How the Australia Hanukkah massacre hit home for a Sacramento rabbi | Opinion

On Sunday morning, the phone rang. My wife, Judy, and I received a call from our friends Orit and Oded Morgenshtern, longtime former Sacramento residents visiting from Israel. We had shared a joyful reunion dinner with them just the night before. They called to tell us that their eldest daughter, Lior, recently married, had phoned them. Lior and her husband, Yair, had been traveling in Australia. She was calling from the beach in Sydney during the terrorist attack.

“If I don’t survive,” Lior told her parents, “Just know you are the best parents I could ever be blessed with.”

Thank God, she managed to run to safety — though not before risking her own life to help others escape the terror unfolding around her.

Others were not as fortunate.

The death toll climbed to 15, including a 10-year-old child, with dozens more wounded, making it one of the most brutal attacks on Jews in the Diaspora in recent memory.

As the names of the victims emerged, the loss reached even closer to home. I spoke the next day with Sacramento Chabad Rabbi Mendy Cohen, who told me he wept when he heard the news. One of the victims, 41-year-old Rabbi Eli Schlanger of Chabad of Bondi, was someone he had known for more than 15 years.

“He was the kindest, sweetest young man,” Cohen told me. “The pillar of his synagogue.”

In a tragic reminder of how small the world can feel at moments like this, Lior and her husband had been guests of Rabbi Schlanger just days earlier, on Friday night, for Shabbat dinner.

Hanukkah recalls a moment when a small, determined group of Jews overcame overwhelming odds to preserve their traditions and their way of life. It is a story of faith, perseverance and community surviving against the threat of erasure.

In Sydney, echoes of that history could be seen in the quiet acts of courage — the victims who helped one another escape, the bystanders who acted despite fear and the families who continue to celebrate the holiday, lighting the candles and gathering together even in the shadow of tragedy.

The Australian Hanukkah Massacre, as the attack will be known, is just another grim marker in the long history of violence against Jews. It joins a devastating list of antisemitic hate crimes that includes Pittsburgh, Poway, Washington, Boulder and too many others to name.

These tragedies are not confined to memory or geography; they are part of a present and growing reality.

In October, Jewish Federations of North America and the Anti-Defamation League released a comprehensive study documenting the scope of antisemitism in the United States, finding that one in five respondents reported being physically assaulted, physically threatened or verbally harassed because of their Jewish identity during the past year, while more than one-third said they had witnessed an incident involving actual or threatened antisemitic violence.

In the days since the attack, Mariela Socolovsky, CEO of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region, wrote to our community, emphasizing resilience rooted in connection and belonging, and the determination to respond not by retreating, but by strengthening Jewish life and visibility.

“We will draw on the millennia-long strength of our people and respond not by dimming our light, but by shining it more brightly,” Socolovsky wrote.

One man who shined his light on that blood-soaked day was 42-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim immigrant from Syria, who heroically rushed toward one of the terrorists and wrestled the rifle from his hands. He didn’t have to risk his life, but he did.

How many of us would have had the courage to do the same?

As Jewish families continue to light the Hanukkah candles this week, let us remember that light is not just a symbol; it is a call to action. Each of us has a moral responsibility to confront hatred whenever and wherever it arises, to protect vulnerable individuals and communities and to ensure that love and compassion — not hate or indifference — define our world.

In doing so, we honor the victims and the enduring spirit of a Jewish people who refuse to be extinguished.

Reuven H. Taff is rabbi emeritus of Mosaic Law Congregation in Sacramento.