Jewish soldiers honoured at Anzac Day dawn service

Governor-General Sam Mostyn paid tribute to Jewish soldiers and the victims of the Bondi Beach massacre at the North Bondi Anzac Day dawn service, describing Anzac Cove and Bondi as “two iconic places in Australia’s history”.

Speaking just a few hundred metres from where 15 people were murdered four months ago, Mostyn said the service was “especially poignant as we think about the Anzacs making landfall on another shore at first light at Gallipoli, 111 years ago”.

“We must also think about the lives that were taken here in the summer dusk just four months ago in that unspeakable antisemitic attack,” she said.

“Our sense of peace was shattered, but our Australian spirit of community and belonging and service was not.”

Mostyn praised North Bondi RSL, which “became a significant first responder and opened its doors and hearts and became a safe place at the centre of recovery, not just that terrible evening, but in the days and months afterwards”.

“We saw the values of this club in action: compassion, fraternity, selfless service, good stewardship and enduring resolve,” she said.

Paying tribute to the many Jews who have served in the armed forces, the Governor-General mentioned how 2000 Jewish Australians enlisted in the First World War, including Leonard Maurice Keysor, who landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 and was the first Jewish Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross.

During the service, a wreath was laid in honour of Private Greg Sher, who was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2009. Members of the Milner family laid the wreath for their nephew and cousin.

Sher’s father Felix told The AJN that having his son memorialised at the service highlighted “how we’re [Jews] an integral part of Australian society”.

“The old diggers and whatnot, they embrace us and they feel for us, and so do many in the military,” he said.

Felix Sher described his son as someone who “set many benchmarks and was a true role model” and “had a unique way of making people feel they had a special relationship with him”.

“It is remarkable how many lives he touched, and how many had their lives enriched by him,” he said.

He told how when Greg was killed, one of the armourers built a Magen David “and they put that in the chapel, so he would lie under the symbol of his religion” as a show of “the respect they had for him”.