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Morning. It’s 5:00 AM here in Bondi Beach. Just come to watch the sunrise behind me. I’ve been in Bondi the last few days, just trying to process what took place here.
It’s been a really challenging couple of days, just talking to people who were affected and people who just missed the incident just by a few minutes. It’s been really tough being here, but also really healing, spending time at the vigil. I’m standing now at the place where it all happened. Here’s the Bondi playground next to me. There’s the bridge over there where the shooters stood, and this area here is where the Hanukkah celebration was – just reopened yesterday. There’s a whole lot of events happening this morning here at Bondi Beach. There’s 5:00 AM – and there are so many people out here already starting to run and gather the outdoor gyms packed and there’s a big paddle out.
I just wanted to share a few thoughts, you know, like my work at March the Living, we go visit massacre sites of Jews. We go to Auschwitz and Majdanek and then we go to Israel and visit October 7 sites down south. The Nova sites. Sderot.
And it feels like we go and visit those places which are far away in Europe, in the Middle East, but not here in Bondi. Never in my wildest dreams that I think I’d be visiting a Jewish massacre site in Bondi Beach. That group there are Bondi lifeguards. I saw them warming up a few minutes ago, so those are all the guys that were here. That were here on Sunday, running towards …bullets to try and help people. So there’s a lot of healing going on here at Bondi. People trying to process in their own way.
So yeah, as I was saying, you know, like visiting a place like Auschwitz, you think how could humanity descend to such horrific levels? And we know when we talk about the Holocaust that Auschwitz didn’t happen overnight. You know, it started with words and then dehumanizing people and then demonizing them and ostracizing them from society and eventually murdering them.
And we really have to have a hard look at ourselves and, and what happened to Australian society that some people became so radicalized that they ended up wanting to murder families at a Hanukkah celebration at this park a few days ago.
But yeah, I just feel we need to use this, this moment, to do everything we can to try and build a better Australia. Let the site be a clarion call to all of us to reach out to our neighbors, to build longer tables and, and not bigger walls around us. You know, what’s been incredible the last few days is just the outpouring of kindness and friendship and people really like leaning on each other. People are so traumatized. The amount of PTSD in this community. People will struggle to come back to the site, the, the images they have in their heads. And I did have friends here and friends’ parents, and they talk about seeing dead bodies and the screaming and it’s, it’s gonna take a long time for us to heal from this, this absolute tragedy.
But we need people to come back to Bondi Beach. We need this to become a place of, of unity, a place where this was the moment that Australia united and became a better country and stamped out extremism and antisemitism. We can’t let this become a moment where Australians started hating each other and becoming more angry and more divided.
I know it’s easier said than done. I know there’s a lot of anger and it’s justified, but, you know, I’m here and I’ve been visiting just because I really believe that we need to learn from this experience.
We visit Auschwitz and we visit Nova, not because it’s an enjoyable experience or because we want to, but because need to understand what we can learn from history – to ensure that it never happens again. Never happens again to the Jewish people – any people.
So I’m about to go for a run and then a swim, but it’s important for me just to come back here and, and pay my respects to the fallen. You know, the last few days we’ve been hearing their stories, we’ve been, you know, watching their funerals. It’s been so, so heavy. Just getting to know all the people who fell here. There’s many people in hospitals still met some in critical condition.
But again, when we learn about the Holocaust, when we learn about October 7th, we focus a lot on the people who risked their lives to save others, the upstanders, and there were so many upstanders here on Sunday.
Those Bondi life guards I just saw, Ahamad el Ahmed, New South Wales Police, CSG, the couple who tackled the terrorists as soon as they got out of their car. So many people died on Sundays as heroes.
And I think that’s what we need to focus on. We need to focus on how incredible humanity is and how people really care about each other and are really willing to risk their lives to save others. And we need to shine a spotlight on them. There are so many good people here. The people who were killed, little Matilda’s funeral yesterday. We need to honor their memory by building a better Australian society this, so this never happens again to anyone. All right, I’m gonna head off now. Thanks for listening to me.
I’m not gonna go near that bridge. It still feels a little bit too full on to go stand there – see the bullet holes on it and think about what happened there a few days ago, but in time, we’ll need to go and confront it all.
Shabbat Shalom.
