By Nomi Kaltmann as seen in the Australian Jewish News

December 20, 2025

When I was in primary school at my Chabad primary school in the early 2000s, I grew up on a steady diet of stories about brave Chassidim. The Chabad movement began in Russia, in the small town of Lubavitch, and our teachers spoke about Russian Jews with a particular reverence.

The pattern of these stories was familiar. The Russian authorities would crack down on organised Jewish life. Jewish schools would be shut, and synagogues would be raided. Rabbis would disappear and be jailed. And then there would be the Chossid, the observant Jew, who no matter the pressure, refused to stop being a Jew. He would take Jewish life underground and would teach Torah in secret. His wife would light Shabbat candles behind blacked out windows, and his family would keep kosher even when food was scarce and starvation was real.

In some stories, the punishment came quickly. Prison, or exile or beatings and even sometimes death. In others, the resistance was quieter but no less radical. A mikveh carved into frozen earth in the middle of a Siberian winter. A choice to make decisions, time and time again, that survival without Judaism was not survival at all.

As a child, I listened to these stories but did not fully understand. I am Australian born. Blessedly, I have never had to fight to practise my religion. I have never feared imprisonment for lighting candles or saying a prayer. Judaism, for me, has always been something I could practise openly. With my background, I did not grasp what it meant to be forced into defiance just to remain who you are.

Russian Jews, by contrast, have lived with this pressure for centuries. Not only under the Tsars, but under Stalin, under communism, under regimes that saw Judaism itself as a threat. For Russian authorities, Jewishness was never seen as neutral. It was something to be erased or controlled. And yet, despite the hardships, Judaism in Russia endured.

To be Jewish in Russia requires a certain stubbornness. You may not know much about your faith, and you may not read Hebrew, but your Jewishness sits deep in your core. It is not negotiable, and it is definitely not something you surrender to make life easier. You may bend in other ways, but not on that.

To me, that instinct was on full display during the Bondi massacre where Russian Jews bravely fought the terrorists with their bare hands.

Dashcam footage captured Boris and Sofia Gurman, Jews who immigrated from the former USSR to Sydney, running straight towards danger at Bondi Beach, tackling the gunmen as they arrived. While most people would flee, they ran directly towards danger, and they paid with their lives.

So did another Jew from the former USSR, Reuven Morrison, who ran towards the terrorists and hurled bricks at them, knowing full well that they were armed with high powered rifles and he had nothing but his hands and whatever he could grab. He too, was murdered.

All three were Russian Jews. All three were shaped by a culture that does not accept passivity in the face of antisemitism. All three were killed in the worst terrorist attack in Australian history.

When I watched the footage, something clicked. I finally understood the stories from my childhood. They were not simply stories of religious observance under persecution, but rather an understanding that a commitment to Jewish life and your Jewish pride becomes fiercer under threat, not weaker.

Russian Jews have learned, across generations, that survival sometimes requires confrontation. What I saw at Bondi was instinct. It was the reflex of people who come from a lineage where Jews have learned, again and again, that waiting politely for violence to pass does not work. That compliance does not save you, that sometimes the only moral choice is to move towards the threat, even when the cost is obvious.

Boris and Sofia Gurman and Reuven Morrison did not need to be reminded of who they were. They acted with immense bravery because this is what it has meant, for Russian Jews, to remain intact as Jews. To refuse to backdown, to refuse to forfeit their Jewish pride.

The bravery we saw at Bondi has been honed by centuries of knowing exactly what happens when Jews do nothing.

Russian Jews are not only survivors. They are fighters, and when history calls, they answer.