What Bondi Beach Taught Us About Courage — and Should Teach Us About Preparedness

In the days since the Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach, names have begun to surface — not as statistics, but as lives destroyed. Families shattered. Futures erased. Some names from that day suggest more than what happened. They illuminate something deeper about Jewish history, moral courage, and the moment we are living through.

Two of those names are Boris Gurman and Ahmed al Ahmad.

They were very different men, bound by nothing except circumstance and conscience. Yet on that evening, both confronted Islamist-supremacist terrorists armed with rifles, and both chose to run toward danger rather than flee from it.

Boris Gurman was celebrating Hanukkah with his wife, Sofia, among hundreds of Jewish Australians and visitors who had gathered to light candles by the sea — an ancient ritual of Jewish continuity performed openly, peacefully, and in public. When the gunmen appeared, Boris did what generations of unarmed Jews have done when history suddenly demands courage: he moved toward the threat.

Like Ahmed al Ahmad — an Arab shop owner whose heroism has rightly been praised — Boris managed the unthinkable. He wrestled a rifle away from one of the terrorists with his bare hands. He disarmed a man intent on slaughtering Jews— a people who have survived pogroms, expulsions, and genocide.

But Boris was almost certainly not trained for combat. He did not — or could not — pull the trigger. In that moment, one of the terrorists shot him. He was mortally wounded, with his wife Sofia at his side, after the two of them had jointly attempted to stop the attack.

There is no criticism here. Only grief. Only awe. Only the unbearable sorrow of knowing what was asked of an ordinary man — and what he gave.

What Boris Gurman did was an act of profound moral courage. It belongs to a long and tragic Jewish tradition: a people often unarmed and unprepared throughout our history in the diaspora, yet unwilling to surrender their humanity even when confronted by those who seek to extinguish it. His bravery echoes across centuries — from communities that stood defenseless before mobs, to families who shielded one another during pogroms, to parents who made impossible choices during the Shoah.

It mirrors the courage of Ahmed al Ahmad, who also ran toward gunfire, who also wrested a rifle from a murderer, and who now lies in a hospital bed because he chose to protect strangers — Jews celebrating Hanukkah among them. Their stories are not parallel. They are shared. Together, they remind us that moral clarity and human courage still exist, even as civilization frays.

But history is not a morality play. It is a structure — a set of conditions that shapes what people are forced to do, and what they are able to do when the moment arrives. And the structure of Jewish life today, especially in the diaspora, is one in which Jews are increasingly targets before they are prepared, victims and mourners before they are protected.

Boris’ courage was extraordinary. His sacrifice was immeasurable. But it should never have been necessary for an unarmed 69-year-old retired mechanic and Jewish father, attending a holiday gathering, to confront with only his bare hands an Islamist-supremacist terrorist armed with a rifle. Nor should Ahmed al Ahmad have had to improvise heroism without training or tools. That they fought at all speaks to their courage. That they had to speaks to who we must become.

This is not a call for bravado. It is a call for responsibility.

A people with the longest memory of violent persecution understands something others often refuse to see: Jew-hatred does not wait for permission, and violence does not arrive politely explained. The past decade, with a near 900% increase in violent antisemitism in the USA alone, has made this painfully clear. Jews have been targeted in Sydney, Paris, London, Los Angeles and New York. And if even a Hanukkah candle-lighting on a public beach is treated as a legitimate target, Jewish communities can no longer rely on hope, distance, or the comforting assumption that “it cannot happen here.”

Preparedness is not militancy. It is prudence. It means training in self-defense. It means learning Krav Maga or similar disciplines. It means responsible firearms training where legal and appropriate. It means refusing to remain the only minority group told that self-protection is morally suspect.

To say this does not diminish the heroism of Boris Gurman or Ahmed al Ahmad. It honors them. It insists that no one else should be forced to improvise in the dark what could have been learned in the light.

Their instinct — to shield others, to confront evil, to refuse passivity — is the legacy they leave us. What we do with that legacy is now our responsibility.

May the memories of Boris and Sofia Gurman be a blessing. May their family find some measure of comfort in knowing that they died as heroes — brave, protective, and unwilling to let evil advance unchecked. And may Ahmed al Ahmad heal fully, knowing that Jewish history will remember his name with gratitude.

Bondi Beach was a tragedy. But like the Hanukkah candles lit that night, the actions of the Gurmans and of Ahmed al Ahmad can still serve as beacons. And in the long, unbroken story of Jewish survival, it is the beacons — not the darkness — that we are commanded to carry forward.

Micha Danzig served in the Israeli Army and is a former police officer with the NYPD. He is currently an attorney and is very active with numerous Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including Stand With Us and the FIDF, and is a national board member of Herut North America.