The fear of forgetting: Lihie Gilhar’s fight to remember October 7 victims

Gilhar, 53, was determined not to let that happen.

“The scale of the loss was so enormous that people were already disappearing into numbers,” Gilhar, who lives in Tel Aviv, said, adding: “I couldn’t tolerate that.”

An expert in trauma, with a deep understanding on how it affects the mind and body, she quickly realized that a nation cannot recover from such immense collective trauma by rushing to “move on.”

“When trauma is pushed aside too quickly, it doesn’t disappear. It stays stuck in the body, in the nation, in the culture,” she said. “But when the stories are told fully and with dignity, something else happens: people begin to metabolize it. It becomes part of identity, not a wound that keeps bleeding.”

“True healing comes when we look, when we name, when we remember – for to remember is to restore humanity: both theirs and ours.”

With that in her mind, Gilhar launched “Bring Them Light,” a project focusing on keeping alive the memory of those who were murdered on October 7.

“It was never about death. It was always about life – about carrying forward the essence of who they were,” she explained, adding, “It is a way for families – and for Israel – to move forward without forgetting, which ultimately is the only way to move forward at all.”

This, she described, is the core of her work: “to help people hold pain without being swallowed by it – and to transform grief into something that continues to give life. For me, that is the antidote to erasures; it’s the antidote to the world’s short memory.”

After it closed, still driven to keep the victim’s memories alive, Gilhar, who had never managed or fundraised for a project on this scale before, decided to set up an Instagram page. She filled it with tribute videos for all of the victims with “the intention to tell the story of each and every person.”

New to creating videos, she drew on her training as a clinical psychologist to interview the grieving families and find out more about the people she was now profiling.

“When families share their child’s or partner’s or sibling’s story, they experience two things simultaneously: pain and meaning,” she said about the process.

“Pain because they are revisiting memories, messages, and photos; meaning because the person they love is being seen, remembered, and honored.”

“It transforms grief from something silent into something shared,” she explained, “and shared grief is always more survivable than isolated grief.”

Each video on the Instagram page is beautiful and sensitive. They share the life story of each victim through photos, clips, and songs shared by their loved ones.

But not all the families have been cooperative, said Gilhar. For some, the pain is still too raw; she still checks in gently with them from time to time and never gives up.

While the emotional toll has also been heavy for her, she tries to focus on the gratitude she has received as fuel for her work.

While the social media format of “Bring Them Light” helps her to reach a broad audience, Gilhar admits that the short and snappy medium can be frustrating.

“How do you tell a person’s life story in a minute or three minutes?” she asked. “If we want to be authentic, then we need to put in the time and get to know the facts and the people, and not just post for the sake of posting for likes.”

To counter this, Gilhar has sought a permanent space to recreate an in-person exhibition like the one that was held temporarily in Tel Aviv.

“I would really like it to be in a place where people can come and experience the symbolic element of the light and watch [the victims’] videos,” she said, adding that she hopes it will help Israelis process their grief, which is still raw for many of them after two years of war.

“There’s a whole process of mourning that hasn’t even happened,” said Gilhar. “Israel doesn’t really do well with mourning.”

Gilhar also hopes the monument will one day travel internationally and that it will be used as part of a worldwide October 7 remembrance event. This happened last March on a small scale when she was given access to billboards in New York’s Times Square and two massive screens displayed some of her 15-second clips of victims’ names and faces.

Two years after October 7, Gilhar says she remains shaken by the events but is even more committed to her mission of preserving the memory. At a time when Israelis feel attacked and silenced globally, she believes this is more necessary than ever.

“This is a way to not silence us, to carry it forward, and to tell these stories – because it really is our duty,” she said.

“We need to be their light, and we need to be their voices,” the creator of “Bring Them Light” said, adding that her message is simple: “Follow the project, share the stories, and carry their memories forward.”■