Bay Area freeway vigils call for hostages’ release
Six months after his 19year-old cousin was stuffed barefoot and bleeding into the back of a jeep, Shai Shahar of Campbell walked up onto a freeway footbridge to join a vigil called “Bring Them Home Now.”
It was a quiet rally Sunday on the pedestrian overcrossing of Highway 101, south of University Avenue in East Palo Alto. The gathering had protest signs but no chanting, which allowed Shahar to be with the thoughts that had not left his mind for 183 consecutive days since Naama Levy, a 19-year old soldier, was dragged from her bed at 6:33 a.m. on Oct. 7 and disappeared, only to reappear over and over again on video.
“You eat something, you think, ‘Is she getting enough food?’ You go to sleep, you think, ‘Does she have a blanket?’ ” he said. “You take a shower, you wonder, ‘Are they letting her take a shower? ’ ”
With that, his mind went off to a dark place, and Shahar’s wife, Efrat, finished the thought. “Who is watching her naked in the shower?”
The rally was attended by 20 or 30 people as one of three simultaneous actions on footbridges across the freeway on the south Peninsula, and a sister rally on an overpass along Highway 24 in Lafayette. Participants hung banners and American and Israeli flags from the chain-link fence in the hope that motorists would honk and give a thumbs-up, and maybe take greater notice at the banner farther down the freeway.
That was the extent of the message as conveyed by people who stood on the overpass holding yellow balloons that were trying to escape into the midday breeze. No permit was required, provided they took everything with them, which they did after two hours.
“There is nothing political about it. This is strictly humanitarian,” Efrat Shahar said. “We are just trying to raise awareness that we are here. Bring them home.”
It was a day for numbers. Cars traveling one direction on the eight lanes of Highway 101 saw the “183” in big letters to indicate the number of days hostages have been held. Motorists traveling the other direction saw “133” in block letters to indicate the number of hostages held. Shar had a third number in mind — 55 — the total days since his first cousin’s daughter, Levy, had been seen alive by a hostage who was released. To that end, the 133 that hung on the sign was hopeful. It had been 134 on Saturday, but the body of a hostage was returned so the sign had to be changed.
“We don’t want the dead bodies. We want them alive,” said Rony Sagy, a San Francisco attorney who came down to East Palo Alto on behalf of Carmel Gat, a distant niece who has earned some fame among the hostages for teaching yoga to fellow captives to help deal with the stress.
“We don’t know that she’s alive,” Sagy said. “She’s in my heart every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep.”
Revital Ganon Baruch stood on the bridge holding an Israeli flag that she’d normally flown only on Independence Day. She brought it to the first protest after the kidnappings, and after six months of use, the edge is tattered like a cavalry flag, from overwork.
“Now, unfortunately, I use it all the time,” she said. But there is always hope the flag could be put away.
“Bring Them Home Now” was formed by family members of the hostages, with its first rally on Oct. 9. The freeway vigils started in November on the El Curtola overpass on Highway 24. Yoav Harlev and Itzik Goldberger began with a daily vigil of five people, and Sunday it grew to 300.
“Every time, we are hoping this is the last time we have to go out and call for their return,” said Yael Wieder, an Israeli immigrant who lives in Sunnyvale, works in tech and is one of the volunteer organizers of “Bring Them Home Now.”
“After 183 days, you can’t bear the thought of what all the hostages are going through every moment,” Wieder said.