Vivian, dedication to peace above all else

Three days before her death, she was still marching through the streets of Jerusalem with Women Wage Peace, the organisation she had helped to found. Vivian Silver was born and raised in Canada. She first travelled to Israel in 1968, during her first year of college, and then attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the age of 25, she became a member of Kibbutz Gezer in 1974, and was its secretary, one of the few women to hold this position. In 1990, together with her husband and two sons, she moved to Be’eri, the kibbutz five km from the border with the Gaza Strip, where on 7 October 2023, Hamas militiamen took an unknown number of Israeli civilians hostage, and killed at least 108 others.  Among them was Vivian Silver, who was only identified through DNA investigations of some human remains.

She was 74 years old and a lifelong women’s rights activist demanding gender equality. Women Wage Peace, originally founded with Israeli women, has over the years reached out to women and men from other regions and religions, to over 20,000 members. The organization has two main objectives: to encourage peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority; and to urge the implementation of UN resolution 1325 (“Women, Peace and Security”) which “reaffirms the importance of the role of women in conflict prevention and resolution”.

The organisation has collaborated several times with the Palestinian Women of the Sun, which pursues similar goals, and working together to form a “common platform”. In March 2022, the two groups met on the beach of Neve Midbar on the Dead Sea for a peace conference.