From tragedy to tables — what I discovered in a basement a few streets from the beach
On 14 December 2025, a terrorist attack on Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach shocked the nation. Jewish men and women were targeted on that beach for no reason other than that they were Jewish. It was Australia’s worst antisemitic attack in living memory — and it happened in one of the most recognisable and beloved postcodes in the country.
I was in Bondi in late May to attend a gathering connected to the visit of Eli Beer, the remarkable founder of United Hatzalah — Israel’s volunteer emergency medical organisation, which has pioneered some of the most creative and life-saving humanitarian responses to crisis anywhere in the world. Eli’s presence in Bondi was itself a statement: that the Jewish community does not retreat in the face of hatred. It shows up. It serves. It saves lives.
It was there, in the days following that gathering, that I met Rabbi Doctor Dovid Slavin. He invited me to come and see what he had built just a few streets from the beach. I went the next morning. What I encountered left me, as a Christian leader, genuinely humbled.
A Basement Full of Light
Our Big Kitchen — OBK — operates from the basement of the Yeshiva Centre at 36 Flood Street, Bondi. Founded by Dovid and Laya Slavin in February 2005, it began as an act of simple neighbourly compassion: a woman in the community fell seriously ill, volunteers borrowed a kosher kitchen, and people came together to cook. Twenty years later, that borrowed kitchen has become a full-scale industrial operation that has fed tens of thousands of people across Sydney — and the electricity, as Laya Slavin once described the atmosphere of those early sessions, has never left the room.
The premises are owned by Mr Harry O. Triguboff AO of Meriton Group and made available at no cost to OBK
There was no government funding. Rabbi Slavin secured donations of labour from builders, excavators, painters and electricians — workers from Jewish, Greek and Italian communities all contributing — and poured the concrete floor himself when an extra hand was needed. That floor was laid on 11 September 2001. While the world watched in horror as the Twin Towers fell, something was being built in Bondi.
On the morning I visited, teams of corporate volunteers from companies including Salesforce, Metro and Charter Hall were working side by side in a friendly cook-off, producing approximately 800 meals between them. Every meal was destined for someone in need — delivered to St Vincent de Paul, to women’s refuges, to homeless shelters across the city. I watched executives who had never met each other that morning laughing together over chopping boards, plating meals with genuine care, and leaving — I could see it on their faces — changed by what they had done.
Giving Doesn’t Have to Be a Sacrifice
What strikes you immediately about Rabbi Slavin is his gift for reframing generosity. He has a mischievous, warm insistence that doing good should also be deeply joyful.
“Giving does not have to be a sacrifice, everybody,”
he told the volunteers with a grin that made clear he has said it a thousand times and believes it more each time.
That movement — from charity to dignity, from recipient to person — is the beating heart of what OBK does.
The corporate team-building model at OBK is built on this conviction. Companies that might otherwise book their staff into white-water rafting or paint-ball sessions are instead invited to come and cook something that actually matters. The results go far beyond the meals. When world-class companies walk through the OBK doors, the case workers and therapists accompanying shelter residents witness something shift in their clients. The staff can say: these people came here for you. They believe in you. Start believing in yourselves.
That movement — from charity to dignity, from recipient to person — is the beating heart of what OBK does.
From the Streets to the Four Seasons
OBK is not content to feed people today and leave them where they are tomorrow. It wants to restore them.
In the yard outside the kitchen, a professional barista station operates each week. Four consecutive Wednesdays — just four — is enough to teach someone experiencing homelessness to make a professional cup of coffee, to handle front-of-house, to show up and show interest. Those who complete the programme earn an internship at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney. I sat with that detail for a moment. From the streets to the Four Seasons. Not through a government scheme. Through a kitchen in Bondi, run by a rabbi who believes that everyone has something to offer and that the task of a community is to help them find it.
Behind the scenes, an equally impressive operation manages food rescue — pickling, heat-sealing, careful repurposing — ensuring that what cannot be served fresh becomes something nourishing tomorrow. Not a meal is wasted if Dovid can help it.
The Real Story of Bondi’s Jews
I want to say something directly to readers of this newspaper — and I want to say it because of where this kitchen is.
A few kilometres from 36 Flood Street is the beach where Australian Jews were attacked last December simply because they were Jews. And in that same suburb, a Jewish family has spent twenty years quietly feeding the hungry, training the homeless, bringing strangers together, and sending warm meals to the most vulnerable people in our city — regardless of their background, their belief, or their circumstance.
This is the real story of Bondi’s Jewish community. Not the story the headlines tell. The story that happens every Wednesday morning in a basement, when rescued food becomes beautiful meals, and when people who felt invisible are reminded that someone came here today — specifically for them.
The God of Israel spoke to Abraham: “Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3) I am a Christian leader. I have studied that promise for decades. But I have rarely seen it lived out with such creativity, such joy, and such absence of fanfare as I saw on the morning I walked into Our Big Kitchen.
As Dovid handed each volunteer two packets of biscuits at the end of the session — one for themselves, one to give to somebody else, what he calls OBK Forward — I thought: this is what it looks like to be a light to the nations. Not grand. Not loud. Just faithful, warm, and unrelenting.
Visit, Volunteer, Support
If your church, small group or business is looking for a team-building experience with genuine meaning, I cannot recommend Our Big Kitchen highly enough. Their volunteer programme is open to all. Visit obk.org.au to find out more — and when you go, tell them a Christian for Israel sent you.
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