Reuven hailed for his bravery
Rabbi Gutnick: “His community was his pride and joy”
At the funeral for Reuven Morrison in Melbourne on Thursday December 18, thousands came to honour the 62-year-old grandfather, whose extraordinary courage in throwing bricks at a terrorist on Bondi Beach enabled others to escape.
At his funeral it was said, “The Torah describes a lion as one who rises without fear, who steps forward instinctively to protect others. Reuven did exactly that in the face of pure evil, he did not turn away. He stood, he confronted and he shielded his brothers and sisters with his own body. As we stand in the days of Chanukah, the festival of light, we remember that light is not only found in miracles, it is found in courage. The Maccabees were few, but they stood. Reuven you stood – one flame can push back great darkness.”
Rabbi Moshe Gutnick came from Sydney to say a eulogy for his close friend, “I first met Reuven, who had come from the Soviet Union, when he decided to reconnect to his roots, to Yiddishkeit… He continued to grow in his Yiddishkeit, and he continued to just amaze me and inspire me with the person that he was…Everything he did was for Hashem.”
Rabbi Gutnick said Morrison was “totally devoted to the Russian Jewish community” and helped build a shule for the Russian Jewish community.
“And anybody who comes to Sydney, I invite you to come to his shule… the most magnificent shule that you could possibly imagine. It was his pride and joy. His community was his pride and joy,” he said.
Referring to Morrison’s bravery, he remarked, “I want to tell you bravery. A lion is brave… the lion has nothing to fear, so a lion can afford to be brave. Real bravery is when a person is scared, when the odds are against you when there are obstacles before you, and you nevertheless get up and you lunge forward and you do the incredible things that we all saw on video, running towards the terrorist.”
The Rabbi shared that a couple had told him that Morrison saved their lives because the terrorist was close to approaching them, before Morrison intervened.
He noted that Morrison’s daughter Sheina had inherited Morrison courage in the way she spoke to the media to call for action on countering antisemitism while still in grief, “She was doing this for one reason only. She was doing this for her father and for the Jewish people,” he said.
A photo of Sheina and her father was on the from cover of The Australian and she stated, “My father was murdered. In cold blood. Shot. For being Jewish. He did not cower. He did not lay low. He sprang into action. To fight. He was a man bigger than life itself. No boundary was uncrossable. Impossible was not a word in his mind.”
She said that he fled the USSR to live as a Jew without fear, but Australia had failed him, “Australia did not fail quietly. It failed loudly, repeatedly and with full knowledge. Its government watched hatred grow and chose to do nothing. They minimised it. They excused it. They dismissed Jewish warnings as noise,” she wrote.
Rabbi Gutnick noted that today’s Torah reading was about Reuven. “And what does the Torah say about Reuven… Reuven will live. Reuven lives on. He never dies and will not die.”
Reuven’s memory lives on through his wife Leah, whom he met on Bondi Beach, their daughter Sheina and son-in-law Joshua, and his grandchildren – and in the memory of all of us who will remember his selfless bravery.
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