Bondi Terror Victim Rabbi Eli Schlanger’s Book Hits Shelves

The book that Rabbi Eli Schlanger never lived to see published is now in reader’s hands.

Conversations With My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World, co-authored by Rabbi Schlanger and Australian journalist and bestselling author Nikki Goldstein, was released on May 26 by HarperCollins.

The launch was celebrated at Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, where a large crowd, including NSW Premier Chris Minns and Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane, gathered to mark the occasion.

Rabbi Schlanger, a Chabad-Lubavitch representative in Bondi for 18 years and a father of five — including a son born just two months before the attack — was murdered on December 14, 2025, when terrorists opened fire on the public menorah lighting he organized at Bondi Beach. He was 41 years old and one of fifteen people killed in the attack.

The book grew out of an unlikely friendship. In September 2022, Goldstein was near death in a Sydney ICU when her daughter spotted Rabbi Schlanger in the hallway and asked him to come pray for her. He blew the shofar at her bedside — and the following day, she began to recover. The doctors called it a miracle. As Goldstein regained her health, she and Rabbi Schlanger developed a close friendship, and in January 2025 they began recording a series of in-depth conversations for a book.

The focus of those conversations was the Seven Noahide Laws — the universal moral code that the Lubavitcher Rebbe worked tirelessly to bring to the world’s attention, and a cause to which Rabbi Schlanger was devoted to. He had founded “Project Noah” to bring these principles to young people and the broader public. When he discovered that Goldstein — who had never heard of the Noahide Laws before they began working together — was a bestselling author, he saw it as an opportunity to take the mission global. The book, written for Jews and non-Jews alike, explores each of the seven laws as a candid, searching dialogue between a Chabad rabbi and a secular journalist, drawing out their practical meaning for individuals and society today.

Weeks before the final chapter was completed, Rabbi Schlanger was murdered. Goldstein continued the work together with Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, Rabbi Schlanger’s father-in-law and director of Chabad of Bondi, completing the final chapter on justice — the one conversation Rabbi Schlanger never got to have — and ensuring the book was published faithfully and in the spirit in which it was written.

“Eli saved me. Now I’m saving his legacy,” Goldstein writes.

Conversations With My Rabbi is available now at bookstores everywhere, including Barnes & Noble.