Hundreds gather at Bondi at dawn for October 7

Hundreds gathered at Bondi Pavilion before sunrise on Wednesday to mark three years since the October 7 attacks, with the shofar sounded at 6.29am, the moment the assault on Israel began.

The commemoration, organised by StandWithUs Australia and the Zionist Council of NSW, brought together community, political and religious leaders to remember the 1200 people murdered and the hundreds taken hostage.

StandWithUs Australia executive director Michael Gencher opened the gathering by noting that the date had not receded into history. “Three years later, October 7 is not simply a date in history. It is still with us,” Gencher said. “It is with us in the way Jewish Australians think about our safety, in the way that we speak about Israel and our relationship with Israel, and especially in the conversations we have with our children.”

Standing in Bondi made that doubly true, he said, because the gathering also sat in the shadow of December 14. “For us, these events do not sit in isolation. They are part of the same three years in which hatred towards Israel and the Jewish people has become more visible, more accepted, and more dangerous.”

Gencher said the community remembered not only those who stood with it but those who did not. “We also remember those who were silent, those who turned away, and those who failed to stand with us when it mattered.”

Israeli Ambassador Hillel Newman noted it was his first October 7 outside Israel, and recalled his brother-in-law arriving at his home at 8am on Simchat Torah telling him to turn on the television. “Behind every one of those numbers is a name, a face, and a family,” Newman said, after setting out the toll. He described the brutality as the attack’s defining feature, and the pride the perpetrators took in it.

Among those murdered was an Australian, Galit Carbone, 66, of Kibbutz Be’eri. “When the terrorists reached her safe room, she was on the phone to her daughter. She hung up so that her daughter would not hear what came next,” Newman said. “Her last act was an act of love.”

He said Israel had since seen all hostages returned, families rebuilding in the south, and its enemies significantly weakened after fighting on seven fronts. But he was direct about what had followed in Australia.

“We have witnessed verbal violence and bullying, which led to vandalism, arson, and culminated in the murder of 15 right here,” Newman said. “There is a direct line between the shooting at Nova and the shooting at Bondi. It is not the actions of Israel. It is the hatred of Jews.”

Zionist Council of NSW president Orna Triguboff said the gathering was for mourning before anything else. “Today we allow ourselves to feel that pain and cry,” Triguboff said. “We mourn the loss of those we loved, even if we did not know them personally, and we mourn something else — the loss of innocence, the loss of the sense of safety we once took for granted. Safety in Israel and safety around the world, even here in Sydney, in this very spot in Bondi Beach, our Bondi Beach.”

Senator Dave Sharma said the commemorations did not get easier, and that this year felt especially painful. He described October 7 as a pogrom rather than a military operation, and said he had visited the massacre sites and seen wounds that would never heal.

He was scathing about what followed in Australia, saying the massacre of 15 people at Bondi nine months ago was directly linked to the poison unleashed by Hamas. “This was a culture where vilification was permitted to go unchecked, where antisemitism was excused, or tolerated, or met with moral equivocation, and where Australian leaders went missing in action, and lost their moral compass,” he said.

He said it remained a stain on the nation that Australia had failed in its most basic duty to protect its citizens, and that even on this day there were people seeking to deny, diminish or misappropriate the trauma inflicted on Jewish Australians.

“Your safety is not a favour to be granted. It is your fundamental right as Australians,” Sharma said. “Against those who seek to terrorise, to destroy, or to divide, the ultimate response, as Jewish people have done throughout the ages, is to go on living, to go on building, to refuse to be silenced, to refuse to be intimidated.”

NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane said she had made a point of bearing witness — watching the footage, attending a parliamentary screening, visiting each site after the summer of firebombings, and coming to Bondi.

She said she did not have answers for how to make sense of the past three years, but was certain about one thing. “Forgetting is not an option. Burying these memories is not an option. Looking away is not an option,” she said, before turning to those holding protests on the anniversary. “Shame on you to the people who held protests on this day of all days.”

Remembering, she said, “is how we refuse to let hatred have the final word”.

Waverley mayor Steven Lewis, elected last month, said the council was home to the largest Jewish community in NSW, with roots traceable to the earliest days of European settlement.

He said antisemitic hatred had become more visible after October 7, and that people who had lived in the area safely for generations began to feel afraid that words and symbols could lead to something worse. “Tragically, that fear became a reality,” Lewis said, pointing to the December attack metres from where the gathering stood.

AUJS NSW president Moshe Kadoury and vice-president Ely Adani, both StandWithUs Emerson Fellows, spoke about what the past three years had meant on campus. Kadoury said antisemitism had always existed, but that for some people antizionism had become a new vehicle for it, and that those in authority had failed to call it out, allowing the behaviour to continue in the name of free speech or academic freedom.

“All this has done is given others greater confidence to keep pushing those boundaries even further,” he said, describing watching Adani defend his identity on campus and being booed, yelled at and publicly outed by other students.

Adani said the debate had reached a point where victims were being blamed. “You can be murdered at a music festival, and within days watch people on the other side of the world argue about whether you somehow had it coming,” he said. “We’ve sat in lecture halls with people our own age debating whether those who were murdered were somehow responsible for their own deaths.”

Both said the response had been a surge in involvement. “We’ve seen more young people get involved than ever before,” Kadoury said. “Don’t despair. It can sometimes feel like the wave of hatred is overwhelming, but that isn’t the whole story. We are not becoming stronger — we already are stronger.”

Israeli youth advocate Ben Carasso, introduced as the country’s youngest “spokeskid”, said those gathered were among the first in the world to formally commemorate the anniversary this year, given the time difference.

He said he had spent three years travelling the world on advocacy, encountering a lack of knowledge and what he called brainwashing against his country, and refused to stay silent. “We will not bow our heads, and we will not surrender,” Carasso said. “Never again is now.”

Mitzvah House founder Rabbi Noach Koncepolski sang the El Maleh Rachamim prayer, and Rabbinical Council of NSW president Rabbi Shua Solomon recited the prayers for the State of Israel and for the IDF.