News of the slayings of at least 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia reached Rabbi David Weiner early Sunday morning as he glanced at the newsfeed on his phone.

“Hanukkah is a beach holiday in Australia,” said Weiner, leader of Knesset Israel in Pittsfield. He knows from experience. He did his rabbinic internship there. His immediate concern was for his wife's family in Sydney, who thankfully did not attend the event.

On Sunday, hundreds of Australians attended an annual Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. Around 6:30 p.m., two gunmen opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 15 people. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia in nearly three decades. One suspect, Naveed Akram, 24, was arrested and critically injured; his father, Sajid Akram, 50, was fatally shot by police.

“People are really shaken, and also nobody is surprised,” Weiner said. “Antisemitism in Australia has been building dramatically and quickly over the last couple of years in the public square with zero condemnation from the government and from public authorities.”

Rabbi David Weiner of Knesset Israel in Pittsfield said "nobody is surprised" by the mass shooting in Australian on Sunday. “It was inevitable that there would be an attack of some sort that would actually result in somebody dying."

In Berkshire County, local rabbis and Jewish organizations are taking cues from their counterparts in Australia, emphasizing resilience, community and the importance of continuing Hanukkah celebrations despite the tragedy. While they’ve heightened security at synagogues and community events, leaders say the focus remains on “adding light” in the face of growing antisemitism worldwide, honoring the holiday’s spirit even as they mourn the victims.

Weiner saw this shift in Australia from what he called “the margins to the mainstream” when his family attended his niece’s bat mitzvah in July in Sydney. The same weekend in Melbourne, a synagogue was firebombed.

“It was inevitable that there would be an attack of some sort that would actually result in somebody dying,” he said.

According to Weiner, Australia’s societal change toward antisemitism can also be seen in other English-speaking countries: Canada, England and the United States.

Still, at Congregation Knesset Israel in Pittsfield on Friday, Weiner will preside at the Shabbat and Hanukkah celebration. While he’ll add a commemoration and shift some of the musical selections to match the mood, he’s taking his inspiration from the Jews in Australia, who gathered on Monday evening at Bondi Beach to both commemorate the lost lives and to celebrate Hanukkah for a second night.

“I don't know that there is a Jewish holiday that doesn't coincide with a recent terror attack,” Weiner said. “We wouldn't have any holidays at this point if we decided to turn Passover and Yom Kippur and Sukkot the holiday in the fall — and now Hanukkah — into memorial days. We can't do that, but we can remember even as we celebrate.”

For Rabbi Levi Volovik, the co-director of Chabad of the Berkshires in Lenox, the attacks hit close to home.

Rabbi Levi Volovik lights the menorah in Lilac Park in Lenox in 2023. Volovik, of Chabad of the Berkshires in Lenox, said his cousin was at Bondi Beach for the Hanukkah celebration where at least 15 people were killed in a terrorist attack.

His cousin, Shmuel Gopin, was at Bondi Beach for the celebration.

“He told me they were saved by a miracle,” Volovik wrote in an email to the community. “He described how the person standing to his left was shot, and how he and his daughter ran and hid behind a tree. In an act of sheer instinct, he threw a stroller in front of his daughter to shield her — minutes later, that stroller was struck by a bullet. Thank God, he and his family are safe.”

Volovik’s teenage daughter was on that same beach a year ago celebrating Hanukkah with her Australian cousins. Rabbi Eli Schlanger led that celebration; he was killed in Sunday’s attack.

For Volovik and other Berkshire leaders, the attack underscored the global rise in antisemitism and the need to remain vigilant locally.

“I think the only thing we can do is add light,” Volovik said. “And you know what? Light is more attractive. Darkness itself is not an entity. It's just an absence of light."

Rabbi Valerie Lieber at Temple Anshe Amunim said she didn’t know of any specific familial ties among her Pittsfield congregation to Sydney or the victims.

“But we’re all Jews, and we all grieve together,” she said. “We’ve really already created all kinds of ways to harden our target. We don’t speak about them publicly.”

Rabbi Jodie Gordon said this is the third time in recent memory that she’s opened the religious school at Hevreh of Southern Berkshire on the day after a terrorist attack. The first two were Oct. 28, 2018, the day after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, and on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas attacked Israel.

On Sunday morning, she had the delicate responsibility of leading a Hanukkah celebration for school-age children and their families.

“Sadly, we're practiced in this,” she said, adding that Hevreh always has a police presence for security purposes. “The sad piece of all of this is that we have a lot of security layers in place because this isn't new.”

While she met with teachers beforehand, “Our practice has been, in front of a room full of children — some of them wearing Hanukkah pajamas and dreidel headbands — is to proceed with Jewish joy. So in terms of what we did frontally, we did not name the event explicitly.”

Still, certain songs and prayers might have taken on a layered meaning for the adults in the room, Gordon said, referring to Debbie Friedman’s modern Hanukkah classic, “Not by Might, Nor by Power,” which takes its central words from the prophet Zechariah.

“It was an apt moment to sort of point out the messaging, ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by spirit alone shall we live in peace,’ which I think of as a quieter response to the moment that we are living in,” Gordon said.

Dara Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, said she worked closely with Andrew Hoffman, the federation’s community security director, to confirm that security was tight and in place, particularly for outdoor community events this week. She also reached out to Lenox Police Chief Mark Smith ahead of Sunday night’s event at The Mount, which drew about 150 people.

Members of the Berkshire Jewish Musicians Collective perform during the Community Hanukkah Celebration at NightWood 2025 at The Mount in Lenox on Sunday night.

Kaufman is making herself available to any organization that wishes to combat antisemitism to “speak and figure out how we can work together on this.”

In addition, on Monday she sent out a list of security protocols to partner organizations.

At the opening night Hanukkah celebration at The Mount, state Rep. Leigh Davis, D-Great Barrington, reflected on the rise in antisemitism in Massachusetts documented by the Special Commission on Antisemitism.

“We need to keep coming together as a community and making it clear that we're not going to normalize hatred and we're not going to normalize antisemitic behavior,” Davis told The Eagle. “It's due to a widespread indifference and a failure to act that these acts continue. And coming together as a community and focusing on the light is what's really, really needed at this time to push back the fear.”

At a brief menorah lighting on the lawn of the Williams inn on Monday evening, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, spoke of the miracles of Hanukkah — and its lessons of resistance.

“Hanukkah is also a remembrance of when the ancient Greco-Syrians tried to wipe us out about 2,200 years ago,” she said. “And the Jewish people is still here. The Greco-Syrians did not extinguish our light. And neither did the Crusades. And neither did the pogroms. And although we grieve with our beloved Australia, the shooting in Australia didn't extinguish our light either.”