Bondi survivor takes his warning to the UN’s doorstep
Bondi terror attack survivor and head of AIJAC's Sydney office, Arsen Ostrovsky, addressed a rally outside the United Nations in New York, calling on Jews to live openly and without apology.
Bondi terror attack survivor Arsen Ostrovsky has told a rally outside the United Nations in New York that the massacre “did not happen in a vacuum”, warning world leaders that hatred of Jews left unchecked leads to violence.
Ostrovsky, who heads the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), spoke on AIJAC’s behalf at the Rally Against Antisemitism on September 23, as world leaders gathered for the annual UN General Assembly. He was introduced by Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt, who visited the Bondi memorial in August.
“It was built chant-by-chant and march-by-march,” Ostrovsky told the crowd. “For two years, repeated warnings from the Jewish community went unheeded.”
He said his family had moved back to Australia from Israel last November. When he and his wife told their daughters, his eldest, then eight, asked: “Abba, does that mean no more boomies?” She meant the rockets, missiles and runs to the bomb shelter.
“I said, ‘No sweetie, Australia is a long way away.’ But I was wrong.”
Just two weeks after they landed, the family went to Bondi Beach for the first night of Chanukah. Ostrovsky was queuing for food, and his wife and daughters had taken their seats for the candle lighting, when two gunmen opened fire. They killed 15 people, among them 10-year-old Matilda and 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman.
Ostrovsky ran towards his family and was shot in the head.
He said he also saw ordinary Australians show “extraordinary courage and humanity” at the scene, running towards danger to help strangers.
“One man ripped his shirt off to give me, another woman held my hand.”
Survival, Ostrovsky said, carried “a heavy responsibility: a responsibility to remember those taken, to tell the truth and to sound a warning”.
He said the warning applied on the streets of New York as well, where rhetoric singling out Israel and calls to “Globalise the Intifada” were “now given political respectability, or met with clichéd condemnations and empty promises of action”.
“The lesson I bring from Sydney is simple: That hatred directed at Jews, or manifesting against the Jewish state, when ignored, excused or mainstreamed, will lead to violence.”
His message to the leaders meeting nearby was that “you cannot fight racism while tolerating antisemitism” and “you cannot defend human rights while denying them to Jews”.
He called on Jews to respond by living openly and without apology.
“The answer to antisemitism cannot be Jewish silence. It must be Jewish strength.”
While in New York, Ostrovsky met American Jewish leaders to discuss the situation in Australia since Bondi. He also met Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, and US officials, including Ambassador Jeff Bartos, the US representative for UN management and reform.
UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York hosted the rally at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, near UN headquarters, with partners including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Media estimates of the crowd ranged from several hundred to about 1,000.
UJA-Federation chief executive Eric Goldstein told the rally that the UN, founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, had “allowed its sacred mission to be hijacked by a singular focus on condemning Israel”.
Conference of Presidents chief executive William Daroff told the Jewish News Syndicate that standing with victims “from Bondi, from Nova, from here in New York” showed the Jewish people’s determination that world leaders take a stand.
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