There are years that scar a community, and years that bind a people together across borders. 2025 was both. For Jews everywhere, 2025 was not the year antisemitism returned. It was the year antisemitism stopped pretending to leave or dissipate. It became unmistakably global – moving across continents with ease, borrowing language from politics, energy from social media, and legitimacy from the world’s hesitation to confront it directly.

By December, Jews in Sydney, Manchester, Washington, Paris, Jerusalem, Montreal, New York and beyond were no longer trading stories out of curiosity, but out of recognition and fear. The flags, accents and locations changed but the pattern did not. A swastika on a wall in one country echoed a knife attack at a memorial in another. A gunman at a museum in Washington sat in the same moral universe as an arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne. And when terror reached Bondi, it shattered a comforting myth shared by many in the diaspora – that somewhere, at least, Jewish life could be public without consequence.

Many believed that as war in Israel receded from headlines, hatred would recede with it. 2025 proved the opposite. Antisemitism detached itself from any single conflict. It no longer needed justification. It became self-sustaining – ideological, emotional, and increasingly violent.

This is a record of 2025: the defining antisemitic attacks and incidents, and what they revealed. Jewish history demands we understand what our Haggadah tells us each year when we read ‘Vehi Sheamda.’ It also tells us that we have and always will rebuild and there is always light in the darkest of times. So Part two will be a record of how Jewish life in 2025, both in Israel and across the diaspora, answered hatred not only with grief, but with stubborn continuity and defiant beauty.

The Year of Attacks, Names, and Warnings (Unfortunately, in no way is this list exhaustive)

1) The Bondi Hanukkah Massacre (Sydney, Australia)

What happened:
The night was meant to be simple: a public Hanukkah celebration in a park overlooking the iconic Bondi Beach – candles, music, families, children darting between adults, the gentle audacity of Jewish visibility in one of the most iconic public spaces in Australia. The sort of event that quietly says what Jews in the diaspora have always wanted to believe: we can belong here safely, openly, without shrinking ourselves.

Instead, it became the deadliest antisemitic and terrorist attack in Australian history – and one of the most devastating assaults on Jewish public life in 2025 and previously. Fifteen people were murdered. More than forty were wounded, many critically, many permanently – many still in hospital fighting for their lives right now. The victims reflected the fullness of Jewish life: children, young adults, parents, elders. Matilda, aged ten, was killed while attending with her family, the kind of name that should only be spoken at school assemblies and birthday parties, not memorials. As well as the other end of Jewish life – Holocaust survivors slaughtered – people who had once fled the epicentre of antisemitic annihilation were murdered, this time in their new safe haven in the far edge of the earth.

How it happened:
Two attackers, later identified as an Islamic radicalised father and son, opened fire on the crowd with high-powered weapons. Panic spread as reports of possible explosives emerged. Families scattered. Children hid. Bodies murdered and injured lay scattered across Archer Park in a scene resembling a war zones on the other side of the world. Emergency responders arrived to the scene of a mass casualty event never before witnessed in Australia.

Response and reaction:
Condemnations flowed instantly – solemn statements from leaders, promises of unity, an urgent tightening of security at Jewish schools, synagogues, community centres and events across Australia (you’ll start to see a pattern). But grief did not settle into quiet. It sharpened into demand. Families of the murdered called for a Royal Commission, insisting that Bondi was not an anomaly but the culmination of years of escalating antisemitism – threats, vandalism, intimidation and online radicalisation that had been treated too often as “incidents” instead of warnings.

The government refused that request. Instead pursuing narrower processes and timelines. The refusal itself became part of the story – because when the bereaved ask for the highest form of accountability a nation can provide, and the state says no, it tells Jews something we recognise instinctively: the truth is being managed.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)