The Sydney Jewish Museum in Australia opened three decades ago to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. Its collection has items like striped trousers from a concentration camp, faded identification papers and a worn guitar with a Star of David drawn on its body.
Now it is adding pieces of a more recent vintage: surf rescue boards that were used as stretchers, Christmas-themed rash guards worn by lifeguards, a part of a car’s rear window, as well as hundreds of plush toys and thousands of dried flowers left at a beachside memorial.
They are reminders of an atrocity that was committed less than three months ago. Just east of the museum, at Bondi Beach, two gunmen targeted Jews and killed 15 people. Dozens of others were injured in what was one the deadliest mass shootings in the country.
“Museums are places of history and it’s not history yet,” said Shannon Biederman the museum’s senior curator. “When something like this happens, there is comfort that can be found in knowing that these stories are going to be preserved.”
The museum has been closed since January 2025 for renovations and will display the new collection, which is now in storage, when it reopens next year. It is a reflection of a community and a country that are still trying to process a tragedy and to commemorate the victims, the youngest of whom was 10.
In Sydney, Bondi Beach is the focal point of Jewish life; the surrounding area is home to a large part of the community. For now, the local authorities have installed a large silver menorah on the site of the attack as a temporary reminder of the lives forever changed, with its solar-powered candles lighting up each night.
It was originally commissioned as a celebration of Jewish culture. The sculpture was set up a few miles from Bondi Beach days before the attack. On Dec. 14, minutes before it was set to light up for the first time, the attackers started firing their long guns.
They targeted a Hanukkah celebration that was organized largely by the Chabad of Bondi.
Rabbi Mendy Ulman, the Chabad’s director, said Bondi had always been a welcoming space for his community to celebrate Jewish holidays, weddings and Shabbat dinners.
Now, the area is a painful reminder of the night he lay on the ground, sheltering behind a sign while hoping his wife and children were safe as the bullets flew around him — bullets that took the life of his brother-in-law.
He said he would probably never be able to bring his children back to the beach-side playground.
The “families that lost people forever, how are they supposed to move forward?” said Rabbi Ulman. “Those who’ve been traumatized, those who’ve been severely injured and have months, if not years, of rehabilitation, how can they move forward?”
“We’re just trying to get past every single day and see a brighter future.”
For many Australian Jews, their everyday lives are a reminder of what happened, said Alex Ryvchin, co-chief of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Roughly 0.5 percent of the country’s population identifies as Jewish, and historically the largest Jewish communities have been centered around Melbourne. But the attack in Bondi has indelibly been woven into the fabric of Jewish Australia, Mr. Ryvchin said.
“Bondi Beach, being such a joyful place, it’s so easy to just forget what happened there,” he said. “But we can’t forget it because that would dishonor the dead.”
The Sydney Jewish Museum is working to record testimonies of those who were at the beach that night as an oral history project. It is challenging, Ms. Biederman said, because everyone in the community knows someone who was there that night, and everyone knows the beach intimately.
“The community coming together and working on building all of these items, whether it be the flowers or the stones or the testimonies, it’s really hard, but I think it’s also been really therapeutic,” Ms. Biederman said.
There also has been some debate about what exactly to preserve.
During the attack, the gunmen fired many rounds of bullets from an Art Deco pedestrian bridge that leads to the beach’s pristine sand. The premier of New South Wales State, where Sydney is, said the bridge should be torn down, calling it a “ghoulish reminder.”
But many local residents, including those in the Jewish community, say it should be preserved.
Ms. Biederman, who had tickets to take her family to the Hanukkah event at Bondi Beach but changed plans, said she was overwhelmed by the number of Australians who want to contribute to the museum’s planned exhibit on the shooting.
While the design of the exhibit has not been finalized, there are thousands of items that the museum will need to sort through: tributes with messages from around the world, Christmas decorations, homemade crafts and sporting memorabilia.
The terrorist attack has forever embedded itself into not only Australian Jewish history, but Australian history, she said, adding “We will ensure that it isn’t forgotten and that it’s properly documented.”
Laura Chung is a Sydney-based reporter and researcher for The Times, covering Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.
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