About 20 members of the Northwestern chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and the NU community gathered at the lakefront Sunday to participate in a Tashlich, a Jewish atonement ritual, honoring the lives lost in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Tashlich is a Jewish ceremony where participants throw rocks, leaves or other items into a body of water. It occurs during or around Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and symbolizes casting off sins of the previous year.
The ceremony began at The Rock with the singing of Hinei Ma Tov, a Jewish hymn.
Weinberg senior and JVP member Paz Baum said Hinei Ma Tov means “coming together in unity.”
“We are a group of people who individually believe in a free Palestine and a safe Palestine for all,” Baum said. “We come together as a group, mostly a group of Jewish students, and we then are using our tradition to fight for this tenet of Judaism, which is that every life is precious.”
The group walked from The Rock to the lakefront just south of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Center for the Musical Arts while singing a nigun, a Jewish melody with no words. The group carried banners that read “MOURN the dead FIGHT for the living” and “Divest from ISRAEL NOW.”
When they arrived at the lakefront, they gathered and sang a few more songs, before participating in the Tashlich.
Baum said she found the ceremony to be spiritual and used it as a time to reflect upon her past year and the future.
“Those pieces that we place in the water represent individual and collective sin,” Baum said. “We do this to recognize the genocide against the Palestinian people and to demand that NU and the U.S. government divest from Israel and stop financing these crimes.”
The ritual ended with the singing of Oseh Shalom. The song is a call for peace for all people, said Weinberg junior and JVP member Evgeny Stolyarov.
“The only future that we deserve and that we demand is one where everybody, no matter if they’re Palestinian, no matter if they’re here in the U.S., no matter whether they are in Ukraine, all of them should be able to live in peace and in prosperity and to have the opportunity to live long, peaceful, happy lives,” Stolyarov said.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military action in Gaza has killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials. Israel’s ground and air offensive follows the militant group Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel which killed about 1,200 Israelis, according to Israeli officials.
Stolyarov said though it is important to mourn, “we must also commit to fighting even harder for those who are still alive.”
Medill senior Isabelle Butera, a JVP member and former Daily Staffer, said Sunday’s events reminded her how JVP has allowed her to celebrate her Judaism while also grieving what is happening in Palestine.
“I think today was a really beautiful example of having the space to grieve the lives that have been lost and the absolute atrocious genocide that we have seen with people that I’m in community with,” Butera said.
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