The cost of reclaiming ourselves
Six months on, I want to talk honestly about recovery.
On December 14, 2025, something broke. Something in the quiet assumption that our community could absorb whatever the world threw at it and keep moving.
The terror attack at Bondi Beach was not the first wound inflicted on Australian Jews. But it was the most severe and a new threshold. And thresholds demand a response that matches the moment.
Six months on, I want to talk honestly about recovery. Not the version that fits in a press release, but the kind that keeps me awake at 3am. And I want to ask a question that should sit uncomfortably with all of us: if not now, when?
Recovery is not just money but money matters
The financial cost of what happened is staggering, and most of it is invisible. It’s in the security now considered essential at every Jewish institution. It’s in the trauma counselling and emergency welfare for families whose lives changed in an instant. It’s in the relentless legal and advocacy work to hold institutions and governments accountable.
We are spending to defend ourselves at a scale we have never had to before and that is on top of the everyday work that never stops: the schools that must keep teaching, the elderly who must be cared for, the fabric of Jewish life that has to keep being woven. None of that pauses. And much of it falls to us to meet.
What we are capable of when we choose to be
Here is what should give us both pride and pause. After October 7, 2023, this community gave with extraordinary force. Australian Jewish giving to Israel is understood to have more than doubled the following year. When our extended family in Israel was attacked, Australian Jews reached deep and gave like never before. That was right and proper, and it should make us proud of what we are capable of.
So I have to ask the obvious question. If we could find that generosity for a community thousands of kilometres away, why are we struggling to find it for ourselves, after our own people were murdered? I am not suggesting our donors don’t care, I know they do. But we have not been honest enough about what rebuilding actually costs, nor made the case forcefully enough that we, here in NSW, are also a community in need. If October 7 could move us to double our giving for Israel, surely December 14 should move us to do the same for ourselves.
To those who give everywhere but home
I want to speak directly to a particular group, with respect, because many of them are among the most generous people I have ever met. There are members of our community of significant means, people who give magnificently to hospitals, universities, the arts, and causes abroad but whose names rarely appear on the giving lists of their own local Jewish community. I understand the instinct. The global causes feel bigger, more historic. The local work can feel like someone else’s responsibility.
After December 14, that has to change. The security keeping your grandchildren safe at school, the support for a family shattered by this attack, the advocacy defending our place in this country, these are not someone else’s responsibility. They are ours. And if those of us with the greatest capacity to give will not step forward to protect our own community at the very moment it has been attacked at home, then when exactly are you waiting for? What are you saving it for, if not for this?
Security alone is not enough
In a crisis, philanthropic energy rushes to the most visible threats; security, advocacy, legal action. All essential. But the slower work of Jewish identity and education risks being starved precisely when it matters most.
Jewish education is the single most powerful determinant of whether our grandchildren will feel connected to this community at all. We have to do all of it – security and advocacy and education and identity – together.
A call to action
If you are a donor, I am asking you to give more than you ever have and to give it here, to your own community, with the same conviction you have shown for causes abroad. If you are someone of real means who has never put your local community on your list, start now, at the moment it needs you most.
We showed the world a strong face after December 14. Now we have to build the foundations that make that strength real and lasting. This is what recovery actually looks like. It costs more than we’ve budgeted and it starts now.
Because if not now, when?
Alain Hasson is CEO of the Jewish Communal Appeal (JCA) NSW.
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