MELBOURNE, Australia — Passover was always one of her family’s favorite festivals, but this year, Sheina Gutnick is dreading the holiday’s arrival. It will be the first time celebrating without her father, Reuven Morrison, who was murdered in the terror attack on a Hanukkah gathering at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December.

“My dad loved Passover. He would prepare everything himself for the Seder, barbecuing the lamb shanks, grinding up his own maror,” Gutnick said, referring to the horseradish traditionally used as the bitter herb for the Seder plate. “I think he really felt a deep connection to the festival as an ex-Soviet Jew who lived behind the Iron Curtain, and he really related to Jewish suffering and the Exodus from Egypt.”

In the three months since the Bondi Beach shooting attack, which saw 15 people killed by a father and son inspired by the Islamic State terror organization, Gutnick has hardly had a chance to breathe.

She has successfully lobbied Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to establish a royal commission into the Bondi attack, met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on his visit to Australia, spoken to international media about rising antisemitism in Australia, and tried to piece together exactly what happened in the moments before her father’s death.

The work is relentless, but so is the need behind it: to understand how something like this could happen in a country that has not historically seen itself as having an entrenched antisemitism problem.

What remains most vivid to Gutnick, however, is the night that her father was killed.

Morrison, who lived across the road from his daughter in Melbourne, had traveled to Sydney for the Hanukkah event. After immigrating to Australia, Morrison first lived in Sydney and maintained close ties with the Chabad of Bondi community, attending the Hanukkah festivities almost every year.

Gutnick, who was at a Hanukkah party in Melbourne with her husband and children, ran into a friend when she first got an inkling that something was wrong.

“As we were leaving the [Melbourne] Hanukkah party, I saw that my friend was as grey as a ghost. He told me that he had just got off the phone with his family and that there was a shooting at the Chabad of Bondi........

© The Times of Israel