By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC

9 September 2026

Around the world, Jews are making preparations for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. According to Jewish tradition, beginning at nightfall on Friday, 11 September, Jews will celebrate 5,787 years since the creation of the world. We will gather around festively set tables, dip our apples into honey and wish each other Shana Tova, a good and sweet new year.

In synagogue, we will hear the cry of the shofar, the ram’s horn, and recite the ancient words of Unetaneh Tokef, one of the most haunting prayers in Jewish liturgy, which asks us to consider who will live and who will die in the year ahead. On Rosh Hashanah, according to Jewish tradition, all of humanity, not just Jews, passes before God and is inscribed for life or for death in the year to come.

For Australian Jews, this year it is difficult to hear the words of Unetaneh Tokef without thinking about the worst terror attack in Australia’s history, targeting Jews at a public Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach.

There are fifteen people who will not be sitting around tables with their families ushering in the new year ahead. Those killed on 14 December 2025 include two rabbis from Sydney’s Jewish community, Eli Schlanger and Yaakov Levitan, and 10-year-old Matilda Bee Britvan. The fifteen people killed were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandparents, friends and neighbours. They were people who had woken up that morning expecting, like the rest of us, to have another ordinary day, only to be murdered for daring to be Jewish in public.

Nine months later, my Australian Jewish community of 120,000 is still reeling as we try to understand how such a thing could happen here, and what it means for the rest of us to continue living in a country where Jews were specifically targeted in Australia’s first mass shooting in more than three decades. The Bondi attack did not occur in isolation. It came after months of rising antisemitism in Australia in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023. Australian Jews were killed at Bondi after their synagogues and places of business had been set alight, after their homes and schools were graffitied with vile slurs, after Jewish artists and authors were doxxed and deplatformed, and after Jewish students and academics were hounded and harassed.

My own family’s story is, like so many other Australian Jews, deeply connected to the story of people who came here because they needed somewhere safe. My grandpa, Joseph Kaltmann, was a Holocaust survivor who came to this country in order to escape from persecution after his mother, father, brother and sister were murdered in the Holocaust. In Australia, my grandpa was not rare. So many Holocaust survivors arrived here with the hope that their children would grow up in a place where being Jewish was safe, where they would not be a target. And those children and grandchildren grew up believing that Australia was different from other places in the world, that things would be good for us here.

Then the Bondi massacre happened and shattered those illusions of safety.

I don’t believe most Australian Jews have stopped loving Australia. In fact, I think the persistence of national attachment is part of what makes this current period of rising antisemitism full of so much anguish and grief. There is a particular kind of sorrow that comes from feeling unsettled in a place we have always considered home. For so many of us, Australia is the place that our families rebuilt themselves after the devastation of European Jewry.

And now, somehow in the depths of this complicated period, when we are still mourning those whose lives were cruelly snatched away at Bondi, Rosh Hashanah arrives. In Judaism, the calendar does not wait for us to be ready. The new year comes whether we have finished processing the old one or not.

During Rosh Hashanah we are asked to stop, to remember, to take stock of our lives and to imagine that the year ahead might be different from the year we are leaving behind. Our prayers are full of uncertainty, but they are also full of possibility. We ask for life, we ask for peace, we ask to be written into the Book of Life.

This year, Australian Jews who walk into synagogue on Rosh Hashanah will hold their children’s hands a little more tightly. There will be grandchildren of Holocaust survivors sitting beside their own children at their new year’s tables, wondering how to explain that the Australia their grandparents came to for safety is a country in which Jewish safety has once again become a national conversation.

But I also think there is something hopeful about celebrating the Jewish new year in the face of great adversity. We will make the same blessings over the same apples and honey that Jewish families have been making for generations. We will hear the cry of the shofar, perhaps with a little more emotion than usual. We will still wish each other Shana Tova, even though none of us can know what the year ahead will bring. And we will continue.

This Rosh Hashanah, when we ask to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, I think many of us will be thinking about the people who did not get that chance.

Despite the hard times Australian Jews are currently living through, I am convinced there is something powerful about beginning the new year together, still here, still Jewish, still believing that the next chapter can be better than the one we have just lived through.

I take comfort in the words of Rabbi Eli Schlanger who was murdered at Bondi. A year before he was killed, when he was asked how to respond to rising antisemitism in Australia, he said: “Be more Jewish. Act more Jewish. Appear more Jewish.” In his honour, and to honour the fourteen others who were killed, I will try to live out these words in the year ahead.