My Rabbi Was Killed in the Bondi Shooting: What His Memory Teaches Me
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On the evening of December 14, the unthinkable happened.
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Rabbi Eli Schlanger (my rabbi) organized a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Bondi is home to Eli’s Chabad synagogue and has been an idyllic haven for Jews since the early 20th century. Jewish restaurants and social clubs sit alongside tattoo parlors, Italian pizza bars, and chic boutiques. It’s a magnet for people from every corner of the globe, and it was Eli’s backyard.
For 18 years, he’d organized “Chanukah by the Sea.” It was the quintessential Eli event—families gathered, united in joy and prayer, for the festival of light. It was on brand and on mission for Eli, who would often say, “I want the whole world to light up with the Jewish flame.”
Given today’s climate of vicious antisemitism, he would have known there were some risks in being so identifiably Jewish in a public place—so much so, he had organized both police and additional security for the event. But when I once asked him if he was afraid of being an out and proud Jew, he simply said, “When they hate us, we don’t hide, we don’t cower, we become even more Jewish.”
Witnesses report that around 6:41 p.m., two gunmen opened fire. Eli had just had his photo taken helping someone with their tefillin, and a minute or so later, he was dead.
That day, I’d been having lunch with friends. That prior engagement kept my husband, Rowan, and me from attending the ceremony at Bondi (and probably saved our lives). At 7:00 p.m. on the group chat for the lunch, we were in a text fest thanking the hosts when Katrina, one of the guests and a journalist, texted: “Gunshots at Bondi Beach. Lots of sirens and choppers en route.”
Before I could process the words, my stomach sank, and I screamed downstairs to Rowan, “A shooting at Bondi... Eli.”
We raced to turn on the television. Rowan, in his usual calm way, soothing me saying, “Surely not, don’t jump to the worst conclusions, Eli will be okay,” but I was already shaking, and tears were streaming down my face.
Moments later, Katrina texted again: “Nine dead apparently. Lighting of Menorah ceremony. Attack on Jewish community.”
Without confirmation of the slain, I put on the group chat: “Oh God could be MY rabbi.”
Only an hour before at lunch, I’d been telling my friends about the joy of having Eli in my life. They were captivated.
By 8:00 p.m., I received a message from a friend from the Melbourne Jewish community. She sent a photo of Eli with the headline “Breaking News. Rabbi Eli Schlanger has been identified as one of the victims in the massacre at a Chanukah event at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.”
My husband and I fell into each other’s arms. Rowan’s body trembled as he buried his head into my shoulder. Like a wounded animal, I wailed, my body collapsing under the weight of grief.
I didn’t sleep much, but I woke up in the morning knowing that Eli’s legacy, his mission to bring light and love to the world, would not die with him. Through the hours of conversations, he had prepared me to be his torch-bearer.
Rowan and I attended Eli’s funeral. The state premier of New South Wales, the Honorable Chris Minns, was there, as well as other politicians and a vast crowd of friends and family. Through a veil of tears and deep pain, Eli’s father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the chief rabbi who Eli assisted at the Bondi Chabad Centre, addressed the coffin and said in his eulogy.
“Eli, from the moment you married Chaya you became a son to us as much as she’s our daughter. And you became everything to me, my hands, my head, my heart, my feet," I remember him saying. "I relied on you for everything. You’re my son, my friend, my confidant.”
Rabbi Eli Schlanger was only 41-years-old when he was gunned down mercilessly, senselessly by terrorists. In that shooting spree with high-powered hunting weapons, two men killed 16 people and injured at least 40 others. Amongst the dead was a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Eli’s two-month-old baby was injured in the attack and had a severe shrapnel wound to his leg. Chaya, Eli’s wife, also had shrapnel wounds to her back.
I feel immensely lucky to have met Rabbi Eli Schlanger. He left behind a beautiful young wife and five glorious children. Their baby will never know his father.
To me, Eli was a Jedi knight. His lightsaber was the love he radiated. Filling the world with joy was his raison d’être, it was his fuel and his compass. Eli found a place in himself where his light had merged with God, and anyone who met him felt it instantly. I did. Everyone did. And it was as magnetic as the sun pulling planets into its orbit.
Eli would hate me to dwell on sad things, in fact, he would have only wanted me to focus on the light.
May his memory be a blessing.
This excerpt was adapted with permission from CONVERSATIONS WITH MY RABBI: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World by Rabbi Eli Schlanger and Nikki Goldstein.