Social change… always appears slowly, over time, like bulbs that have to mature in the soil before the plant can grow upward and start blooming
Vivian Silver built peace the way some people build homes: steadily, practically, and with room for others.
Born in Winnipeg, Vivian immigrated to Israel in 1974 and eventually made her home on Kibbutz Be’eri, near the Gaza border. From that place — close enough to feel the consequences of every escalation — she spent decades working for a different future. Her activism was never abstract. It was rooted in community, women’s leadership, Jewish-Arab partnership inside Israel, and the lives of Palestinians in Gaza just beyond the fence.
Vivian was one of the founders of AJEEC-NISPED and worked for many years alongside Dr. Amal Elsana Alh’jooj to advance equality, empowerment, and cooperation between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, especially in the Negev. She also helped found Women Wage Peace after the 2014 Gaza war, joining women across Israeli society in a demand for political solutions and an end to the cycle of violence. Even after the Gaza border became harder to cross, Vivian continued to look for ways to stay connected. She volunteered with Road to Recovery, accompanying cancer patients from Gaza to hospitals in Israel.
Her work carried a quiet insistence: security cannot be separated from equality, and peace cannot be built without women at the table. She believed in the slow, stubborn labor of social change — the kind that grows through institutions, relationships, shared leadership, and daily acts of responsibility.
On October 7, 2023, Vivian was murdered in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eri. Her death devastated the peacebuilding community in Israel, Palestine, and far beyond. But Vivian’s life cannot be reduced to the violence that ended it. Her legacy lives in the organizations she helped build, the women she helped bring into leadership, and the people who continue to widen the circle of dignity, cooperation, and mutual respect.
That legacy now continues through the Vivian Silver Impact Award, supported by B8 of Hope, which honors Arab and Jewish women advancing the values Vivian lived: partnership, peace, equality, and women’s leadership. For B8 of Hope, Vivian’s story is a reminder that peacebuilding is not naïve. It is the long, disciplined work of building the future before the world believes it is possible.