Three times a day at Bondi Beach, a rabbi helps a community grieve
In the days after the Bondi Beach massacre, as mourners arrived with flowers and stood quietly in front of the memorial at Bondi Pavillion, Rabbi Yossi Friedman sensed that many people wanted to grieve but did not quite know how.
“I stood there for hours just watching,” Friedman said. “People were connecting through silence, through being present, through laying flowers. In Jewish tradition we have silence, but we also give grief meaning.”
Friedman arrived at the site early in the morning after the attack and watched as crowds gathered without any formal structure. With little confirmed information and no organised memorial, he decided to try something simple, saying the names of the victims.
Rabbi Yossi Friedman leads a service at Bondi Beach
“Let’s make it real for people,” he said. “Let them connect to a name or to a story.”
Standing before a crowd of about 500 people, Friedman read out the names that were known at the time, acknowledged those still unidentified, and shared a short personal story about one of the victims. He then led the crowd in prayer, including Kaddish, and in songs, including “Oseh Shalom” and the Australian national anthem.
The response was immediate.
“People came up to me afterwards and said it meant everything to them,” he said. “They asked me to keep doing it.”
What began as a spontaneous act of remembrance has since become a regular ritual. For the last three weeks, Friedman has led memorial services three times a day at Bondi Beach, with readings in the morning, at 1 pm, and in the evening. During the first week, Friedman said he often stood up every hour as new waves of people arrived, fitting the services around funerals, hospital visits, and meetings with grieving families.
Rabbi Yossi Friedman
When flowers and other tributes were cleared from the site after a week, visitors continued to arrive, uncertain where to leave them, showing the need for a shared place to grieve had not passed.
“Even now, weeks later, people are still coming and crying,” he said. “There is still very raw emotion.”
Friedman plans to continue the services through this Sunday, the end of the 30-day Jewish mourning period, known as “shloshim”.
The memorials have also become a place for survivors and witnesses to speak. Each evening now includes firsthand testimony, with plans to introduce speakers at the lunchtime services as more people come forward.
“The stories are what people leave with,” Friedman said. “They matter.”
The tragedy is deeply personal for him. On the afternoon of the attack, Friedman drove past the Chanukah gathering at Bondi Beach just minutes before the shooting began. Unable to find parking and running late to join his family at a Chanukah event in a park in Dover Heights, he decided not to stop.
“Twelve minutes later, the park was in lockdown,” he said.
Friedman is well known to the Sydney community, having grown up here and working across several congregations, including South Head Synagogue, Central Synagogue, Cremorne Synagogue and Kingsford Maroubra Hebrew Congregation.
As details emerged that night, the names hit close to home. Friedman spoke of the murder of his close friends, Rabbi Eli Schlanger and Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, and described the shock and disbelief as news filtered through.
“These were our friends. Our family. Our community,” he said.
He also paid tribute to the Chabad Bondi community, describing it as a central and much-loved part of Jewish life in the area. The synagogue and community centre, led by Rabbi Ulman, had opened only a year earlier and had quickly become a focal point for connection, now marked by loss. He recalled how Rabbi Schlanger had proudly taken him on a personal tour of the new space.
Despite the horror, Friedman said the gatherings at the memorial have revealed something hopeful.
“People from all backgrounds and faiths keep coming,” he said. “Standing together. Supporting one another.”
For Friedman, the services are not only about grief, but about presence and resolve.
“We are here,” he said. “We are not going anywhere.”
He ended with words that have echoed through Jewish history in moments of trauma and endurance.
“Am Yisrael Chai,” he said. “We will get through this. We always have.”
The final memorial gathering will be this Sunday at 8:30pm and mark the end of Shloshim. Gatherings are held outside Bondi Pavillion on the side away from the beach.
