“Take your anger and\u2026 just spread happiness and love and memory for my lovely niece,” Ms Chernykh said.<\/p>\n
“I hope maybe she’s an angel now. Maybe she [will] send some good vibes to the world.”<\/p>\n
Jewish community leaders have in recent days suggested the tragedy was an inevitable result of Australia struggling to address rising antisemitism.<\/p>\n
The attack on Sunday, which targeted the Jewish community at an event celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, was the country’s deadliest incident since 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people during the Port Arthur massacre.<\/p>\n
Ahead of Matilda’s funeral on Thursday, Ms Chernykh said the family was devastated.<\/p>\n
“I look at their faces [and] I don’t know if they will be ever happy again,” she said of Matilda’s parents.<\/p>\n
Matilda’s younger sister, from whom she was “inseparable”, is shattered and confused, she said.<\/p>\n
“She doesn’t have enough tears to cry.”<\/p>\n
At a flower memorial on Tuesday, Matilda’s mother Valentyna told mourners that the family came to Australia from Ukraine more than a decade ago, thinking it would be a safe place for them.<\/p>\n
“I couldn’t imagine I’d lose my daughter here… It’s just a nightmare,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Take your anger and\u2026 just spread happiness and love and memory for my lovely niece,” Ms Chernykh said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-322123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}