From memory to responsibility

As we marked Yom Hashoah this week, the memory of Alex Kleytman was fresh in our minds.

Kleytman survived the horrors of the Shoah against the odds and built a new life here in Australia – only to be killed by the same hatred he escaped all those years before.

Tolerant, multicultural Australia should have been a safe haven for him. And for many years it was, until it wasn’t.

We live in a time of sad and dark parallels.

We often speak of how the Holocaust did not begin with the death camps; it began with words. So too, the Bondi Beach terrorist attack did not begin with bullets. It began even before October 7, when antisemitism was already festering in the dark corners of our society. It went mainstream after the Hamas attack. And inaction after each grim milestone, from the October 9 Opera House mob, to the doxxing, to the many graffiti and arson attacks, and more besides, raised the temperature as our broken country hurtled towards Bondi.