Vivian Silver, victim of Hamas attack, remembered as peacemaker

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This article was published 14/12/2023 (963 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s Jewish community gathered Thursday to mourn a peace activist who died after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Vivian Silver, 74, was born and raised in Winnipeg but moved to Israel in 1974. She lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, a Jewish community near the border of the Gaza Strip, and devoted her life to promoting peace between Israeli and Palestinian people.

Her family feared she had been kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas after her last contact with them was over the phone on Oct. 7, the day Hamas launched an attack against Israel, while she hid in a closet.

The family was told she was among the 1,200 people who died in the initial attack that day, according to numbers from Israel’s foreign ministry.

At a memorial held at the Asper Jewish Community Campus, her family remembered her as a loving mother and fierce advocate.

“She would arrange encounters between Israelis and Palestinians in the morning, and inquire about our feelings after we came home from school,” her son Chen Zeigen told the crowd of mourners.

Chen and his brother Yonatan announced they would establish grants to be awarded to women who make strides in promoting peace and policy making between Jews and Arabs in the region.

Silver had many humanitarian roles. She was executive director of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, which promotes community projects that bring together Arabs and Jews, and the founder of Women Wage Peace, a grassroots group to “promote a non-violent, respectful, and mutually accepted solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

While Silver was listed as missing, her son Yonatan called for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s escalating attacks, stating “the right thing to do is to push immediately for diplomacy.”

Lt.-Gov. Anita Neville encouraged mourners to work together to create a “culture of listening and understanding” in their own communities.

“It would be easy to give in to despair. It would be easy to say there is no solution, no way to bring people together to resolve disagreements through dialogue,” she said. “But today, as we gather to remember Vivian Silver, it is our responsibility to honour her vision by avoiding despair.”

The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that more than 18,000 Palestinians and approximately 1,200 Israelis have died. It says 1.9 million people have been displaced by the war.

— With files from The Canadian Press

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca