In the evening of Dec. 14, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. As of Dec. 19, of the near 1,000 people attending the event, 15 were killed and 42 were injured.
As the world mourned the victims, Grant High School’s Jewish Student Alliance (JSA) decided to commemorate them in the school’s main hallway and outside its front entrance for the last days of school before winter break.
“I wish I could say I was surprised,” writes JSA president Mica Dorfman, “but these attacks have become all too common. I was (and) still am frustrated at the fact that this is the reality in which we live in. I immediately knew I wanted to do something at school. I reached out to other JSA leaders and we decided to put up a small memorial.”
The posters, put up three days after the attack, honored the 12 victims with obituaries published by BBC News at the time. Matilda, a 10-year-old girl; Rabbi Eli Schlanger; French soccer player Dan Elkayam; husband and Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman; Boris and Sofia Gurman, a married couple of 34 years who attempted to stop one of the gunmen; former police officer Peter Meagher; Reuven Morrison, who also fought one of the gunmen alongside survivor Ahmed al-Ahmed; Rabbi Yaakov Levitan; “‘beloved’ member of the Bondi Chabad Synagogue” Tibor Weitzen; bridge club volunteer Marika Pogany; and Edith Brutman were honored on the poster at Grant’s front entrance.
Brutman was the vice president of the New South Wales branch of B’nai B’rith, a nearly 200-year-old international organization dedicated to “making the world a safer and more tolerant place” through a variety of community-strengthening services. B’nai B’rith even has a Portland chapter, which Dorfman and many other Jewish students in Portland Public Schools are involved in.
“We really just wanted to keep their memories alive,” Dorfman writes.
Since the poster was put up, three more victims were announced dead: father Boris Tetleroyd, whose son was also shot, and is hospitalized; father of four and sports fan Adam Smyth; and Tania Tretiak, whose husband was shot, and is currently in critical condition.
This is not the first tragedy Dorfman has had to grapple with during her four years at Grant. “The Jewish community are certainly no strangers to violence towards us,” Dorfman writes. “But, this attack felt different.” Dorfman writes that the attack provoked responses from people who she never expected to speak up. “I was honestly shocked by the amount of support the Jewish community received in Portland,” she writes.
As tragedies occur across the world, Dorfman finds the power to respond. “It is important to respond to these tragedies because if we keep ignoring them then (I believe) we are subconsciously normalizing them,” she writes. “People need to step back and look at the humanitarian issue that comes with these tragedies. Regardless of your religious beliefs or skin color you should be able to recognize that murder is not okay.”
For this reason, the posters JSA put up at Grant included no Jewish symbols. “We wanted it to simply be a memorial,” Dorfman writes.
As for the future, the JSA plans to hold a discussion on addressing antisemitism that will be open to all Grant students.
