We have seen the darkness, but if kindness is a light, Australia is glowing

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

December 21, 2025 — 5.00am

The day after the Bondi Hanukkah Massacre, when I drove past my synagogue in Melbourne, I saw a dozen bunches of flower bouquets poking through the security door’s bars. As a Jewish man walked in, a woman approached, thrusting a $100 note in his hand. It was a donation, she said. She felt so terribly sad about what had happened to the Jewish community.

Later, a candle arrived on my doorstep from a neighbour. Texts of condolence pinged on my phone. A non-Jewish friend in Melbourne sent me a photo: outside her house, she had hung a massive sheet, emblazoned with the words: “We stand against the hatred of the Jewish people”. Cars honked as they drove past, and a Jewish person arrived on her doorstep with Hanukkah donuts and candles as thanks. My friend propped these up on her Christmas table, placing them side by side with the nativity figures her nanna had knitted. “In unity we are stronger than the evil,” she wrote to me.

A floral memorial is growing daily near the scene of the shooting at Bondi.

It had been a while since I’d felt so much kindness at once. For the past two years, ever since the attacks of October 7 when Jewish people were also the target, I’ve felt the effects of antisemitism, of sometimes being shunned, dismissed, threatened, hated, ignored. And so when the kindness arrives at once and in such abundance, it feels strange, and I’m a bit like a child dipping their toe gingerly in a pool to test it out. This week I see Israeli flags everywhere, waving in the wind, wrapped up among the sea of flowers at Bondi Pavilion, or hanging as backdrops on TV news programs. Yet I can’t forget that if I’d wrapped a flag around my shoulders last week and walked through the streets of Melbourne’s CBD, it would have been seen by some as an incendiary act. It would have been unsafe for me to do it.

Good people are all around us in Australia; I know this, and I’ve simultaneously felt this over the past two years. I train my focus on them. It is something I learned from my late mother Mira, a Holocaust survivor of four concentration camps, who also chose to embrace the light – rather than the evil – after the war. Decades after she moved to Melbourne, she gave her testimony to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, in which she recounted the horrific events that killed her parents, her only sister, her brother. When the interviewer asked her whether she had learned anything from her experiences, her reply was immediate. “In the Holocaust I learned about the goodness of people.”

Despite the horror and brutality Mira experienced, she never forgot that so many Jewish and non-Jewish people helped and saved her. Some had hidden her. Others had protected her. There were those who had risked their own lives for her, and ones who lifted her up when she was weak, like the non-Jewish Belgian major who chanced upon her in a prisoner-of-war camp after liberation. Seeing Mira, an emaciated 18-year-old girl lying listlessly in a bunk, he took it upon himself to bring her liver every day and feed it to her by hand.

Rachelle Unreich and Mira, together in 2000.

For me, kindness arrived in truckloads this week, wrapped up in emails and hugs and signs, like the one at my local Fleischer cakes, which explains that “we have chosen to pause our Christmas music as a mark of respect following the tragic events in Bondi”. It is a balm, and it is so easy to see the good people – and their own sorrow – in every pocket of Australia. I just need it to stick around. I need their kind hearts to open their eyes, to see the materialisation of the hate Jewish people have felt for too long. Their kindness is a kind of light – so appropriate on this holiday of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights – but I want it to do more than make our path brighter. I hope it serves as an illumination too, for how we got here, and what needs to change. I am touched when one work colleague reaches out asking for book and podcast recommendations: “I’m trying to read and learn as much as possible from a Jewish Australian perspective,” she says. Her message sought not only to comfort me, but to understand the events that caused me to need comfort, the atmosphere that allowed the hate of two monsters on a bridge to grow.

As I prepared to attend the Melbourne Jewish funeral of Reuven Morrison, one of the 15 victims who heroically threw rocks at one gunman and paid for it with his life, I received a message from someone who knows me because of the book I wrote about my mother Mira. She explains that while she struggles to find the right words to say, “I did not want to stay silent.” This is exactly what I need to hear. I hope that the kind, silent people have resolved to speak up, sparking action and change, and that they will be silent no more. Kindness, so beautiful and welcome in our community, is necessary, and needs to be coupled with people willing to stand up vocally and strongly against antisemitism if we are to return of the country that my mother chose and loved and felt safe in, a glorious Australia that I have missed seeing for far too long.

Rachelle Unreich is the author of A Brilliant Life: My Mother’s Inspiring Story of Surviving the Holocaust (shortlisted for The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024), and contributed to two post-October 7 collections: Ruptured and On Being Jewish Now.

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