Today we went to a Women in Black Vigil and a most wonderful thing happened, and I can hardly wait to tell it. Women in Black are mostly Israeli women who have been standing in silent vigil every Friday for almost 20 years holding signs in English and Hebrew and Arabic that say “Stop the Occupation.”

But to put my story in context I have to go back 15 years. I’m a fabric artist and I’m always looking for new images. So when I saw a photograph in a book of an elderly woman standing with Women in Black in Jerusalem holding her Stop the Occupation sign, I could hardly wait to get started. The caption below the picture said “This woman is demonstrating because her family was killed in the Holocaust and she doesn’t want the Palestinians to suffer as she has suffered.” Inspired, I stitched her portrait with her words embroidered behind her.

Later in 1994, I attended a Women in Black conference in Israel, and I found the subject of my portrait. I learned her name was Anna Colombo and that she was 86 years old, and she had grown up in Italy and those were indeed her words. I gave her the portrait I had made, which I had slipped into my back pack in the hope that we would meet.

We liked each other very much and corresponded for some years. In one of her letters to me she wrote that she had once been asked why she wasn’t afraid living in Europe under Hitler, and she had replied “Why should I be afraid? All Hitler can do is kill me, but he can never be right”. She became one of my heroes, and I have told her story many times over the years.

After awhile I stopped receiving her letters and I believed she had become too elderly to write, or perhaps was no longer alive. But today when we arrived at the Vigil, there she was, still dressed in black, now 98 years old and proudly holding up her Stop the Occupation sign for all to see. She remembered me perfectly although her hearing is poor and we spoke through a translator. But we had hugs and took photos, and although I can’t possibly carry her in my heart more than I already do, I’ve been given a huge gift in meeting with her again.

--Elizabeth Shefrin
Written in Jerusalem, March 2007