Remembering the 15 Lives Lost in Sydney
Hanukkah is supposed to be a festival of light over darkness, resilience over despair, life over oppression – eight nights to remember courage, community, and miracles. But this year, for Jewish communities around the world and for all people who cherish peace and human dignity, that light was violently stained.
On December 14, 2025, during a public celebration of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, two gunmen opened fire on families and friends gathered to mark the holiday. In a few minutes of rage and hate, 15 people were killed and dozens more wounded in what authorities have called a terrorist, antisemitic attack – a deliberate targeting of Jews celebrating their holiday.
Among the dead were people of all ages – from a 10-year-old child to Holocaust survivors, rabbis, volunteers, athletes, and neighbors who had come together to celebrate community and light. Their lives mattered. Their families matter. Their stories matter.
🧬 WHERE I COME FROM
My Jewish roots are Eastern European.
They come from places where candles were lit quietly,
behind curtains, because survival required silence.
From villages where names were erased, where synagogues were burned, where Jewish life was treated as expendable.
And still – the candles were lit.
Hanukkah is ancestral memory.
🕯️ WHAT HANUKKAH MEANS
Hanukkah is not about triumph. It is about continuance.
It is the insistence on life when history has made very clear
how easily Jewish lives are deemed disposable.
A flame that says: We are still here.
đź•Ž What Hanukkah Teaches Us
Hanukkah is about struggle and survival:
- A tiny flame that refuses to die.
- A community that refuses to be erased.
- People who remember who they are even when the world looks away.
This year, that message is painfully real.
✡️ A Reckoning
This wasn’t an accident. It was hate in action – antisemitism given weaponry, space, and bloody consequence. It was lives snuffed out before their time. It was 15 human beings – full stories, full futures – ended needlessly.
And it demands truth: that hatred does not travel in a vacuum, that violence does not appear from nowhere, and that silence enables the conditions where terror finds its targets.
🌍 Light Against the Darkness
So this Hanukkah, as candles are lit across the world:
- We remember the 15 whose candles now burn elsewhere.
- We stand with the families shattered by grief.
- We refuse to let hate to define the moment or the message.
Light is not passive. It shatters shadows. It reveals what’s real: that every life – every single one – has worth, history, and a place in our shared humanity.
May this festival of lights not just be a memory of survival long ago – but a call to protect life, confront hate, and demand justice today.
