Chen Schimmel’s Lens of Truth and Pain

At this year’s Jerusalem Post Conference in New York, I had the chance to meet Chen Schimmel—a 25-year-old photojournalist whose work doesn’t just capture images, it captures essence.

There’s a belief in photography that when you take a picture, you take a piece of someone with you. After spending time with Chen and experiencing her work, I can say with certainty: her photographs don’t just call out to you—they transport you. They pull you into a dimension where time is paused and emotion is eternal.

Following the October 7 Hamas massacre, Chen couldn’t sit still. “I had to go,” she told me. That sense of urgency led her to Be’eri, one of the hardest-hit communities, alongside her father, a ZAKA volunteer. What she found there was devastation frozen in time. “The streets were silent. Bikes lay where children had dropped them. Life had been frozen mid-motion, then shattered.”

Two haunting images from Be’eri form the emotional core of her upcoming book, Holy Work. One captures a ZAKA volunteer collecting blood with what Chen describes as “reverence.” The other—titled God’s Rays and Buckets—shows two members of the Haran family kneeling in the ruins of their home. “You see the darkness,” Chen told me. “And yet, the light is there.”

But her lens didn’t stop there.

She continued documenting funerals of soldiers, each frame holding unbearable weight. And then there was the image that stopped me in my tracks—a photograph of Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. It was unlike anything I had seen before.

Chen shared the story behind it. “I don’t usually do staged photos,” she explained. “Rachel asked, ‘What should I do?’ I told her, ‘Just do what you feel.’” What followed was a moment of raw humanity—Rachel collapsed into Jon’s arms. The embrace was fierce, maternal, shattered. It told the story of a lioness in anguish, stripped bare by relentless grief.

I asked Chen what she hopes people take away from her work.

“I want my images to leave a mark,” she said. “I want them to tell the truth—so no one can ever say these atrocities didn’t happen.”

Chen Schimmel is more than a photojournalist. She’s a visual witness, a truth-teller, and a fierce guardian of memory. Through her lens, we don’t just see the tragedy—we feel it, we remember it, and we are called to never forget.