Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel, like many in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, spent Sunday torn between celebrating his faith’s festival of lights and mourning an antisemitic attack in Australia.
But the sting of the shooting on Sydney’s Bondi Beach — in which at least 15 people were killed during a Hanukkah celebration in what Australia’s prime minister called act of antisemitic terrorism — hit hard for the 11th-generation Englishman, who moved to Pittsburgh in 1991.
His cousin’s son, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who lived in Pittsburgh as a child a generation ago, was among the dead.
Schlanger, a father of five, was 41. His youngest son was born just two months ago.
Though mourning, Vogel insisted on attending a Hanukkah parade in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, the city’s center of Jewish life. Vogel runs the Aleph Institute in Squirrel Hill, a nonprofit that aids Jewish prisoners.
“We’re broken and in pain,” Vogel told TribLive Monday morning, “but we’ve got to bring more light and more love into this world.”
Sydney has become a familiar background for anti-Jewish hate, scholars say. Antisemitic acts were up dramatically last year in Australia, where Jews account for about 120,000 of the nation’s 28 million people.
Australia recorded 1,713 antisemitic incidents last year, The Associated Press reported.
The numbers are also up in Pittsburgh.
A total of 304 antisemitic incidents — a single-year record for the region — have been reported this year to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, according to Shawn Brokos, the group’s director of community security and a former FBI agent.
In 2021, the total was 82, Brokos said.
In 2017, the year before 11 Jewish congregants were gunned down in Pittsburgh during an Oct. 27, 2018, Shabbat service at Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue, there were just 27 antisemitic incidents reported citywide.
Brokos said armed guards helped staff 10 different Hanukkah events in the Pittsburgh region on Sunday — a menorah lighting in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, as well as others in Dormont and Mt. Lebanon.
Hanukkah, an eight-day festival that started at sundown Sunday, commemorates the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Maccabees in 165 B.C. after its desecration by the Syrians.
Police have provided additional protection for Jews in the city, adding “extra patrols around synagogues and schools out of an abundance of caution,” Cara Cruz, a police spokeswoman, said.
Administrators at Community Day School, a Jewish K-8 school in Squirrel Hill, responded to the shooting by cancelling all outdoor family candle lighting events for Hanukkah through the remainder of the week, according to a letter distributed to parents after Sunday’s shooting.
All recess at the school was moved indoors.
“Please do not congregate around the menorah during dismissal,” the letter added.
On Sunday, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, took to social media to note the relevance of the attack’s timing.
“The story of Hanukkah feels especially resonant,” Shapiro posted to X. “It’s about sustaining light, even in our darkest moments. It reminds us of our resilience and strength — and to be proud of our faith.”
Shapiro, too, knows the sting first-hand of antisemitic acts. A man firebombed the governor’s mansion in April during Passover, a major Jewish holiday marking the liberation of Jews from Egyptian slavery.
Like many Jews, Shapiro said he planned to light candles with his family this week.
“We are used to greeting each other with ‘Hanukkahsameach,’ or Happy Hanukkah, but that’s so difficult to say when nothing feels particularly happy, particularly ‘sameach,’” Rabbi Danny Schiff, a scholar who works for the Jewish Federation, told TribLive in a phone call from Jerusalem.
Schiff, an Australian born in Bondi and raised in Melbourne, spends six months a year in Pittsburgh. He said he is greeting his Jewish family and friends differently this week.
“I say, ‘May Hanukkah rededicate us to our purpose,’ which is the essence of what those Jews who died would have wanted,” Schiff said.
Vogel told TribLive he was set to drive to Harrisburg on Monday to celebrate Hanukkah with Shapiro and others. He plans to return to his Squirrel Hill home in time to light his menorah around sundown.
“As much as I’d like to stay home and just curl up … I’ve got to get out,” Vogel told TribLive Monday morning. “Terrorism cannot slow us down.”