Bondi's dual legacy: Where a father died defending his community

Sheina Gutnick stood before the royal commission on antisemitism on a Monday morning in Sydney, carrying a geography of grief. Bondi Beach, the place where her parents first met as young Jewish refugees, where she built childhood memories in the sun with her own children during school holidays, had become something else entirely. It was now the place where her father died.

Reuven Morrison was 62 when he was killed on December 14 at Bondi Beach during what authorities describe as an ISIS-inspired terror attack targeting Jews gathered for a Hanukkah celebration. Fifteen people died that day. Morrison's death came after he threw bricks at the gunmen, an act of physical resistance that cost him his life. "Bondi holds many complicated and conflicting feelings for me," Gutnick told the commission as its first witness, her words carrying the weight of a place transformed by violence into something that could no longer be simply loved.

Morrison had arrived in Australia from Ukraine at fourteen, a Jewish boy seeking refuge in a country that, unlike so many others at the time, had not turned him away. He met his wife at the beach—another refugee, another person who had found safety in this corner of the world. He became an Australian citizen and, by his daughter's account, carried deep pride in that belonging. The beach represented something to him: not just a place, but proof that refuge was possible, that a life could be rebuilt.

But the world Gutnick inhabits now is different from the one her father knew. A year before the massacre, in December 2024, she was walking through a shopping center with her baby when a man pointed at her Star of David necklace and called her a "fucking terrorist." She was surrounded by people. No one stepped in. "I felt shocked, exposed and unsafe," she said. Since then, she has lived with constant fear, a heightened vigilance in public spaces that has become the texture of her daily life.

Other witnesses at the commission's opening hearings described a similar landscape of escalating hostility. One anonymized witness, identified as AAK, spoke of encountering rallies that made her feel unsafe, of a sixth sense developed across generations of discrimination—a capacity to recognize when danger is approaching. After the Bondi massacre, she told a friend who reached out in support that the Jewish community's warnings about rising antisemitism had been downplayed or ignored. "Dead Jewish people don't need love, alive Jewish people need people to listen to us when we tell people we feel like history is repeating itself," she said.

Alex Ryvchin, co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, testified that Australia now resembled the antisemitic Soviet Union his family had fled when he was a child. He described rampant abuse, violence, and a particular kind of relish in its infliction. As a prominent advocate, he receives consistent death threats, threats against his children, and encounters with what he called "fixated individuals" who post his family's pictures online. Being called a "Jewish dog" in the street in Sydney, he said, stopped him in his tracks. Yet despite this, he told the commission he would not leave. "I'm not going anywhere, I'm going down with the ship if that's what is required," he said. But he also acknowledged that he has fielded calls from Jewish families asking him, calmly and directly, when it would be time to go. He has told them he would call and advise them when that moment came.

Another witness, identified as AAL, described falling in love with Australia while visiting from South Africa, feeling immediately that he had found home. The growing violence of antisemitism has shattered that certainty. "I have to admit, things have changed," he testified. "I really have to think very, very seriously whether this is the country for my grandchildren."

Former High Court Justice Virginia Bell, who chairs the commission, opened the hearings by noting that the sharp spike in antisemitism witnessed in Australia mirrors patterns in other Western countries, clearly linked to events in the Middle East. "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 commission's current block of hearings focuses on defining antisemitism and its impact on Jewish Australians. Subsequent blocks will examine intelligence and law enforcement failures in the lead-up to the Bondi attack, and the role of social media in radicalization. What emerges from these first testimonies is a portrait of a community living in a state of accumulated fear, questioning whether the country that once represented refuge can still be home.