Chanukah On A Beach In Australia
By Rabbi Heshie and Rabbanit Rookie Billet
The recent Bondi Beach massacre of Jews publicly celebrating Chanukah in Sydney, Australia highlights the growing and deadly antisemitism in that country. As Americans who are currently living in Israel, for us, this is both shocking and frightening.
We spent two U.S. summers in Australia in 1975 and in 1978. Australia was rich in Jewish life in Melbourne and Sydney, the two largest communities. We also enjoyed the smaller Jewish community in Perth. The Australian Jewish community had its origins in the nineteenth century. But it was largely made up of Holocaust survivors and their children as well as emigres from South Africa.
The Jewish community seemed to be well-received. They thrived religiously, professionally, and materially. There were many different synagogues and day schools that spanned the spectrum of Jewish life. There were also vacation spots where Jews relaxed in large numbers during the summer.
In the words of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “For Jewish Australians, the country represented safety, freedom, and opportunity. After the events of the past two-plus years, culminating in the Hanukkah Islamic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, Australia has forfeited this claim.”
Under current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his Labor Party has received praise from the terrorist group Hamas following Australia’s unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood. The recent terrorist murders on Bondi Beach in Sydney is the deadliest crime that has followed a string of antisemitic attacks in Australia. On December 6, 2024, at approximately 4:10 a.m. local time, an arson terrorist attack took place at the Adas Israel Synagogue of Melbourne, Australia. The targeting of Australian synagogues continued after the Melbourne incident with the Southern Sydney Synagogue in Allawah vandalized on January 10, 2025. On January 11, 2025, the Newtown Synagogue in Sydney’s Inner West was vandalized. On July 4, 2025, an unknown perpetrator attempted to set East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation on fire by pouring a flammable liquid on the entrance and igniting it. Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the Albanese government following that incident, linking the event to Australia’s position on the Middle East. President Isaac Herzog said that he has spoken with PM Albanese, advising that antisemitic attacks required “strong and firm action.”
With this background in mind, we come to the December 14, 2025 erev Chanukah mass shooting at the Bondi Beach Chanukah celebration attended by approximately one thousand people. Two gunmen killed 15 people, including a ten-year-old child. Police and Australian intelligence agencies declared it an Islamic State–linked terrorist incident. Numerous world leaders, news outlets, and Australian authorities declared that the shooting was motivated by antisemitism. One of the people murdered was Chabad Rabbi Eli Schlanger.
Rookie and I had a very moving shivah visit with the parents and brother of Rabbi Schlanger. We discussed our personal encounters with the Rebbe and the Rav’s (Rav Yosef Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik) relationship with the Rebbe. We told them a Rebbe Holocaust story they did not know. We spoke with them about their son and daughter-in-law. During our visit, they received a call saying that the Australian coroner had released the bodies. Rabbi Eli was 41 years old, a pillar of the local Jewish community, a father of five, with a baby only two months old. He just completed the construction of the Chabad house of which he was very proud. This Chanukah, the lights are being lit in Rav Eli’s memory and in memory of all the victims. His father told us that Rav Eli had remarked that many Jews in Australia knew nothing about Chanukah. His death on Chanukah has now brought awareness of Chanukah to all the Jews of Australia and indeed to the entire country, Jews and non-Jews alike.
Rav Eli’s siblings are also shluchim. The brother of Rav Eli who also spoke with us is a Chabad rabbi in Bakersfield, California. Before we left, the elder Rabbi Schlanger gave us a copy of his book entitled Security for the Land of Israel, a collection of the Rebbe’s writings about that subject. He also asked us to email him a summary of everything we spoke about during our visit and to share it with as many people as possible. Rabbi Schlanger’s message was clear and consistent: be more Jewish, act more Jewish, appear more Jewish.
We must add that one of the heroes during the attack on the Sydney beach was a Muslim, Ahmed al Ahmed. He was badly wounded in the terror attack after rushing to stop one of the terrorists and wrestling the weapon away when the attacker ran out of ammunition. Speaking from his hospital bed, he summed it up simply, saying he acted from the heart to save lives. People from around the world collected several million dollars for him.
What follows is the email that we wrote to the parents of Rav Eli, Hy’d. As we mentioned earlier, we are publishing this note with permission and encouragement from his parents:
Dear Rabbi Schlanger and Rebbetzin Schlanger,
You might recall that my wife and I made a shivah visit to your family yesterday in Jerusalem. Later, I watched the livestream of your son’s funeral. There are no words! My name is Rabbi Heshie Billet and my wife is Rookie. I was a student of Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik who also had the merit of meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe three times. At our visit, we spoke about the warm relationship that those two great Torah giants had with each other from the time that they both studied in Berlin prior to World War II.
My wife and I had been to Australia several times on the Counterpoint missions to do kiruv with the students from Mount Scopus College.
Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Groner of Melbourne Chabad became a good friend almost from the first day that we arrived in Melbourne in 1975. Counterpoint was a Yeshiva University program that held religious seminars for boys and girls from Mount Scopus College, a community Jewish school, who came from non-observant homes. The seminars were all one week long and they were filled with many activities, including teaching of Torah, singing, and dancing to Jewish music, and other educational events to interest the students more in their Jewish identity and grow their knowledge. Everything was orthodox and reliably kosher. It was largely funded by Mr. Hans Bachrach and his wife Ginnie. A staff of about 15 young men and women from the U.S., some married and some single, came to run these weeklong seminars in Benalla.
My wife and I were sent a week ahead of the group. My job was to “neutralize” Rabbi Groner. This was the second year of the Counterpoint program, and he was vocally opposed to it. His voice in Melbourne orthodoxy was a very important one.
On my very first day in Melbourne, I walked to Hotham Street to attend the morning minyan. I was warmly greeted by Rabbi Groner and asked what I was doing in Australia. I told him that we were there for Counterpoint. He immediately invited me to eat breakfast with him, where he told me that the entire program was contrary to halacha because the Counterpoint program was coed.
When I asked him to please explain his position, he told me to check the Bais Chadash in Shulchan Aruch, Even Ha’Ezer. He told me that it says there that following a wedding in Krakow, Poland, if there were women and men seated at a sheva berachos, they do not say Baruch Elokeinu she’hasimcha bimono in the zimunfor Birkat Hamazon.
Hence, he said, you see that coed programs are against Jewish law. I responded, you learn the contrary from that source! The source makes it clear that in Krakow when they had sheva berachos in the time of the Bais Chadash, they were at times coed. He liked my answer. We became friends. Every day that I was in Melbourne, I prayed with him in the Yeshiva. And after that, when he visited the United States, I went to Crown Heights to say hello to him.
In 1980, I became the Rabbi of the largest modern orthodox synagogue in America, the Young Israel of Woodmere. I became friendly with two prominent Chabad Rabbis. One was Rabbi Korff of Lishkas Ezras Achim, which provided charity for the poor, and the other, Rabbi Kanelsky of Bris Avrohom, who arranged circumcisions for adult Jewish males who never had a bris when they were eight days old. I once carried a knife sharpener for a shechita knife to the Chabad shochet in Leningrad, Rav Kogan.
About eight years earlier, when I was just married, my wife and I traveled to the Soviet Union for 22 days. We were traveling on behalf of a branch of the Israeli foreign ministry called Lishkat HaKesher. The Soviets had broken diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War. The head of that division of the Israel foreign ministry was an orthodox Jew named Aryeh Kroll. He started recruiting young orthodox American couples to go as “tourists” to the Soviet Union for two or three weeks. Once there, they distributed many religious books, including Siddurim and Chumashim and Jewish calendars. As one of those couples, we also brought in tashmishai kedusha like tzitzit and tefillin. On that trip, we went to five cities in the Soviet Union. One of our assignments on that visit was to bring out as many names and addresses of Soviet Jews as we could who could then receive invitations to emigrate to Israel. It was the time of the large ransoms that were demanded by the Soviet government to allow Jews to emigrate. We took out over one hundred names, carefully written in long hand and hidden in unlikely places. We spent that following year in Israel and were privileged to welcome to Israel many of those whose names we took out who successfully emigrated to Israel.
Over the years I became acquainted with Rabbi Kotlarsky of Chabad who did such wonderful work with shlichim all over the world.
We have since visited Russia and have seen the incredible leadership of Rabbi Lazar and what he has built there. I met another Chabad Shaliach in Kazakhstan. Sadly, there was a feud between him and Rabbi Lazar.
Years later, when our oldest daughter became bat mitzvah in 1986, we were offered to “twin” her with a Russian Jewish girl from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). That meant that we included her name on the invitation, and she was mentioned at our daughter’s celebration. For a while we stayed in touch with her family, the Lukatskys, but we lost contact in the course of the years. Fast forward still more years, our daughter made aliyah and moved to Neve Daniel in Gush Etzion and settled there. The Lukatskys had also made aliyah and lived in the same town! Our daughter Dassi and her “twin” were reacquainted. Mr. Lukatsky was a Chabad Chassid who had built mikvaot. When he passed away, we made an emotional shivah visit to the family and reminisced about the time our families were first connected so many years earlier.
We just want to say that your son was a holy Jew. He and all the others murdered less than a week ago are all kedoshim. Your son in particular was a rabbi and a person who had a truly positive influence on the people in Sydney. He was a sincere ba’al chesed.
I would like to add a few thoughts of comfort to you. These are ideas that my wife and I share when we make a shivah visit to people who have lost a child. You must know that we too are members of that terrible club. We have lost both a child and a grandchild. So we have been there…
One thought is: it says, tzarot rabim chatzi nechama, which means that the suffering of the many is half a comfort. My question is, why should someone else’s suffering be half of a comfort to me? I do not want anyone to suffer on my behalf. And I get no comfort from their suffering. I have an original answer to this question.
It is not the suffering of others that is a comfort. It is the recovery of others who have suffered that is a comfort, or at least half a comfort! Why? Because their recovery tells me that just as they have recovered, I also have the possibility of recovering and going on with my life. It is not a full comfort because I still have a lot of work to do in order to get better. And my loss is still painful and will be painful for a long time. But at least I have the knowledge that many other people before me have suffered the loss of children and have found a way to move forward with life in a positive way.
The second thought is one of Rabbi Yosef Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik, my great teacher and my mesader kidushin. In his very important essay called Kol Dodi Dofek, he addresses the famous question of Theodicy, “Lamah tzaddik v’rah lo, rasha v’tov lo.” In other words, “Why do the righteous suffer and those who are evil have it so good?” I do not know if there is any good answer to that question, but he makes an important observation.
He says that there are two kinds of people. There is the man of fate. He calls him adam ha’goral. The other person is a man of destiny who is called adam ha’yiod. What is the difference between them? The following example shows the difference. Imagine that these two men are both on a ship at sea. Their boat gets caught in a terrible storm, and the captain announces that the ship is going to sink.
Man of fate goes to his cabin and lays down on his bed and waits for the ship to sink. After all, that is his fate. On the other hand, man of destiny, runs to the bridge to speak to the captain. He challenges the captain. He says, “the ship cannot sink.” He is, after all, man of destiny!! He continues: “I have too much to do in my lifetime. You cannot let the ship sink.” The captain replies and explains that he has done everything that he has learned in the school that taught him how to be a ship captain. He has done everything in the book, and there is nothing more that he can do.
Man of destiny says: that means that you have not done enough. Try something new. Be creative! The ship cannot sink!!
When a bad thing happens to a good person, man of fate asks, “why did that happen to me? I am a good person.” And of course, there is no answer to that question. He is crushed. Man of destiny asks the same question. “Why did this happen to me? I am a good person.” And of course, there is no answer to his question, either. But he is a man of destiny and cannot allow himself to be crushed.
So what does he do? He changes the question. He understands that the question, “why?” is the wrong question. There is no answer! So he asks, instead, now that this has happened to me, “what” can I do to make things better? That is a much better question. There are answers to that question.
Rabbi Soloveitchik says that the challenge in life when we are confronted with tragedy is to try to change our “fate” into our “destiny.” In Hebrew, that reads, “L’hafoch et ha’goral l’yiod.” That is not a simple thing to do. But it can be done. My wife and I know this very well because we believe we were able to do it. We lost a child and a grandchild. This is something we never forget. One never goes back to being the exact same person one was before the tragedy. But we have recovered as best as we could, and we try very hard to help others who have lost children and grandchildren and help give meaning to the young lives that were lost. We have tried to find good deeds to help make the world a better place for those who need assistance or an emotional boost.
Another thought that Rookie always retells is the story told by her friend at the shivah for our daughter. She spoke about her Chasidic father, a Holocaust survivor who had recently passed away. She was going through his extensive library of Jewish books. A volume jumped from the shelf and fell to the floor, open to a particular page. On this page she read the question, how will we recognize the neshamot of those that we’ve loved and lost when we join them years later in the world to come? If they were ill, will they be restored to their appearance of robust health? If they were young, will they have grown older, or have remained frozen at the age at which they passed? The author answered that we will recognize the souls of those we’ve loved and lost in the world to come not by their physical appearances that we might recall, but because they will be clothed and cloaked in the good deeds we do in their names. This thought spoke to us because it gave meaning to all the mitzvot, learning and chesed we and others would do in their memory. It also helped us to think that when we enjoyed a song, or a poem, or an inspiring thought, or a beautiful day, or a walk in the park that the deceased could no longer do, that also helped clothe the souls of those who were no longer with us. These ideas help us feel grateful for every day,
You can do the same. You and your children and grandchildren are the messengers of Hashem all over the world. You are warm and welcoming. You have tremendous faith in Hashem and love for the Jewish people. You have a strong commitment to serve Am Yisrael wherever they find themselves. As they say in Israel “Ain braira!”All that you do will be an aliyah for the neshamot of your son and his wife and the precious souls we all lost at Bondi. Yehi zichram baruch. Hashem yikom damam.
We are here for you. Please be in touch with us after your shivah if we can help you in any way. Thank you for your important book on the Rebbe’s thoughts on Israel’s security.
With respect and admiration,
Rookie and Heshie Billet
