Phillip Abram is a lifelong resident of the Sydney, Australia, enclave Bondi Beach and a member of its world-famous surf club. The 59-year-old food sector worker starts every day, like many Sydney-siders, by plunging joyfully into the Pacific Ocean. “There are hundreds of Jewish people down there every morning that I know—middle-aged, elderly, young, community members—enjoying the lifestyle we have,” he told me. Abram was holding a bouquet of flowers as he made his way down the road that opens onto one of the world’s most iconic beaches—now crime scene in the wake of the country’s worst-ever terror attack on its own soil.
“Everything’s changed now,” he said.
Hundreds of mourners—local residents, politicians, community leaders, Jewish community volunteers—arrived throughout Monday to lay flowers at the Bondi Pavilion, the century-old, colonnaded gateway to the beach. Just up the road, beyond the police tape and tangles of abandoned bike shares, stood the bridge now seared into the nation’s mind, from which gunmen, later identified as father and son, opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration on what had begun as a glorious Sydney summer evening. Their rampage killed at least 15 people and injured dozens of others on the packed beach and adjacent park. Sajid Akram, the 50-year-old suspect, owned six legally licensed firearms and was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police. Naveed Akram, his 24-year-old son, remains in the hospital. Australian authorities say the younger man was examined in 2019 for ties to the Islamic State.
The massacre—Australia’s worst mass shooting in nearly three decades—has touched everyone in Bondi. When I met him, Abram had just stopped at a local kosher supermarket. The son-in-law of a man running the store was on the beach during the attack and hid his daughter under a pram as bullets whizzed by, striking someone beside him. Abram hugged the shopkeeper. “I’m here if they need anything,” he told me. Just two weeks earlier, Abram had been celebrating a family milestone: his son, a rabbi, was getting married. One of the wedding guests was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a key organizer of the “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration, who was among the victims shot and killed. The close friend of Abram’s son was hit three times. “Horrific,” he said.
The day after the shooting, people with whom I spoke were wrestling with anguish and outrage—and with questions about the scale of the disaster: After escalating incidents of antisemitism in Australia following the beginning of the war in Gaza, how could the Jewish community have been so vulnerable? And how did a nation that prides itself on strict gun laws allow two men to be so heavily armed?
“One of the major reasons you come is that you think it’s a safe place to live.”
“One of the major reasons you come is that you think it’s a safe place to live,” said Nick Lewis, a 31-year-old banker with Jewish heritage who moved to Bondi three years ago from London. I heard the same sentiment again and again. Jordan, a 23-year-old yacht manager who asked me to use only his first name, said his childhood memories of Bondi—and Australia’s sense of safety—were forever replaced by the scene of horror. “A lot of people compare America to Australia, and how we’re safe because we’re not as loose with the laws of guns,” he told me. “It is a safe place, but for something like this to occur and to ruin it—it’s devastating.”
Edward Renton, a 27-year-old who lives nearby, stood alone leaning against a railing above the gathering. As he spoke quietly, his eyes glistened with anger. “It’s just fucking tragic that children are being shot next to a petting zoo, when they’re celebrating a holiday,” he said, describing the activities at the Hanukkah event. “It’s definitely not something that Australians are used to, and hopefully we don’t have to get used to it.”
“This is just not who we are. We don’t carry guns, we don’t shoot each other.”
“This is an absolute shock for Australia,” Mark Leach, an Anglican pastor and antisemitism campaigner with the religious tolerance advocacy organization “Never Again Is Now,” told me. “This is just not who we are. We don’t carry guns. We don’t shoot each other. We’re really a very, very, peaceful, cohesive society. So this kind of evil and this event is unfathomable for Australians.”
After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 killed 35 people, conservative Prime Minister John Howard pushed through sweeping gun law reforms that restricted semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns and introduced stricter licensing. “That decision to remove assault rifles from Australia would have saved, I would say, dozens of lives last night,” said Leach. “If you’d had two active shooters with actual assault rifles, we’d be talking 50, 60, 100 people killed in 10 minutes.”
At one point, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull made his way through the crowd to pay his respects and lay flowers. “In Australia, it’s very hard to get a semiautomatic weapon,” he told me. “We do have very strong gun laws.” But in interviews with journalists as he left the park, Turnbull also sounded the alarm about the need to re-examine those laws—and to ask why the one gunman was allowed to amass six firearms. “A very, very fair question is being asked,” he said. Gun laws “should be reviewed all the time.”
That review now appears to be underway. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese convened an emergency national cabinet on Monday, where leaders agreed to pursue stronger gun laws, including limits on the number and types of firearms a single person can own, as well as creating an accelerated national firearms register. An August investigation by The Guardian found that there are now more guns per capita in the community than in the aftermath of Port Arthur, amidst a renewed political support for guns in some quarters.
At the event, former PM Turnbull also reinforced the need to show solidarity with Jewish Australians by thoroughly rejecting antisemitism. “We are the most successful multicultural society in the world,” he said. “We must not let them win.”
But local Jewish Australians I spoke with were moving quickly from shock to anger, pointing to what they saw as repeated government failures and a lack of resolve on antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. “They’ve been the opposite of vocal,” Abram, the mourner I accompanied earlier in the day, told me. “They feel as though they can tippy-toe around what’s happening to the minority.”
“This starts with the Jews, but it doesn’t end with the Jews.”
Abram and others said there had been an air of inevitability about the shooting. “My feeling at the moment is devastation and anger and vindication,” said Rai Met-Levit, a 58-year-old content creator who was joining friends on the sunny lawn. “We have been saying this for so long, and as it’s been said before: This starts with the Jews, but it doesn’t end with the Jews. This is a problem for all Australians.”
Met-Levit called on the Albanese government to adopt a raft of recommendations proposed by Jillian Segal, who was appointed Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in July 2024. Segal’s plan, released a year later, offered a sweeping framework for action in all sectors, from law enforcement to culture. It sparked often-contentious debate about whether its proposals could infringe on freedom of expression, particularly in universities and the arts.
“We need a vibrant Jewish community to reassert itself, and we need education,” Segal told me at the memorial. “Antisemitism is deeply embedded, and it needs to be fought with all the firepower that we can muster.” While journalists pressed the government on the apparent delay in acting on some of her proposals, Segal told me that individual government ministers had, in fact, been supportive. But she wanted a stronger, faster response. “The government needs to come together now and do a whole-of-government fight against antisemitism.”
A hushed crowd formed a ring around the flowers in the blazing sunshine as a man began to sing a somber prayer. Earlier, a rabbi helped a younger man wrap the leather straps of tefillin, two small black boxes connected by these straps containing Torah scrolls that some Orthodox and observant Jewish men wear.
Billy Smidmore, 19, watched alone as the vigil swelled with flowers, trying to “sit with the thought of what’s happened in my backyard,” he said. “I tell all of these other people that I work with from other countries that it’s such a safe place, and it doesn’t feel like it anymore.”
Smidmore had been napping at home on Sunday evening when he was awoken by gunfire from about a few blocks down the road. His stepdad had been out for a swim, he said, around 50 yards from the shooters, and his mother raced out to find him. While his family members were all eventually accounted for, “everyone was just a mess,” he said. “And there are so many people I know that have been affected by this,” including his close Jewish friends and former schoolmates.
“It’s going to be not just today, but the next weeks, months, years,” Smidmore told me. “This is not going to go away. Everyone’s hurting for each other.”
He shook his head and spoke in a near-whisper. “No words, to be honest.”