The rm command is pretty permanent unfortunately. It's not like the deleted files go into a trash bin or something. They are gone.
You might be able to recover them with something like DataRescue, but it's not a given, and I would strongly encourage you to stop using the Mac entirely until you can use a tool like the above to see what it can recover. Because of how disk management works, the files are still there, but not accessible because the space they occupied on the disk has been allocated as empty blocks to the filesystem, so the more the computer gets used, the more likelihood of the original data being overwritten by newly written data and thus becoming unrecoverable.
