Bondi Beach couple in the

Wayne and Vanessa Miller were at the event on Australia’s famous Bondi Beach on Sunday with their two daughters, and said it was a joyful and peaceful event to celebrate the start of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, until it was vandalized by two Gunmen shooting indiscriminately into the crowd..

“They were handing out donuts, they had faces painted and there was music, the kids were just having a great time,” Wayne Miller told “News Mornings” co-host Gayle King on Monday.

Then, while standing in line with his daughter Capri, Wayne heard what he at first thought was a firecracker. Then another crack was heard and he realized it was gunshots.

“My daughter was in front of me. I turned around, grabbed her and saw a table and I dove under this table and lay on top of my daughter Capri,” he recalled. “He was just lying on top of her, protecting her.”

“Bullets were just popping, people were screaming and running and running. About two arm lengths away from me, there was a guy shot on the ground screaming, ‘help, help!'” Miller recalled.

As bullets 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, ‘Do you have the girls?’ I say, ‘I have Capri.’ I’m at the 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 that moment I thought, okay, I have to look for her, and I stuck my head out from under the table to look at the field. And someone yelled, ‘There’s gunshots!’ I just heard gunshots. And the guy said: Duck, duck, duck! And I thought, ‘I just need to wait and protect my little Capri.'”

“It was scary,” Vanessa said. “I’m screaming and shots are ringing and I’m trying to run.”

He said he even tried to grab a police officer’s gun at one point, “to save more lives.”

“I have nothing to lose. I have to go, I have to go,” thought the mother. “I felt desperate. I looked, I was watching everything. I just see people on the ground. I called my mom and I said, ‘Gigi is dead. Gigi is dead, Gigi is dead.’ I just knew she was dead… What does a 3-year-old know?… Do you think they’re going to drop to the ground and take cover? No. I just knew I’d be running and screaming. I was an easy target.”

Wayne finally found his wife, gave his daughter Capri to Vanessa, and then set out to find Gigi.

“I ran back into the field to look for Gigi, and I was searching through the blood and the bodies and I found my little girl lying underneath this beautiful hero, an absolutely brave hero, Jess. She was protecting my little baby from the gunshots,” he told News themezone. “It was the most special moment of my life meeting her, and I took her number and said, ‘Jess, thank you. You are an absolutely brave hero. You are an absolute superhero.”

Vanessa Miller said Jess continued taking video of the attackers even as he leaned on the Gigi to protect her, “and you could see the guy on the bridge, shooting at her. Shooting at her.”

Miller said she had asked her husband if he thought the event was safe just 15 minutes before the attack began, noting that to her there seemed to be very few security personnel in the area.

“There were only two police officers there,” Vanessa said. “I didn’t feel safe. I told him, ‘I don’t feel safe.'”

The couple were highly critical of the Australian government, accusing officials of having “done nothing to protect Jewish communities” in the country in the face of rising anti-Semitism.

The police should have been on high alert, given that it was a Hanukkah celebration and there have been anti-Semitic threats and attacks. was shot in Australia since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that sparked the war in Gaza, according to data from the Executive Council of Australian Jews.

According to data collected by the council, anti-Semitic incidents in Australia remain at historically high levels – almost five times the average annual number seen before October 7, 2023.

Police officials in New South Wales state said at least 15 people were killed and another 40 remained in local hospitals after what Australian leaders called an anti-Semitic attack.

He The suspects were father and son.. They had six firearms (legally owned by the 50-year-old father) and had assembled an improvised explosive device, all supposedly to target the Jewish gathering, according to Australian authorities.

“It was ground zero,” Ben Ferguson, one of the first responders who arrived at the scene, told News themezone. “We were all there and we ended up taking bodies out into the street.”

Ferguson, a lifeguard at the local Bondi surf club, said club members were among the first to provide medical care to people injured in the shooting, and he said they began doing so as soon as the shooting stopped. “We realized it was a mass shooting when someone shouted that the gunman was reloading, and then we knew we were completely vulnerable.”

“There was a really big feeling… a constant paranoia that a bomb was going to go off. And we didn’t know where the gunmen were,” Ferguson told News themezone on Monday. “The surf club has a lot of medical resources, so there were a lot of accidents and delivery of oxygen tanks.”

Friends and family pay tribute to slain Rabbi Eli Schlanger

Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jews, told News themezone he believes a last-minute decision not to attend the Hanukkah event saved his life.

“For the last 10 years, the rabbi has invited me to speak and deliver 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 very dear friend of mine, who I would have been with, was among those massacred,” Ryvchin told News themezone.

The co-executive director paid tribute to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of the event’s organizers, calling him an “extraordinary human being.” Ryvchin said Schlanger’s work across New South Wales included helping the disadvantaged and visiting people hospitalized with terminal illnesses.

Schlanger’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Mendel Kastel, was also present with his family.

“The last 24 hours have been really difficult,” Kastel told News themezone on Monday. “You know, losing a brother-in-law, you know, a family member, it affects me directly. But at the same time, I have a role in the community supporting others. It’s been really difficult.”

Kastel praised Schlanger as “an incredible young man, a person committed to his work.”

“He was committed to the community. People loved him. Everywhere he went, he was really interested in people and people were really interested in him. He visited people in hospitals, he visited people in prisons, he taught people, he taught bar mitzvahs. He inspired other rabbis with his enthusiasm and his positivity,” Kastel said.

Shalom, a 20-year-old Miami man who has been living in Bondi, told News themezone that his friend was still hospitalized Monday after being shot while near Schlanger.

“From what I heard, he was with the rabbi and another police officer, and all three of them were shot,” Shalom said. “My friend… they shot him twice, once in the stomach, he came out, he came out and another in the leg.”

“Last night we were at the hospital all night, and we were with him, praying, just being there for him and he was hooked up to a breathing tube. They operated on him and they told him. [the bullet] “It hit one of his intestines and they fixed it, and they said he’s stable, thank God,” Shalom added.

Grieving residents living in Bondi, a suburb south of Sydney, gathered on Monday to lay flowers and mourn those killed after the shooting attack.

For Rabbi Kastel, that community spirit is the essence of what Hanukkah symbolizes.

“We want to shine, we want to light those candles together, we want to embrace each other and really build a proper Australian community where people feel valued, loved and cared for,” she said.