On 14 December last year, Sharri Markson was holding on to her six-year-old son with one hand and clutching a serving of chips with tomato sauce in the other, celebrating Chanukah at a cliffside festival overlooking Sydney Harbour.
The merriment was ruptured by a yell from a Hatzolah volunteer medic, alerted on the radio that his colleague had been injured.
“Yanky’s been hit,” he shouted. “There’s a shooting!”
Terror took hold. “I got down on top of my child,” says Markson. Then they started running. “It was so chaotic. There was so much panic. We had to go climb under the fence. And then we went into a stranger’s house across the street behind a hedge.”
The message on the Hatzolah radio had actually come from another Chanukah celebration a four-minute drive down the hill, at Bondi Beach. There, 55 people were shot and 15 murdered, including ten-year-old Matilda Britvan and 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, after father-and-son gunmen Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24, fired into the crowd.
Once she had got her children to safety, Markson acted on her other impulse – a professional one. She texted her boss at News24 (formerly Sky News Australia) and told him to alert the newsroom. She was soon on the scene covering the massacre for five hours, not returning home until after midnight. “No-one sent me,” she says, but a sense of duty gripped her, and it has not let go.
Ahead of the first anniversary next month, her work has culminated in a meticulously researched book, Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, the Courage, the Aftermath, for which she and co-writer Alex Ryvchin interviewed many victims and rescuers who had never spoken publicly before.
They include Gefen Bitton, a 31-year-old who was shooed away by Sajid Akram – Bitton later suspecting it was because, with his long hair and dark skin, he may have been mistaken for a Muslim by the shooter. In fact, he is a Jewish Israeli.
Rather than fleeing for his life, he decided to run towards the bullets. Just as he was about to try to wrestle the gun from Akram Sr, he was shot and ended up in a coma for three-and-a-half weeks.
Cesar Barraza also gives his first interview. The detective senior constable is a Seventh-day Adventist Christian who had just been transferred to Bondi.
“He’d prayed to his parish priest to put him in the police station where he’d be needed the most,” Markson tells me on a video call from Sydney as she makes a cup of tea, having just come off her 8-9pm show, Sharri. “This was his last shift before annual leave. And when he heard there was a shooting on the radio, he didn’t even put his bullet-proof vest on. He just ran out the door. He killed Sajid Akram in a single shot from quite a far distance. Then he was engaged in this firefight with the son. And he eventually takes him down.”
The father died from his wounds. His son faces trial next year, charged with 78 offences.
Explaining her compulsion to document the horror, Markson, 42, says: “You know, there’s not really any other prominent Jewish journalists [in Australia]. And I had been reporting on antisemitism, but also campaigning against it so heavily for the two years before Bondi.”
Co-author Ryvchin – co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry – had been similarly raising the alarm. Post October 7, authorities had looked on as crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House chanting “F*** the Jews” and graffiti appeared declaring “Bring Hitler back. Finish the job”.
Then came the physical attacks, including a spate of arsons against synagogues and Jewish businesses. “One of those firebombings was my former home, which the assailants believed was my home at the time,” says Ryvchin. “When that happened, I stood outside and I said: someone’s going to die. This is going to end in death. And that house is on the same road as Bondi Beach, just a couple of kilometres up the road from it.”
The road from racist chanting to mass murder was paved with failure to heed the Jewish community’s increasingly urgent warnings.
Markson had, since 2023, “focused on antisemitism reporting, even though it wasn’t popular, even though it damaged me and my ratings, even though people kind of just wanted me to move on from it. That’s what the viewer feedback sometimes is – that I’m just whingeing all the time about antisemitism.”
As they write in the book, no Australian woke up on October 8 spontaneously hating Jews. However, Ryvchin tells me: “What October 7 did was it created this feeling of ascendancy among antisemites. They felt this was their moment where the Jews were finally getting what they deserved. They revelled in our pain. They enjoyed it.
“And at that point in time, there needed to be a national unity, led by the federal government, to say that that deplorable conduct will never define this country. And to isolate those extremist forces, which became rampant – the far left, radical Islam and neo-Nazism.
“That didn’t happen. The response was always convoluted, always with balancing statements. And when you create that kind of ambivalence, that’s where extremism thrives. To those of us who know the story of antisemitism, we know it never just peters out. It escalates. It becomes a sense of quest and mania. And it only ends one way, and that’s exactly what happened.”
Both are hesitant to talk about their own trauma; their personal stories are confined to a few pages of the acknowledgements at the back because they are conscious of the devastation of others.
But both of their lives were shattered at Bondi. When I ask Ryvchin if he thinks he will ever be able to feel truly safe in Australia in his lifetime, he says simply: “No.”
The 43-year-old had come to the country with his family as a four-year-old refugee from Ukraine. Before finally being given their exit visas, they had been refuseniks – banned from practising their Judaism and banned from emigrating.
On arrival, he says his love for his new land was immediate, and symbolised by “these beautiful, iconic photos of a family hopefully looking out over the horizon” – after they were taken by a newspaper photographer to the Harbour Bridge. Now, he says, he and his community “need to carve out a new reality. Those pure old days are gone for ever.”
In August this year, Markson was given extra cause for unease. A sophisticated intelligence operation involved the hacking of a former Trump official – a contact of Markson’s – and the infiltration of her emails. She was later told by the intelligence services that the attack came from Iran.
“It has taken away my sense of safety in the world, definitely,” she says. “And I feel like I have a hyper-vigilance, especially after the Iran cyber attack, because you don’t know why they targeted me. Why do they want my personal information? So, I definitely now move through the world with a lot of physical anxiety, and worry about the children and their safety.”
Markson pays tribute to Ryvchin in the book for his optimism and “unbreakable spirit”. Yet she fears the rhetoric around Jews is only “getting worse”. Ryvchin agrees.
“I think that we as Jews have to change our mentality and understand that the price of being a Jew is to be hated,” he says mournfully. “It’s one of the aspects of the Jewish condition. We’re law-abiding, moral, good people, and we expect fundamentally that if we treat other people well, we’ll be treated well in return. That doesn’t happen to the Jews.
“And so we have to learn to live with that discomfort, live with that injustice of being hated and excluded for no good reason whatsoever. But we have to be able to find joy and happiness in spite of that.”
Bondi Terror, by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin, is published by Harper Collins
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