‘He hasn’t left a hole – it’s a crater’: Melbourne grandfather who died charging at Bondi shooters remembered

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Reuven Morrison met the woman who would become his wife on Bondi Beach.

As their daughter, Sheina Gutnick, tells it, the two teenage Jewish refugees had recently fled the Soviet Union when they found each other on the shore of a new home, wearing the same pair of Levi jeans. “And it was love at first sight,” Gutnick says.

On Sunday, Morrison, 62, was back on Bondi Beach with his wife, Leah, to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah at the Chabad in Bondi he helped build with fellow Orthodox refugees.

Within a matter of minutes, that beach – “Dad’s beach,” Gutnick says – would become the scene of Australia’s worst terror attack, as two gunmen opened fire into the crowd gathered for the festival of lights.

Melbourne rabbi Gabi Kaltmann, a close friend of the Morrison family, says that while the community is now reeling from the massacre, no one who knew the proud grandfather is surprised by what happened next.

As shots rang out, Morrison didn’t hesitate. Unarmed, he charged at the shooters, pointing and yelling at them to stop, picking up objects to hurl at them. Soon after, he was shot dead by the attackers.

“He didn’t have to,” says Kaltmann, his voice shaking. “He could have got down and hid with the others.”

But Morrison was a “great, generous bear of a man”, the first to pull you into a hug or share a laugh, and he was a warrior for his community, Kaltmann says. “There was no way he was lying down.”

When Gutnick saw the footage of her father charging the shooters, she recognised him at once. “That’s my dad,” she says.

“I have friends who were hiding their babies under them on the ground who told me ‘your dad saved us’ because he took minutes off the shooting, he got the shooters away from the scene of people. If there was any way for him to leave, it would be fighting off a terrorist. There’s no other way he would be taken from us.”

Gutnick had been at a Hanukkah celebration in Melbourne on Sunday when she heard of the shooting. “A great pit of dread” opened in her stomach, she says, as she thought of her parents’ trip back to Bondi.

Her father didn’t answer her calls, but Leah picked up at once, screaming that Reuven was “up and running”.

“Dad was running at the shooters,” Gutnick recalls. “Then Mum said he was down. He was down, and they were laying a sheet over him. I fell to the floor.”

Born in Kyiv and fleeing at 14 years old “with nothing”, Morrison knew hardship and danger behind the Iron Curtain, Kaltmann says. But he found a home in Australia, first in Sydney and then Melbourne, where he and Leah raised their only child and “miracle baby”, Sheina.

“I remember he’d often pull me into a bear hug, tell me, ‘You’re doing a good job, rabbi,’” says Kaltmann. “Maybe we’d have a whisky. He was that proud grandpa you imagine at the table with all his [grand]kids.”

Throughout his career, Morrison built up a development empire that spanned NSW and Victoria, and at one point he owned the Mandarin Shopping Centre in Chatswood. Despite his success, he lived relatively modestly, his family says.

Kaltmann says: “He was the driving force behind the Chabad in Bondi getting its own community centre [a group known as Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe]. He wanted a place for them.”

Morrison made it his life’s work wrangling permits and campaigning to the local council. “He was always giving to charity or to us; to others quietly. He never kept anything for himself,” Gutnick says.

“But he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, either. He had such a strong moral compass. And you should have seen him bust a move on a dance floor. He was larger than life.”

Another woman, Chavi, who sheltered from the gunman with her six-month-old baby on Sunday, and knew several of those killed, says Morrison was a ba’al Chesed – meaning a man of great kindness.

Chavi’s brother, Melbourne Rabbi Effy Block, prayed with Morrison at their local St Kilda synagogue, and also knew Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who had been hosting the Bondi event when he was gunned down.

“The Sydney and Melbourne Chabad are very close,” he said.

Block remembered Morrison as a “quiet, kind, unassuming guy, but a big philanthropist”. “We’re all in shock.”

Now, Morrison is among a small number of civilian heroes who will be remembered for swinging into action as gunshots tore through the festival.

Sheina Gutnick says she is angry no one came to protect him, given longstanding warnings about growing antisemitism in Australia.

Last night, one of her children slept with a bottle of soda water, worried that grandpa would want his favourite fizzy drink if he came back.

“He was their whole world,” says Gutnick. “He [and my mother] only lived over the road. He hasn’t left a hole – it’s a crater.”

But Bondi is still her father’s beach, she says. Where he met the love of his life, where he found a community and built a sacred place for his faith, and the lights of Hanukkah will continue to shine this week, across the country, and by that sea.

“It feels pitch black now, but we cannot hide. People like Dad, they are the light.”

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