A new Chabad center has been set up on Sydney’s Bondi Beach at the site of the Hanukkah terror attack earlier this month, from which the Hasidic group specializing in Jewish outreach seeks to share acts of kindness with passersby.

The center is being called “Ohel Eli and Yaakov” in memory of Rabbi Eli Schlanger and Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, two Chabad emissaries killed in the December 14 attack in which 15 people were murdered and dozens injured.

“It’s not really a full Chabad house,” said Rabbi Noach Koncepolski, the project’s founder. “It’s more like an expanded kiosk where we hand out food and help Jews put on tefillin [phylacteries]. The idea is to have a point of connection to share some kindness, to have a moment of sweetness, with anyone passing by.”

“We’re calling it a ‘mitzvah house,'” he added, using the Hebrew word for good deeds.

The morning after the attack, Koncepolski and some friends headed over to the Bondi Pavilion site and started offering to help people put on the phylacteries used in Jewish prayers.

“It just blew up immediately,” Koncepolski recalled, saying his group put tefillin on 1,500 people a day that week. “After that, we started handing out Shabbat candles and handing out food. During Hanukkah, we gave out thousands of doughnuts to Jews and non-Jews........

© The Times of Israel