One year ago, on Oct. 8, when Iris Weinstein woke up at her home in Singapore she went into “operation mode” to find out the status and whereabouts of her parents, Judi Weinstein, 78, and Gad Haggai, 73, after the Hamas terrorist attacks on their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
For weeks, the family knew only that Judi and Gad had been on their morning walk near their home, when terrorists encountered them, reportedly on motorcycles, shooting and killing Gad.
Authorities in Israel confirmed the deaths of her parents 83 days later, in December 2023. About 100 out of 400 residents of Nir Oz were either murdered or kidnapped, comprising around a quarter of the community. (The four captive members of the Bibas family, including the youngest hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, and their parents, Shiri and Yarden, are also from Nir Oz, and are still being held in Gaza.)
Since then, Weinstein has travelled from Singapore to Israel, the United States, Canada and The Hague, advocating for the release of around 100 remaining hostages in Gaza, including the bodies of her parents.
Weinstein says that starts with raising awareness about her family, and her Canadian mother.
“My mom is the only Canadian hostage. She’s an Ontarian. It’s about time that every person in Ontario and Canada knows about her [and] says her name,” Weinstein told The CJN in an interview in Toronto.
“She should be known, her name should be known in every house… every parliamentarian should know my mom’s name. But I can’t say that they do… so it’s very, very frustrating.
“And that’s why I’m here now… making sure that people know that the daughter of the only Canadian hostage is here… and it’s time to say her name.”
She says her mother embodied Canadian values like human rights and compassion.
“I think that’s what I’m expecting from the Canadian government: Remember what our values are. There’s a Canadian hostage, she’s an innocent Canadian hostage who was stolen from not only her life but our lives so viciously, and it’s the Canadian government’s responsibility to make sure that she comes back to a respectful burial. It’s not only her right as a person. It’s our right as her Canadian family to bury her respectfully so we can have closure.”
Her father, Gad, was a jazz bass guitarist and roasted his own coffee, while her mother, Judi, was a haiku poet and teacher of everything from puppetry to mindfulness.
Her mother pursued a life of study, art, nature, spirituality, and service in Israel; later in life, she began teaching meditation and mindfulness to children living near Gaza that they could practice in bomb shelters. She found her place living there, “serving and guiding others,” says Weinstein.
But she was always proud to be Canadian, Weinstein emphasizes.
“She grew up here really proud because Canada was all about human rights, equality… and some would say, really advanced when you would compare to the rest of the world,” especially while her mother was growing up in Toronto, says Weinstein.
She wants to see more leadership from Canada on the hostage file, she says.
“I’m [also] expecting the government to take the lead, to use their leverage, use their voice, their diplomacy, to unite other governments, to demand the unconditional release of all hostages,” she says.
“This is a humanitarian crisis. It’s not going to solve the regional conflict… but this is a crisis above all, and we can’t show the world that we stand with this type of terrorism.”
Born in New York state, Judi, who moved to Toronto at age three and grew up in the city, held Canadian, U.S., and Israeli citizenship, while Gad, who she met after moving to Israel in the 1970s, was a dual Israeli-American citizen.
Iris Weinstein was last in Toronto in July 2023, with her parents and her own daughter, months before the attack, and says it feels like a tough time to be in the city right now.
She says the response from Canadian officials on the issue of the hostages has made her feel, more often than not, that the issue has become more of a “political footnote” than the serious humanitarian issue she hopes more Canadians will rally behind.
“Why isn’t justice being imposed on those who harmed my mother? Eight Canadians were murdered that day. Where’s the search for some kind of justice for that? I would expect them to do that, and I would want them to remember what being Canadian means.
“I’m asking Canadians to not only keep that in mind but also stand with me. I feel like I carry my mother’s strength and she raised me with those values and above all we stand for human rights. These are innocent people who are currently… being tortured in these underground dungeons.”
Weinstein is representing her parents along with Ohad Lapidot, the father of Tiferet Lapidot, another of the eight Canadians murdered in the Oct. 7 attacks, in a lawsuit to claim damages under Canada’s Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act.
The Ontario Superior Court statement of claim, filed earlier in October by lawyers for Ohad Lapidot and Iris Weinstein, seeks $250 million in compensation from the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria, and Vancouver-based Samidoun, which Public Safety Canada and U.S. authorities jointly designated a terror entity on Oct. 15.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants are funding schemes that reward the families of terrorists who attack Israel. Samidoun’s directors, Charlotte Kates and her husband Khaled Barakat, as well as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, are among those personally named in the lawsuit along with their respective organizations. (B’nai Brith Canada is also supporting the Weinstein and Lapidot families’ claim in court.)
Weinstein thanks Canada and the U.S. for the “big step” of listing Samidoun as a terror group, but adds that there are many more things that governments can do.
“The U.S. took the initiative and is prosecuting…the perpetrators of the attacks of Oct. 7, and Canada should do the same.”
Weinstein has visited Canada more than once in the past year, including previous meetings with Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau but she says it’s a world of difference from working with the U.S. administration, which she feels is more responsive, and gives her “the time of day” more consistently.
“Canada has been absent, absent, completely absent… My uncle was basically told the Canadian policy is ‘don’t speak about the hostages… Don’t say their names.’”
By contrast, she says she had much more access to officials like U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and CIA officials. A two-hour videoconference with President Joe Biden, and 20 families of U.S. citizens either killed or taken hostage in the attacks took place six days after the attacks, on Oct. 13, 2023.
“Even though he had no information, just the fact Biden took the time to listen to us,” was significant, she says.
Weinstein says Canada hasn’t taken responsibility for efforts to secure the return of the only Canadian hostage, and that Joly only mentioned her mother’s name in the House of Commons after she urged the acknowledgement.
“Until this day, can you tell me how many people in Canada know there’s a Canadian hostage? Even in Parliament, I got Joly to say her name as a hostage for the first time on Oct. 7, this year,” Weinstein said.
“Even meeting with officials [in 2023], the first thing [they] say is ‘don’t go public with it. Don’t do media about it.’ That’s the first thing they told me,” she said, to which she replied:
“Listen, that’s not my policy. Sorry.”
Canada likely wanted to lower the risk of jeopardizing the hostages.
“But this was a completely different situation,” she says. “This is a huge hostage crisis, definitely one of the biggest in modern history… and I just felt they didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t feel like they saw me.”
Eventually, she turned her efforts to working with other authorities and groups, including the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which helped organize the current Canadian visit.
Weinstein was slated to meet with political party leaders and senior officials in Ottawa meeting Oct. 31 with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilevre, and was scheduled to meet with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and deputy Conservative leader Melissa Lantsman, among other senior MPs.
Weisntein addressed the Ontario legislature on Oct. 30 at a commemoration ceremony organized by the Israeli consulate, and is also attending a rally in Montreal on Sunday, Nov. 3, held by the Hostage Family Forum to call for their release.
Bringing home the hostages, including the bodies of her parents, will also, she hopes, help answer lingering questions about Judi’s death and bring closure to the entire family.
Iris still has not had evidence of the death or further information about the status of her parents’ bodies.
During her quest to find out what happened, she found herself back in Israel, weeks after Oct. 7, tracking down the CEO of Magen David Adom, the Israeli emergency medical service, to obtain an audio recording of an emergency call Judi made the morning of the attack in which she confirmed they had been attacked by terrorists on motorcycles and that Gad had been killed. According to Weinstein, her mother graphically described her father’s head wound in the audio recording.
“What we found out [from the call recording] basically is that my dad was murdered and that my mom was hurt. But that’s all we [knew], because my mom was speaking… [but] she didn’t sound like somebody [who] just got shot in her face.”
Calling both of her parents her “moral compass,” Iris Weinstein said that moment of revelation had realized her biggest fear—losing them.
“They were both people who were all about justice and equality, and a two-state solution,” she says. “They were the ones to be the first in line to advocate for peace.”
Rabbinical authorities in Israel require evidence to officially declare the deaths of Gad and Judi in order to facilitate proper Jewish burial rituals.
“In Judaism you have to have something, even blood, in order to have a respectful burial, which we can’t have. We didn’t even sit shiva.”
That reality, and explaining it to her young daughter, adds to the challenges for her family.
“It’s been a year and we have no grave to cry on,” she says. “My eight-year-old… she’s asking me: ‘Mommy, but they don’t have a grave. How do you know they’re killed?’
“The answers that I need to give her are inhumane. No mother should answer those questions… and no child should ask these questions.”
In late November 2023, a negotiated agreement saw the release of several groups of hostages, which at the time gave Weinstein hope.
“I thought I was going to see my mom. We even made her new glasses because we found her glasses in the fields,” she says. “Every night I would sit in this depressing hotel room in Israel, waiting for Hamas to release a list of 10 names…hoping that my mom would be in that list, and every day would get a no.”
Of the 40 people from Nir Oz who were released during that deal, none had seen her parents, she says. When the releases ended, she realized they didn’t have all the information.
“And then, 83 days later, we found out they were both murdered and that their bodies were taken hostage, basically as bargaining chips.”
Not knowing details has been one of most difficult things, she says—even though it was “heartbreaking” to learn what happened.
“I was worried sick that she is tortured… then an hour later I’m thinking, ‘but if she’s there, maybe she’s using her mindfulness to help other people and that’s what’s keeping her alive’… Even now, we have the idea of intelligence but my mind keeps telling me, maybe it’s a mistake, because we don’t have the bodies, we don’t have anything.
“At least with my dad, I have my mom’s call, but with my mom what I have is like images that I saw, but your mind keeps telling you maybe it’s Photoshop… maybe she just fainted… your mind plays these games on you.” (An Instagram video post she viewed appeared to briefly show part of Gad’s body, on a truck being driven in Gaza, she said, but the images could not be confirmed to be of her father.)
One of the most wrenching details she’s learned so far has to do with the desecration, on Oct. 7, of Judi’s beloved book collection.
Judi, who had studied English at the University of Toronto, was a poet who was active in literary circles in Israel’s English-language poetry community, as well as in Toronto and New York. (A posthumously published poetry chapbook, organized by a group of English-speaking poets to which Judi belonged called Voices Israel, included new poems some members composed using excerpts of Judi’s poetry.)
“She was a reader. She always loved books. Even though my parents weren’t murdered in their home, the terrorists were in our homes and they stole almost everything,” says Weinstein.
“But the books and the albums, they tore [them up]… and that hurt me to the core, because every book that we had, my mom chose. They were her best friends from childhood. She had books that she grew up with here [in Toronto].
“She basically raised us into that world, and she was very proud of being Canadian. She came here every year: she had her friends here from childhood. She had her poetry groups here as well,” and would participate in staged readings on her visits each year, says Weinstein.
Back in Singapore, where she lives with her family, Iris had been planning to launch a textile business in December 2023, before the attacks shifted her into her current hostage advocacy efforts.
“This doesn’t just affect hostage families, it puts all of our lives on hold—the magnitude of this knows no borders,” she says.
“Every person should know there’s an innocent Canadian [held] hostage by terrorists. This doesn’t mean that you don’t support Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that you support only Israel. This has nothing to do with [the] Middle East conflict. This is a humanitarian crisis.
“This situation is not something to just gloss over. It’s a catastrophe, and we have to recognize it and make sure it never happens again.”
