Alexander Kleytman escaped the Holocaust as a child, survived exile, starvation and decades of antisemitism, only to be murdered at 87 while protecting his wife during the Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach.
Kleytman was born in 1938 in what is now Ukraine. When World War II erupted, his family fled advancing Nazi forces, crammed onto a train heading east toward Siberia. Bombs fell along the way. People died around them. At one point, young Alexander became so ill he was separated from his family and hospitalized, believing he might never see them again.
He did survive — and reunited with his parents — but Siberia offered little mercy. The family lived in freezing conditions with almost no food. Years of malnutrition left him permanently hunched, his body marked for life by what he endured as a child.
After the war, the family returned to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. There, Kleytman faced another lifelong battle: antisemitism. His daughter Sabina said the family could not openly practice Judaism, yet her father never stopped being proud of who he was.
“He lived his whole life as a proud Jew, even when it was dangerous,” she said.
In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kleytman moved his family to Australia — a country he believed was finally safe. He built a new life from scratch, becoming a civil engineer and contributing to major infrastructure projects, including Sydney’s Olympic stadium. In a literal sense, he helped build the nation that gave him refuge.
When he retired in his mid-70s, Kleytman turned to writing, documenting the lives and suffering of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Despite his family urging him to write his own memoir, he refused, preferring to preserve the stories of others.
In Australia, for the first time, he could freely and openly live as a Jew. Each year, he attended the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach — a public expression of faith, joy and survival.
But in recent years, after the October 7 attack in Israel and rising antisemitism worldwide, Kleytman had begun to worry. Friends say he sensed the country he once viewed as a haven was changing.
Still, on Sunday, he went to Bondi Beach with his wife, Larisa, to celebrate Hanukkah.
That’s when two gunmen, later linked to ISIS-inspired extremism, opened fire on the crowd.
As bullets tore through the gathering, Alexander Kleytman did what he had done his entire life: he protected his family. Witnesses and Jewish community leaders say he placed himself between the gunman and his wife, shielding her with his body.
He was killed instantly.
“Dad died doing what he loved most,” his daughter said through tears. “Protecting my mother. Standing as a proud Jew. Bringing light to the world.”
Fifteen people were killed in the massacre, including a 10-year-old girl, rabbis, and community members who tried to fight back. But Kleytman’s death struck a particular nerve across Australia — a man who survived humanity’s darkest chapter, only to be murdered decades later in the country he believed was safest.
For many in Australia’s Jewish community, his killing represents a devastating irony: a Holocaust survivor dying in an antisemitic terror attack nearly 80 years later.
Alexander Kleytman survived Nazis, Soviet persecution, hunger, exile and hate.
He did not survive Bondi.