Updated Dec. 16
Arsen Ostrovsky sat with his wife, Tzeira Ostrovsky, and their two young daughters on Sunday evening at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Arsen, a prominent civil rights lawyer and activist, stepped away to buy a hotdog.
On his way, he heard what he thought were the sounds of balloons bursting, one by one.
“He realized it was a shooting,” Rabbi Menachem Creditor, Ostrovsky’s brother-in-law, told J. on Monday. “He stood up to look for the girls and my sister, and that was when he was shot.”
During Sydney’s largest annual public menorah lighting and Hanukkah celebration, which is organized by Chabad, two gunmen targeted Jews in what Australian authorities are calling a terrorist attack. They killed at least 15 people as Hanukkah was about to begin. Another 27 were hospitalized as of Monday, according to CNN.
The dead include a 10-year-old girl, a Holocaust survivor and Chabad of Bondi Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the event’s organizer and the brother of the rabbi who leads Chabad of Bakersfield.
In the hours after the shooting, Northern California Jews shared the experiences of loved ones who witnessed and were victims of the attack, highlighting the connections across the Jewish community that span oceans and continents.
Creditor, the former spiritual leader of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, told J. that his sister’s first instinct, when she realized what was happening, was to protect her children.
She “threw the girls to the ground and covered them with her body,” Creditor said.
The Ostrovskys moved to Sydney just weeks ago from Tel Aviv, where they experienced a country at war over the past two years.
During the attack in Sydney, Creditor said, Tzeira whispered in the ears of her daughters, ages 5 and 8, “We survived Iran. We’ll survive this.” She was referring to the 12-day war with Iran in June, when Iranian missiles rained down on Israel, killing 28 people, injuring thousands and forcing people to run to their bomb shelters every day.
Creditor, who is UJA-Federation of New York’s scholar-in-residence, helped found a nonpartisan coalition called Rabbis Against Gun Violence a decade ago. He moved to New York after leading Netivot Shalom from 2007 to 2018.
He told J. that a bullet fired from one of the gunmen grazed the back of his brother-in-law’s head. Ostrovsky was lying face down on grass as blood gushed from his wound. Then he reached for his phone and photographed his blood-stained face.
“He has always documented and archived his experiences,” Creditor explained. “He’s been very involved in defending and championing the Jewish people around the world, and certainly in Israel.”
Creditor shared the unnerving image with J. with his brother-in-law’s permission.
Chana Deitz witnessed the horrors, too. As soon as she heard gunshots, Deitz, who is a sister of Rabbi Mendel Levin of San Francisco, fell to the ground and covered her 4-year-old daughter and young niece with her body. She sent her brother a chilling three-minute video from ground level showing clusters of people lying down, some in fetal position, and gunshots ringing out spasmodically every few seconds.
In the video, a man is heard on the phone crying out “Ima!” and other voices are screaming at people to stay down.
Beyond the Bondi Beach area, which is home to a large concentration of Jews, the greater Australian Jewish community is extremely close-knit, said Anthony Goldbloom, a native of Melbourne who moved with his wife Merav to San Francisco 14 years ago. (About 117,000 Jews live in Australia, a country of over 25 million, according to census data from 2021.)
For Goldbloom, Bondi Beach has a particular significance: In 2009 it was the site of his marriage proposal.
He and his wife immediately began calling their friends in Sydney on Sunday to check on them. They learned that a friend’s son had witnessed the attack but was unscathed.
The mass shooting — a rarity in Australia due to its strict gun laws — comes as violence against Jews has risen sharply across the island nation.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has documented what it calls an unprecedented surge in antisemitic incidents, according to JTA. In a report released earlier this month, the group recorded more than 1,600 incidents nationwide in the year ending September 2025, several times the annual average seen in the years before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that began the war in Gaza.
In December 2024, Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was destroyed in a firebomb attack, which authorities linked to Iran.
Two days after Oct. 7, 2023, outside the Sydney Opera House, pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “gas the Jews.”
Goldbloom said his sister’s children attend a Jewish school in Melbourne that has been graffitied several times with antisemitic messages.
“I think there was this sort of feeling that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened,” Goldbloom said.
Chabad of Bakersfield posted a tribute to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the event organizer who was killed in the attack. He was the brother of Rabbi Shmuli Schlanger, who leads Chabad of Bakersfield.
Eli, who was 41, “was joyful and dedicated to his work with the 5,000-member-strong Russian-speaking Jewish community in the Sydney area, who fled from the former Soviet Union,” the tribute read.
Eli’s wife Chayale gave birth to their fifth child, a son, in October.
Originally from London, he had offered words of strength for the Jewish community in Manchester in October, when an attacker drove a car into a group outside of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation during Yom Kippur services and then began stabbing people. Two worshippers died in the attack.
“In the fight against antisemitism the way forward is to be more Jewish, act more Jewish, and appear more Jewish,” Eli Schlanger said after that attack.
Rabbi Moshe Langer of Chabad of SF publicly mourned the loss of Schlanger at Sunday’s Bill Graham Menorah lighting in San Francisco’s Union Square. Years ago, the two rabbis were classmates in their Brooklyn rabbinical seminary and lived in the same dormitory, Langer told J.
“It’s numbing to think about what happened over there,” Langer said of the Bondi Beach attack, where a second Chabad rabbi, Yaakov Levitan, was also killed. “That could have been me.”
On Monday, Arsen Ostrovsky was in the hospital undergoing surgery.
“We’re davening for him right now,” Creditor said.
“We’ve lived through worse, we’re going to get through this and we’re going to get the bastards who did this,” Ostrovsky told Sky News Australia in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Before Ostrovsky went into surgery, Creditor asked him what message he’d like to share with the Jewish community.
His response? “Our role is to make sure we remember that evil will not prevail, that evil will not triumph, and that we will prevail,” Creditor said. “What that means to me is that we should not be shy or quiet about our Jewishness.”
Goldbloom, in San Francisco, felt a similar calling and decided to attend the Chabad of Noe Valley’s public menorah lighting with his wife and three children on the first night of Hanukkah.
“It seems like a very appropriate way to mark what happened in Australia,” he said. “The terrorists win if we all cower in fear.”