Photojournalist Chen Schimmel, 26, delivered a deeply personal and emotional speech at the Jerusalem Post Washington Conference, describing her journey from a young street photographer to a witness to the atrocities of October 7 and the war that followed. “I picked up my camera when I was young, it was my way of telling stories,” she said. But it was standing in Auschwitz at 17 – a site deeply connected to her own family’s Holocaust trauma – that made her realize she wanted “to bear witness.” This sense of duty reemerged on October 7. As sirens rang across Israel, both of Schimmel’s brothers went south to join the fight. “As I watched my brothers leave one after the other,” she recounts, “I knew I couldn’t sit still. I had to go and witness.”
What she saw when they reached Kibbutz Be’eri was utter horror: “Bikes were lying where children had left them, bullet casings scattered across the ground, life had been frozen in the middle of itself and then shattered.” Since then, Schimmel has traveled across Israel and into Gaza, photographing hostage families, evacuees, Nova festival survivors, and soldiers. Amid the devastation, she said she discovered “a quiet hope, an unshakable resilience. A nation that refuses to be defined by what tried to break it.” Her new book, “October 7: Bearing Witness” gathers those images and testimonies. “All proceeds go to soldiers living with post-trauma,” she noted.
Schimmel later presented two of the images featured in the book. The first, titled “Holy Work,” shows a ZAKA volunteer collecting blood from a murder site in Be’eri. “It is one of the most profound and heartbreaking photographs I have captured… it shows the sanctity of every life and the courage to honor it.” The second depicts Yuval Haran, kneeling in the ruins of his family home two months after his relatives were murdered or kidnapped, light streams through the shattered room. “You see the darkness and destruction, and yet the light is there,” she said. “A people who know how to spin light out of darkness.” As Hanukkah approaches, Schimmel said her mission remains unchanged: “These stories must never be forgotten. They must never be denied. The light is not over.”
Written in collaboration with Chen Schimmel