Bondi Terror book launched at Bondi Pavilion

A book reconstructing the December 14 attack at Bondi Beach minute by minute was launched at Bondi Pavilion on Thursday night, before an audience of survivors, bereaved families, first responders and political leaders gathered metres from where 15 people were killed.

Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, the Courage, the Aftermath, by News24 host Sharri Markson and ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin, was written in nine months and draws on dozens of hours of testimony from survivors, witnesses and first responders.

Markson said the idea came while she was moving between hospitals interviewing the wounded and the bereaved. “The truth is there were just too many stories to capture, and I deeply wanted to do them justice,” she said. Her sister Rikki and journalist Samantha Maiden both urged her to write a book, she said, and her first reaction was that she had no time.

Ryvchin said he agreed immediately. “It would be a vital recording of Australian history, and I felt that we could do it justice,” he said. “Even though in our lives at that time we were utterly consumed by work and by concern for the community, we knew this book just had to be written.”

The pair presented the book to the families who lost everything, to the hundreds with wounds that do not heal, and, as Markson put it, “to our country that we both love”.

Ryvchin said the community had taken its cues in the aftermath not from politicians but from those whose suffering was deepest, among them Chabad of Bondi spiritual leader Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, whose son-in-law Rabbi Eli Schlanger was killed.

“When people looked at those who lost so much, they saw quiet dignity and the clarity that only such tragedy can win,” he said. “These seemingly ordinary people showed us the way, because they showed us that if they could go on, so could we.”

Markson said chapters investigating the failures that preceded the attack were added during the writing. The alleged shooter Sajid Akram came to the attention of agencies in 2007, when the national security hotline received an alert about his interest in explosives, and again in 2014 over his interest in Islamic State, she said, but when ASIO conducted an assessment in 2019 it did not have access to those earlier reports. “No one agency had the complete picture, and that’s the ultimate failure,” she said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns, launching the book, said it contained hard questions for leaders like him. “It’s the first job of government to protect its citizens, and we failed our Jewish brothers and sisters on December the 14th,” Minns said. “We made some big mistakes, including the decision to let protesters march on the Opera House two days after October the seventh. And bear in mind that was before any action in Gaza.

“We find it abhorrent when people glorify violence by chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ on our streets.”

News Corp executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch said a warning to then Victorian premier Jacinta Allan, reported on Thursday, showed a pattern of inaction. Jewish leaders had written to Allan 10 weeks before the Adass Israel synagogue firebombing of December 6, 2024, seeking urgent reassurances about escalating Iranian threats against Jews.

“This warning, like many others, was met with silence, or indifference, or political cowardice,” Murdoch said, adding it was the job of the Royal Commission, due to report in December, to grapple with those failures.

Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who hosted a panel of survivors, said those in positions of authority had ignored the warnings. “There were desperate cries for help that fell on deaf ears, and for that, 15 people lost their lives,” he said.

Elon Zizer, who was shot six times and spent two weeks in intensive care, said he was ahead of the curve in his recovery but living with nerve damage and remaining shrapnel, and was trying to follow a path of post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress.

Hanna Abesidon, whose 78-year-old father Tibor was murdered as he ate doughnuts with his wife of 37 years, said she wanted him remembered as a peace-loving man. “He loved Australia. He brought us here for a better life, and I think that his message would be that he wants the old Australia back,” she said.

NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane, who ran towards the attack that night, said safety did not mean barbed wire around schools or armed guards at every event. “If the Jewish community, if any Australian community, is to be safe, we need to root out all forms of hatred,” she said.

Ryvchin also announced the establishment of the Matilda Foundation, honouring 10-year-old Matilda, to encourage Australians to live by her values of goodness, kindness and empathy. Her father Michael Britvan said he had named her Matilda because she was the family’s first Australian, and thanked the community for nine months of support.

Rabbi Ulman closed proceedings with the El Maleh Rachamim memorial prayer and sounded the shofar ahead of Rosh Hashanah. “As we open and launch this book about the tragedy that struck Bondi, we stand at the threshold of a new year, praying that its pages will mark not an ending but a new beginning of strength, unity, peace and blessing,” he said.