Dvir Abramovich: Bondi horrors haven’t faded a month after attack which left 15 dead at a Hannukah festival

The horror of Bondi still claws at us, raw and unrelenting, a month later. It is an open, seething gash across the heart of our community that refuses to heal, a rage that boils in the marrow, fierce and unyielding.

In the aching, disoriented aftermath of December 14, 2025, Australia felt like a stranger wearing its own face. Familiar streets, familiar sky, yet everything inside had shifted, like the ground had cracked open beneath us and the world we knew was gone. The unspeakable slaughter carved a wound so deep that it bleeds fresh every dawn, a fury that rages unchecked beneath the skin, refusing to fade, refusing to rest.

Shock wrapped us in a strange, mechanical veil. We moved, we spoke, but it was all automatic, as if our bodies were on autopilot while our hearts were screaming in the background, refusing to accept that the impossible had become real.

Fifteen lives ripped away at Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday of miracles and endurance turned into a killing field in one horrifying instant. This was not some random act of madness. This was anti-Semitism unmasked, its features twisted with centuries-old venom, like a predator stepping into moonlight, stripped of all pretence. The monster wore no hood, no disguise. It chose its targets with chilling intent, turning candles meant to defy darkness into the last thing those families ever saw.

We were not prepared for how intimate the terror would feel. Not a distant war, not a far-off tragedy, but our beach, our celebration, our people. The violation cuts deeper because it was so personal, so close, so utterly unthinkable in the place we once called home.

And the cruelty of a child’s death cuts the deepest, a 10-year-old’s life snuffed out in an instant of senseless hatred.

Matilda’s name hangs in the air, a haunting reminder that innocence was slaughtered, leaving us hollowed out with sorrow. A life still unfolding, full of small wonders and ordinary dreams, snatched away in a heartbeat.

There is no meaning we can force upon it. No story we can tell ourselves to make it bearable. There is only the devastating truth that sears the soul: a child, radiant with the promise of tomorrow, was torn from the world while embracing the very essence of joy, and no whisper of redemption, no veil of time, can ever mend that shattered miracle.

We will cradle her name in our palms like a fragile ember, not because it mends what was torn, but because she deserves to be remembered, not as a name on a list, not as a wound, but as the radiant, luminous girl she truly was.

A girl whose laughter once danced like sunlight on water, whose eyes held the spark of a thousand unwritten stories, whose small hands reached for life with fearless wonder. The world that stole her must never be allowed to forget the miracle it extinguished, the bright, beautiful, irreplaceable light that once walked among us, and still flickers in every heart that refuses to let her fade into silence.

Her name will not be a footnote. It will be a flame. A vow. A living refusal to surrender joy to the dark. We will carry it forward, not to heal, but to honour. Not to forget, but to remember. Forever.

Among those who arrived at Bondi carrying the glow of hope in their hands was a Holocaust survivor who had already stared into the abyss and walked out alive, rabbis who spent their lives teaching hope and faith, fathers, grandfathers, sons and daughters, wives and husband. Their absence a hole that can never be filled.

We shouted it until our throats bled, begging our leaders to see the rising flood of contempt and blood-libelling that was never harmless chants. It was the spark set to dry grass, the fuse hissing toward disaster, bullet chambered and hammer back.

We told them that this path ends in blood. We implored them to lead and enforce. We pleaded for consequences before the consequences became corpses. But they were deaf to our pleas. And so, mark my words. We will not forgive those who chose to act only after the bodies were counted. We will not forgive those who heard our cries and turned away. We will not forgive those who let the fuse burn until it reached the powder. We will not forgive those who allowed the unthinkable to become the inevitable.

For the Jewish community, this carnage landed on ground already cracked. It did not appear out of thin air. It followed years of living on a knife-edge of impending doom, of too many conversations with politicians that ended with empty reassurances and press releases, of repeated warnings, and of days spent wondering when this out-of-control antisemitism would finally erupt into butchery.

And when the explosion came, it confirmed the nightmare we had lived with for too long: in Australia, safety is conditional. If you are Jewish, if you are Israeli, if you are a Zionist, your life can end in a heartbeat.

To those who thought they could fracture the iron in our bones: You did not succeed. You did not extinguish our light. You only proved what we have always known: that the Jewish people are a resilient family, bound by an unbreakable will to go on and to endure. You brought us closer together. The Jewish community stands tall today, not in spite of you, but because of what you could never destroy: our determination, our hope, our courage.”

We will always be here. We sing the songs. We hold our children closer and teach them that no darkness can ever extinguish what blazes inside us.

And we pledge: the flames of Hanukkah will roar this year, defying every shadow you cast.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is Chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission