There are deaths that wound a family, and there are deaths that indict an age.

Alex Kleytman – an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor – was killed on Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah, in an attack authorities have treated as terrorism aimed at a Jewish gathering. According to accounts reported by journalists speaking with those closest to him, he died shielding his wife – a final, instinctive act of love and protection.

It is difficult to convey the obscenity of that sentence without turning it into something ornamental. One does not wish to gild grief. Yet the bare fact remains: a man who survived the industrialized annihilation of European Jewry – who made it through the century’s most meticulously organized machinery of death – was cut down in the open air, on a beach, during a festival dedicated to light.

Hanukkah, for those who have forgotten (and the world has a deplorable talent for forgetting Jewish things), is not a triumphalist holiday. It is not an empire’s birthday. It is a commemoration of survival, of identity held stubbornly in public, of the refusal to be extinguished. A candle in the window is not a boast; it is a declaration: we are still here.

And that, in the end, is what Alex Kleytman’s murder was truly aimed at—the attempt to make “still here” feel like a provocation. The attempt to turn visibility into vulnerability, joy into a liability, and gathering into a gamble.

Let us be precise, because precision is a form of moral hygiene: this is what hatred does when it believes it can get away with it.

Now we come to the part that will be called “too political” by people who treat politics as something that happens in parliament rather than in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)