After Sydney terror attack, a Palisades Hanukkah celebration is ‘all about hope’

The first night of Hanukkah in Pacific Palisades, coming nearly a year after January’s wildfires, was always going to evoke both joy and loss in the beleaguered community.

But on Sunday evening, as leaders from the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades gathered at the Palisades Village mall to light a towering menorah, locals also grieved the massacre at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

A couple lay flowers at a tribute to shooting victims outside the Bondi Pavilion at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Monday, a day after multiple people were shot.

(Mark Baker / Associated Press)

That attack Sunday killed at least 15 and injured at least 38. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the shooting “an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores in an iconic Australian location … associated with joy, associated with families gathering.”

Those killings cast a pall over holiday celebrations in Pacific Palisades, where the Jewish community gathered for the 38th menorah lighting ceremony and the first Hanukkah celebrations since fires decimated the area and Altadena in January.

For Rabbi Zushe Cunin, the executive director of Chabad Palisades who led Sunday’s ceremony, the Sydney attack compounded the grief his community has felt over the last traumatic year.

“I don’t know if you can make make sense of that; it’s not possible to accept,” Cunin said. “We’re made of resiliency, and being able to go forward as we mourn. But it’s unacceptable that people who go out to celebrate as a community, to bring light and joy to the world, and then — look what happens. But our answer to that is to get together and support each other, to create more opportunity for light.”

Security fears necessitated tight controls at the menorah-lighting festival, where guests passed through tiers of armed guards, off-duty police and metal detectors before reaching the music and holiday decorations. But once inside the Palisades Village mall, children ate sufganiyot doughnuts and decorated ornaments while adults danced to upbeat Hanukkah-themed pop songs.

Developer Rick Caruso hands out small menorahs to children at the annual Hanukkah ceremony in Palisades Village.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

Property developer and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who built the Palisades Village mall (and successfully defended it during the blaze), mingled with the grateful crowd before the ceremony.

Even with the added security concerns, producing this event for Palisades locals was “incredibly important,” Caruso said in an interview. “This is all about hope. Hanukkah is the celebration of lights, and it’s about locking arms and supporting each other and being together. Especially after what happened in Australia today, it’s important to show strength together and lift people up.”

Some of the hundreds of attendees on Sunday said they came to honor the resilience of both the Palisades community and the victims of the Australian tragedy. The vulnerability of gathering to celebrate Hanukkah in public after a terror attack weighed on many in the crowd.

“I wanted to come out after what happened in Australia and show solidarity. That was important to me,” said Joseph Shalant, who said he lost three of four properties he owned in the Palisades fire. “To see the warmth of the people here, and the fact that we’re unafraid to come out, shows we won’t be deterred by whatever antisemitism there is, and there’s a lot of it.”

Many attendees, displaced from the area after the fires, used the occasion to catch up with old friends and former neighbors they hadn’t seen in months.

“I’ve been in the Palisades around 24 years, and this is a really important moment, because we’ve missed each other,” said Frances Nedjat-Haiem, a professor at San Diego State University who came up for the Hanukkah celebration. “Everybody’s dispersed all over in different communities. Some of us haven’t seen each other since the fire. This is a place where our community can come back to for hope, and this festival is about bringing the light back into our lives.”

As Cunin and his fellow celebrants raised a torch to light the wicks of the candles atop the 10-foot-tall menorah in the plaza, he told the crowd that “there aren’t words sufficient to express our mixed emotions today.”

Alongside praise for the Palisades and Altadena communities, each beginning to rebuild and reconnect, he mourned the death of Rabbi Eli Schlanger in the Sydney attack, whom Cunin praised as “doing amazing work, who inspired love and joy and supported the community, both Jewish and non.”

A menorah is lighted Sunday at the annual ceremony, where attendees mourned the mass shooting in Australia.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

As the Palisades community wrestled with its own losses and post-fire futures in the area, Cunin hoped that this small ceremony could help them “transform pain into purpose.” Both the Sydney attacks and January’s fires showed how precarious life and community can be.

Still, he felt grateful that, for one night, everyone could feel safe returning to the Palisades to light candles and celebrate.

“People we’ve known for decades are struggling with whether they will come back,” Cunin said. “Even if your house remained, you’re still traumatized, and you’ve missed your community. Tonight was really special, to have a full house of people who want to feel connected to each again.”