Rutie Mizrahi lost her happiness on Oct. 7, and she isn’t sure when she’ll get it back.
Life changed completely for the manager of a Jewish daycare in Vancouver when her uncle and aunt, Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz, were among the more than 240 hostages taken to Gaza during the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that left 1,200 Israelis dead.
The elderly couple—Yocheved is 85 and Oded is 83—lived at Kibbutz Nir Oz, where terrorists kidnapped them from their home, which was set on fire, and took them hostage to Gaza.
A retired news reporter, Oded Lifshitz, along with Yocheved was among the group who helped build the kibbutz in the 1950s, said Mizrahi.
She says her uncle “was very well known for his love for justice and for humanity.”
“He was a real journalist. He wanted to bring up stories and the truth even though it was [at times] something… that wasn’t okay.”
In the 1970s, Mizrahi says, Lifshitz helped a group of Bedouin Israelis regain land of which they had been “cheated” or dispossessed.
“He didn’t do [the things he did] ‘because they are Bedouin’ or [because] ‘they are Jewish,’” she says. “He saw them as human beings, as equals, fighting for their rights.”
Oded had volunteered with Road to Recovery, driving cancer patients to medical appointments from Gaza to Israel each week and waiting out appointments before driving back.
Yocheved is a photographer and former physical education teacher, as well as a peace activist along with her husband. Much of her art work was lost when her house was burned during the attack. A small exhibition of her images, “Surviving Moments,” is currently running at Tel Aviv’s MUZA Eretz Israel Museum.
Yocheved was released after 17 days, one of two women who were let go on humanitarian grounds
It’s believed 101 hostages remain captive in Gaza, though confirmed signs of life from them have been scarce. The murder of six of those hostages, in late August, left many family members on edge. Mizrahi says there’s been no word from officials on her uncle’s status.
She says she’s usually very optimistic and tries to find the good in any situation.
Except, not lately, Mizrahi says, noting she’s held off from her outdoor hobby.
“One of my favourite things is to take my camera out to nature, I do a lot of nature photography… and this year, even today, it’s such a beautiful day in Vancouver for a change, I would say ‘let’s go somewhere.’
“I’ve kind of lost my happiness… and these days I just I can’t find it anymore,” the Israeli-born Mizrahi told The CJN, just a few days before the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks.
“Seeing my country shattered to pieces and burned, and missing everybody… I think I’m in mourning, almost one year,” she said.
To add to the emotional year for Mizrahi, a trip to Israel she had planned for Rosh Hashanah to see her parents was cancelled by the airline just days before she was supposed to leave.
Flights in and out of Israel have periodically been unpredictable, with disruptions and cancellations, since Oct. 7, including periods during military action that saw the Tel Aviv airport closed or with major restrictions.
Now, with Iranian missiles reaching central and southern Israel on Oct. 1 in response to the series of Israeli strikes and assassinations of Hezbollah in Lebanon, many airlines again cancelled Israel and Lebanon routes.
The other flights to Israel that Mizrahi managed to find were far too expensive.
“I was really hoping to be in Israel on Oct. 7 with my aunt that I didn’t see for over a year now,” along with family and friends, she says, including her parents, who are older and “not healthy.”
“Thinking about Oct. 7 [makes] you suddenly understand that you never know what’s going to happen in a second, right?” she says.
Although she thinks of the hostages constantly, lately Mizrahi hasn’t attended the weekly Sunday rallies calling for their release.
She explains she’s not opposed to the idea of rallies, but rather, says that it’s the current Israeli government, a fractious coalition of 64 Knesset members keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in office, which has dragged out and turned down deals to secure the release of the remaining hostages.
“I felt like, ‘I’m here in Canada, in Vancouver, I’m going to rallies. I want the world to hear more about the hostages.’ I want to push everybody who can support, maybe the Canadian government,” she says.
But the Israeli government does not seem to be moving with urgency for the hostages, according to Mizrahi.
When Netanyahu made his recent address to the United Nations in New York, Mizrahi says, one of her cousins, Oded’s son, Izhar (third from left, to Mizrahi’s right in the above family photo), was among the hostage family delegation the prime minister brought with him.
“I don’t think he even mentioned [our hostages] in one sentence,” she says.
Before the prime minister returned to Israel from New York, hours after the IDF strike in Lebanon that eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Netanyahu and his wife Sara reportedly attended a lavish Shabbat dinner hosted by some of his US supporters at a Manhattan hotel.
Netanyahu’s posture exemplifies why Mizrahi has been skipping the Vancouver rallies for the hostages.
After Mizrahi’s aunt, Yocheved, was released, Mizrahi learned she had been briefly visited by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar while she was captive.
Yocheved didn’t shy away from confronting Sinwar, according to Mizrahi.
“She [said to him] ‘How dare you? You have to be ashamed… who are you attacking? People that try to build peace and try to help people,’” Mizrahi says.
“He ignored her,” Mizrahi says.
“The only thing he said is: ‘Oh, in a few days, you’re going to be back home.’”
Mizrahi also learned that Israel could have received her aunt and the other elderly woman two days earlier, but did not.
“I found out that two days before [she was released], Hamas offered Israel to get her and the other lady back and they refused to get her… but then the Hamas actually advertised the name, the full name, and then, only then, they [Israel] got them.”
According to Mizrahi, her aunt said: “Maybe he didn’t want us back.”
“People can say whatever they want—we call them Bibistim, people that are so brainwashed by [Netanyahu]—and it’s [still] a fact… they could have our hostages back months ago,” via negotiations, she says.
Following the news has forced Mizrahi to contend with a range of emotions.
“The last year since Oct. 7, I have [a lot of] anger that I never felt before, which is really hard for me to release,” she says.
“It’s the whole situation of course, but it’s not only towards the people in the world or Hamas or whoever… it’s also for the Israeli government.
“Think about how you would you feel if one of your relatives, your mom, your dad, your sister, your best friend, was in a situation now… tens of metres underground, no air, no food, no oxygen, no daylight,” she says. “How would you feel about it?”
She relates Oct. 7 to the destruction of the First and Second temples as catastrophic moments for the Jewish people and Israel.
“Now this is the third one,” says Mizrahi.
“Even if now, next week or whatever, the war will be ending and everybody can go back to their lives, Israeli society is bleeding really hard and I don’t know how, or if we can fix it.
“And this is for me much worse than fighting Hamas, because… we’re supposed to be like brothers, regardless of our differences.”
“I’m in a lot of pain because of what’s happened to my country,” she says.
But attending the rallies hasn’t been the solution for her.
“What am I supposed to? What am I achieving here? It breaks my heart to see it again and again, and again,” she says.
At one rally she spoke at, though, outside the provincial legislature in Victoria, Mizrahi says she was impressed to hear another speaker talking about her uncle after having looked up “his story.”
Mizrahi says she is close with the family of Ben Mizrachi (no relation), the 22-year-old from Vancouver who lived on Kibbutz Kvutzat Yavneh and was killed at the Nova festival after tending to the wounded using his IDF medical training.
A proud Israeli-Canadian, Rutie Mizrahi, who also teaches Hebrew,. practices Reiki, and runs a life coaching business, says she’s always felt safe in Vancouver, and hadn’t experienced antisemitic events personally. But she says she’s become more hesitant to tell someone she meets she’s Israeli, noting the rhetoric she hears from local pro-Palestinian supporters.
It’s made her more distrustful, less open to meeting people, she says.
“I’m very disappointed. The thing that strikes me the most is Oct. 7, there was this horrible massacre in Israel. And there was a ceasefire until that day. Then what happened? [Some people] have maybe a very short memory… some of them don’t care… [that’s] what you see in university campuses and in the streets,” she says.
Vancouver Police arrested a suspect Oct. 1 after a protest two days earlier organized by Samidoun, resulted in an attack on a Jewish woman. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, police said.
It’s been a fraught year to be an Israeli in Vancouver, Mizrahi explains.
“So many people now tell me ‘Oh I’ve never I never say where I’m from. I’m not even saying that I’m Jewish, so of course I’m not going to say that I’m Israeli,” she says.
“I’ve always been proud of being Israeli… I’m not afraid, but I do hesitate sometimes.”
There’s a string of blue and white lights at the front of Mizrahi’s Vancouver home.
In a late September Zoom interview, the lights and small Israeli flags hang on the window, above several plants, and across from a framed Roberto Luongo hockey jersey, a present from her four adult children.
Mizrahi put up the lights after Oct. 7, and has left them on for the hostages since.
“I said that I will never turn it off until my uncle and the rest of the hostages are safe at home,” she told The CJN.
“Unfortunately, it’s almost a year now and it’s still on. I really hope that I could turn it off soon.”
