By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC

27 January 2026

This has been the most difficult period of my life — and of the lives of almost every Jewish person I know in Australia. Some mornings I wake up and have to remind myself that 15 people were really murdered while celebrating Chanukah on Bondi Beach, and that this is not some awful dream that will fade once I’ve had coffee and checked my phone. It still feels surreal to go about my day in a country my grandfather, Joseph Kaltmann, a Holocaust survivor, chose because of its safety, and to realise that Australian Jews will now carry the trauma of being the victims of Australia’s worst ever terror attack.

Since the attack in Bondi, what has settled over my community is a persistent sadness. There is a lot of checking in, but not much reassurance to offer. Dropping my kids off at their Jewish summer day camps, I now have a knot in my stomach that does not quite loosen. Will they be safe? Is going to synagogue each week to celebrate Sabbath a risk to my life and the lives of my friends? No one can guarantee our safety anymore and having known several people killed and injured in the Bondi attack, the trauma will be lifelong.

To me, the last six weeks has not just been about one horrific act of violence. It is also about the climate in which it occurred. Since the events of 7 October 2023, antisemitism in Australia has risen sharply and Australia’s government has fumbled the response. Instead of being proactive, it was reactive. Meanwhile, Jewish institutions have been targeted, Jewish students have been harassed, synagogues were firebombed and Jews were assaulted.

Despite not being the victim of any of these attacks, the knowledge that it could happen to me is terrifying. In a close-knit Australian Jewish community where it feels like everyone knows everyone, that fear changes how you move through the world. It makes you think twice about what you wear, where you go, what you say and whether you want to be identified in public as Jewish.

There is also a strange loneliness to it. Other Australians do not live the way we do, with bodyguards at our children’s school, with air locking doors at our synagogues and high security for all our cultural events. As Australian Jews, so many of us are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. For my family and for so many others, the trauma of Bondi is both personal and historical. My grandfather survived and built a life here on the assumption that this was a place where Jews could finally stop scanning the horizon for danger and start thinking about futures.

My grandfather chose Australia because it was far from Europe. After his mother, father, brother and sister were murdered in concentration camps, he did not want his family ever to endure the same fear and persecution he experienced. And yet, here we are, just over a month after the worst massacre of Jews anywhere in the world since 7 October 2023.

I do not believe Australia is uniquely hostile to Jews, and I am wary of collapsing complex realities into simple narratives of decline. In many ways, what is happening here mirrors what Jewish communities in the United States and Europe are also grappling with: a rise in open hostility, a sense that old assumptions about liberal democracies as natural refuges for minorities are no longer as reliable as we once believed. But that does not make it easier to accept. If anything, it is harder, because it suggests that there are fewer places left to imagine as unquestionably safe.

Which is why the UN’s International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, on 27 January, feels different this year. It is always a day of mourning and reflection, but it is also meant to be a day where we reflect on the moral frameworks that societies have built to make ensure that a Holocaust can never happen again.

This year, the uncertainty about my future in Australia feels uncomfortably close. I do not want my children to inherit a version of Jewish life that is defined by caution and concealment. I do not want the story of my grandfather’s choice to be one of temporary reprieve rather than lasting refuge. I want to believe that the country he chose, and countries like it, can still be places where Jews can be safe, but unfortunately, I am no longer sure that this will be the case.