For five weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, the two sons of Canadian Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver thought she was among the hostages from Kibbutz Be’eri who had been kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas terrorists.
But after her house was destroyed that day, and they received no further word about her fate, her sons Chen, an archeologist based in Connecticut, and Yonatan, an Israeli social worker, threw themselves into campaigning for their mother’s release, while also channelling her spirit in advocating for a non-violent solution to the war.
In late November 2023, Israeli forensic experts notified Silver’s family that her remains had been identified in the rubble of her burned-out kibbutz neighbourhood. She had been killed on the first day of the attack.
Growing up, they had watched their mother’s tireless efforts to build bridges between Jews and Palestinians, while they pursued their own, different lives and career paths. Now, as the two-year anniversary of their mother’s murder approaches, Vivian Silver’s sons are still mourning their mother, but also curating her legacy as “Vivian”, an internationally-renowned political anti-war symbol.
On today’s episode of The CJN’s newly rebranded North Star podcast (formerly The CJN Daily), host Ellin Bessner sits down with Chen and Yonatan Zeigen to explore how having a purpose helps with their grief, rather than seeking vengeance for past trauma.
Transcript
Chen Zeigen: I would say that her name is used in two different ways that we don’t approve of because we’re used to her name being used as proof that here, these peace activists, and especially Vivian Silver—her name is brought up a lot because she’s the most prominent one—they drove the sick kids from Gaza and they were still murdered, right.
Ellin Bessner: So that’s the voice of Chen Zeigen, the older son of the late Winnipeg-born peace activist Vivian Silver, who was murdered on October 7 in her kibbutz Be’eri home during the Hamas attack on Israel nearly two years ago. Silver had founded groups like Women Wage Peace, and she used to drive Palestinian patients from Gaza to medical appointments in Israeli hospitals for the last 611 days. Since then, the Zeigens became champions of their mother’s legacy. Her sons have continued and expanded the work their mother started.
Ellin Bessner: Especially Yonatan, traveling the world, calling for the release of the hostages, demonstrating in protests in Israel for a non-military end to the war, which is how she would have wanted it, they say. Along the way, finding a purpose to move forward despite their grief, spreading Vivian’s story has made her internationally admired for her unwavering faith in the peace movement and a shared society. To others, though, she’s a symbol of the peace movement’s naivete and futility.
Ellin Bessner: There’s also a new Canadian-Israeli documentary feature now in production about her, and they’ve been raising money for an annual prize the family created in her name for female peace activists in and around Israel whose work embodies Vivian Silver’s values. Hello, I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Monday, June 9, 2025. Welcome to North Star, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Ellin Bessner: And yes, you heard it right. For you longtime listeners of the CJN Daily, this podcast has new theme music and a new name to mark four years of us bringing you in-depth interviews and eyewitness on-the-ground reporting covering the major stories impacting Canada’s Jewish community, be it here at home in Canada or from around the world. You’ll notice our new logo has the Star of David on top of a map of Canada with radio waves extending out and back. The name North Star is intended to evoke the idea that this podcast can be your North Star, your guide where you can always find your way to trustworthy, accurate reporting on Jewish issues through a Canadian lens.
Ellin Bessner: And why purple? Well, it’s still my favourite colour and a nod to the old logo with that stylized photo of me wearing my purple jacket. Continuity with a fresh look and sound but the same show you’ve made part of your daily routine. And now, to today’s important and thought-provoking episode. A few days ago, Chen Zeigen and his younger brother Yonatan flew into Toronto to attend a celebration of their mother’s life arranged by her close friends and supporters.
Ellin Bessner: As the boys grew up watching their mother’s lifelong commitment to the peace movement after she moved to Israel in the 70s and started a family, her sons forged their own career paths. Chen is 38 and an archaeologist currently based at the University of Connecticut. Yonatan is 36, in Israel. He used to be a social worker, but that changed after October 7, and Yonatan has jumped full-time into advocacy and peace work. Chen took a break from his PhD studies for months but has now returned to complete his degree. Their ties to Canada remain strong.
Ellin Bessner: The new Canadian branch of their mother’s group, Women Wage Peace organisation, is now up and running here. Their mother’s two siblings still live here, and the sons keep an eye on the recent tougher talk coming out of Canada’s new Carney government threatening sanctions on Israel and launching a war crimes investigation on Israel and Hamas. I met the Zeigens in the living room of a midtown Toronto home of their family friend, former Winnipegger, Lynn Mitchell.
Yonatan Zeigen: Thank you for having us.
Chen Zeigen: Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: Is it okay if we express our condolences in person to you, even though it’s almost two years?
Yonatan Zeigen: Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: Tell us, what is the importance of your trip here in Canada this week?
Yonatan Zeigen: Since October 7, there has been a kind of rallying in utilizing Vivian as our mother as a symbol for the causes she was dedicated to during her life. And we felt that honouring Vivian means carrying out the work, and in that sense, doing inter-community events of Jews and Palestinian diaspora. In the diaspora, being able to work together and bridge divides and rally under a banner of peace instead of pro each side felt very significant to do in Vivian’s name. We’re appreciative and proud to be a part of it here in Canada.
Ellin Bessner: You know, I don’t know how much you follow how Vivian’s, your mother’s name, is used sometimes by maybe people that you didn’t approve of or aren’t comfortable with. As, for example, the Israeli ambassador to Canada invoked her name in an interview when Canada rebuked Israel with France and England two weeks ago. And I’m wondering how you navigate that.
Chen Zeigen: I would say that her name is used in two different ways that we don’t approve of. It’s because we’re used to her name being used as proof that here, these peace activists, and especially Vivian Silver—her name is brought up a lot because she’s the most prominent one. They drove the sick kids from Gaza, and they were still murdered, right? So that’s usually how we’re used to her name being invoked in ways that we don’t like.
Ellin Bessner: That’s true. You’re right. It says, you see, you see, you have no one to talk to. And then the other way would be as we have to stand strong, we have to fight anti-Semitism because we’re doing, we have to have peace. Canada’s wrong about rebuking Israel because of Vivian Silver. Like, they use it; it turns into a political tool for people sometimes.
Yonatan Zeigen: Vivian would definitely support a Canadian effort to end the war, and the Israeli government, who is waging this war, is in the wrong. So I still don’t understand how her name could be used to attack Canada for trying to end the war. You know, when Canada, France, and the UK came out with this announcement, I said, better late than never. We need the international community to play a more assertive role in ending the war and promoting a diplomatic process, holistic that ends the conflict in general. We won’t do it by ourselves. You know, conflicts, a lot of times, they erupt between two sides, but they are always either enabled or solved with the intervention of third parties. We, up until now, have, quote, unquote, enjoyed only the enablement part of the international community intervention. We need to start enjoying the capacity to solve problems, our problems. And ending the war is a necessary first step in our ability to live viable lives in Israel and Palestine.
Ellin Bessner: And I wonder, as her kids, what have you learned more about her that you didn’t know when she was alive, that you now know that you would like to share with us maybe the…
Chen Zeigen: Extent of her impact, of her personal impact on people. I knew that she was well known, but so many people came up to me, you know, random people, oh, I knew your mother. I didn’t know she was your mother, but I knew of her, and she was very inspiring to me.
Ellin Bessner: Does that help you when even now it’s almost two years, when you find these little tidbits?
Chen Zeigen: I would say it’s very nice to hear, but I personally sort of make a separation between my mother as a public figure and a mother. So I wouldn’t say it sort of helps me with a feeling of loss and grief because I lost a mother; my grandchildren lost their grandmother. Her public impact, I don’t know if it really has much to do with that. I feel it’s like two different things. But, yeah, it feels good that she served as a figure that people sort of can now rally around and, you know, there’s so much division now. Yeah, I think that the fact that she’s serving as this figure maybe is helpful.
Ellin Bessner: I just ask about it because being the curators or the guardians of this legacy is a big responsibility. So how do you make sure, like we said a little earlier, that it’s being done the way the family wants? How much control over it do you get?
Yonatan Zeigen: I don’t really bother myself with things that are being done without my consent because I realize that the minute someone is a public figure, then it’s out of my hands. I don’t waste my resources on that. Usually, when people do ask for consent, I think about it. It’s a process of what would be conveyed out of this specific project. What will it add? Is it necessary? Is it in good taste? You know, it’s a lot of considerations. Is it political in a sense that I don’t wish? Is it bad messaging? So there’s a process.
Ellin Bessner: The people that your mom, your late mom, worked with, how much do you know about them? Like the people she drove, for example. Do we know if they’re alive? What happened? Are you able to keep in touch with any of the people?
Yonatan Zeigen: No. Well, Vivian’s projects and partners from Gaza itself, they kind of dwindled down since the second intifada and when Hamas took power. So we are in touch with one of her close friends and colleagues from back then. He’s not in Gaza anymore, but his family is there, and they’re in really, really bad shape. I also had a conversation with another colleague of hers that worked with her from Gaza, and he also left Gaza. He was persecuted back there by Hamas.
Chen Zeigen: There are other people who used to work on Barrie when we were children as construction workers. Over the years, they couldn’t continue to come and work. Our mother, together with other people on the kibbutz, usually organized some sort of donation for them, and over the years, they would call her sometimes to wish her a happy holiday or ask how things are going. Yeah, so some of them had to flee, and some of them, I don’t know.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned Barrie, so I was wondering if you know what is happening with her house? Have you seen what’s new there? Our country, our community’s been helping and supporting, but we’d love to get an…
Chen Zeigen: Update. Specifically, her house and the whole neighborhood that was… It’s like two or three blocks of the kibbutz that were impacted the most severely; they’re still standing.
Yonatan Zeigen: Their outer shells are standing.
Chen Zeigen: Yeah, I was gonna finish. The kibbutz is in sort of a renovation process, but they are investing in rebuilding other parts or constructing new neighborhoods. And the houses that were impacted, most of them were burned from inside. They’re still standing from the outside. Sometimes, in some of them, if you just glance, you might think, “Oh, they’re still standing.” But if you go inside, they’re completely destroyed.
Ellin Bessner: So do you want them to rebuild it? Do you want them to keep it as a memorial? Like, what is planned?
Chen Zeigen: I, and I think Jonathan agrees with me, believe that the kibbutz needs to decide, as the kibbutz does in the democratic process. They are the ones who went through October 7th, and it’s up to them to decide how they want to commemorate it. On our part, we have actually signed a release that says you are allowed to demolish the house. We have no ownership over the house because it’s a kibbutz.
Ellin Bessner: I’m curious why you decided that.
Yonatan Zeigen: It was okay, we’re done collecting what we want to collect of the remains. It’s not ours, it’s not our property. In terms of symbolism, I personally don’t feel the need for a specific material point of reference. I wholeheartedly give the kibbutz the prerogative to decide what they want to do in terms of commemoration and how they will proceed with it. You know, we have her in our hearts. We have her legacy, which is moral, philosophical, and political. There will be this movie that will be, I think, very significant in our kids’ and future generations of our families’ memories of her. So the house is not… you know, in the kibbutz, your relationship to housing is not so sentimental. We would move every couple of years to a new house because, relative to your status in the kibbutz, you move.
Chen Zeigen: We never really lived in that house, actually. She moved there after we were already grown. But I think that the important thing is that this is a thing that happened not only to our mother but also to an entire community.
Ellin Bessner: Right. I just mean because, for example, like all the tourism that it brings into the areas like the Nova Festival. It’s like a point of pilgrimage now for many, not just… You know what I mean?
Chen Zeigen: So I think we are not interested in our mother’s house becoming a point of this grief tourism. I completely understand the need of Israelis and world Jewry to come and see what happened, remember, and feel connected. But there are also a lot of problematic issues with this grief tourism, and we don’t really have a sentiment towards that.
Yonatan Zeigen: But I think that the kibbutz, one of the reasons why the houses in these neighborhoods are still standing, is part of that context of tools in the kibbutz.
Chen Zeigen: From what I understand, a lot of the people in the kibbutz that had to go and keep working there and be there became uncomfortable with just constant people visiting. So, at some point, they decided that no one comes in unless accompanied by someone appointed by the kibbutz.
Ellin Bessner: I wonder, you know, when the IDF says we’ve killed the person who held so and so hostage, or we’ve killed the commander of so and so. Are you interested in knowing what happened to the people who killed?
Chen Zeigen: Your mother. As you said, I’m very… I really want to know all the details about what happened, and I know that I never will. In terms of the specific person who was there, I don’t really think about it. I mean, because it’s, you know, part of a mob of people. The specific person, I don’t think, is very consequential to me. Imagine that if someone told me, “Oh, we identified the person who killed your mother, and we know that he has been eliminated.” I don’t know, maybe I would be… It’s hard for me to say. I can say that in the aftermath, I did feel, I don’t know if a need for vengeance upon the war of vengeance that is being waged, but a sense that there is accountability that needs to be shown. I would say that I did have some satisfaction when Yahya Sinwar was killed, though I don’t know if it was helpful for, you know, the future or not. But, you know, I would say that if there is a face on this, it was Yahya Sinwar for me.
Yonatan Zeigen: The way I dealt with this aspect of things is kind of a depersonalization of the event.
Yonatan Zeigen: It wasn’t in my mind, a concrete person who came and killed my mother. It was people engaged in a collective psychosis, which is my perception of war in general. Like I treat Israeli soldiers. You know, I grew up with all my peers were soldiers, my father was a soldier. And they sometimes commit atrocities on the Palestinians and they come back and they’re wonderful people. In the same sense, Palestinians who engaged in violence and combat against Israelis, they go back to their homes, and they can be wonderful people. So I see it as we need to promote the effort to create settings that won’t bring us to meet this terrible component in human beings.
Yonatan Zeigen: And I think that it is realistic that if countries and combating sides are able to shift the circumstances and the settings in order to not let young men engage in battle and violent resistance and all of that, then we would have been able to meet the specific person who killed their mother in a different kind of atmosphere where we wouldn’t have encountered his capability of murder.
Yonatan Zeigen: So I saw pain and loss and trauma as like a substance that has quantity in the world and I suffered from it. So in my logic, I need to reduce the quantity of that in the world. If I want retaliation, if I want others to suffer, it means I raise the amount of suffering in the world in general. In order for others not to suffer from what I have suffered, in order for my kids not to have to go through the same experience, I need to reduce it in terms of the peace movement or civil society in Israel and Palestine.
Yonatan Zeigen: I think there is a consensus about the overlooked fact that both people are there to stay and that we need to shift from two opposing sides, violently negotiating or not negotiating on our rights to the land to a mutual equality-based problem-solving group that figures out our shared problem of how to share the land. The future is shared. And because our future is shared, we need to start cutting back from that understanding into pragmatic steps towards that. We don’t see that. We see only more division, only more dehumanization, only more fantasies that each side can prevail and be exclusive on the land.
Yonatan Zeigen: And in North America, when people choose sides and don’t elevate the discourse of a shared future, they just feed into that unrealistic fantasy that the Palestinians will be liberated and form, I don’t know, an Islamic nation or a Palestinian exclusive state on the land. That will never happen by resistance. For Israelis, that we will control the whole of the promised land and live secure lives in well-being. That will never happen through military force. We need to be able, and we are in the peace movement and civil society. We are working together towards that shared future, towards that confederation, towards that sustainable and viable two-state solution.
Yonatan Zeigen: It doesn’t matter; we will solve it technically when we sit together in the room from a standpoint of equality. So when you raise a flag here and call for intifada, if you’re on the Palestinian pro-Palestine side, you are counterproductive to the Palestinians in Palestine. When you raise an Israeli flag and blindly cite we have a right to defend ourselves when we are actually aggressors, you are counterproductive to the Israelis, to the Jewish people in Israel underground.
Chen Zeigen: I will add one small remark that I think that the discourse on both sides is very much focused on the past. It’s focused on how do we right the wrongs of the past. We are saying, don’t ask how we right the wrongs of the past because there’s no end to how much further back you can go. Ask how you can bring justice to our grandchildren and not our grandparents.
Yonatan Zeigen: For me to get up in the morning, to identify this gap between our lived experience and our potential and trying to close that gap, that generated meaning for me and it creates hope within me and it fuels me. You know, before October 7th, I was a social worker and I worked with people and it was a lot. It was very meaningful in the personal and private sense. But I always felt this sense of alienation that I’m a part of. I’m doing good in a system that is broken and now I feel like I am contributing something, whatever I can. I don’t know how meaningful it is objectively, but it’s really meaningful for me personally to healing a system. And it keeps me going.
Ellin Bessner: I’m very honored that you shared that with me, and I thank you. And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like. For this episode of North Star, made possible thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation. Vivian Silver was one of the eight Canadian victims of the Oct. 7 massacre. The day after the Zeigen’s sold-out Toronto event, IDF special forces retrieved the body of the last Canadian still unaccounted for, Judy Weinstein Haggai during a special mission inside Gaza. Weinstein Haggai grew up in Toronto and like Vivian, built her life with her Israeli American husband Gotti on a kibbutz near us. If you want to learn more about the Vivian Silver Award, we put the link in our show notes. So far they’ve raised US$600,000. Our show is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman and the music is by Brett Higgins. Thanks for listening and let me know what you think of our rebrand.
Show Notes
Related links
- Read more about the sons of the late Vivian Silver, fresh from their June 4 Toronto fundraiser/celebration of their mother’s life, in The CJN.
- To learn about the Vivian Silver Impact award and to donate.
- Hear how Silver’s family and friends gathered in November 2023 in Israel for her private funeral and then for a separate public memorial service, on The CJN Daily.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Bret Higgins
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