An attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia left 15 people dead and at least 40 injured on Sunday. A D.C. rabbi’s family was part of that gathering and targeted attack.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of the American Friends of Lubavitch Chabad based in D.C., told WTOP his brother-in-law and other family members, “were literally hiding while bullets were just whizzing right by them.”
Shemtov’s cousin’s son was shot during the attack, he said. He had surgery Monday morning and is recovering.
“The initial reports are that he’s OK,” Shemtov told WTOP.
He said other family members had traveled home just shortly prior to the attack.
“My sister-in-law and her husband had just left with their family about two minutes before the shooting started,” he said.
Shemtov helped organize the National Menorah Lighting in D.C. on Sunday night. He said it had special meaning this year.
“Everybody came together to show that light will always win over darkness. Justice will always win over tyranny, and right will always win over might,” he said. “That’s really the story of Hanukkah.”
His wife’s family is from Australia, and when he first became a rabbi, he started his journey there, so the community has deep meaning to him.
“Celebrations of Hanukkah out in the open in Australia are very personal for me, and to see that beauty punctured by a dark, sinister terrorist was, I would say, particularly painful on a personal level,” he said.
Police said that two gunmen had opened fire at Bondi Beach while the first night of Hanukkah celebration was happening. The gunmen were a 50-year-old man who died and his 24-year-old son, who is hospitalized in a coma, according to police.
Shemtov said the Jewish community is strong and it’s incredible to see them come together.
“It’s a day of not only tragedy and shock, but unbelievable horror, because it’s a breakdown of a certain sense of security that people felt, particularly in Australia,” he said.
Australia has some of the world’s strictest gun laws, and lawmakers intend to tighten them more after Sunday’s attack. Among the new measures proposed would be a limit on the number of guns someone can own and a review of licenses held over time.
“People should never hurt other people just because of who they are, and that’s being done with more intensity and greater frequency in these recent times,” he said. “But we, the Jewish people, have a certain spine that is indestructible.”
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