Jessica Chapnik Kahn took her five-year-old daughter Shemi to a party near the Bondi Pavilion on Sunday but just minutes in, as her daughter was smiling and patting a goat, their world changed as gunfire began.
Warning: This story contains graphic content that some readers may find disturbing.
Shemi was adamant she wanted to go to the event and, according to her mother, was “so excited”.
Her nine-year-old boy, Lev, was equally adamant: He did not want to go.
So Lev stayed with his dad Nadav in their Bondi apartment while Jessica and Shemi walked the few hundred metres to the pavilion.
“She was giddy with excitement,” Jessica said.
Like at most Jewish community events, there were security guards at the party.
Shemi Kahn pats a goat at the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach before the attack. (Supplied)
Jessica was asked a couple of cursory questions before they were allowed in.
“It was really joyful,” she said.
“There were so many children, and we went straight to get our special Jewish doughnuts that are traditional for Hanukkah. And she [Shemi] was so excited, and got one for her brother and one for herself. I was holding them and we went straight to the petting zoo, and she was just giggling and patting a little goat and she was delighted.”
And then the shots began.
“I instantly knew it was a gunshot,” Jessica told 7.30.
“I looked at the crowd and I saw people smiling, looking up, and I clocked in just that second, they think it’s fireworks and it’s not.”
Diving into a pit to save her daughter
She grabbed Shemi and ran towards a small sunken area in the grass.
In the aftermath of the attack many items were left strewn across the ground. (ABC News: Jack Fisher)
“We all threw ourselves into that pit with all our children beneath us … there was so much crying and so many children’s voices, and parents screaming, ‘Get down! Get down!'”
She pushed Shemi’s body into the ground beneath her.
“I just was doing everything in my power to make sure that my body was covering her entire body … I had other children at my legs and I was trying to put my legs over them and other people. It was a tangle, an absolute tangle of people.”
Read more on the Bondi Beach shooting:
Sitting inside her Bondi apartment, less than 48 hours after the horror of Sunday’s attack, Jessica closed her eyes to recall her own state of mind.
“I was so afraid,” she said.
“I could feel the shots getting closer and closer and closer, and I just thought there was a whole gang of people just coming, walking towards us to just spray bullets.
“I was thinking, ‘God, I just don’t want her to have to crawl out from underneath my dead body.’
“I was playing that out in my mind. What’s she going to do when she comes from underneath and she’s alone, and what will I look like?”
She told 7.30 she could feel bullets hitting the bodies next to her.
“I felt sprays of things and I knew that it was bodies next to me, just sprays of blood or sprays of body part or bone. Things were cold and wet over us.”
A husband and wife’s biggest fearsÂ
As she lay on the ground, among the dead, injured and terrified, Jessica thought she would probably not survive, and attempted to regain some control over her own panic.
Jessica and Nadav were separated at the time of the shooting. Nadav would later search for Jessica and their daughter among the dead. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)
“I found some sort of stillness inside myself, like a safe place, and I wanted to share that with Shemi,” she said.
But Jessica had been pressing down so hard on her daughter’s body that she soon had another fear.
“I realised she hadn’t been moving for a really long time. All the other children were moving and crawling,” the mother of two said.
During that period her phone was also ringing constantly — she knew it had to be her husband, Nadav. She didn’t dare touch it.
Nadav was still at the apartment, where his mother had called him to tell him there was something wrong at Bondi Beach.
Many ambulances descended on Bondi on Sunday afternoon. (ABC News: Nick Dole)
Nadav said he had been living in fear of an attack on a Jewish gathering since the events of October 7, 2023. The terror attack was a realisation of that.
“Instantly I knew there was an attack there,” Nadav told 7.30.
“I tried calling Jessie. She wasn’t picking up. Tried texting and she wasn’t answering, and I was like, I have to go and find her before it’s too late.”
Lying on top of her impossibly still daughter, Jessica called out to her.
“I said to her, ‘Are you breathing? Are you breathing?’ And I just heard her sob, a little sob that was tiny that I could feel like her body convulsing and her little cry,” she recalled.
“Then, finally, the shooting stopped — and people began standing up.
“And I heard parents scream to the children, ‘Close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes.’
“And I said, ‘Shemi, hold on to Mama. Put your head here. Close your eyes. Don’t look up.'” She said, ‘Why?’
“I said, ‘I’ve got you. We’ve got this. We’re going.'”
Running from the ‘bloodbath’
The dead and injured were all around her.
“I saw the bloodbath. I saw the disaster. I saw the man next to me with holes everywhere.”
She picked up Shemi and ran.
“I ran straight to a policeman and I asked him, ‘What do I do?’ And he said, ‘Run home now!'”
Jessica Chapnik Khan was forced to run away from the gunfire with her daughter. (Supplied/New York Post)
But the route home was where the shots were fired from, so they ran to towards the North Bondi Surf Live Saving Club.
At the same time Nadav and Lev were running down Beach Road, Bondi. It was full of people running in all directions. The father and son arrived at the back of the pavilion to find what looked like a brawl in progress on the footbridge, where moments earlier the shooters had been standing.
Nadav did not know that at the time. He and Lev ran on, thinking his wife and daughter were in terrible danger, injured, or worse.
There were many bodies on the ground.
“As soon as I saw that, I just covered his eyes. I held his hand and covered his eyes and said, ‘Just stay with me. We’re going to find them,’ Nadav told 7.30.
“He said he was very, very afraid and I said, ‘I am too, but we’re together and we’re going to find them.'”
Finally, his phone rang.
Jessica and Nadav share an embrace after detailing their experience. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)
“I can’t tell you my relief when I saw Jessie’s number and heard her voice,” he said.
They reunited with Jessica and Shemi in the surf club.
“It was just surreal that we could find each other again,” Jessica said.
The aftermath
Barely two days after the attack, the children are just beginning to process what happened.
Jessica lays flowers at the Bondi memorial. (ABC News: Jerry Rickard)
“I made sure that they each gave me their accounts,” Jessica said.
“I think that’s a really important part of processing trauma. After Shemi did that, she said, ‘I never want to talk about this again.'”
But her memories keep coming back.
Her mother said Shemi describes the shooting as “bing bangs”, and asks: “Is there going to be more bing bang?”
Lev has questions too.
“He has started saying things like, ‘Why would someone come to a Hanukkah party and start shooting people?’
“I said to him … that they weren’t well, but these [are] people that made really bad decisions and there are some people that believe that hurting people will make them happy.”
The family has been several times to the growing memorial of flowers that is accumulating behind the Bondi Pavilion.
Mourners pay their respects at a memorial at Bondi Beach. (ABC News: Liam Patrick)
Nadav says the tragedy has changed the community.
“In the Jewish community we feel more targeted,” he told 7.30.
“There is all of this fundamentalist hatred and antisemitism and, yes, all of that — but in Bondi, I really feel like a sense of some of the innocence that’s been destroyed for everyone.
“This is everyone’s playground, this is everyone’s beach. And just seeing the number of people coming to offer flowers from all walks of life, from all nationalities, from all faiths, it just reinforces how as humanity we’re all feeling it.Â
“We’re all so disturbed by such violent, cruel behaviour, that’s so nonsensical.
“It also felt so wasteful. There is no martyrdom in dying, in being killed or killing.”
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