After 15 innocent people were gunned down at Bondi Beach on a Sunday afternoon, a Hebrew word came to Peter Wertheim’s mind: teshuvah. Often translated into English as repentance, the concept more accurately describes a return, a turning back to something you’ve strayed or looked away from.

“In the Jewish tradition, changing one’s attitude and behaviour is a process. It’s not an instantaneous decision,” says Wertheim, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. “It takes an absorption into a person’s heart and soul that they have been wrong and a commitment to do better.”

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Since the October 7 attacks in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, Wertheim and other Jewish leaders had warned about surging levels of antisemitism and their fears that vandalism and harassment would morph into deadly violence. “People were telling us we were imagining or exaggerating things,” says Wertheim, whose 98-year-old mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and fled to safety in Australia. “Much of it was orchestrated ill will but it was aided by breathtaking ignorance.”

Then came the December 14 massacre. Among those shot was the Executive Council of Australian Jewry communications director Evan Zlatkis, who was lucky to survive. The terror attack, Wertheim says, shook Australians out of their sense of complacency, sparking profound questions about how the nation had reached this point.

Of all the nation’s Jewish leaders, Wertheim is closest to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The pair formed a bond two decades ago when Albanese opposed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel that was gaining traction in Sydney’s inner west. They then united against the Abbott government’s attempts to water down the Racial Discrimination Act.

One prominent Jewish Australian describes Wertheim as the “good cop” working with the government while his fellow co-chief executive, Alex Ryvchin, criticises Labor’s policies on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Behind the scenes, Wertheim has played an important role guiding Albanese towards his unnecessarily protracted and painful decision to hold a royal commission into antisemitism and the Bondi attack.

The first public commentator to call for a royal commission – on the day after the attack – was Chris Taylor, a former national security official who now works at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. To Taylor, the case for such an inquiry seemed so obvious as to be almost redundant. “Surely the federal government would act quickly along those lines? After all, how could there not be a royal commission........

© The Sydney Morning Herald