The UK’s chief rabbi has said his cousin and cousin’s wife “spent 15 terrifying minutes hiding under a doughnut stand” as gunmen opened fire during the Bondi Beach attack.
“People to their right and left were being shot dead,” Sir Ephraim Mirvis said.
Fifteen people including a 10-year-old girl were killed in an attack by the two gunmen targeting a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on the beach in Sydney.
Rabbi Mirvis said one of the key messages of Hanukkah was that Jews around the world declare “we belong and we will not hide who we are”, but “that declaration was met with murderous hatred” at Sunday’s mass shooting.
The causes of “toxic antisemitism” must be addressed, he added.
Rabbi Mirvis, who will travel to Sydney, called for people to stand together “against the normalised rhetoric that demonises Jews and the only Jewish State”.
At the Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach, Jewish people were “targeted for the simple act of gathering together, visibly and peacefully, as Jews”, said the chief rabbi, who represents the largest Jewish community in the UK.
The right of Jewish communities to gather safely and publicly is a “test of the moral health of any society”, he said.
“Jews have lived with security concerns for as long as I can remember, but the fact that today every public Jewish gathering must be weighed for risk is a sign of something deeply wrong.”
A society in which a minority group have to “calculate whether it is safe to be seen together in public” is a society that is “failing all of its citizens”.
He later added that Jews are “on the front line” and have faced repeated “terrorist attacks”.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who spoke to Rabbi Mirvis on Sunday night, has pledged a “more visible security presence” at Hanukkah events.
“It has impacted on Jewish communities here in the UK, that I know feel even more insecure today than they did before,” he told a Commons committee on Monday.
“This is clearly not an isolated incident, and these incidents are chillingly focused on some of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar,” he said, referencing an attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur that left two Jewish victims dead.
Sir Keir said the government would “take every step we can and use all powers” to make British Jews safe.
Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones is going to Manchester on Monday to celebrate Hanukkah with survivors of September’s attack, which took place on the holiest day of the year for Jews.
Davies-Jones expressed solidarity with the Jewish community in the UK, telling BBC Breakfast there was a need to “ensure that their Hanukkah events and their celebrations can go ahead”.
She said we know “how deeply and closely this is being felt by the Jewish community here in the United Kingdom and we stand with them”.
The shooting in Australia began at around 18:47 local time (07:47 GMT) on Sunday as around a thousand people were said to be attending a public event organised by Jewish centre Chabad of Bondi.
Verified videos showed hundreds of people fleeing the beach, screaming and running as a volley of gunshots rang out.
The ages of the victims range from 10 to 87 years old, and include two rabbis and a Holocaust survivor.
The two gunmen have been named in local media as 50-year-old Sajid Akram, who died at the scene, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, who is in hospital in a critical condition.
The chief rabbi said that “for far too long we have allowed chants such as ‘globalise the intifada'”, which he said “incite hatred and which inspire people to engage in hate action”.
“Why is it still allowed? What is the meaning of globalise the intifada? I’ll tell you the meaning… it’s what happened on Bondi beach yesterday.”
He added: “We have to be far stricter with regard to what people are allowed to say and to do in a way which incites the hatred, which produces the violence that we have witnessed.”
The organisation which arranges security to protect Jewish communities across the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST), told the BBC that the UK has seen record levels of anti-Jewish hate crime, and that this began to increase immediately after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.
Dave Rich, CST’s head of policy, told the Today programme that “we have had huge protests ongoing in our city centres and university campuses with language like calls for intifada”.
“Jewish people see a connection between violent words and violent actions,” he said.
The Bondi attacks were “the extreme end of this political spectrum”, he added.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she was “absolutely horrified” by the attacks, adding that “antisemitism is on the rise”.
Asked if the government was doing enough to tackle antisemitism, she said: “I think that for several years now we have not done enough.”
The prime minister’s spokesman, when asked a similar question, told reporters “the Prime Minister has resolved to stand with Jews in Britain”, adding there was already funding and efforts to crack down on antisemitism following the Manchester synagogue attacks.
The chief rabbi said the festival of Hanukkah commemorates the defiance of a small band of Jews some 2,150 years ago who were targeted by Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes. He denied the Jews the right to openly practise their faith, demanding conversion on pain of death.
The message of the festival is about “their refusal to be intimidated or erased”.
“The Jewish community is nervous. The Jewish community is strong. The Jewish community is worried, but we’re tenacious. You’ll see us during the eight days of Hanukkah, we’ll be out there.”
