Memory moves to joy

This year, Yom Hazikaron carries a weight that Australian Jews understand more deeply than ever before.

For Jewish communities around the world, Yom Hazikaron has always been a solemn day. A moment to honour the fallen soldiers, police officers, first responders and civilians murdered in acts of terror who paid the price for Jewish sovereignty and survival.

In Israel, the names read aloud are not strangers, nor are they are from the past. The Israeli government says 170 soldiers and security personnel have been killed since Yom Hazikaron last year. They are siblings, parents, children, friends.

The sirens that bring an entire nation to a standstill demand that we feel the full cost of what it means to exist as Jewish people in the world.

But this Yom Hazikaron, our community brings its own grief after 15 of our own were murdered at Bondi Beach four months ago.

They were not soldiers. They were not living in a war zone. They were families, gathered in joy, on an iconic Australian beach. And yet they were killed for the same reason Jews have always been targeted. For being Jews.

Their names belong in our hearts on Yom Hazikaron.

The Torah commands us, again and again: zachor – remember. In Judaism, memory is not passive. It is an obligation, an active force that pulls the past into the present so that we might shape what comes next. To remember our 15 is to refuse to allow their deaths to fade. It is to insist that their memories shape our future.

And then, almost immediately, Yom Ha’atzmaut begins. Israeli flags are raised. Music returns. The same community that stood in grief and silence begins to celebrate its very existence. It is jarring by design, because the joy of Jewish independence, of Jewish life, is not diminished by grief – it is forged from it.

Israel exists precisely because the Jewish people refused to let loss be the final word. This year, that transition feels both harder and more necessary than ever. We are a community still raw with mourning, yet we are also a people who have always known how to carry grief in one hand and hope in the other.

Am Yisrael chai.