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Long before Bondi massacre, Australian Jews lived with a sense of peril
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Jewish men embracing after a morning prayer at the site of the deadly shooting attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Dec 15.
PHOTO: MATTHEW ABBOTT/NYTIMES
Victoria Kim
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SYDNEY – In Ms Rebecca Di Veroli’s 33 years of growing up as a Jew in Australia, a sense of precarity had always been in the background, as much a part of life here as the sun, surf and sand.
Armed guards stood outside every synagogue, every daycare centre, even the Jewish nursing home where she visited her grandfather. Towering walls surrounded the grounds of the Jewish schools she attended. Her father, whose family fled Poland in the midst of a pogrom, forbade the family from attending Jewish gatherings, particularly in open spaces like parks.
