The hospital that treated one of the survivors of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre last month changed the name of the victim to hide her Jewish identity, Australian media reported this week.
Rosalia Shikhverg was taken to Liverpool Hospital in Sydney with a gunshot and shrapnel wounds to her head following the December 14 shooting, which left 15 people dead. Staff at the hospital gave her a nametag that read “Karen Jones" instead of her real name and entered the fake name in their records. She was not asked for her permission for this name change.
The staff told Shikhverg that the reason for the name change was so that she would not be hounded by the media. However, Shikhverg believes the move may have been meant to protect her from the hospital's own employees.
“In my opinion, they were afraid of staff, not media," she told Sky News Australia. “They can’t trust their own staff."
"I was so scared and so upset," she recalled. "I started to remember, not long ago, the two people from Bankstown Hospital, they openly threatened to kill Jews when they come to [the] hospital."
“I was thinking, ‘I have to be discharged very quick’ because I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink. I cried all the time," she added.
Shikhverg also praised and thanked Bondi Beach hero Ahmed Al Ahmed, saying: "If not for him, we would have been killed 100%."
New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park denied that the reason for the “It wasn’t about protecting her from staff, or [protecting] staff from different ethnic backgrounds," he told Sky News. "It was not done with any ill intent."
"We didn’t want people coming in and trying to engage with her or threaten her or make any comments to people who had already been through hell and back," he added.
Despite Park's denials, Shikhverg husband, Gre,g noted that no other hospital that treated the dozens of other victims of the attack had changed the names of any of their patients.