Woman says dad died a hero by throwing bricks at Bondi Beach attacker, and ‘Australia is no longer a home for Jews’

The daughter of one of victims of Sunday’s terrorist attack at Bondi Beach told CBS News on Monday that her father was “shot because he was Jewish,” and she now believes Australia is not a safe home for Jewish people.

Sheina Gutnick said her father, Reuven Morrison, a 62-year-old Soviet member of Australia’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, was killed while trying to stop one of two gunmen in Sunday’s shooting, which Australian authorities called an anti-Semitic terrorist attack.

“From my sources and my understanding, he stood up the second the shooting started. He managed to throw bricks at the terrorist,” Gutnick told CBS News in Bondi on Monday, referring to an attempt to arrest one of the gunmen filmed during the previous day’s attack.

She said it was her father who tried to stop one of the attackers after another man, later identified as Ahmed al Ahmed, 43-year-old fruit sellerconfronted the suspect and grabbed a gun from him.

“I believe that after Ahmed managed to remove the terrorist’s gun, my father went to try to unlock the gun, to try to shoot. He was shouting at the terrorist,” she said. “My dear father, Reuven Morrison was shot dead for being Jewish at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach, while protecting lives, while jumping, putting his own life at risk to save other members of the Jewish community.”

Dramatic social media video verified by CBS News Confirmed shows Morrison throwing objects at one of the suspected shooters after another man, confirmed by Australian authorities to be Ahmed, tackled and disarmed him.

Gutnick recalled the devastating moment she found out her father had been killed in the attack.

“As my family was leaving a Hanukkah event in Melbourne, we heard from a friend that there was a shooting in Sydney. I immediately felt the biggest pit in my stomach and tried to call my dad who didn’t pick up the phone. I then called my mom and I heard screaming, screaming. She was screaming that there was an active shooter,” Gutnick said. “I called her back and she was screaming that he was running, that he was running, then that he had been shot. After a few more attempts to hang up and call back, my mother was screaming for medical help, screaming for an ambulance, screaming for help, asking for help…she then indicated he was on oxygen and hung up.”

She said she managed to get her mother on the phone, “and she was screaming that they had stopped working on him and that he had been covered by a sheet. I was hoping, in her hysterical state, that she was just deluding herself and that wasn’t the case.”

Gutnick said she believed Australia was no longer a safe country for the Jewish community, and she blamed the country’s government, accusing leaders of failing to confront the rising tide of anti-Semitism.

Australian police were “lying on the ground in the grass, covering their heads, untrained for this massacre, untrained for what was going to happen, untrained for what the Jewish community was telling the Australian government was inevitable,” Gutnick said, adding his voice to a chorus of criticism after documented increase in hate attacks aimed at Jewish residents of Australia.

“Australia is no longer a home for Jews. This is not possible. If we are dejected while celebrating our religious festival of lights, of pride, of who we are, and if we cannot do that, Australia is no longer a home for us. We cannot be here,” she added.

Morrison had fled the Soviet Union to escape anti-Semitic persecution fifty years ago, Gutnick said, and said she felt a sense of “betrayal” because of the manner in which her father died.

“He came to Australia because he thought it would be safe,” she said. “This is where he was going to raise a family, where he was going to live a life far from persecution.”

“And for many years he did that – he lived a wonderful, free life – until Australia turned against him.”

“I feel betrayed by the government. I feel like the signs were coming for a long, long time. The alarm bells were there, and the government was doing nothing.”

“The Jewish community is suffering today,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters at a memorial on Bondi Beach on Monday. “Today, all Australians are hugging them and saying: we stand with you. We will do whatever it takes to eradicate anti-Semitism. It is a scourge and we will eradicate it together.”

One of the suspects, a father and son, was killed on Sunday, and the younger man – who was investigated in 2019 for alleged links to extremism but considered not to pose a threat – remained hospitalized in a coma on Monday, Albanese said.

“People’s situations can change,” he told reporters before a cabinet meeting on Monday. “People can become radicalized over time. [Gun] Licenses should not be perpetual. »

“We are doing a lot of work on the backgrounds of both people. At this stage we know very little about them,” New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Monday.

Gutnick said she will remember her father as a hero who “fought.”

“He brought so much light to the world. There was no human on Earth that you could compare him to. If there was a way for him to leave this Earth, he would be fighting a terrorist. There was no other way for him to be taken from us,” Gutnick said.