“I wanted to make moments matter,” said 25-year-old photojournalist Chen Schimmel, addressing the Jerusalem Post Annual Conference’s opening gala. “To document. To bear witness.”
Schimmel shared the personal and national traumas that shaped her lens in a moving speech that traced her journey from street photography to frontline documentation. At 17, she stood in Auschwitz, carrying the memory of her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who now, at 86, “speaks none” of the 14 languages she once knew. “She can no longer say what she carries. So I carry it for her.”
Following the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, Schimmel experienced a strong urge to capture the destruction through photography. “I couldn’t sit still. I had to go.” She entered Be’eri with her father, a ZAKA volunteer. “The streets were silent. Bikes lay where children had dropped them. Life had been frozen mid-motion, then shattered.”
Two images from Be’eri anchor her forthcoming book: Holy Work, showing a ZAKA volunteer collecting blood “with reverence”; and God’s Rays and Buckets, of two of the Haran family members kneeling in the ruins of their family home. “You see the darkness,” she said. “And yet, the light is there.”
“I keep going back,” Schimmel told the crowd. “Because the story isn’t over. And neither is the light.”