By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Community members gather outside of Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach on December 15, 2025 in Sydney, Australia. (Audrey Richardson/Getty Images)
Anyone who still harbors doubt as to the sheer vehemence of worldwide antisemitism need only have been on Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach during the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025.
In what was to be a festive Chabad-organized prelude to the first night of Hanukkah, a pair gunmen took position on a footbridge, aimed their rifles at crowd goers below, and opened fire. By the time the gunfire finally ceased, 15 victims lay dead or dying, with another 39 wounded along sands that, once pristine white, were now dark with the blood of murdered Jews.
The episode was all the more perverse given that the murderers were a father and son, acting in the name of the Islamic State. It speaks to the ubiquitous hatred of Jews and Jewishness that we’ve become accustomed to spasms of antisemitic violence, just not on this scale. Not on a sun-splashed beach on the eve of Hanukkah. Not when the slain include a 10-year-old child.
Yet here was a wanton demonstration of antisemitic evil, unabashed in its intensity. For many of us, the Islamic State has receded as a palpable, immediate threat: relegated to secondary status compared to the contemporary extremist surges of Hamas and its terroristic brethren. Radicalization may be an ever-present dynamic, tempting certain weak-minded individuals steeped in delusion and desperation, but when it erupts like this, it shocks us.
It’s also startling to encounter a gun-driven homicidal rampage in a place like Australia. That nation’s gun laws, while not as restrictive as, say, the UK, still guard against unfettered access to firearms. You can’t stroll into your neighborhood retailer and, a few minutes later, stroll out with all manner of weaponry.
Even so, the elder Bondi Beach shooter had, legally, amassed a collection of at least six long guns. Equipped with a sizeable cache of ammunition, the 50-year-old father and his 24-year-old son were able to unleash round after round.
Terrible as the death toll was, it could have been considerably worse had 43-year-old Ahmed al-Ahmed not crept up behind the father, tackled him and wrested the rifle from his hands, compelling the gunman to retreat from the scene. An Islamic fruit seller, armed with nothing but his bare hands, fortitude and immense courage, acted selflessly to come to the aid of citizens, Jewish citizens, he’d likely never encountered before that terrible December day.
The dead ranged in age from that 10-year-old girl, Matilda, to 87-year-old Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor. The murdered also included Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Chief Operating Officer of Chabad of Bondi. Each year he organized and presided over the “Chanukah by the Sea” festivities on Bondi Beach.
He was fulfilling Chabad’s imperative of outreach, wrapping his spiritual arms around Jews of all persuasions — from the most rigorously observant to the most resolutely secular. The afternoon along Sydney’s most celebrated playscape was supposed to be suffused with joy and anticipation. Instead, it became a killing ground.
There were other examples of selfless acts, such as one couple who confronted one of the gunmen, hurling bricks at him before being shot to death. The elder shooter was eventually killed by police; his son, critically wounded, has survived to face 15 counts of murder.
Within days came the expected demands for stricter gun laws, the typical after-the-fact reaction to events such as these. What also emerged was a renewed cognizance of how Jews are increasingly under siege. Sometimes that siege is expressed nakedly, as it was in Sydney. But often it is insidious, percolating underneath a seemingly tranquil surface.
It has been this way for generations, centuries, millennia — an endemic component of our collective Jewish circumstance. But more and more frequently, we are witnessing (indeed, experiencing) outbreaks that are unforgiving in their brutality.
Viewed through that aperture, the leap from October 7 to Bondi Beach is hardly a leap at all. It is the inevitable consequence of regarding antisemitic hatred as intrinsic to Jewish existence: transcending time and space, heaven and earth. It falls to each of us then, not to concede that apparent inevitability, but to confront and battle it with all our might.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.