Bondi Beach terror victim Rabbi Eli Schlanger has…
He saved her life — now her mission is to save his legacy. Nikki Goldstein doesn’t keep in mind the first time she met Rabbi Eli Schlanger in September 2022. She was comatose in a Sydney, Australia, ICU, battling pneumonia and failing lungs. Doctors didn’t assume the 57-year-old would live to see the next day.
Moments after her husband and daughter lifted their bowed heads resting over wires on her hospital mattress, they caught a glimpse of a whirling dervish darting past the room carrying a yarmulke.
Though Goldstein was a secular Jew who never went to synagogue, her determined husband Rowan requested the rabbi to give his dying spouse a blessing.
When Nikki Goldstein’s husband requested Rabbi Eli Schlanger to give her a blessing, he sounded the shofar in her hospital room. Facebook/Eli Schlanger
Before reciting historical prayers over her “near lifeless” physique, the bearded, bespeckled younger rabbi brandished a ram’s horn recognized as a shofar, auspiciously blown before the Jewish High Holidays.
He sounded the simple instrument thought of a “spiritual wake-up call” that “pierces the heavens” with its plaintive cry and left Goldstein’s room.
By the next day her infection retreated as docs introduced Goldstein out of the coma, one thing the medical group jokingly hailed as a “miracle.”
A few days later while doing his rounds as a hospital chaplain, Schlanger walked through the recovery ward and noticed Goldstein — sitting up, speaking on the cellphone and wanting strong.
“You survived,” he said, wanting “completely shocked,” Goldstein, whose new guide, “Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World” (Harper Influence), comes out May 26, recalled to The Post.
Nikki Goldstein would turn out to be recognized as “Eli’s miracle.”
She would immediately be recognized as “Eli’s miracle.”
“I don’t really know who you are,” said Goldstein, a bestselling writer, of their first dialog. “And I didn’t understand much of what you did. What I do know is this — God has given me a second chance. I’m alive today because of the mitzvot [good deeds] you brought into that hospital room.”
In fact, she had never met a rabbi before. But as he entered her new room, she felt no longer grim — but full of hope.
Before she left that hospital, the tenacious assistant rabbi of Chabad Bondi in Sydney proposed they write a guide together.
She was fascinated by Schlanger, a British native and married father of 5 who called Sydney home for the past 18 years. Anyone who met the Orthodox rabbi said “they were in the presence of someone quite special,” writes Goldstein.
“He was the first person to say he wasn’t a saint, but not many people walk with God in a moment-by-moment real-time way. It made him electric, somewhat eccentric, and very alive.”
Schlanger later explained the significance of sharing with the world the Noahide Laws, the seven legal guidelines given to Noah after the great flood, predating the Ten Commandments, about how to create a just society.
“What are the Noahide Laws?’” Goldstein recalled asking the rabbi at the time. But once she discovered that the legal guidelines, meant for everybody, regardless of religion or background, merely deliver Jewish knowledge into a trendy context and help humanity live in concord, she was in.
“I was intrigued,” admitted Goldstein, now 60.
The seven legal guidelines — Do not worship idols; Do not blaspheme; Do not homicide; Do not eat the flesh of a dwelling animal; Do not steal; Do not commit acts of inappropriate immorality; Establish courts of justice in our world — communicated from God to Adam and Noah imply that they’re common and apply to all humanity.
They have been the proper odd couple.
A secular Jew who felt like a “tourist in my own tradition” and the religious rabbi whom Goldstein described as somebody who “lived with God, breathed God, wrestled with God.”
Though coming from profoundly different worlds — one steeped in spiritual custom, the other in a non secular secularism — they found they have been in search of solutions to the same important questions.
“I don’t really know who you are,” Goldstein told the Rabbi. “And I didn’t understand much of what you did. What I do know is this— God has given me a second chance. I’m alive today because of the mitzvot [good deeds] you brought into that hospital room.”
The legal guidelines, a common ethical code, aren’t spiritual, argued Goldstein, noting “they’re an ethical and moral framework meant to uplift and uphold a good world. And they’re important now because people are very lost.”
Now, she has a profound understanding of just how misplaced.
On December 14, 2025, the first night time of Chanukah, moments before lighting the menorah before a crowd of hundreds, Schlanger was shot and killed by terrorists who opened fire on the gang celebrating his signature “Chanukah by the Sea” pageant at world-famous Bondi Beach.
Schlanger was shot in the back after throwing himself on a group member to defend them from the bullets, and died immediately. POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Schlanger was a prison chaplain who was recognized for having the ability to discuss to anybody, with an uncanny present to meet them where they’re “in nanoseconds.” Tragically, it didn’t work this time. The rabbi, with his “deep belief in humanity and the goodness in people,” was seen pleading with the terrorist, according to other survivors.
He was shot in the back after throwing himself on a group member to defend them from the bullets, and died immediately.
The focused bloodbath killed a complete of 15 innocents — from 10-year-old Matilda to 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alex Kleytman — and injured dozens, including Schlanger’s spouse, Chaya, who was grazed in the back and their two-month-old son, who took shrapnel to the leg.
“He gave his life for his Judaism,” says Goldstein of her buddy and trainer. Facebook/Eli Schlanger
It’s thought of the worst terror assault in Australian historical past.
The co-authors who cultivated a deep friendship have been mere weeks away from ending the seventh and last chapter: “What Does Justice Look Like?”
“Establishing courts means creating a world where the widow, the orphan, the homeless person, and even a stranger has a forum in which they can stand before power and be heard,” said Schlanger. “This law… is for all of us.”
The back and forth, real-time radically candid conversations lend an immediacy and intimacy that makes readers really feel they’re half of a dialogue between buddies. They problem and push one another to query assumptions.
These messages are all the more highly effective now for Goldstein — attempting to foster the best of humanity when Schlanger’s life was cruelly stolen by the worst of humanity, when humanity fails.
The two terrorists have been father and son. Sajid Akram, 50, was killed by police on the spot, and his son, Naveed, 24, was already dealing with 59 costs, including 15 counts of homicide, when he was hit with an extra 19 costs earlier this month.
Today, Goldstein refuses to give them “any brain space” and focuses on the that means of the timeless Jewish ideas, which hit in another way now.
“Eli showed me that when you embrace the rules, they become just part of the relationship that you have with God,” she said. “I think I really misunderstood how Eli saw the rules and the covenant,” she said in reflection. ”I assumed that they have been a burden.”
The legal guidelines, “God’s gift to everybody,” aren’t “so onerous,” she said, noting her shifted perspective on the Torah’s 613 commandments post-Bondi Beach assault. “What strikes me now—after Eli’s gone—is that if Eli could adhere to 613, we can all do seven. It’s not that hard, right?”
Goldstein said she seems to be at the legal guidelines in a deeper, more profound manner in the wake of the assault.
She now understands that “do not worship idols” isn’t about bowing to an summary golden calf, but about cultivating an “intimate, direct relationship with God.”
The creator is “gently, compassionately, lovingly inviting us to connect in a very personal way,” a revelation that only got here to her after shedding Schlanger.
“That’s changed my life.”
Mourners after the Bondi Beach capturing. Getty Images
The affect of the bloodbath will never depart her. “Had Eli still been alive, I still would have been struggling with all those rules,” she admitted.
Goldstein spent her complete life looking for solutions, and her “epic” likelihood assembly with Schlanger “transformed” her life in more methods than one.
“I was always looking for answers, but the way that it came to me through Eli, is that I treasure.”
How Australia — thought of one of the most secure nations in the world and recognized as a protected haven for Jews for over a century — may permit the high quality cracks of hate to break huge open, is devastating for Goldstein.
Her own refugee German Jewish grandparents, fleeing on the precipice of the Holocaust, have been warmly welcomed into their new home on the other aspect of the world.
Schlanger believed in the best of humanity. Facebook/Eli Schlanger
With a modest national Jewish population of 120,000, the wakeup call of the Bondi Beach bloodbath never fairly materialized.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had initially “refused” to maintain a Federal Royal Commission for the assault, according to Goldstein, of the formal, impartial inquiry into systemic failures that help “uncover facts and assign accountability.”
Though the inquiry course of is now underway, Goldstein blasted the galling recalcitrance. “He was guilted into it — it was gobsmacking,” she lamented.
Goldstein is still ready for a reckoning.
Earlier this month, a girl was charged with antisemitism for allegedly shouting, “F–k the Jews” at a ladies’ under-12 athletic meet in Sydney. She was heard including Jews “should have been eradicated.”
It adopted a Sydney “Globalize the Intifada” event that occurred, overriding the mayor’s cancellation for fears it could spark violence.
Last month, a unity live performance for the Bondi Beach victims was canceled after the Australian Hellenic Choir refused to carry out with the Jewish Choral Society, a collaboration that last occurred “without issue” in 2022, a yr before the Oct. 7 terror assault.
Now, Goldstein sees herself as a conduit for Schlanger’s mission.
“He leaves a big hole in this world,” she said through tears. “He would have gone on to do so much good for so long.”
“He leaves a big hole in this world,” Goldstein said of the late rabbi. Facebook/Eli Schlanger
Schlanger’s goal was to let people know they weren’t forgotten, even and particularly in the worst of circumstances, whether or not it’s mendacity in a hospital mattress or languishing in prison.
Now, Goldstein is making certain that her loving buddy’s “light” received’t “die with him.
“Through the hours of conversations, he had prepared me to be his herald, his foot soldier, and his torch-bearer,” she writes.
Schlanger used the shofar as an instrument to “call my soul back,” she writes of destiny’s merciless bait and change. “He switched roles on me. He was supposed to be the teacher, not me.”
“He entrusted me with the words,” Goldstein said. “He gave his life for his Judaism.”
Doree Lewak is a common contributor to the New York Post. She has also written for the Daily Mail, The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
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