SYDNEY: A Holocaust survivor and a local rabbi were named on Monday among 15 people killed in a mass shooting that targeted a Jewish celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach.
A father-and-son duo opened fire as crowds gathered at Sydney’s world-famous Bondi Beach on Sunday evening to mark the start of the Hanukkah holiday.
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Local Jewish bodies named 41-year-old rabbi Eli Schlanger as one of the dead, mourning a community leader who helped to organise the gathering.
“Anyone who knew him knew that he was the very best of us,” said Alex Ryvchin from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
“This was a person who rose each day with a simple mission of doing good. Whatever good he could find, whatever kind deeds he could perform.”
The international Chabad organisation, which represents a branch of Hasidic Jews, said Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman was also killed.
“A native of Ukraine and Holocaust survivor, he was attending his wife Larisa,” the body said in a statement.
“He died shielding her from the gunman’s bullets.”
French President Emmanuel Macron led tributes to Dan Elkayam, a budding amateur footballer and French citizen building a new life in Sydney.
“It is with profound sadness that I learned of the death of our compatriot Dan Elkayam in the anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Sydney,” he wrote on social media.
Sydney’s Rockdale Ilinden football club remembered Elkayam as an “extremely talented and popular figure amongst team mates”.
The youngest victim was a 10-year-old girl who died in a children’s hospital, police said.
The oldest was 87.
Another 42 people were hospitalised, including two police officers.
Police are still unravelling what drove the shootings, although authorities have said the plot was clearly designed to sow terror among the nation’s Jews.
“What we saw yesterday was an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday.
