Threads of Grief, Threads of Love: A Blessingway for Gaza’s Children

For 50 years, the Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) has equipped our community with tools to build a just and peaceful world. This event is part of RCNV's Loving Justice: A Transformational Path Towards Interbeing initiative initiative cultivating Beloved Community, shared learning, and solidarity. We hope you'll join us as we continue to deepen our collective integrity and accountability.
Since ancient times, textiles have offered both shelter and story—threads that hold together what might otherwise come apart.

This gathering accompanies an exhibit of 36 baby quilts sewn by community members in Santa Cruz, commemorating 720 infants in Gaza killed before their first birthday.

Community members made these quilts because watching from a distance—in a country whose government is implicated—was not bearable. We cannot disentangle our lives from this harm. But we can refuse indifference, and in that refusal, we stitched with care, imagining the babies who should have been wrapped in them.

The Gathering

We gather in community for reflection, witness, and conversation—a passage toward presence and responsibility.

We do not equate our grief with that of families who have endured these losses. But we can allow their loss to deepen our attention and shape how we live with one another.

In a democracy, what is carried out in our name asks something of us. This gathering is an invitation to remember these children with care—and to consider how remembrance might move us toward greater responsibility in the choices we accept, and the futures we help shape.

Panelists include:

• Mo Sati—Mo is a Palestinian writer, playwright, poet, documentarian, and podcaster whose work centers on witness, memory, and the full humanity of Palestinians too often reduced to numbers. He is the creator of They Have Names, a nomadic theater and storytelling project carrying Palestinian names and stories into communities through performance, film, and audio.
• Rolla Alaydi—Rolla is an educator, author, and community advocate seeking to amplify voices of resilience and foster compassion, cultural understanding, and human connection. She is the author of NORAH: From My Grandmother’s Kitchen: Palestinian Recipes and Memories, preserving Palestinian heritage through storytelling, memory, and tradition.
• Unhae Langis—Unhae is a literature teacher turned writer, artist, and organizer. Her recent works include Common Sense in the Time of Genocide, a civic meditation on war, empire, and conscience, and Shakespeare and Wisdom (with Julia Reinhard Lupton). For her, quilting brings together political expression, poetry, calligraphy, and textile art.
• Rami Chahine—Rami is a Lebanese artist and educator whose work explores imagination, ecology, death, and regeneration. Living among the redwoods of California, he draws on both the natural world and collective memory in his artistic practice.
• Maha Taitano—Maha is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, textiles, and mixed media. Born in Baghdad and raised across Lebanon, Guåhan (Guam), Morocco, and California, her work explores identity, memory, decolonization, and the layered histories carried through materials and process.
  

Together, they will share lived experience, artistic practice, and reflections on grief, memory, and care.

Join Us

Honor these children by remembering them.
Honor them by refusing indifference.
Honor them by choosing care, in the quiet and public ways available to us.

Everyone is welcome.

Sliding scale ticket donations ($0-50) support RCNV's vital work.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Resource Center For Nonviolence, 612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, United States

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