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A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR and a local rabbi were named as being 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 Bondi Beach on Sunday evening to mark the start of the Hanukkah holiday. Local media has reported the attackers’ potential links to the Islamic State.
The father, named in local media as 50-year-old Sajid Akram, was killed in a shootout with police. His son, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, is critically injured and is in hospital in Sydney.
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”.
A ten-year-old girl who was killed in the shooting has been named only as Matilda. She died in a children’s hospital, police said. She is the youngest victim of the attack.
The Harmony Russian School of Sydney confirmed the death of Matilda, who was one of its students, in a post to Facebook.
“We are deeply saddened to share the news that a former student of our school has passed away in the hospital due to injuries sustained from a gunshot. Our thoughts and heartfelt condolences go out to her family, friends, and everyone affected by this tragic event,” the school said.
Randwick Rugby Club confirmed the death of Peter Meagher, who it said went by Marzo, in a post on its website.
Peter was a retired Detective Sergeant who had served in the police force for almost 40 years, it said.
The club wrote: “It is with an extremely heavy heart that Randwick DRUFC can confirm the tragic passing of our much loved First Grade Manager and loyal club volunteer Peter Meagher yesterday.
“Devastatingly, Peter was caught up in these horrible Bondi Beach shootings and was sadly one of 15 innocent people, who have lost their lives.
“Peter was working as a freelance photographer at the ill-fated Hanukkah event and for him it was simply a catastrophic case of being in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”
Reuven Morrison, originally from the former Soviet Union, was another victim in the shooting. Local media has said he migrated to Australia as a teenager, where he was a successful businessman and a prominent member of the local Jewish community in Sydney.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation named man Tibor Weitzen and a woman named Marika Pogany as two more of the victims in the shooting.
The oldest victim 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 today.
Additional reporting by AFP
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