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Just before Hanukkah attack, Jewish mayor of Bondi Beach region had been praised for fighting antisemitism
Three weeks before the Hanukkah mass shooting in Australia that has become the deadliest attack on Diaspora Jews in decades, the mayor of the affected region had been feted at a global summit for fighting antisemitism.
“I think it’s really important for us here in Australia, and particularly Waverley, to be proud that we’ve been put on the international stage talking about what we have done in Australia to combat antisemitism,” Will Nemesh, the mayor of the Sydney-area region of Waverley, told the Australian Jewish News about his appearance and panel discussion at the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s mayoral summit held in Paris.
Nemesh’s participation there followed one at an earlier event in September, with other Australian mayors, also put on by the Combat Antisemitism Movement. Jewish himself, Nemesh was committed enough to the cause of fighting antisemitism that he gave a presentation to his city council just days before the attack.
Nemesh’s staff was unable to make him available to comment for this article. But he spoke about his efforts to curb antisemitism during a gathering last week when he convened other mayors from the region in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in which a father and son who had pledged allegiance to ISIS killed 15 people and wounded more than two dozen others at a menorah lighting at Waverley’s Bondi Beach.
“The last time we gathered as mayors in this same place was in February of this year. We gathered with a mission calling for action on antisemitism,” Nemesh said. “We had seen hate spreading through our communities. We knew then, as we know now, that hatred targeted towards the Jewish people never ends there. It spreads like a virus, infects our social cohesion and our Australian way of life, and tragically now it has directly led the loss of life.”
About his fellow mayors, he added, “Being here demonstrates their commitment to combating antisemitism at a local level.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement has long pressured governments and institutions to follow its playbook in order to prevent antisemitic incidents. Now, with a vocal adherent of its strategy having experienced a violent antisemitic attack under his watch, an emissary for the movement has nothing but praise for him.
“You can definitely not blame him. He’s the last person you can blame,” Yigal Nisell, an advisor for the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Australia branch, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about Nemesh. “He’s not just a supporter of the Jewish community, he’s probably the most active mayor in Australia against antisemitism.”
At the same time, Nisell said, the organization has “a lot of anger coming out now for the government, massive anger.”
That anger, he said, should be directed at senior Australian officials, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whom Nisell believes helped encourage the attack by recently recognizing a Palestinian state in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel-Gaza war.
Nisell took little heart in statements from Albanese and others, both before the attack and after, that condemned antisemitism and vowed to root out influence from foreign actors like Iran.
“It’s all bulls–t,” he said. “They didn’t protect the Jewish community… If you look at other governments in the past, this would have never happened because they were very strict, they stood supportive of the Jewish community.”
A sign reading “Jewish Lives Should Matter, Too” is seen at the floral tributes area outside Bondi Pavilion in Sydney on December 18, 2025, to honour victims of the Bondi Beach shooting. The attack at Bondi Beach on December 14 was one of the deadliest in Australian history. (Photo by DAVID GRAY / AFP via Getty Images)
Days after Nisell first spoke with JTA, Albanese gave an address in which the prime minister said he would “accept my responsibility” in failing to safeguard Australia from antisemitism. He unveiled a new plan that includes harsher penalties for speech targeting Jews, shortly after the United Kingdom announced that it would also begin stricter speech prosecution.
“It’s a very, very good step,” Nisell said of Albanese’s plan. “Unfortunately, we had to wait for this kind of incident to make it clear for him that this is necessary.”
But Albanese later declined to convene a state commission to investigate intelligence failings in the lead-up to the attack, inflaming his critics’ anger. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition calling for his resignation.
Nisell, who is a former senior executive at CAM, lived in Australia for years before moving to Israel in 2023. He is currently head of Mosaic United, a project of Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.
In his time in Australia, he said, Nemesh was one of the few government officials who took the threat of rising antisemitism in Australia seriously.
“Will stood almost every day and warned the government that all these hate crimes were happening in his backyard, and warned them that if this won’t be stopped it could get much, much worse,” he said.
It was a mission that Nemesh felt acutely. Born and raised in Sydney, he is a member of Emanuel Synagogue, a leading liberal congregation in Sydney, and a former staffer at the New South Wales Board of Deputies, a Jewish representative body. In university, he was a leader in Australia’s Jewish student group. He was elected to the Waverley Council in 2017 and chosen for a two-year term as its mayor last year, making him the first Jew to hold the role in the heavily Jewish area in 16 years.
The election followed a controversy on the council, when a deputy mayor voted against condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“I think it’s very important to have a strong voice for the Jewish community. Particularly since October 7, communities have felt traumatized and, in some respects, marginalized,” Nemesh told the Australian Jewish news outlet J-Wire at the time, adding that he thought it was important to be “in a position to call out hate and particularly antisemitism and to show strong leadership on that.”
Just prior to the Bondi Beach attack, CAM — which frequently pressures governments to adapt more stringent policies to fight antisemitism — had celebrated Nemesh as one of the few officials doing the right thing.
The movement praised the “Model Antisemitism Strategy” Nemesh had instituted in Waverley, and had him share the strategy with European mayors in Paris. Nemesh’s plan, a CAM release stated two weeks ago, “offers a practical guide to support councils across the country to build their own locally tailored initiatives to counter antisemitism.”
Among the policies the group applauded was the promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism. “If you are an anti-Zionist, you are an antisemite,” Nisell said, when asked what CAM’s biggest policy priorities are. “This is the biggest thing we want to be clear.”
Mayors have been a major focus of CAM’s activism in recent months, with the group engaging hundreds of such local leaders worldwide on the issue of curbing antisemitism in their communities.
But after the attack, Nisell downplayed the ability of mayors like Nemesh to stand as such bulwarks.
“His power is very, very limited,” he said, of Nemesh. “Will was very active. His council was very active promoting IHRA, promoting statements against antisemitism. I’m just making a point here that everything he has done is just a drop in the sea.”
In fact, Nisell theorized, the mayor’s embrace of such policies may have drawn more attention from antisemitic actors, because he was one of the few mayors in the country who adopted them.
“Because he was only one of very few leaders in Australia that stood against antisemitism, this happened. If there were more, this would never have happened,” Nisell said.
Does the fact that a mayor who proudly and openly embraced CAM’s policies still experienced such a horrific antisemitic attack on his watch mean that there is no way to prevent such incidents? Nisell doesn’t think so. CAM, he said, would continue to promote mayoral summits and policies like Nemesh’s. He hopes that mayors who had declined invitations to attend CAM’s last summit will be compelled by the attack to come to the next one.
On Tuesday the group released an open letter it had circulated to other mayors in its coalition in Australia and beyond, addressed to Nemesh, that offers words of solidarity and encouragement.
“As mayors and council members from around the world, we see firsthand that antisemitism is not an abstract threat — it manifests in our streets, our schools, and our communities,” the letter reads. “Cities are on the front lines of this fight, but governments at all levels must now fully assume their responsibility: to protect Jewish communities, to confront antisemitism decisively, and to ensure that those who incite or commit hatred face real consequences.”
It’s signed, “Mayors and Council Members from Around the World.”
Not every response to the letter has been positive. During the signing phase, an Australian council member told CAM that, while “I unequivocally condemn antisemitism in all its forms … it is essential to distinguish antisemitism from legitimate political and moral positions.”
“Being anti-occupation, anti-genocide, and anti-oppression does not equate to antisemitism,” the official, Cumberland City Councellor Ahmed Ouf, continued in an email shared with JTA. “Condemning the occupation of Palestine, the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people, and the mass killing of tens of thousands of civilians over the past two years is a stance grounded in human rights and international law, not hatred of Jewish people.”
(The open letter does not mention Israel or Palestinians. However, CAM’s ask to its partners includes the statement, “Support for Hamas and terrorist organisations must be illegal, calls for a global intifada investigated, and extremist incitement eradicated.”)
After the attack, Nisell said, he was in contact with Nemesh. “Honestly he couldn’t speak,” he recalled of the mayor. “He is so shocked. Nobody in their wildest dreams could think that this could happen.”
Nisell believes the larger Jewish community should spare Nemesh from its ire. “I really, really hope that this won’t break him, and that this community will show him support,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Just before Hanukkah attack, Jewish mayor of Bondi Beach region had been praised for fighting antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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A hypnotic new album inspired by a unique Yiddish recording
Folklore scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett doesn’t remember interviewing and recording the Yiddish folksinger Rose Cohen in 1968 in Toronto. But this recording may turn out to be one of the most significant ones that made it into the storied archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
In it, Cohen sings ten songs from her childhood in the Kyiv region of Ukraine, in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian and Russian. A handful of these songs have never been found anywhere else.
Cohen, who came to Toronto after World War II, was from a dynasty of what she called khazonishe, or singing rabbis, and learned many of these songs listening to them singing in her home.
This recording became the inspiration for a new album, The Rose Cohen Experience, released last month on Borscht Beat Records. Her songs are performed here by Cantor Sarah Myerson and Ilya Shneyveys, a married couple of talented multi-instrumentalists. The duo, called Electric Rose, took nine of the ten songs Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recorded and created their own elaborate, imaginative versions of them.
In the recording, Myerson — who serves as spiritual leader and cantor at Roosevelt Island Jewish Congregation in New York City — sang them as she and Shneyveys played an array of instruments over loops, creating a surreal, hypnotic sound. Shneyveys was no stranger to this, having once been part of the Yiddish “psychedelic” rock group Forshpil.
One of the songs, Berosh Hashone (On Rosh Hashone) begins with a segment from the solemn High Holidays prayer Unetaneh Tokef, about how our destiny is determined by God, depending on what deeds we’ve done. But then there are other Yiddish verses about an unhappy woman asking her children if she should divorce their father. “We don’t have that as a Yiddish song elsewhere in the repertoire,” Myerson said in an interview. “We don’t know of that song existing in other languages either.”
The album is structured, at least at first, as an imagined narrative of Cohen’s own life. “Ikh heyb mikh on tsu dermonen” (I’m beginning to remember) possesses a driving rhythm and a powerful recollection of an immigrant in North America dreaming of going back to his wife in Europe. Even though it’s a folk song, it’s possibly autobiographical when she sings it, as Cohen’s father immigrated to Toronto before the rest of his family. Myerson and Shneyveys aimed to draw out the autobiographical aspect of this song by playing selections of the Cohen interview where she recalls where she is from and how old she is.
The song transitions to Bay mashin (At the machine), a folk song about a woman slaving over a sewing machine, looking forward to getting married after having assembled her dowry. In an interesting twist, Myerson actually uses the sound of a sewing machine throughout the track, both in recorded and live performances. It’s a small hand-crank sewing machine from the early 20th century, “possibly developed for child labor,” Myerson said.
Myerson contributed a special track, Kale Tfile (Bride’s prayer), to supplement the nine Cohen songs. Kale Tfile is taken from an excerpt of a tkhine (a Yiddish-language women’s prayer) that a woman would recite on the night before the wedding. She found the prayer in an 1897 prayerbook known as the Siddur Korban Minchah.
Myerson said she decided to include this text after trying to imagine how Cohen may have felt singing Bay mashin, where the ending indicates that the female narrator is about to marry. The words are plaintive (“O God, please hear my youthful prayer, receive my hot tears that I now spill before You”), raising the possibility that she is unhappy about the match. Myerson’s performance delivers the song in that spirit, utilizing a vocoder, a keyboard that allows her to harmonize with herself.
From here, the album drops its autobiographical train of thought and moves into a more experiential mode. Mayim Rabim (mighty waters), also known as Psalm 93 — a psalm recited during the Shabbat evening prayer service — is remarkable because, as Myerson said, “we just don’t have many recordings of women of her generation singing liturgy.” Here, we see how Electric Rose made use of ambient recordings; in this case — ocean waves from Miami Beach.
You can catch Electric Rose on their upcoming tours throughout the East Coast, California and Germany.
The post A hypnotic new album inspired by a unique Yiddish recording appeared first on The Forward.
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China Warns Against Foreign ‘Interference’ in Iran as Trump Mulls Response to Regime Crackdown
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
China on Monday expressed hope that the Iranian regime would “overcome” the current anti-government protests sweeping the country, warning against foreign “interference” as US President Donald Trump considered how to respond to Iran’s deadly crackdown on nationwide protests.
“China hopes the Iranian government and people will overcome the current difficulties and uphold stability in the country,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters during a press conference.
“China always opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs, advocates that all countries’ sovereignty and security should be fully protected by international law, and opposes the use or threat of force in international relations,” she continued. “We call on parties to act in ways conducive to peace and stability in the Middle East.”
The comments came as Iran continued to face fierce demonstrations, which began on Dec. 28 over economic hardships but escalated into large-scale protests calling for the downfall of the country’s Islamist regime.
If the regime in Tehran was seriously weakened or potentially collapsed, it would present a problem for a strategic partner of Beijing.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing. Traders and analysts have said that Chinese reliance on Iranian oil will likely increase and replace Venezuelan oil after US forces captured Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro earlier this month.
Iran’s growing ties with China come at a time when Tehran faces mounting economic sanctions from Western powers, while Beijing itself is also under US sanctions.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
The extent of China’s partnership with Iran may be tested as the latter comes under increased international scrutiny over its violent crackdown on anti-regime protests.
US-based rights group HRANA said by late Monday it had verified the deaths of 646 people, including 505 protesters, 113 military and security personnel, and seven bystanders. The group added that it was investigating 579 more reported deaths and that, since the demonstrations began,10,721 people have been arrested.
Other reports gave indicated the number of protesters killed by the regime numbers well into the thousands, but with the regime imposing an internet blackout since Thursday, verification has been difficult.
Trump has said he will intervene against the regime if security forces continue killing protesters. Adding to threats of military action, Trump late on Monday announced that any country doing business with Iran will face a new tariff of 25 percent on its exports to the U.S.
“This order is final and conclusive,” he said in a social media post.
According to reports, Trump was to meet with senior advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for Iran, including military strikes, using cyber weapons, widening sanctions, and providing online help to anti-government sources.
Iran has warned that any military action would be met with force in response.
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories [Israel] as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf told a crowd in Tehran’s Enqelab Square on Monday, adding that Iranians were fighting a four-front war: “economic war, psychological warfare, military war against the US and Israel, and today a war against terrorism.”
However, the White House stressed that Trump hopes to find a diplomatic resolution.
“Diplomacy is always the first option for the president,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” she said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Al Jazeera that he and US envoy Steve Witkoff have been in contact.
Trump said on Sunday the US could meet Iranian officials and he was in contact with Iran’s opposition.
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Arson Suspect Targeted Mississippi Synagogue for ‘Jewish Ties,’ Laughed During Confession: FBI
Smoldered remains of the Beth Israel Congregation’s library. Photo: Screenshot.
The suspect believed to have intentionally ignited a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi has told US federal investigators he targeted the institution over its “Jewish ties,” according to an affidavit the FBI has submitted to federal court.
Stephen Pittman, the FBI said in portions of the affidavit made public on Monday, “was identified as a person of interest and ultimately confessed to lighting a fire inside the building.” The document added that Pittman, arrested on Sunday, purchased the accelerant, gasoline, with which he ignited the blaze from a gas station.
Pittman, 19, allegedly started the conflagration in Beth Israel’s library during the early morning hours on Saturday, setting off a blaze which coursed through the entire building and intensified to the extent that its flames, according to one local account, “were coming out of the synagogue’s windows.” As he carried out the act, he notified his father of it via text message, saying “I did my research,” the
According to the court filing, Pittman also told his father that he was aware of the incident being filmed by Beth Israel’s security cameras, describing them as “the best.”
“Pittman laughed as he told his father what he did and said he finally got them,” read the affidavit from Nicholas Amiano, an FBI agent in the Jackson division.
In the end, Pittman allegedly destroyed a number of Torah scrolls and caused damage so great that the building must, for now, be abandoned while authorities conclude their investigation of the incident and Beth Israel, founded in 1860, weighs a reconstruction which could takes years to complete.
The institution was once targeted by the Ku Klux Klan over its rabbi’s support for civil rights for African Americans. With the latest destruction, some 150 families will be left without the only Jewish house of worship in the city.
“As Jackson’s only synagogue, Beth Israel is a beloved institution, and it is the fellowship of our neighbors and extended community that will see us through,” Beth Israel president Zach Shemper said in a statement. “We are a resilient people. With support from our community, we will rebuild.”
Jackson Mayor John Horhn, a Democrat also issued a statement, saying, “Acts of antisemitism, racism, and religious hatred are attacks on Jackson as a whole and will be treated as acts of terror against residents’ safety and freedom to worship. Targeting people because of their faith, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is morally wrong, un-American, and completely incompatible with the values of this city.”
He added, “Jackson stands with Beth Israel and the Jewish community, and we’ll do everything we can to support them and hold accountable anyone who tried to spread fear and hate here.”
Reactions to the suspected hate crime poured in from major Jewish civil rights organizations across the country, with Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt saying, “An attack on any synagogue is an attack on all Jews.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) called the fire a “hateful act” that “is only the most recent symptom of the dangerous rising antisemitism facing Jewish communities across the country and around the world.”
For several consecutive years, antisemitism in the US has surged to break “all previous annual records,” according to a series of reports issued by the ADL since it began recording data on antisemitic incidents.
The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, providing statistical proof of what has been described as an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly fifty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
The FBI disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
“This latest deplorable crime against a Jewish institution reminds us that the same hatred that motivated the KKK to attack Beth Israel in 1967 is alive today,” the Florida Holocaust Museum said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday. “Antisemitism are still trying to intimidate Jews, drive them out of public life, and make houses of worship targets of violence instead of place of safety and community.”
It added, “With your help we can resist this evil. The more society understands about the nature of antisemitism, including the Holocaust, the better prepared it will be to identify and reject anti-Jewish bigotry. May Beth Israel’s Holocaust Torah, which survived the fire, inspire us all to stand up for each other and create a more just and accepting world.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.