Thank you Commissioner for allowing me the honour of providing a closing statement today.
While Chabad of Bondi’s written submission provides our detailed reflections and recommendations, I stand before you this afternoon and speak from my heart, as a father and as a rabbi of the Chabad of Bondi community for forty years.
At the heart of the Chanukah story is a decision to return.
More than two thousand years ago, after a period when Jewish practice had been outlawed, the Jewish people returned to their Temple in Jerusalem (of which the Western Wall was a part) and found it desecrated.
They cleared the Temple. They rebuilt the altar. And then they lit the Menorah – a symbol of the ‘Eternal Light’, being G-d’s unending presence.
