This Chabad Rabbi Prayed For My Recovery, Then He Was Murdered At Bondi Beach

When Australian journalist Nikki Goldstein was placed into a medically induced coma in September 2022, doctors warned her family to prepare for the worst.

Goldstein, who had long struggled with chronic lung disease, had entered the hospital believing she had another chest infection. Instead, her condition deteriorated rapidly. By her second day in the ICU, doctors told her husband and daughter that she had “a whiteout,” which means that there was no healthy lung tissue left. As her daughter sat crying beside her hospital bed, she noticed a rabbi walking through the ICU.

“My husband jumped up from his chair and he ran over to the rabbi and he said, ‘Rabbi, my wife’s in a terrible position. She’s Jewish and she would really love it if you said some prayers.’” That rabbi was Eli Schlanger. Schlanger came to her bedside, whispered prayers, and then pulled a shofar from his pocket and blew it directly there in the ICU.

“It was, I think, a great surprise to all the medical staff to see a rabbi blowing a shofar,” Goldstein said. “But a very ironic nurse said she didn’t think it would disturb anyone because they were all in a coma.”

Goldstein did not wake up immediately. But within 24 hours, her lungs began responding. Doctors had no way of explaining what had happened to her and called her recovery a miracle. Days later, as she sat weakly upright in her hospital bed, the rabbi returned.

“He literally stopped in his tracks at the door and said, ‘You survived,’” she recalled. The two began talking. Goldstein, who described herself as having been raised with very little Jewish education, had never really known a rabbi before. “Up until October 7th, I really thought of myself as Australian first and Jewish not even a close second,” Goldstein said. “My mom went to the most posh Christian girl’s school in Melbourne. They wanted to be integrated Jews.”

But Schlanger intrigued her. A charismatic Chabad rabbi in Sydney, he had a gift for making spiritual ideas feel deeply human and accessible. Soon, their conversations grew into something bigger: a book.

“He said, ‘I’ve really always thought there was a book in me,’” Goldstein recalled with a laugh. “And I said to him, if I had a dollar for everybody who said they had a book in them, I would be rich by now.” Still, he persisted.

“Every time he would ring to check on me and see how I was doing… he’d say, ‘How’s our book coming along?’” Over time, Goldstein agreed.

The project became Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World, a book structured around the Noahide Laws, an ethical code for all of humanity, and built from the kinds of questions ordinary people wrestle with: Why believe in God? Why do bad things happen to good people? How do you live ethically in a broken world? “He had a way of making them very contemporary, very real, very authentic and very down to earth,” she said. The conversations transformed Goldstein’s relationship to Judaism and faith.

“I got this amazing opportunity to learn,” she said, “me being able to ask any question I wanted and that he would answer.”

She began to rethink ideas she had once dismissed. One teaching in particular stayed with her: the concept of false idols.“I really came to understand that that wasn’t about bowing down to golden calves,” she said. “It was about developing a relationship with God.”

“And what distracts us from having that relationship with God are the false idols of our culture — money, power, wealth, fame.”

By December 2025, the two had been working on the manuscript for roughly a year. Schlanger kept telling Goldstein that their book would be a worldwide best seller, but she was incredulous. Getting close to completion, they still did not have a publisher, and Goldstein assumed she would self-publish a few hundred copies for Schlanger’s community and that would be that. Then came December 14, 2025.

That afternoon, Goldstein was at a lunch with Australian journalists when news alerts began appearing about a terror attack unfolding at Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach.

“A couple of minutes later, it was police en route, helicopters en route, nine dead,” she recalled. Before her friend and spiritual mentor was officially named as one of the slain, Goldstein said that she “just knew in my bones that he was dead,” she said. “We had this phenomenal kind of soul connection.”

Soon after, it was confirmed that Schlanger had been murdered in the attack while preparing to light a public Chanukah menorah. Through her grief and pain, Goldstein felt the rabbi’s teachings shaping her response to this deeply personal tragedy. One of Schlanger’s driving hopes for the book had been that it serve as “an antidote to antisemitism,” she explained. He believed deeply that the Noahide Laws could help create “a civil and just world.”

She remembered a story his assistant once told her: Schlanger had spotted a Muslim imam at a shopping center, dropped all his bags, and rushed over asking, “What can we do together? Like, how can we build a better world?” “He was so optimistic,” Goldstein said.

After his murder, the book took on entirely new meaning. What had once been intended as a modest spiritual project suddenly became a legacy. “Because he sacrificed his life for this,” Goldstein said, “Harper Collins came to the book.”

Now, Goldstein sees herself as carrying forward not only the manuscript, but the rabbi’s message itself. “He prepared me to be his torchbearer,” she said. “That’s what he prepared me to do.”

And for a woman who once saw Judaism as little more than background identity, we pray that that spiritual enlightenment in Goldstein may be part of Schlanger’s legacy too. 

May his memory be for a blessing.

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