Some moments divide life into before and after, and some of them arrive quietly, without ceremony. Jessy and Lissy are two women I knew before that kind of moment – before Bondi, before survival became something they would carry with them.

Like many Jews around the world after October 7th, both of them found their way to Citizen Café not because they wanted to “learn Hebrew” in any simple sense, but because they were asking something deeper and more urgent: Where is my tribe? They weren’t looking for answers so much as grounding, a place to feel less alone in what they were carrying. And then Bondi happened.

The moment the body knows

When I listened to Jessy and Lissy talk about that day, what struck me most wasn’t fear, it was recognition. While many people around them assumed the sounds were fireworks, their bodies reacted differently. Not from panic, but from something older: memory, history, images, and stories passed down, October 7th still fresh, years of knowing what terror sounds like even from afar.

Lissy was with her 21-year-old daughter, on their way to a bar mitzvah, when she noticed a large menorah they were walking past — a detail most people would have overlooked. But for her, once the shooting began, that image was enough for everything to click.

She immediately understood this was a terror attack, and she acted.

She knew they had to run for shelter. Wearing high heels, she realized she was slowing her daughter down. Stopping to take them off felt too dangerous — it would make her an easy target. So she screamed at her daughter, “Run without me.” Her daughter refused. She stayed with her, and they ran together toward the closest shelter.

They found refuge near a lifeguard tower, alongside many others. While those around them were frozen in shock and confusion, Lissy took charge. For her, the knowledge and images of October 7 had already kicked in. She was preparing for the worst, and helping those around her do the same.

Three minutes earlier

Jessy had arrived just three minutes before it all began. Her five-year-old daughter Shemi was laughing, watching big bubbles float through the air, doing what kids do when the world still feels uncomplicated. They’d stopped by for a small moment of joy, nothing more.

Shemi was holding a sufganiya – a Hanukkah donut, the kind of thing a five-year-old begs for and then guards with both hands. When the shooting started, Jessy shares how she looked around seeing people look up with joy thinking it’s fireworks – yet she knew immediately and started running. Shemi didn’t put down the Sufganiya. Not while Jessy was lying on top of her feeling at some point she might have sufficated her daughter. Fortunately for them a 40 cm high cement barrier stopped a bullet from hitting them directly. 

When they managed to get home, Shemi still held onto the suffaniya, the way children hold onto things when the world stops making sense. It was only later, once they were finally safe, that she let it go.

That sufganiya became a kind of symbol afterward – of how celebration and terror can exist in the same moment, of how instinct takes over when there’s no time to think. Jessy didn’t arrive that day as a survivor. She was just a mother stopping by with her daughter, holding something small that would come to mean far more than it ever should have.

When Identity Becomes Instinct

This part is uncomfortable to say plainly, but what helped Jessy and Lissy survive that day wasn’t luck or some particular bravery. It was that instinctive knowledge that lives in your body, the kind passed down through generations without anyone having to explicitly teach it. The kind that tells you when to run, when to hide, when to grab your child and stop waiting for explanations.

For many Australians, this sort of threat felt like it belonged somewhere else, to another country’s story. For Jessy and Lissy, it never had. That difference ended up mattering a great deal.

Bondi changed something

Bondi is more than a neighborhood – it’s an icon, a symbol of Australian ease and openness. This attack didn’t happen at a synagogue or somewhere tucked away. It happened in one of the country’s most visible, most beloved public spaces, and that changed the story. Suddenly, it wasn’t only a Jewish experience; it was an Australian one too.

I live in Bondi, but on the day of the attack, I had just landed in Israel for a visit. I remember the strange feeling of realizing that, for once, being in Israel felt like the safer option – when usually, for Israelis, it’s the opposite. That irony has stayed with me, not because it offered any comfort, but because of what it says about how things are shifting.

When I came back, I was grateful that Jessy and Lissy were willing to share what they’d been through. These aren’t easy stories to tell, and they didn’t owe anyone that. But there’s something important in the telling – not as explanation, but as continuity. These stories remind us who we are and what we carry, and the need to keep sharing them honestly and humanly feels clearer now than ever.