Two women, one lens

At the time of their meeting, Zecharia’s daughter, Eden, had been a hostage in Gaza, taken from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. When Schimmel arrived to photograph Zecharia for The Jerusalem Post as part of a series on hostage families, she expected to see grief. Instead, she encountered grace. “She came into my home,” Zecharia says softly, “and I saw a big light enter with her.”

The two women – one, a mother whose world had shattered; the other, a young photographer determined to document it – would form an unexpected bond that would resonate through Schimmel’s haunting new book, October 7: Bearing Witness.

Schimmel, 26, spent the early days after the attack rushing between Israel’s South and hospitals, documenting the chaos as a freelancer. “I knew I had to record everything,” she says. “But after a while, I realized that the most urgent stories were the families – the hostages, the missing, the waiting.” Photographing them, she discovered, required more than courage. “It’s very, very difficult,” she says.

“You’re meeting people living through hell. You have to be extremely sensitive. You have to be a human first, before a photographer.” That principle guided her into Zecharia’s living room. “I get nervous before every photograph,” she notes, smiling softly. “Every single one. I always want to feel that I’m there to tell a story, not to take something from them.” But Zecharia made it easy. “She was immediately so strong, so full of life,” Schimmel remembers. “The connection was instant.” After the shoot, as Schimmel packed up her camera, Zecharia asked: “Do you want to stay for a cup of tea?”

“I hesitated,” Schimmel says. “And then I thought, ‘Yes. I really do.’”

They sat on the couch and talked – about Eden, about Hanukkah, about hair products, and about everything else. “She started playing with my hair,” Schimmel laughs. “It was so ordinary, so human. And in that moment, I felt how much love still filled her home.” That conversation stayed with her. “She told me she was praying for a miracle on the last night of Hanukkah,” Schimmel says. “That was Eden’s birthday. She said, ‘I pray she comes home to me. That would be the greatest miracle of all.’”

A few days later, Zecharia called her. “She said, ‘Eden is coming home, but not alive.’”

That was when Schimmel found out that Eden had been murdered in captivity. When Zecharia invited her to photograph the funeral, Schimmel agreed. “I’d been to military funerals before, but this was different,” she says. “It was so intimate, so raw. Everyone was on top of the grave, touching the coffin, crying. I had to put my camera down.” It was one of the few times she stopped shooting to simply feel.

That day, she wrote in her journal, the only handwritten reflection included in Bearing Witness. “Usually the book has one photograph per page,” she explains. “But Eden’s story became a small series. I needed to write it down before I lost the feeling.”

For Zecharia, Schimmel’s perspective became another way to keep her daughter’s spirit alive. “It’s so important to capture those moments of parting,” she says. “People think it’s strange to photograph a funeral, but those pictures are a gift.”

After the massacre, Zecharia transformed her pain into a different kind of documentation: a book of her own titled 365 Ways to Turn Every Challenge into an Opportunity. Each page begins with the word “Today,” a reflection of the daily discipline that helps her keep living.

“I can’t promise myself tomorrow,” she says. “But today, I can choose to smile. Today, I can choose life.” That focus on agency, on choosing life over despair, stayed with Schimmel. “Every time I look at her photos, I remember that conversation about choice,” she says. “She wasn’t pretending she was okay. She was choosing to live.”

In October 7: Bearing Witness, that strength appears silently. The book’s design is stark and restrained – one image per page, no captions, few colors. “It’s not just a book of images,” Schimmel says. “It’s a record of connection.”

Among portraits of soldiers, volunteers, and survivors, the ones dedicated to Zecharia stand out for their stillness. “It’s not a photo of grief,” she explains. “It’s a photo of strength.”

When people describe her photographs as confident, Schimmel smiles, almost shyly. “I’m nervous every time,” she says. “It’s the anticipation that’s hard. Once I start shooting, I forget about myself. Once I connect with someone, the nerves disappear.” She believes that connection is what gives the images life.

When asked whether she sees her friendship with Zecharia as symbolic, a meeting of two sides of the same war, Schimmel hesitates. On Oct. 7, both her brothers had rushed to the South to fight: one in Nahal Oz, the other in Be’eri. “People have said that,” she admits softly. “That Orin lost her daughter, and my brothers went to fight. But to me, it’s incomparable. What she lost, there’s nothing like that.” Still, the parallel is inescapable: two women drawn to the same front line from opposite directions – one enduring, one documenting – both refusing to turn away. “Maybe that’s what connects us,” Schimmel says. “We both decided to face it.”

“Eden was all light,” Zecharia says. “And when Chen came, she brought light into my home again.” Schimmel remembers that same glow: “There’s a photo where the sun hits Orin’s face just right. When I developed it, I thought, ‘This isn’t just light, it’s Eden, somehow.’”

Both women’s books, in their own ways, serve as acts of illumination – one through words, the other through images. October 7: Bearing Witness confronts horror while maintaining humanity; 365 Ways charts a path through grief toward grace. Together, they tell a single story, a quiet dialogue between seeing and surviving.

“I didn’t plan for it,” Schimmel says, “but Orin’s story became the heart of my book. It reminded me that photography isn’t only about showing pain. It’s about showing that people keep living.”