UK chief rabbi says cousin hid for 15 ‘terrifying’ minutes in Bondi attack

The UK’s chief rabbi has said his cousin and cousin’s wife “spent 15 terrifying minutes hiding under a doughnut stand” as gunmen opened fire during an attack on a Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach.

“People to their right and left were being shot dead,” Sir Ephraim Mirvis said.

Fifteen people including a 10-year-old girl were killed by two gunmen targeting the Jewish celebration on the beach in Sydney, Australia on Sunday.

Rabbi Mirvis said nothing would stop Jews in the UK and around the world celebrating their faith in public, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to protect British Jews following the attack, which he said was not an “isolated incident”.

The chief rabbi, who represents the largest Jewish community in the UK, also said the causes of “toxic antisemitism” must be addressed, calling for authorities to crack down on hate speech.

Around 1,000 people were said to be attending the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration on Sunday evening when the shooting began, with verified videos showing attendees screaming and running as a volley of gunshots rang out.

The ages of the victims range from 10 to 87 years old. Among the dead are two rabbis and a Holocaust survivor.

The two gunmen have been named in local media as 50-year-old Sajid Akram, who died at the scene, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, who is in hospital in a critical condition. The two had reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

Rabbi Mirvis, who will travel to Sydney on Tuesday, said Jewish people had been “targeted for the simple act of gathering together, visibly and peacefully, as Jews”.

The right of Jewish communities to gather safely and publicly was a “test of the moral health of any society”, he said.

“Jews have lived with security concerns for as long as I can remember, but the fact that today every public Jewish gathering must be weighed for risk is a sign of something deeply wrong.”

A society in which a minority group have to “calculate whether it is safe to be seen together in public” is a society that is “failing all of its citizens”.

Sir Keir, who spoke to Rabbi Mirvis on Sunday night, has pledged a “more visible security presence” at Hanukkah events following the attack.

“It has impacted on Jewish communities here in the UK, that I know feel even more insecure today than they did before,” he told a Commons committee on Monday.

“This is clearly not an isolated incident, and these incidents are chillingly focused on some of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar,” the PM said, referencing an attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur that left two Jewish victims dead.

Sir Keir said the government would “take every step we can and use all powers” to make British Jews safe.

Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones travelled to Manchester to celebrate Hanukkah with survivors of October’s attack, which took place on the holiest day of the year for Jews.

Around 200 members of the Manchester Jewish community gathered at the synagogue to light the menorah for Hannukah and remember the lives lost in Manchester and in Bondi.

The service was led by Rabbi Daniel Walker, who urged those present to find “light in darkness”. The menorah was lit by the widow of Melvin Cravitz, who was killed in the attack.

Earlier, Rabbi Mirvis said he appreciated the work of the UK government and the police to protect British Jews, who he said were “on the front line” and had faced repeated “terrorist attacks”.

But he urged authorities to tackle the causes of hatred, “not just the symptoms”.

He called for people to stand together “against the normalised rhetoric that demonises Jews and the only Jewish state”.

The chief rabbi said that “for far too long we have allowed chants such as ‘globalise the intifada'”, which he said “incite hatred and which inspire people to engage in hate action”.

“Why is it still allowed? What is the meaning of globalise the intifada? I’ll tell you the meaning… it’s what happened on Bondi Beach yesterday.”

He added: “We have to be far stricter with regard to what people are allowed to say and to do in a way which incites the hatred, which produces the violence that we have witnessed.”

The organisation that arranges security for UK Jewish communities, the Community Security Trust (CST), told the BBC that the UK has seen record levels of anti-Jewish hate crime, which began to increase immediately after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.

Dave Rich, the CST’s head of policy, told the Today programme that “we have had huge protests ongoing in our city centres and university campuses with language like calls for intifada”.

“Jewish people see a connection between violent words and violent actions,” he said, adding that the Bondi attack was “the extreme end of this political spectrum”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she was “absolutely horrified” by the attacks.

Asked if the government was doing enough to tackle antisemitism, she said: “I think that for several years now we have not done enough.”

The prime minister’s spokesman, when asked a similar question, told reporters that there was already funding and efforts to crack down on antisemitism following the Manchester attack.

Lord West, speaking on behalf of the government, later told the House of Lords that while there was “no specific intelligence of a linked threat” in the UK to the Bondi attack, “we must remain vigilant”.

Shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson – a relative of British Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed on Bondi Beach – told a memorial in Parliament Square on Monday evening that the UK needed to be more muscular in fighting the root causes of antisemitic violence.

When the public health minister Ashley Dalton spoke of her solidarity with the Jewish community she was repeatedly met with boos and heckles from some of the crowd and cries of “shame”, “rubbish” and “stop the marches”.

The festival of Hanukkah commemorates how, some 2,150 years ago, a small band of Jews revolted against Emperor Antiochus, who had suppressed their faith and demanded conversion to ancient Greek religion on pain of death.

The group, led by the Maccabee family, removed Greek idols from the temple in Jerusalem and, the story goes, were able to light its menorah for eight days with only one day’s oil.

Rabbi Mirvis said the message of the festival was about Jews’ “refusal to be intimidated or erased”.

“The Jewish community is nervous. The Jewish community is strong. The Jewish community is worried, but we’re tenacious. You’ll see us during the eight days of Hanukkah, we’ll be out there.”