Chabad.org has won three Simon Rockower Awards, sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association. The Rockowers, presented on June 4 at the gala banquet of the AJPA’s 45th annual conference, are often dubbed the “Jewish Pulitzers” and awarded for excellence in Jewish journalism. This year’s ceremony took place at the Center for Jewish History and marked the first time that the conference, held June 2-5, took place in New York City.
Chabad.org won prizes in three categories, recognizing the website’s coverage of the Bondi Chanukah Massacre, the approach of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, to antisemitism through the perspective of the Australian Jewish community, and a stunning tribute to Rabbi Sholom B. Lipskar, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who spent a lifetime building Jewish life from where it was non-existent into one of the most populous Jewish corners of the United States.
In the Award for Excellence in Long-Form Writing category, Chabad.org’s Moshe New took home first place for “The Heroes of Bondi Beach,” a harrowing minute-by-minute account of the December 2025 terror attack at Chabad of Bondi’s “Chanukah at the Sea” in Sydney, Australia.
The article chronicled the attack, in which Chabad Rabbi Eli Schlanger and 14 others were killed. New’s article reconstructed the events of that evening through the accounts of those who were there, and in the judges’ view, accomplished what the best long-form journalism does: placing the reader inside a moment they could not have otherwise experienced.
A judge praised the piece in unambiguous terms: “This is a heartbreaking and terrifying account of the terrible attack on Bondi Beach. It made me feel like I was there, witnessing every second.”
The second honor came in the Award for Excellence in Writing about Antisemitism category, where Chabad.org earned second place for Mendel Super’s “‘I Don’t Recognize This Australia’: Persistent Antisemitism Rocks Australian Jewry.”
Reported before the Bondi Beach attack, the feature story documented a Jewish community increasingly unsettled by a surge in antisemitic incidents on the street, arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish property, and in public life—and captured the disorientation of Australian Jews who had long considered their country a safe home. Importantly, the story showed the community’s refusal to back down and hide away, echoing the Rebbe’s approach to darkness and hatred.
One of the rabbis Super interviewed for the story shared his community’s determination to double down on proud Jewish expression, and shared what would become his epitaph and legacy: “Be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish.” That rabbi was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who would be murdered just 10 months later at the Bondi event he had organized. Those words, “Be more Jewish, act more Jewish and appear more Jewish,” would become a rallying cry for the Australian Jewish community, and a fitting epitaph for a man who had lived his life accordingly.
Chabad.org’s third award came in the category of Excellence in News Obituaries, where Dovid Margolin’s tribute to Rabbi Sholom B. Lipskar earned second place.
Over the course of more than five decades, Rabbi Lipskar, who founded The Shul of Bal Harbour and Surfside in Florida, as well as the Aleph Institute, the leading Jewish organization caring for the incarcerated and Jews in the armed forces, remade Jewish life in south Florida, transforming Miami into—in the words of the Rebbe—“a showcase … in the area of Torah education and [the] revival of Yiddishkeit.”
Judges described it as “very well reported and artfully presented,” noting that it “tells the story of a successful immigrant and builder as well as the story of the Jewish century.”
Since 2015, Chabad.org has won a total of 29 Rockower Awards.
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