Wayne and Vanessa Miller were at the event at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach on Sunday with their two daughters, and they said it was a joyful, peaceful event to celebrate the start of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, until it was shattered by two gunmen firing indiscriminately into the crowd.
“They were giving out donuts, and there was face painting and there was music, the kids were just having an absolute ball,” Wayne Miller told “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King on Monday.
Then, standing in a line with daughter Capri, Wayne heard what he first thought was a firecracker. Then there was another crack, and he realized it was gunfire.
“My daughter was in front of me. I just turned, I grabbed her, and I just saw a table and I just dived under this table and I just lay on top of my daughter Capri,” he recalled. “I was just lying on top of her, just shielding her.”
“The bullets were just going off, people screaming and running and running. About two arm lengths from me, there was a guy shot on the floor who was screaming, ‘help, help!'” Miller recalled.
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As rounds flew overhead, his wife called him, and they quickly realized they had lost track of their other little girl, Gigi, in the chaos.
“Vanessa calls me and says, ‘Have you got the girls?’ I’m like, ‘I’ve got Capri. I’m on top of Capri. Where’s Gigi? Gigi, you’re with Gigi. Where’s Gigi?’ She said, ‘No, I’m not with Gigi. Where’s Gigi?’ And at this stage, I thought, okay, I need to look for her, and I stuck my head out from under the table to look up into the field. And somebody shouted, ‘There’s gunshots!’ I just heard gunshots. And the guy said, Get down, get down, get down. And I just thought, ‘I just need to wait and protect my little Capri.'”
“It was terrifying,” said Vanessa. “I’m screaming and the gunshots are going and I’m trying to run.”
She said she even tried to grab a police officer’s gun at one point, “to save more lives.”
“I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve gotta go, I’ve gotta go,” the mother thought. “I felt hopeless. I looked, I was watching the whole thing. I just see people on the ground. I called my mother and I said, ‘Gigi’s dead. Gigi is dead, Gigi’s dead.’ I just knew she was dead … What does a three-year-old know? Three-year-old when gunshots are going, but you think they’re gonna drop to the ground and take cover? No. I just knew she’d be running around screaming. She was an easy target.”
Wayne eventually found his wife, handed their daughter Capri over to Vanessa, and then set out to look for Gigi.
“I ran back into the field to look for Gigi, and I was looking amongst the blood and the bodies and I found my little girl lying underneath this beautiful hero, an absolute brave hero, Jess. She was shielding my little baby from the gunshots,” he told CBS News. “It was the most special moment of my life to find her, and I took her number and I said, ‘Jess, thank you. You’re an absolute brave hero. You’re an absolute superhero.”
Vanessa Miller said Jess continued shooting video of the attackers even as she laid down over the Gigi to protect her, “and you could see the guy on the bridge, shooting at her. Shooting towards her.”
Miller said she’d asked her husband whether he felt the event was safe just 15 minutes before the attack started, noting what seemed to her to be very few security personnel in the area.
“There were only two policemen there,” Vanessa said. “I didn’t feel safe. I said to him, ‘I don’t feel safe.'”
The couple were highly critical of Australia’s government, accusing officials of having “done nothing to protect the Jewish communities” in the country in the face of rising antisemitism.
DAVID GRAY/AFP/Getty 
Police should have been on high alert, given that it was a Hanukkah celebration and antisemitic threats and attacks have skyrocketed in Australia since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, according to data from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
According to data compiled by the council, antisemitic incidents in Australia remain at historically high levels — almost five times the average annual number seen before Oct. 7, 2023.
Police officials in New South Wales state said at least 15 people were killed and 40 others remained in local hospitals following what Australian leaders have called an antisemitic attack.
The suspects were a father and son. They had six firearms — legally owned by the 50-year-old father — and had assembled an improvised explosive device, all allegedly to target the Jewish gathering, according to Australian authorities.
“It was ground zero,” Ben Ferguson, among the emergency responders to reach the scene, told CBS News. “We were all there, and ended up carrying bodies into the street.”
Ferguson, a lifeguard at the local Bondi surf club, said members of the club were among the first to provide medical attention to people wounded in the shooting, and he said they started doing so as soon as the gunfire stopped. “We realized it was a mass shooting event when someone screamed that the gunman was reloading, and then we just knew that we were completely vulnerable.”
“There was a really big feeling … a constant paranoia that a bomb was gonna go off. And we didn’t know where the gunmen were,” Ferguson told CBS News on Monday. “The Surf club has a lot of medical resources ourselves, and so there was a lot of running over and delivering oxygen tanks.”
Friends and family pay tribute to slain Rabbi Eli Schlanger
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told CBS News he believes a last-minute decision to not attend the Hanukkah event saved his life.
“For the last 10 years, the rabbi has invited me to speak and to convey a message. And this year, for the first time, I didn’t attend – I had my oldest daughter’s best friend’s bat mitzvah, so I was somewhere else,” he said.
“The rabbi who invited me, who was a dear dear friend of mine, who I would have been standing next to, was among the slaughtered,” Ryvchin told CBS News.
The co-CEO paid tribute to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was one of the organizers of the event, calling him an “extraordinary human being.” Ryvchin said Schlanger’s work across the state of New South Wales included helping the underprivileged and visiting people hospitalized with terminal illnesses.
Schlanger’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Mendel Kastel, was also at the event with his family.
“The last 24 hours is really, really difficult,” Kastel told CBS News on Monday. “You know, losing a brother-in-law, you know, a family member, so I’m directly affected. But at the same time, I’ve got a role in the community supporting others. It’s been really difficult.”
Kastel lauded Schlanger as “an amazing young man, a person who was committed to his work.”
“He was committed to the community. People loved him. Wherever he went he took real interest in people and people took a real interest in him. He would visit people in hospitals, he’d visit people in prisons, he would teach people, he would teach bar mitzvahs. He would inspire other rabbis with his enthusiasm, his positivity,” Kastel said.
Shalom, a 20-year-old man from Miami who has been living in Bondi, told CBS News his friend was still hospitalized on Monday after being shot while near Schlanger.
“From what I’ve heard he was with the rabbi and another policeman, and all three of them got shot,” Shalom said. “My friend … he got shot twice, he got shot one in the stomach, came out, went out, and one in the leg.”
“We were at the hospital the whole night last night, and we were with him, praying, just being there for him and he was on a breathing tube. They did a surgery and they said it [the bullet] hit one of his bowels and they fixed it up, and said he’s stable, thank God,” Shalom added.
Grieving residents living in Bondi, a southern suburb of Sydney, came together Monday to lay flowers and mourn the dead following the shooting attack.
For Rabbi Kastel, it’s that community spirit that’s the essence of what Hanukkah symbolizes.
“We want to shine, we want to light those candles together, we wanna put our arms around each other and really build a proper Australian community where people feel valued, people feel loved, and people feel cared for,” he said.