Until December 14, the last time I had texted my friend Raphi Bloom, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Manchester, was on October 2, 2025, the night of the Yom Kippur terror attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue, which claimed the lives of two people.
“Are you OK, mate?” I wrote.
The images coming out of the UK that evening, the holiest day of the Jewish year, were deeply disturbing. Whether from Israel or halfway across the world in Sydney, one felt the familiar tightening in the chest that so many Jews now experience when such news breaks, especially during our religious festivals.
Two months later, on December 14, our roles were reversed.
“Are you OK?” Raphi messaged me.
He had seen the reports of the terror attack at Bondi in Sydney, during the Chanukah celebration, which claimed 15 lives, leaving a searing scar on our community. It was also an attack that I survived.
In that moment, the symmetry of our messages captured something deeper about the Jewish experience today. From Manchester to Sydney, from London to Melbourne and beyond, Jewish communities increasingly find themselves bound not only by shared heritage and faith, but by a shared vulnerability, as Jew-hatred surges relentlessly around the world.
As we just marked our first Passover since the Bondi attack, that reality weighs heavily on many Australian Jews, myself included. Yet so too does our strength and resilience as a people.
For Australian Jews, December 14 shattered long-held assumptions. For generations, Australia was regarded as a beacon of peace and coexistence, one of the safest homes anywhere in the diaspora. Our community thrived – confident and integrated.
The events of that afternoon changed that sense of certainty and security. I remember the chaos, the confusion and the sirens. In a split second, Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s most iconic places, became a bloodbath. Children, Holocaust survivors, entire families gunned down. By a miracle, I survived, having been hit in the head by one of the assassins’ bullets.
I cannot explain why my life was spared while those of ten-year-old Matilda, full of promise, and 87-year-old Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor, were taken.
What I do know is that survival comes with a sense of responsibility – a responsibility to share the truth, to speak out for those who no longer can and to fight for the Australia we love and cherish. An Australia defined not by the unrelenting Jew-hatred and violence of the attackers, but by the extraordinary humanity of everyday Australians who risked their lives to help that day and have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Australian Jewish community in the wake of that horrific day.
But solidarity alone cannot erase the deeper anxieties these incidents leave behind.
The Bondi attack did not occur in a vacuum. It came against the backdrop of an unabated surge in antisemitism in Australia, immediately following the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Australia’s Jewish community, much like Britain’s, has warned time and again that when such hatred is allowed to fester, when it is excused, normalised or mainstreamed, it will lead to violence. The Bondi attack was the deadly manifestation of the failures to heed those calls.
The warning signs were impossible to miss. On October 9, 2023, while Jewish bodies were still being identified in Israel, crowds gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting: “Where are the Jews?” Synagogues have since been firebombed, schools have required heightened security, and families have been harassed. Each incident has been met with predictable statements of concern, promises of review and assurances of action.
Australia, like the UK, does not need any further pro-forma condolences and clichéd messages of solidarity from political leaders, claiming these attacks do not represent who we are. We need urgent, decisive action. Laws must be enforced. Incitement must have consequences. Intelligence must be acted on and radical Islamic extremism must be confronted, not managed or excused.
In the UK, the situation is also deeply troubling, with the Community Security Trust recording 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest total ever reported to CST in a single calendar year. On top of that, over the last year alone, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer conceded that “Even in the United Kingdom, the Iranian regime poses a direct threat to dissidents and the Jewish community. Over the last year alone, they have backed more than 20 potentially lethal attacks on UK soil.”
For Jews everywhere, these events reinforce a sobering truth: geography offers no immunity from antisemitism. It rarely arrives suddenly. It builds gradually through the toleration of hateful rhetoric, the normalisation of hostility, the singling out of Israel for demonisation and the erosion of social cohesion.
In Australia there is growing recognition that combating antisemitism requires more than reactive condemnation. It demands structural responses addressing immediate threats and the conditions that allow hatred to take root. That is why the forthcoming Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion represents such a pivotal moment for our country.
As the highest form of public inquiry, a Commonwealth Royal Commission into antisemitism will examine the drivers and enablers of antisemitism in Australia. It should assess failures across our political leadership, education systems, public administration and civil society.
It must rigorously evaluate whether law enforcement and judicial responses to hate speech and incitement are fit for purpose. It must shine a light on the sources of funding, coordination and influence that sustain extremist ideologies.
And it must also examine why over two years of warnings and pleas for action by the Jewish community went largely unheeded by the government.
Jewish Australians, like British Jews, are not seeking special treatment. We are not asking for exemptions or privileges. We are asking for the most basic right in any democracy: to live without fear, as every person is entitled to.
As I look ahead, I am reminded of the quiet, yet unbroken solidarity between Jewish communities worldwide. When Raphi Bloom wrote to ask if I was OK, it was more than a message between mates. It was a reminder that the Jewish story has always been one of intertwined destinies. As the Talmud teaches, “kol yisrael arevim zeh le’zeh” – all Jews are responsible for one another.
As we marked this first Passover since December 14, the ancient questions of our Seder felt especially resonant. Ma Nishtana? How is this night different from all other nights?
This time last year, 59 hostages were still being held in Gaza. Today, thankfully, they are home. Yet as Jewish families gathered around the Seder table, millions of Israeli families were marking the holiday under Iranian missile fire, many in shelters. From Israel to the diaspora, from Bondi to London, New York and beyond, antisemitism is once again surging.
Yet the Jewish story has never been written by our enemies.
For more than three millennia, generations have sought to destroy the Jewish people. Yet here we still are. Even under the shadow of missiles and hatred, we gather, we celebrate and we live.
That is the enduring message of Passover, and it feels especially powerful this year.
Our story is one of hope, faith, independence and resilience. While antisemitism may test our communities, it will never define us.
Arsen Ostrovsky is a human rights lawyer and head of Sydney Office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. He is a survivor of the Bondi attack
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