Bondi attack victim's daughter tells royal commission of surge in antisemitism

Sheina Gutnick sat before Australia's royal commission on antisemitism as its first witness, carrying with her the weight of her father's death and the messages that followed it. Since the shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach last December—an attack that killed 15 people—she had received messages telling her she should have died too. She was there to tell the commission what that felt like, and what she had watched happen to her country in the months since.

Her father, Reuven Morrison, had fled the Soviet Union at fourteen and built a life in Australia. He met Gutnick's mother on Bondi Beach itself, a place that held for him the promise of safety and belonging. Gutnick had grown up with beautiful memories of that beach. Now, she said, those memories felt complicated. The place where her father had found refuge had become something else.

What struck Gutnick most was not the attack itself, but what came after. She described watching antisemitism shift from something whispered to something spoken aloud. "I felt as though antisemitism was allowed to come into the open," she told the hearing on Monday. "All of a sudden it was socially, morally acceptable for antisemitic comments to be made in public discourse." She had seen people attempt to reframe the violence as merely anti-Zionist, a distinction that felt hollow to her. The effect was the same: she felt unsafe in her own country.

Another witness, identified only as AAL, carried a similar story with different roots. He had immigrated to Australia from South Africa in the 1980s and had loved it immediately. "I treated Australia as home from the day I stepped off the plane," he said, his voice breaking as he spoke. But now he found himself asking a question he never thought he would ask: whether Australia was still the country for his grandchildren.

The commission itself had become a measure of the scale of what was happening. Nearly 7,500 submissions had arrived by the time the public hearings began. Judge Virginia Bell, who is overseeing the inquiry, had already published an interim report acknowledging what the data showed: a sharp spike in antisemitism that mirrored patterns in other Western countries, linked directly to events in the Middle East. She recommended gun reforms and an expansion of police protection for Jewish events beyond the high holy days to cover all Jewish gatherings.

Bell had been direct about the mechanism at work. "It's important that people understand how quickly those events can prompt ugly displays of hostility towards Jewish Australians simply because they're Jews," she said. The connection between distant conflict and domestic hatred was not abstract—it was lived, immediate, and measurable in the testimonies now being collected.

The gunman, Sajid Akram, 50, had been killed by police at the scene. His son, Naveed Akram, 24, had been critically injured and was now in prison facing 59 charges, including 15 counts of murder and one of committing a terrorist attack. The legal machinery was moving. But for Gutnick and others like her, the question was not whether the attackers would be held accountable. It was whether the country they lived in would remain a place where they belonged.

The first block of hearings would run until May 15, focusing on lived experience. The final report would arrive on the anniversary of the shooting itself—a deliberate choice to mark the moment when the commission's work would be complete. By then, the commission would have heard from many more people about what it felt like to be Jewish in Australia in 2026.