Sheina Gutnick, née Morrison, never dreamed she’d become the media’s go-to source for authoritative insight into combating anti-Semitism in Australia.
This busy mother of three wears many hats. She works as a behavioral psychologist at a local school in Melbourne, is a kallah and bas mitzvah teacher, and is also very involved in Tahareinu.
“I enjoy making things happen, but in the background,” Sheina says. “I never needed center stage, the biggest microphone or the brightest lights. I actually consider myself an introvert.”
That changed the night Sheina’s father, Reuven Morrison, z”l, was killed on the sandy shore of Bondi Beach at the age of 62.
Attack at Bondi
“All of us were supposed to be there,” Sheina begins, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance. “My parents maintain homes in both Sydney and in Melbourne, and we always pack up our house in Melbourne to join them for summer vacation, which usually coincides with Chanukah here. The Chanukah at the Sea celebration was a yearly fixture. This time, my toddler daughter’s daycare program was ending later, so we opted to join my parents only the following Thursday.”
On Sunday, the first day of Chanukah, the Gutnicks were leaving a Chanukah event. “My baby was crying, a high-pitched wail, which was so unlike her. It wasn’t the cry I was accustomed to hearing. It was a shrill, piercing cry, and it made me edgy. I just wanted to get home.”
On their way out, they bumped into a friend. His face was white.
“I remember the time precisely. It was 6:47 p.m. He told us there’d been a shooting at an event in Bondi.”
Sheina immediately called her father but couldn’t get through. Then she called her mother, Leah Morrison, who answered right away.
“I heard gunshots. So many gunshots. My mother was screaming that men were shooting, and nobody was there to help.”
“Tatty’s down,” her mother said. And then again, “Nobody’s coming to help!”
When the shooting began, Leah Morrison had jumped on top of a friend to shield her. “I’m so grateful my mother’s head was down,” Sheina says, “so she couldn’t see all the carnage around her. As it was, she saw far too much of the horror.”
Sheina was frantic and at a complete loss. “Should I call an ambulance from here in Melbourne? What was happening? We navigated our way to the carpark, my phone still glued to my ear. Then my mother yelled that my father was standing and running.”
The video of the attacks shows that while all the people on the beach were trying to hide, keep low and shield themselves, Reuven Morrison was racing to try to stop the terrorists.
Sheina’s husband drove the family home, which was only five minutes away. During the ride, one of their eight-year-old twins asked if they would ever see Zeida again.
“Of course,” Sheina’s husband replied.
“Something in my heart tore apart,” Sheina remembers. “I couldn’t say that to her. I couldn’t promise.”
At home, Sheina paced back and forth in her living room, still on the phone with her mother. The shooting had stopped, but no emergency services had arrived yet.
Party-goers who were down the beach finally streamed in to help. “The lifeguards came bearing surfboards in lieu of proper gurneys. They began attending to the wounded, giving my father oxygen and performing CPR.”
Although he had been shot several times, Rabbi Morrison was still responsive and gave his name when asked. But at 7:13 p.m., Sheina’s mother reported, medics covered him with a sheet.
Back in Melbourne, Sheina asked if the sheet was up to his shoulder or covering his face.
“When my mother said his face was covered, I thought she was hallucinating. She passed the phone to another woman on the beach, who confirmed that my father was no longer alive. I fell to the ground. My father was gone.”
Back on the phone, Leah told her daughter simply, “There’s no more Tatty.”
“The only thought I had was that I had to get there right away and take care of my mother,” Sheina says, closing her eyes briefly at the memory. “My parents had this old-school marriage where my father took care of my mother, and she in return was completely devoted to him. I never dreamed I’d step into this role before the age of 60, but I knew that I couldn’t fall apart.”
Meanwhile, the Gutnick house was filling up with family and friends who had heard the news. Sheina needed to leave for Sydney right away since the last flight out was at 9:00 p.m. and the airport was 40 minutes away.
Each victim’s name was a fresh horror. “I lived in Sydney and breathed Bondi up until the age of ten,” Sheina explains. “When I heard that Eli Schlanger had been killed, I was shattered. Eli’s wife had been like an older sister to me when I was growing up, and one of his daughters is close with mine.”
As she was leaving, Sheina remembers standing in the doorway of their Melbourne home, the summer evening alive with the sounds of day slowly making way for night. “This is the day our lives changed,” she told her husband.
In the car, the Gutnicks tried contacting a professional for advice about how to break the devastating news to their children, who had been put to sleep in the interim. “We called a youth program leader in our community and asked him to put us in contact with the right people.”
The director couldn’t believe that Sheina’s father had been killed. The news of the attack was beginning to spread.
When Sheina’s husband broke the news to their children the next morning, one of the twins took issue with him. “You promised me we’d see Zeida again,” she said sadly.
“I thought you would,” he replied.
Sheina’s phone pinged as the news spread, but she refused to speak to anyone until she saw her mother. Her husband had the unfortunate responsibility of telling Sheina’s uncle, her father’s brother, the terrible news, even though he had just undergone cardiac surgery.
Flight to Sydney
“I was in the airport, functioning on autopilot, when I spotted another couple I recognized. Their son, a Hatzalah paramedic, had also been shot. What was there to say? We hugged and cried.”
Sheina adds that after many surgeries and interventions, baruch Hashem, their son survived.
“We weren’t seated together on the plane, though that would’ve been a comfort. I sat in my seat, my eyes streaming for the duration of the one-hour flight to Sydney. In the back of my mind, I wondered what the fellow in the next seat was thinking.”
A flight attendant noticed and inquired what was wrong. Sheina told her that her father had been shot. The flight attendant was at a loss. “If you need it, we have some vodka,” she finally offered.
A sister-in-law picked Sheina up from the airport and drove her to her husband’s uncle’s house. While not directly related, they had been best friends with Reuven Morrison. They too were in a state of shock.
By this time, Sheina’s mother was home. Hours after the shooting started, a close relative and friend had finally managed to make her way to the crime scene and taken Leah home. She arrived home even before Sheina landed.
“Everyone in back home in Melbourne kept wondering what my father was doing during the attack,’” Sheina says. “That’s because whoever knew my father knew he was doing something. He wasn’t hunkering down and waiting for them to come for him.”
Video footage released in the hours and days following the attack confirmed their assumptions. While others tried to run and hide, Reuven Morrison had diverted the terrorists’ attention away from them and toward himself. One video snippet shows him taking cover behind a tree and hurling a brick.
“A friend of mine jumped on her kids to shield them,” Sheina says. “She watched as my father ran away from them to distract the terrorists. By the time he threw a brick at one of the terrorists, he’d been shot in the thigh. It took 11 bullets to kill him.”
Sheina exhales. “I keep thinking about what I would have done if we’d been there, replaying all these awful scenarios in my mind. I would have held my baby—and then what? How would I have saved my twins? What would my father have done? My husband might have followed my father straight into the mayhem into the line of fire.”
She describes her father lovingly as a ball of fire, a doer unrestrained by obstacles that would daunt most people. “He lived the last ten minutes of his life the same way he lived all his life. If there was one word to describe my father, it would be ‘unapologetic.’ He was unabashedly proud of being Jewish.”
From Odessa to Bondi
Reuven Morrison’s unapologetic stance regarding Yiddishkeit was something he developed only in adulthood. He had come out of Ukraine in 1977 at the age of 14.
“My father got out of the Soviet Union with the Jewish Agency posing as relatives. After spending a year in a refugee camp in Italy, his family needed to move on. The options were the United States, Eretz Yisrael or Australia. Since he had a brother in Australia, that seemed like the best option.”
In the Soviet Union, growing up Jewish had meant having your identity stamped on your passport and being bullied by classmates. It was a burden but one that Reuven Morrison bore with pride, even though he knew little about Judaism.
“My father remembered his grandfather, who was a lamdan with a big white beard. His grandparents had lived in the shtetl, and his grandmother remembered being locked into a communal building that was doomed to be set on fire. I don’t know how that story ended, but I do know that by the time they left Russia little Yiddishkeit remained.”
Reuven was 17 and Leah 16 when they met in Bondi Beach. Leah was also a refugee from the USSR, and her family history mirrored Reuven’s; she remembered her grandfather coming home with matzah concealed in a pillowcase. She and Reuven were eager to build a life together, and they married a year later.
The story of their kosher wedding still amuses Sheina 42 years later. “Two weeks before their wedding, their very nonkosher venue of choice burned to the ground. The only venue that was available so close to their wedding day was the B’nai B’rith center. My parents were aghast, thinking they’d be serving knaidlach and gefilte fish,” Sheina laughs.
At the wedding, a religious man kept splitting up the men and women during the dancing. The Morrisons were annoyed at him for ruining the atmosphere. “Years later, when they looked at their wedding videos, they were very, very grateful to this person. Thanks to him, my parents had a fully kosher wedding aside from the kosher meal.
“They were childless for 12 painful years,” Sheina continues. “Eventually, someone connected them to the Ulmans in Bondi. The Lubavitcher Rebbe told my father to undergo a bris and that they should undertake to keep taharas hamishpachah. Incredibly, I was born less than a year later. I remained an only child, a miracle. No doctor thought my parents would ever have a child.”
The story behind her parents’ return resonated deeply with Sheina. In her capacity as a kallah teacher and consultant for Tahareinu, she continues to assist others with this mitzvah.
“From the moment I was born, my parents did a complete 180 and I grew up in a completely frum home. My mother wore a sheitel and my father grew a beard. We lived in Sydney up until I was ten years old, when my parents relocated to Melbourne, thinking that it had better chinuch options for me. They maintained two residences because my father’s business interests remained in Sydney.”
Sheina says candidly that being an only child was difficult in some ways. But her parents made sure that the house was very active. “My parents had an open home, full during seudos, full of my friends on Shabbos afternoon. I was never lonely.”
Growing up in the Morrison family occasionally meant having moments that were embarrassing to a teen. “My father had the strongest moral compass I’ve ever seen,” Sheina says. “He was a protector, a defender of Yidden and Yiddishkeit and of his family. In the videos of the attack I see his stance and his gait; he was in full protector mode. We keep saying over and over that if he had to leave, this is the way he would have chosen to go: defending am Yisrael.”
Building Chabad of Bondi
Reuven Morrison was deeply involved in the Sydney community. When he spotted the tennis court near his old shul, he knew it would eventually become the site of the new Chabad of Bondi. What he didn’t know was that it would take 12 years, including a trip to Canberra for permits, for the building to be completed.
Sheina says the process was far from simple.
“In 2017, a court rejected the application, concerned that a shul would pose a security risk in a residential neighborhood. The backlash was brutal and swift. Would Jews be required to move to ghettos out of fear for their neighbors’ safety? That would be rewarding terrorism,” Sheina maintains.
Eventually, they got around that, too.
“The ribbon-cutting ceremony was held 18 months before the attack. My father was beaming, calling the shul his second baby. We’ve been back there since the attacks and it’s heartbreaking. So many empty seats. So much horror.” Sheina paints a picture of a community still grieving.
“My father also had unconventional views on education. He worried that schools stifle children’s innate creativity, and he kept reiterating that I could do whatever I wanted to do. He fully expected me to use the talents Hashem gave me.”
Grief Becomes a Mission
It was that voice in her head—her father’s voice—that prompted her to acquiesce to CBS’s request for an interview two days after the attacks.
“My phone kept buzzing nonstop with media requests. One stood out. CBS wanted to ‘tell the world what your father did,’ as they put it.” Sheina lips tighten into a determined line. “I realized that if I didn’t tell my father’s story, nobody would.”
By Monday night, Sheina was completely wrung out. She hadn’t slept since Motzaei Shabbos, and her father’s body hadn’t even been released by the coroner. Through all the grief, she felt that she had no choice. She had to do the interview. There was no one else.
She did not mince words when she spoke about the government’s egregious failures. The next morning the papers pounced, running with the headline “Blood Is on His Hands.”
A week after the shivah, Sheina flew back to Sydney and Bondi Beach. The media had set up banks of cameras a few feet away from where her father had fallen. She squared her shoulders and went from microphone to microphone, speaking in front of the blinking red lights with a poise she didn’t feel.
“I was pretty much shoved in front of the cameras. It was grueling and the location from where it happened was far too close. Whenever I thought I’d break down, I heard my father telling me, ‘It’s just a place. It’s just a place.’”
Condolence calls poured in from around the world, including a letter from King Charles of England in which he labeled the atrocity “an anti-Semitic terror attack.” From the office of the Australian prime minister came the sound of silence.
“At the time, nobody from Prime Minister Albanese’s office reached out,” Sheina says. “No letter, no call, no emissary. Complete quiet.”
Five weeks later, the Australian Parliament reconvened sessions to pass a condolence motion.
“Many of us traveled to Canberra,” Sheina continues. “Some family members were too traumatized to attend. Others were dealing with the aftermath of the attack, including injuries.”
She and her husband finally met the prime minister.
“It was a hard meeting,” she concedes. “We needed to walk a tightrope between opening a positive dialogue and calling out the government for fostering an environment in which such an attack could happen. We saw the worst and best of Australia that day, and we chose to highlight the best of society.
“At that meeting, we also discussed how authorities can help families. Terrorism is so rare in Australia that support for families doesn’t really exist. I remember pleading with the coroner to release my father’s body. It ended up taking two agonizing days. The reason? There was no way to process victims of terror yet.”
She laughs a brittle, humorless laugh. “It certainly wasn’t a homicide, but they didn’t have the proper designation for a victim of terrorism. So because of that, we couldn’t bury our dead.”
The Australian government resisted calls to establish a Royal Commission, the most powerful form of public inquiry. Such a commission would have broad legal powers independent of the government, much like a special prosecutor in the US. Opening one to investigate anti-Semitism after the attack seemed like the only logical thing to do.
Empowering such a commission, Sheina knew, would lay bare the faults of the country’s top leaders. “As I’ve repeated in my media appearances, anti-Semitism in Australia, and elsewhere around the world, had been confined to the gutters. But in the aftermath of October 7, and in the wake of the pro-Palestinian protest two days later and the Harbour Bridge protest, something shifted. Emboldened by state-sanctioned silence, anti-Semitism has overflowed from the gutters and into the mainstream, a powerful, steaming roar of hate.”
Together with a former treasury secretary, Sheina spearheaded an effort to force Canberra’s hand. She wrote a letter signed by family members of all the victims of the tragedy, wrote extensively online and gave several interviews. The officials ultimately caved in and established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
On May 1, Sheina entered the chamber of the Royal Commission as its first witness. Her husband asked if she was nervous; the chamber was imposing, as were the solemn faces of the tribunal she faced.
“I heard my father telling me, ‘It’s just people. It’s just people,’” she replied.
Sheina recalls her testimony that day. “I told the Commission that I’d been called a terrorist, verbally abused in a shopping center lot clutching a baby, terrified of what the interlocutor might do next. But my encounters were benign compared to the firebombing of the Adass Yisroel shul in Melbourne and the Jewish catering company in Sydney. All Australians must know what we are living through.
“I’m sure my father would be proud if he saw me today,” she adds quietly. “Proud, but not surprised. He’d say, ‘That’s my daughter, using her gifts.’”
Changing the Conversation
Sheina then spoke at an event that was attended by Israeli President Yitzchak Herzog. “We were locked into the stadium after the event for our own safety,” she recounts. “Why has this become normal?”
After that event, Sheina met with Alex Polson, who had been instrumental in helping her force the establishment of the Royal Commission. He told her he was now a senior advisor to a US-based NGO called the Combating Antisemitism Movement, or CAM.
“That’s nice,” Sheina responded.
“Sheina,” her husband said, “he’s offering you a job.”
“Essentially, yes,” Alex responded. “We need voices like yours carrying the message globally.”
Sheina is now the Australian public affairs advocate for CAM. In her official position, she’s met with mayors, local councilors, lawmakers and others, raising the alarm from the grassroots level up.
“As a visibly frum woman and someone who’s experienced anti-Semitism in its ugliest, most venomous form, I have a unique perspective,” Sheina elucidates. “And I can also speak about am Yisrael’s resilience, about a nation that remains unbowed.”
In the current climate, with a prime minister who hasn’t been Israel’s biggest ally historically, Sheina calls the Australian government to task for failing to safeguard its own citizens.
“The Bondi terrorists were known to Australian intelligence as terror threats. This information wasn’t transmitted to local authorities, and one of them purchased legal firearms. And Australia has the toughest gun laws on the books! In addition, the police force assembled to guard the event was scaled down to three officers, all of whom proved to be completely ineffective, leaving passersby to attempt to disarm the terrorists on their own. In my father’s case, it cost him his life.”
She pauses for air.
“Of course, we need more security. But why doesn’t the administration stop policing reactively instead of examining the policies that drove this need in the first place? Why was the only person arrested at the large pro-Hamas protest in Sydney a man with an Israeli flag? Why is it okay for a public school teacher to hand out Hamas headbands to her young students? Why was the public content when an Australian of the Year called to globalize the intifada?”
Most Australians, Sheina is quick to confirm, are decent, upstanding people. “Traditional Aussies tend to say, ‘Take a step back, mate.’ It’s among the younger generation, who are fed a steady diet of misinformation by social media algorithms, that even intelligent people can fall prey to false narratives.”
Sheina points out that Covid also significantly contributed to a dissolution of social cohesion because young millennials turned to their social media feeds for news, hunkering down in their individual echo chambers.
Putting on her behavioral therapist hat for a moment, Sheina reflects on how social media has made the world smaller. “Our brains aren’t designed to interpret so many streams of consciousness simultaneously in our whole lifetime, never mind in 15 minutes.”
Because the world is now a single global village, Sheina maintains, anti-Semitism is now a global problem. “And unless you want to move to a remote island and live off coconuts, you will encounter it in some form,” she says. But she tempers this bleak reality with a note of hope. “We’ve lived through this before. And we’ve always risen above it.
“I see the young college students as divided in two camps. One group consists of delicate, cosseted children who have found their purpose in furthering the Palestinian cause. For them, resistance is the modern-day Vietnam. They don’t engage, and there’s nothing we can say that will ever make a dent.” She writes off that population completely.
“It’s the second group that our efforts are targeting. These people are highly intelligent and well-read, but they are victims of an active misinformation campaign by the media. They are open to hearing new narratives, and we stand a chance to move the needle with them.”
CAM held a summit in Australia for regional lawmakers to understand what anti-Semitism is.
“These mayors had never met a Jewish woman, let alone a religious one. Some don’t know that their constituents are Jewish. The average Australian has no clue how we are living, and once we do tell them, they want to make changes of their own.”
Another summit is scheduled in the near future. CAM intends to use these summits as a springboard to either forward the Royal Commission’s conclusions or combat them should it become necessary.
Many non-Jewish Australians are shocked once they hear CAM speak out. “A sportscaster used his platform to shine the spotlight on anti-Semitism, and the hatred he got for that spurred him to continue his work,” Sheina states. “For decades now, politicians have been pandering to the shrillest viewpoints, and decent Australians are sick of it.”
Although much of her work has received accolades, her inbox is full of hatred as well.
“The officers at CAM offered to investigate the comments. I told them sure, have fun investigating all 5,000 of them. I’ve been told to take gas showers and that it was a shame the terrorists didn’t get me on the beach.”
When she clicked on that last comment, the face of an ordinary Australian stared back at her. Lots of comments are generated by bots that are possibly sponsored by hostile countries, but Sheina cannot be certain.
She has been traveling of late, taking her message to City Hall and to the top brass at the NYPD. “They have all been uniformly positive experiences,” she reports. “Hearing my story has been an eye opener for them.”
Aside from her appearances, Sheina has written for major national papers. “I wrote an op-ed, and even though it was very well received, the paper omitted the section where I called out the pro-Hamas people marching on Harbour Bridge, calling them responsible for any violence that might follow.” She sounds resigned.
Did her father speak out against anti-Semitism during his lifetime?
“It’s interesting. On December 12, 2024, a year before the attack, my father was sought out during a street interview for a national newspaper. The interviewer was soliciting thoughts about the rise of anti-Semitism. He replied that although it has always existed, it’s sad that it has crept into mainstream Australian society, a population that has historically been so tolerant.
“My father always told us to be mindful of our surroundings. I knew it wasn’t coming from paranoia but from real-life experience of having been bullied back in the Soviet Union.”
When she was eight years old, Sheina and her family traveled to Israel during the Second Intifada. Her father took her to see a bombed-out pizza store, a scene that shook her. She repeated this story to an Australian city council debating whether to allow a pro-Palestinian event only 20 minutes from Bondi Beach.
“My own eight-year old girls’ grandfather was murdered in an act of intifada,” she exhorted, “and now you’re allowing an event on government property two months later, glorifying the same thing?”
The event was eventually canceled “not because they concluded it was morally wrong,” Sheina notes, “but because of the incessant pressure.”
Sheina keeps hearing her father’s echoes in the stories of others. “One woman told me she had been dating a non-Jew, and my father promptly drove her to Maayanot, where she eventually committed to a frum lifestyle. In another instance, two men decided to have a bris after meeting my father. One even transferred to a Jewish school. So many people have messaged, called and told me in person how a single meeting with my father changed the trajectory of their lives.”
Some stories involved tzedakah organizations established by her father when he knew that needy community members wouldn’t take tzedakah directly from him. Before any construction project commenced, Reuven Morrison would ask his non-frum partners where they would allocate their tzedakah. “My father taught them that they have to make a kli, a vessel for their success.”
Fighting Forward
What keeps this young mother of three going in the face of crushing grief?
“I just keep putting one foot in front of the other day after day. When I see the impact my work has, I know I have no choice but to continue. It’s not just about the resolutions and laws that were passed. It’s hearing that a woman put her son in a Jewish school after hearing me speak. It’s women from across the religious spectrum reporting that they feel they can live openly as Jews. I know I can’t escape into my grief bubble as long as there is work to be done.”
Although her family and friends have all been supportive, believing in the necessity of her work, she awards her husband the medal for grace. “He seamlessly stepped into the giant shoes my father left behind, even as he processes his own grief. My father didn’t expect to go when he did, and so many loose ends fell on my husband.”
Sheina had always feared sitting shivah as an only child. “That was a wasted worry,” she says. “My husband has nine siblings and I was never alone.”
Sheina has visited many halls of power, but even when surrounded by attentive media members and politicians, she admits it can feel lonely at times. “I need to put on the appearance that I’m okay and strong. But inside, I’m still as broken as the evening I received that phone call.”
The pockets of grief hit at random moments. “It can be as simple as the time I spotted a sour candy my father loved while shopping at the grocery store. I spent the next two hours in the car crying that I would never stock that candy again.”
Keeping busy with her work gives these pain-filled days purpose. “If I have a few empty days with no appearances or speeches the grief hits. I let out all the pain and tears, and then pull it together to fight another day.”
Her children are also processing the grief. “One of my daughters is angry, wanting to know why her zeida couldn’t hide and escape the bullets. Her twin sister is really sad but so proud of him,” Sheina says in a thick voice.
“My father, who was a real estate developer, took immense pleasure in getting down on the floor and playing with my kids. Our houses are practically next door to each other, and if a kid scraped her knee or received a certificate, they would run to him. He once came in on a 5:00 a.m. flight to Melbourne for one of my girls’ Chumash presentations because there was no way he’d miss it. He was a huge part of their lives, and now he’s gone.”
Sheina is quiet for a moment. She lifts her phone; her screensaver is a family photo taken in Yerushalayim. Set against a background of Jerusalem stone bleached white over thousands of years, Reuven Morrison’s eyes are flaming torches, twin blazes of love and passion.
“We almost didn’t do this photo shoot,” Sheina says, “and I’m eternally glad we did.”
For Pesach, the Gutnicks chose to go away, unwilling to sit at a Seder table without their father and husband. Watching her children carefree and having fun, Sheina found herself almost bowled over with grief when she thought about how much her father would have enjoyed the scene.
“I couldn’t console myself,” she admits. “But I acknowledged that even though the sadness and trauma weren’t going anywhere, I could let the light creep in. I could figure out how to let the nachas, the kedushas hamitzvos and the joy crack open the darkness bit by bit. After all, hadn’t my father taught me that this is our national story?”
Sheina’s father epitomized joy and chayus, traits that she actively seeks to instill in her children. “I want to channel that conviction, that simchah, into raising my children as frum Jews despite the aching void that his passing has left.”
After the attack, Sheina and her family went back to the beach with a ZAKA team to process the trauma. “My mother was hesitant to go back there but she eventually came along, and was very glad she did. The team was incredible. We cried, we grieved and we ultimately comforted each other. And after it was all done, my husband took out his tallis and tefillin and began to daven.”
She stops. It’s a painful memory but a treasured one: In the shadow of tragedy, on the same sandy grounds where her father was murdered, a Yid turns to the Ultimate Source of hope and succor.
Her children, too, benefited from the trauma team at Sheba Hospital. “Australians have nearly zero experience with victims of terror. To be able to receive support and guidance from people who spoke the language of the neshamah was a separate comfort.”
Today, Leah Morrison works in a kindergarten, surrounded by the light and laughter of Jewish children. “Her days are full, but watching her go home to an empty house is wrenching,” Sheina says softly. “I know my father would want me to take care of my mother.”
Full closure is still a long way off. The Gutnicks buried Reuven in Australia al tenai, intending Eretz Yisrael to be his final destination. “He always said that when Moshiach comes he doesn’t want a long trip,” Sheina says, her laugh tinged with sadness.
When her husband informed her that he’d secured a plot for her father in Israel, “My shoulders sagged in relief. Finally, he’ll be among his own people.”
On the fifth night of Chanukah, Sheina and her family returned to her parents’ home after the levayah to see her father’s silver menorah, polished to a brilliant sheen, the one cup of golden oil awaiting the touch of a match. Reuven Morrison had lovingly prepared his menorah back in Sydney before going out to the event. He never returned.
Sheina’s husband, who walked in after her, commented, “Oh, my. I hope Sheina doesn’t see this.” The past few days had been enough.
“Of course I’d seen it. I’d even taken a picture!” Sheina says with a smile.
Her husband’s uncle reverently lit the menorah, adding another bit of light—which our Sages teach us can dispel a lot of darkness.
“Of course, we were devastated. But we all took comfort in the fact that we were continuing my father’s legacy, doing mitzvos and strengthening Jewish life. After all, Hashem gave His eternal Torah to an eternal people, along with the promise that we will never be forsaken.” ●
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