He saved her life — now her mission is to save his legacy. Nikki Goldstein doesn’t remember the first time she met Rabbi Eli Schlanger in September 2022. She was comatose in a Sydney, Australia, ICU, battling pneumonia and failing lungs. Doctors didn’t think the 57-year-old would live to see the next day.
Moments after her husband and daughter lifted their bowed heads resting over wires on her hospital bed, they caught a glimpse of a whirling dervish darting past the room wearing a yarmulke.
Though Goldstein was a secular Jew who never went to synagogue, her desperate husband Rowan asked the rabbi to give his dying wife a blessing.
Before reciting ancient prayers over her “near lifeless” body, the bearded, bespeckled young rabbi brandished a ram’s horn known as a shofar, auspiciously blown before the Jewish High Holidays.
He sounded the simple instrument considered a “spiritual wake-up call” that “pierces the heavens” with its plaintive cry and left Goldstein’s room.
By the next day her infection retreated as doctors brought Goldstein out of the coma, something the medical team jokingly hailed as a “miracle.”
A few days later while doing his rounds as a hospital chaplain, Schlanger walked through the recovery ward and spotted Goldstein — sitting up, talking on the phone and looking strong.
“You survived,” he said, looking “completely shocked,” Goldstein, whose new book, “Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World” (Harper Influence), comes out May 26, recalled to The Post.
She would immediately be known as “Eli’s miracle.”
“I don’t really know who you are,” said Goldstein, a bestselling author, of their first conversation. “And I didn’t understand much of what you did. What I do know is this — God has given me a second chance. I’m alive today because of the mitzvot [good deeds] you brought into that hospital room.”
In fact, she had never met a rabbi before. But as he entered her new room, she felt no longer grim — but full of hope.
Before she left that hospital, the tenacious assistant rabbi of Chabad Bondi in Sydney proposed they write a book together.
She was fascinated by Schlanger, a British native and married father of five who called Sydney home for the past 18 years. Anyone who met the Orthodox rabbi said “they were in the presence of someone quite special,” writes Goldstein.
“He was the first person to say he wasn’t a saint, but not many people walk with God in a moment-by-moment real-time way. It made him electric, somewhat eccentric, and very alive.”
Schlanger later explained the importance of sharing with the world the Noahide Laws, the seven laws given to Noah after the great flood, predating the Ten Commandments, about how to create a just society.
“What are the Noahide Laws?’” Goldstein recalled asking the rabbi at the time. But once she learned that the laws, meant for everyone, regardless of faith or background, simply bring Jewish wisdom into a modern context and help humanity live in harmony, she was in.
“I was intrigued,” admitted Goldstein, now 60.
The seven laws — Do not worship idols; Do not blaspheme; Do not murder; Do not eat the flesh of a living animal; Do not steal; Do not commit acts of sexual immorality; Establish courts of justice in our world — communicated from God to Adam and Noah mean that they are universal and apply to all humanity.
They were the perfect odd couple.
A secular Jew who felt like a “tourist in my own tradition” and the devout rabbi whom Goldstein described as someone who “lived with God, breathed God, wrestled with God.”
Though coming from profoundly different worlds — one steeped in religious tradition, the other in a spiritual secularism — they discovered they were seeking answers to the same essential questions.
The laws, a universal moral code, aren’t religious, argued Goldstein, noting “they’re an ethical and moral framework meant to uplift and uphold a good world. And they’re important now because people are very lost.”
Now, she has a profound understanding of just how lost.
On December 14, 2025, the first night of Chanukah, moments before lighting the menorah before a crowd of thousands, Schlanger was shot and killed by terrorists who opened fire on the crowd celebrating his signature “Chanukah by the Sea” festival at world-famous Bondi Beach.
Schlanger was a prison chaplain who was known for being able to talk to anyone, with an uncanny gift to meet them where they are “in nanoseconds.” Tragically, it didn’t work this time. The rabbi, with his “deep belief in humanity and the goodness in people,” was seen pleading with the terrorist, according to other survivors.
He was shot in the back after throwing himself on a community member to shield them from the bullets, and died instantly.
The targeted massacre killed a total of 15 innocents — from 10-year-old Matilda to 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alex Kleytman — and injured dozens, including Schlanger’s wife, Chaya, who was grazed in the back and their two-month-old son, who took shrapnel to the leg.
It’s considered the worst terror attack in Australian history.
The co-authors who cultivated a deep friendship were mere weeks away from finishing the seventh and final chapter: “What Does Justice Look Like?”
“Establishing courts means creating a world where the widow, the orphan, the homeless person, and even a stranger has a forum in which they can stand before power and be heard,” said Schlanger. “This law… is for all of us.”
The back and forth, real-time radically candid conversations lend an immediacy and intimacy that makes readers feel they’re part of a discussion between friends. They challenge and push one another to question assumptions.
These messages are all the more powerful now for Goldstein — trying to foster the best of humanity when Schlanger’s life was cruelly stolen by the worst of humanity, when humanity fails.
The two terrorists were father and son. Sajid Akram, 50, was killed by police on the spot, and his son, Naveed, 24, was already facing 59 charges, including 15 counts of murder, when he was hit with an additional 19 charges earlier this month.
Today, Goldstein refuses to give them “any brain space” and focuses on the meaning of the timeless Jewish principles, which hit differently now.
“Eli showed me that when you embrace the rules, they become just part of the relationship that you have with God,” she said. “I think I really misunderstood how Eli saw the rules and the covenant,” she said in reflection. ”I thought that they were a burden.”
The laws, “God’s gift to everybody,” aren’t “so onerous,” she said, noting her shifted perspective on the Torah’s 613 commandments post-Bondi Beach attack. “What strikes me now—after Eli’s gone—is that if Eli could adhere to 613, we can all do seven. It’s not that hard, right?”
Goldstein said she looks at the laws in a deeper, more profound way in the wake of the attack.
She now understands that “do not worship idols” isn’t about bowing to an abstract golden calf, but about cultivating an “intimate, direct relationship with God.”
The creator is “gently, compassionately, lovingly inviting us to connect in a very personal way,” a revelation that only came to her after losing Schlanger.
“That’s changed my life.”
The impact of the massacre will never leave her. “Had Eli still been alive, I still would have been struggling with all those rules,” she admitted.
Goldstein spent her whole life searching for answers, and her “epic” chance meeting with Schlanger “transformed” her life in more ways than one.
“I was always looking for answers, but the way that it came to me through Eli, is that I treasure.”
How Australia — considered one of the safest countries in the world and known as a safe haven for Jews for over a century — could allow the fine cracks of hate to break wide open, is devastating for Goldstein.
Her own refugee German Jewish grandparents, fleeing on the precipice of the Holocaust, were warmly welcomed into their new home on the other side of the world.
With a modest national Jewish population of 120,000, the wakeup call of the Bondi Beach massacre never quite materialized.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had initially “refused” to hold a Federal Royal Commission for the attack, according to Goldstein, of the formal, independent inquiry into systemic failures that help “uncover facts and assign accountability.”
Though the inquiry process is now underway, Goldstein blasted the galling recalcitrance. “He was guilted into it — it was gobsmacking,” she lamented.
Goldstein is still waiting for a reckoning.
Earlier this month, a woman was charged with antisemitism for allegedly shouting, “F–k the Jews” at a girls’ under-12 athletic meet in Sydney. She was heard adding Jews “should have been eradicated.”
It followed a Sydney “Globalize the Intifada” event that took place, overriding the mayor’s cancellation for fears it would spark violence.
Last month, a unity concert for the Bondi Beach victims was canceled after the Australian Hellenic Choir refused to perform with the Jewish Choral Society, a collaboration that last took place “without issue” in 2022, a year before the Oct. 7 terror attack.
Now, Goldstein sees herself as a conduit for Schlanger’s mission.
“He leaves a big hole in this world,” she said through tears. “He would have gone on to do so much good for so long.”
Schlanger’s purpose was to let people know they were not forgotten, even and especially in the worst of circumstances, whether it’s lying in a hospital bed or languishing in prison.
Now, Goldstein is ensuring that her loving friend’s “light” won’t “die with him.
“Through the hours of conversations, he had prepared me to be his herald, his foot soldier, and his torch-bearer,” she writes.
Schlanger used the shofar as an instrument to “call my soul back,” she writes of fate’s cruel bait and switch. “He switched roles on me. He was supposed to be the teacher, not me.”
“He entrusted me with the words,” Goldstein said. “He gave his life for his Judaism.”
Doree Lewak is a regular contributor to the New York Post. She has also written for the Daily Mail, The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
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