On Monday, July 8, New Haven community members will be invited to scatter 12,756 rose petals around West Rock Playground, in memory of the 4,959 women and 7,797 children killed in Gaza since October 7 (based on conservative estimates most recently reported by the UN). During the ceremony, we will also take "handfuls of sand”—a phrase used by one mother who survived the air strikes in Rafah on May 26 to describe what it felt like to hold her children's remains—and place them at the foot of empty swingsets. We will then take one rose petal to keep, and one to give away (to a friend, neighbor, stranger, enemy)—a gesture of remembrance, peacemaking, and ongoing commitment to resist numbness and violence in all its forms, and to remain feeling, tender, and honoring of Palestinian life. The ceremony will be punctuated by song, poetry, and prayer. Optional picnic dinner will follow.

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9 months since the start of the Israel-Hamas War—the time it takes for a woman to birth a child, we’ll ask ourselves: What has been growing inside us? (Fear? Anxiety? Apathy? Hope?) What do we want to birth into the world, and what threatens its survival?

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Countless dead remain under rubble, in mass graves, or are otherwise unaccounted for. This ceremony focuses on the known deaths of women and children not because they are the only dead worth mourning, but because they are an important, if incomplete, indicator of the scale of civilian casualties that have resulted from Israel's conduct of a genocidal war.

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No one knows how to count the true cost of war. The loss exceeds language and our imaginations. This liturgy seeks to make the magnitude of loss somehow tangible—through something we can hold, together—in communal lament and in communal commitment to express the maternal care that exists within each of us, to tend to a world in which children get to be children not of war, but of imagination and play.

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Note: Children are welcome to join (to play on the playground or to participate) at parent’s discretion.