Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his cabinet have vowed to stamp out the “evil scourge” of antisemitism and consider further tightening gun control measures. But for many who witnessed the attack or knew the victims, those promises come too late.
Levi Silva arrived just after the shooting, racing over on his motorcycle when he heard sirens all over the area.
“It looked like a war zone, honestly,” he said. “There was, like, blood everywhere.”
Among those killed was Silva’s rabbi, Eli Schlanger, a 41-year-old father of five and an assistant rabbi at Chabad Bondi, a global Hasidic Jewish group that organized the event on Sunday.
“He used to teach me in school,” said Silva, 18, who described Schlanger as “kind to everyone.”
Though Schlanger was still alive when he arrived, Silva was powerless to help.
“There’s not much you can do when someone’s bleeding like that,” said Silva, who knew other victims as well.
Many mourners cited a quote by Schlanger, who according to Chabad had recently said that in the face of darkness, the way forward is to “be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish.”
For Mark Rotenstein, that meant laying tefillin, placing one black leather box containing Hebrew parchment scrolls on his arm and another on his head and wrapping the attached strap around his arm as a way to channel his prayers to God.
“I don’t do it very often, but today I really feel the need,” he said.
Rotenstein said what affected him most about the shooting was the death of Alexander Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor and Ukrainian immigrant who Chabad said died while shielding his wife, Larisa Kleytman, also a Holocaust survivor.
“It feels like what Hitler didn’t achieve with that gentleman, now an Australian has,” Rotenstein said. One of the suspects, Naveed Akram, was born in Australia.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry said this month that there were 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents across Australia between Oct. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30, 2025 — almost five times the average annual number before the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023.
Australia, a country of 28 million people, is home to about 117,000 Jews, most of whom live in Sydney and Melbourne.
