Hundreds of mourners gathered at a Sydney synagogue on Wednesday for the first of 15 funerals for killed in Sunday’s terrorist attack about Jews who gathered to mark the beginning of Hanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, 41, assistant rabbi at the local Chabad-Lubavitch of Bondi, who helped organize what began as a joyous event on the famous beach, was the first mourner on Wednesday.

The funeral was held just a few blocks from where he and other members of Sydney’s tight-knit Jewish community were killed.

After sharp criticism of what many saw as lax security for Sunday’s event, there was a heavy police presence around the synagogue on Wednesday. Police officers were seen checking the identification of those walking towards the funeral.

“He was an angel,” Rabbi Moshe Gutnick told CBS News as Schlanger’s body was transported. “He was goodness personified. Everything he did was good for people.”

“He was the heart and soul of the synagogue,” he added. “We will all miss him terribly.”

Gutnick’s brother-in-law, 62-year-old Reuven Morrison, was also among those killed Sunday while throwing rocks at one of the attackers, Morrison’s daughter told CBS News earlier this week.

Given how close the community is, Rabbi Gutnick said they will attend funerals in the coming days, “not once, not twice, but many more times.”

“It’s just one after another after another. It’s our October 7,” he added, referring to the Hamas terror attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war two years ago.

Some family members and friends could not contain their grief during a service for Schlanger on Wednesday, speaking through tears to pay tribute to the father of five, whose youngest was born just seven weeks before he was killed.

“After what happened, my biggest regret was — aside from the obvious — I could have done more to tell Eli more often how much we love him, how much I love him, how much we appreciate everything he does and how proud we are of him,” said his father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman.

Shooting investigations continued, meanwhile.

The the suspects were father and son who lived in the area, Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed Akram, 24.

An elderly man, an Indian who immigrated to Australia in 1998, was killed during the attack.

Naveed Akram, a native-born Australian citizen, was wounded and left in a coma but woke up in a Sydney hospital on Tuesday and was quickly charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder and one count of committing an act of terrorism.