By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in Crikey
15 June 2026
This weekend marked six months since the Bondi attack against Australia’s Jewish community at the Chabad of Bondi Chanukah by the Sea celebration. Six months since my life, and the lives of Jews across this country, changed forever.
I don’t feel like I can relate to the Nomi of December 13, 2025, the day before the attack, the one who didn’t realise that the Australia her children would grow up in would be so vastly different to the one she grew up in.
Since Bondi, my community has become more fearful and more security-conscious. My children are accompanied by armed guards on short excursions, the locations of Jewish events have disappeared from billboards and public listings, and synagogues now advertise their security features alongside their programs. But internally, on a day-to-day basis, I feel so anxious about the future of Jewish life in Australia.
The Australian Jewish community is a traumatised community. We are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who, outside of Israel, settled in Australia in some of the highest numbers per capita of anywhere in the world. The Holocaust survivors came here for two reasons: because Australia did not have the entrenched antisemitism of many European countries that had persecuted Jews for centuries, and because it was about as far away as one could get from the horrors of concentration camps and the antisemitism they had endured.
And now, in a post-Bondi world, I know so many Aussie Jews who are actively thinking about leaving and considering whether they have a future here in this country. It feels completely messed up that a country that many of our families sought refuge in after the Holocaust may no longer be able to provide that refuge.
This loss of safety means there is a feeling of pervasive insecurity about going to anything Jewish, or doing anything openly Jewish in public. Do I want to take my children to Jewish festivals and to Jewish children’s parties if they can be at risk? Do I want to go to Jewish events when they could be targeted? And is it reasonable to feel so anxious when I go to Jewish stores, like the kosher grocery?
People may think I am exaggerating, but I feel I am being devastatingly clear-eyed about the precarious situation that Jews are now facing in this country. The attack in Bondi was, according to police, very well planned. Police allege the gunmen spent months meticulously outlining and practising for their murderous rampage. But what’s more terrifying to me is that when police tracked the two alleged gunmen’s movements on the day of the attack itself, they found that they had parked their car outside one of Sydney’s largest synagogues and sat there for about 20 minutes, at one point opening the boot of their car, which CCTV later revealed had an ISIS flag. Was the synagogue a potential target? Did circumstance intervene? We may never know. But it is difficult to look at that footage and conclude that Jewish concerns about security at our institutions and shops are somehow overblown.
So, while life continues on for most people in Australia, in a post-Bondi world, in my Jewish community, everything feels fragile. On Mother’s Day, I saw Valentyna Poltavchenko, the mother of 10-year-old Matilda, the youngest Bondi victim, talking about her first Mother’s Day without her daughter, and sobbed with her as she spoke about Matilda’s last moments, as she lay with her gunshot wound injury, bleeding on Bondi Beach. I have thought a lot about Alex Kleytman, the Holocaust survivor who came to Australia only to be killed, right here, on a sunny Australian beach at 87 years of age.
I never thought this would be the trajectory of my life, to feel fearful about being Jewish in Australia, and to realise that my safety, and the safety of my children, is not guaranteed. Australia was supposed to be the exception. In a world where antisemitism existed elsewhere, we told ourselves things were different here. That Australia would always continue to be our safe haven, our refuge.
And yet, since October 7, 2023, Australian Jews have found themselves on the frontlines of antisemitism. Synagogues have been targeted in arson attacks, Jewish businesses vandalised, Jewish homes threatened, and visibly Jewish people abused and assaulted. Australian Jews have no power over Israel’s war in Gaza, and have no influence over Israeli government policies, yet our communities are experiencing an unprecedented wave of hate directed at us, from many people who are unhappy with how that war has been conducted.
So where does that leave me? And where does it leave the approximately 120,000 Jews who live in Australia? If I’m honest, I would say it leaves us in a state of flux. We want to be hopeful and believe things will improve, but we also have to be realistic that they may not, and that even more frighteningly, they could get worse.
I have watched the royal commission into antisemitism closely, and I’d like to think that the recommendations from the commissioner will help reduce antisemitism. But I’m being honest when I say I am not sure they will. Many of the Jewish people who have testified about their lived experience with antisemitism have been doxxed with antisemitic abuse, showing that testifying about your lived experience with antisemitism can result in more antisemitism. Some of the commission’s work so far has resulted in heated debates about how to best protect Australia’s Jewish community, while also considering how to balance the civil liberties of protestors and freedom of speech considerations, which are not always easy to reconcile.
Six months on from Bondi, I think many Australian Jews are still trying to work out what comes next: how to hold onto our sense of belonging while also confronting the reality of what has happened here, how to raise our children with pride instead of fear. How to grapple with a place we have always wanted to live in while remaining insecure about our future here, and whether we ought to leave before things get much worse. And perhaps most painfully of all, how to accept that the sense of safety we once took for granted in this country may never fully return.
But despite these awful feelings, I end with the words of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was murdered in the Bondi attack. A year earlier, when asked how Australian Jews should respond to rising antisemitism, he answered: “Be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish.” In many ways, those words capture not only the Jewish response to antisemitism, but the story of Jewish survival over millennia itself.