Bondi after the bullets

I was at a birthday dinner when I received a text from my brother that immediately felt wrong. It was disjointed and vague, as if something serious had happened but hadn’t yet been put into words. I called him immediately.

Moments earlier, he had been at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi with his wife and four children when gunfire erupted nearby. He moved. The bullets did not follow. This action almost certainly saved her and her children’s lives.

When we spoke, his voice was different. We didn’t panic, we didn’t calm down, but we changed. I knew both people who were killed. They were not my close friends, they were people I knew. This alone makes it impossible for me to consider what is happening in an abstract or distant way.

This article was written in the shadow of that moment.

It’s important to say this clearly. My brother may disagree with many of the views expressed here. He is deeply and sincerely committed to his religious beliefs and I am not writing on his behalf. What follows is my own narrative, shaped by my own experiences and background.

I write as a Jew of two heritages. I am the child of Polish Holocaust survivors on my mother’s side. I am a sixth-generation Sydney Jew who grew up around Bondi on my father’s side.

My great-great-grandfather Maurice Abraham Cohen came to Australia and Hevra Kadisha Institution responsible for the burial of Sydney’s Jewish dead.

This is not a historical footnote. It is the present time. The institution my ancestors helped found is now responsible for burying the victims of last Sunday’s massacre.

Jewish life here has never been abstract or symbolic. It was built, organized, debated, and sustained by people who understood Judaism not as a slogan or a test but as a living culture.

I grew up in a moderate, pluralistic, and intellectually vibrant Jewish community. The Jews argued. They disagreed on God, politics, Israel, morality, and culture. Education was important. Independent thought was important. Judaism was not obedience; It was participation in an ongoing civilization.

This was not accidental. This was the essence of Jewish survival.

Over the past 40 to 50 years, Chabad-Lubavitch He steadily expanded his influence within Sydney’s Jewish institutions. This didn’t happen suddenly. This happened gradually—synagogue by synagogue, committee by committee—until much of communal life became centralized around a single ideological framework.

This expansion was not merely organic. It was strategic.

Chabad realized that many Jews were alienated from their own cultural and intellectual heritage: Jewish history, philosophy, ethics, language, and debate. This alienation created vulnerability. Into this void has stepped a movement that offers certainty over knowledge, authority over education, and obedience over loyalty.

Domination through institutional control, not open competition of ideas, followed.

Community spaces were monopolized. Alternative voices were marginalized. Funding, legitimacy and access are increasingly flowing through a single door. Those who opposed were silently frozen.

What emerged figuratively resembled mafia-like politics; not crimes in the strict sense of the word, but their methods: pressure, intimidation, monopolization and systematic elimination of competitors.

Creativity and free thought were not discussed; they drowned. Independent Jewish expression was treated as disorder. Pluralism was framed as a threat. Over time, the message was clear: Get in line or disappear.

This is how a living culture is flattened.

What was presented as Jewish continuity increasingly began to function as its opposite.

Judaism as a lived culture shaped by learning, disagreement, creativity, and moral reasoning was relegated to technical status. Judaism has become something you qualify for rather than something you do.

If your mother or your mother’s mother was Jewish, you were Jewish too. Everything else—education, morality, intellectual heritage—became secondary.

This is not continuity. This is erasure.

It turns a civilization into a checklist and calls for preservation of the outcome.

Chabad does not encourage independent Jewish thought. This is discouraging. There is only one authoritative interpretation, one acceptable worldview, one approved policy. Conflict is treated as a problem, not as a tradition.

Education outside the framework is viewed with suspicion. Creativity is tolerated only when harmony is achieved.

That’s not how Jewish culture survives. This is how it is emptied.

I’m not writing this as an outsider.

I became involved with Chabad. I know the internal dynamics; certainty, pressure to conform, distrust of secular education, discouragement of an independent judiciary. Jews are told not to think for themselves, not to question too much, not to trust moral instincts outside the approved system.

At the same time, there is a deep hypocrisy behind this moral absolutism.

In this environment, sexual abuse existed and was widely known. It was not treated as a moral emergency. It was seen as something that needed to be controlled. Authority figures closed ranks. Silence was enforced. The institution protected itself.

I was directly exposed to this. I wasn’t the right person to be subjected to this. Not anyone. Whatever the psychological dynamics of my own family, it was a fundamentally good situation, and this contrast made the damage of what I encountered even sharper.

This exposure left me permanently scarred.

A movement that claims moral superiority, discourages education, demands obedience, and fails to protect its children has lost its claim to ethical authority.

This is not a coincidence. It is structural.

The ideology that makes this possible is important.

At the center of Chabad theology Tanya, It teaches a fundamental distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish souls. When this idea is lived socially rather than treated as abstract mysticism, it produces a closed moral universe that inhibits empathy, dissent, and accountability.

This worldview also shapes politics.

For years, Chabad has provided uncritical support to the most extreme elements of the Israeli right. Settler movements are celebrated. Power has been aestheticised. Moral hesitation is framed as betrayal.

What many Jews experienced as suffering or moral crisis during the Gaza war was met with public cheer and absolutism.

I believe this stance is ethically, culturally and strategically disastrous.

When Jewish life is reduced to ideological precision and public spectacle, it ceases to be understood as culture and begins to be perceived as a political symbol. Symbols attract opposition.

This is not about blaming anyone for violence. It’s about understanding the outcome.

Extremist movements recognize absolutism wherever it appears. They are nourished by certainty, purity and submission. Groups like Islamic State Act with this logic.

When Jewish life is overtly transformed into a similar absolutist form, it becomes legible and therefore targetable. This change carries real risks.

Bondi didn’t become Jewish by accident. Long before he became an icon and always while acknowledging his previous and ongoing patronage gadigal According to people, Bondi’s history after white settlement was entirely Jewish.

It was originally divided into: British Sephardic Hart family. From the moment the Art Deco buildings were built, Jews began to live in these buildings. My family, like many others, have lived in and around Bondi for generations. Australia doesn’t tend to ritualize its local history the way the United States does, but the fact remains: Bondi has been a Jewish suburb since the beginning of its modern life.

You may not find much information about the Hart family online. They had no need to promote or celebrate their Judaism with public rituals or performances. They simply lived as Jews, participating in the life of the place. And despite this quiet existence, the continuity is real: the Hart family still has Jewish descendants in Australia today. I know some of them.

Something tragic happens next.

This event, which no one sought and no one deserved, strengthened Bondi’s public image as a Jewish place in a way that quiet residential neighborhoods never do. What was once normal was marked symbolically. This change should disturb us.

Normality was a form of protection.

This protection now feels thinner.

This is not an abstract discussion for me.

I came close to losing my brother at a birthday dinner on Sunday night.

If Sydney’s Jews are to survive, they need to rethink their relationship with the supremacist sect Chabad. In fact, all Jews should take this as a warning.

Michael Cohen is a Jewish Australian writer based in Sydney who has previously made extensive contributions to international newspapers, presenting both articles and conceptual material. He now focuses on human rights issues.

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