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza unleashed an increase in antisemitic rhetoric and vandalism.

The feeling of vulnerability had been particularly acute for a community where many could trace their lineage to Holocaust survivors. They had grown up in families who had escaped to the farthest corner of the world from persecution in Europe.

Jews who fled Hungary took refuge near scenic Bondi Beach, which after World War II was relatively affordable. For decades, their families gathered on the sand to hold bar and bat mitzvahs, prayer groups and the annual Hanukkah party, which featured a petting zoo and face painting.

The two gunmen who opened fire on this year’s party, killing 15, were inspired by the terrorist group Islamic State, the authorities have said.

The massacre followed a spate of antisemitic attacks in Australia in the past two years, which have included the firebombing of synagogues and torching of Jewish businesses. The federal government responded by increasing police protection, tightening hate-crime laws and committing millions of dollars to security measures.

After Sunday’s attack, many Jews said the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had not moved quickly enough, even after its own antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, put forth a long list of proposed measures in July.

“We haven’t been feeling safe in Australia,” said Wayne Miller, 50, who moved from South Africa in 2008 after experiencing violent crime there. Mr. Miller was at Sunday’s event with his two daughters, aged 3 and 4. “We feel like our government has failed us.”

Ms. Di Veroli’s two children, Chloe, 7, and Louie, 5, encountered antisemitism this year when the walls of their school was spray-painted with vulgar graffiti about Jews. The school shut for the day, and uniformed police officers patrolled the grounds for weeks in addition to the usual armed guards.

When her children asked why their school had been targeted, Ms. Di Veroli struggled to find words. She simply told them that there are bad people out there.

The morning after the shooting on Bondi Beach, Louie was once again full of questions. His mother felt even more at a loss to explain why being Jewish had made them a target of such hate.

“It’s hard,” she said. “We don’t have the answers ourselves.”

Many Jewish Australians said the sense of their place in the country was rattled when pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, some yelling antisemitic chants, two days after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel.

As the war in Gaza dragged on, many said they struggled between wanting to comfortably express their Jewish identities while fearing those displays would make them a target of violence. On a community forum on the website of a news outlet, The Jewish Independent, one man wrote that it had felt “a bit like walking on one of those rickety rope bridges.”

Irene Fihrer, a psychologist who has been holding group and individual counseling sessions after Sunday’s attack, said several Jewish patients came to her after fearing their previous therapists were opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza, which all too often seemed to mix with a hatred of Jews.

She said her own daughter, who attends a Jewish school with Hebrew on its emblem, became wary of wearing her uniform in public after she and her friends were yelled at and had things thrown at them at a shopping mall.

“It’s in every little aspect of your life that you feel a heightened awareness of, this could be dangerous for me,” Ms. Fihrer said.

Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer in Sydney, co-founded the Jewish Council of Australia after the war began in Gaza to offset right-wing narratives from Jewish organizations unquestioningly supportive of Israel. She said Jews will suffer if blame for the Bondi Beach attack is put on the Palestine solidarity movement or immigration, rather than just the Islamic State ideology.

“If those divisive messages win out, that will only fuel resentment and antisemitism toward Jewish people,” she said.

Like Ms. Di Veroli, Jessica Chapnik Kahn has spent the days since last weekend’s attack wrestling with what and how much to tell her children.

She also had thrown herself atop her 5-year-old daughter on the concrete floor of a picnic area where other terrified parents tried to keep their children still and quiet so the attackers would not fire in their direction. Her daughter, Shemi, was so motionless, like a plank of wood, that she wondered if she had suffocated the girl.

Her 9-year-old son, who ran barefoot with his father toward the shooting to look for his mother and sister, asked later that night: Why would someone do that at a Hanukkah party?

“When you hear a child grappling with it,” she said, “the absurdity is even greater.”

Ms. Chapnik Kahn said her children were very aware of their Jewish identity, but that she and her husband had kept them from learning anything just yet about antisemitism, World War II or Hitler.

To her son, she responded as truthfully as she could.

“There are some people out there that make really bad choices,” she said. “They let their hate overrun things and misguidedly believe hurting people will make them happy.”

Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.

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