Chana Thau had a candle burning in her Winnipeg home for 24 hours on Oct. 7 with the Hebrew word ‘remember’ written on it.
“It’s a very emotional day I think for most Jewish people all over the world because Israel is an important country to us,” Thau told Global News. “And most of us have friends and relatives over there and many have lost people, and when you know somebody, the impact is even greater.”
For Thau, that person is her friend, Vivian Silver. Silver was one of the 1,200 people killed in the Oct. 7 attack, according to Israeli authorities. Hundreds more were taken hostage.
“She was an amazing person. She was small, maybe even smaller than I was, and mighty. She was a force to be reckoned with, I didn’t even realize how much so until the last year,” Thau said.
“But she was very bright, she was very warm, and she really walked the walk and talked the talk for her beliefs.”
Silver was a Jewish humanitarian from Winnipeg that dedicated much of her adult life to campaigning for peace and human rights for Palestinians.
“Vivian moved to the Kibbutz, very close to the Gaza border because she really believed in forming peace, that there has to be peaceful co-existence. Ironically, she was massacred,” Thau said.
“All those people that were in Kibbutz were very idealistic or they wouldn’t have been living there. And sadly they were the ones that were killed, cruelly killed or taken hostage.”
About a decade ago, Silver co-founded the group Women Wage Peace, a grassroots group formed after the war in Gaza in 2014. Thau is part of a local chapter of that group called Canadian Supporters of Women Wage Peace. Thau says it’s to both honour Silver’s memory and to support her work and the group in Israel’s work.
“Despite everything, she would still say, ‘No, we have to have peace, we still have to have a peaceful coexistence’,” Thau said, adding she remains hopeful a peaceful, diplomatic solution is still within reach.
“We’re mothers, we’re grandmothers, and we want a world of peace for our children and our grandchildren,” Thau said. “And it doesn’t look so good, but we’re grabbing onto glimmers of hope.”
Belle Jarniewski, the executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, says Oct. 7 marks a day of immense sadness.
“I think of all of the lives that were lost, I think also of the hostages, I can’t imagine the suffering that they have undergone in this last year,” Jarniewski told Global News.
Jarniewski says she’s also disheartened over the division the conflict has triggered.
“I’m the child of two Holocaust survivors, a mother who experienced Auschwitz, a father who experienced six concentration camps, and I never would imagine that we would see this kind of hate, this explosion of antisemitism right here,” she said.
“For dialogue to take place you need both sides wanting that kind of dialogue and also an ability to listen to reach other, to empathize with each other, and that empathy is something we haven’t seen.”
Oct. 7 triggered the ongoing war in Gaza and according to Palestinian health authorities, more than 41,000 people in Gaza have died as a result of the conflict.
The conflict has prompted demonstrations across the globe. Ramsey Zeid, the president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, has been organizing weekly pro-Palestinian rallies in Winnipeg.
“Today we’re reflecting on the thousands of people that have lost their lives, that have been killed for absolutely no reason. Civilians, women and children that had absolutely no reason to be killed. They had lives to look forward to,” Zeid said, adding a ceasefire in Gaza is long overdue.
“We have to recognize and realize that Palestinians are human beings, that we’re all human beings,” he said.
“That we all need to live equally and freely, and once we realize that, there’s no problems at all. Everybody is a human being, everybody wants to live freely with dignity (and) with humanity.”