Anyone who’s ventured near the state Capitol on a Wednesday at lunchtime since late 2023 has no doubt come across protests of US involvement in Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza.
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Frustrated Santa Feans continue to gather each hump day to “Rally for Palestine” during the lunch hour with signs, flags, and chants to bring attention to what they insist is genocide unfolding practically every day in the Middle East. For an hour each Wednesday, they fortify their resolve for peace while passing cars support them with honks of encouragement.
Now, a subset of those protesters plans to express their grief over the atrocities in a new way: reading the names of those killed since October of 2023. Starting at sundown on Oct. 1, a small group of Santa Feans will gather at the The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 100 S Guadalupe St., to read the names of those killed in Israel in October of 2023 and the tens of thousands killed in Gaza since. Because the number of casualties crested 66,000 at the end of September, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, organizers estimate it will take 120 hours—or five days and nights—to read all the names.
Unlike so many protests in Santa Fe, this action isn’t organized by any nonprofit or activist group. Regular Santa Feans—concerned citizens, back this event. Folks living in and around the area who span different generations, faiths, economic backgrounds, and political views. The one thing they all agree on is the ongoing violence in the Middle East and the suffering caused by the decades-long occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza is a tragedy no one can afford to ignore any further.
“We are coming together to open our eyes to the suffering they’re experiencing in Gaza and hopefully be changed by witnessing it as a community,” organizer Esther Kovari tells SFR. “Giving names to the thousands who have died reminds us of the suffering the people of Gaza have endured and the chaos they continue to endure daily.”
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The Idea
Activism is part of the DNA of this group of friends, which began with Kovari and her husband Frederick Sawyer plus Grietje Laga and Marcelle Grant. They are regulars at Wednesday protests at the Roundhouse, but for this event, they were inspired by an action taken in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
“We didn’t come up with the idea ourselves,” Kovari says. “We saw this video on YouTube from the Netherlands where they read the names, and it just felt like something we could do and should do. I guess you could say it moved us to action.”
While the event is called Santa Fe Witnessing for Gaza, organizers are well aware humanity is bearing witness to the ongoing tragedy thanks to the inescapable images and reporting about Gaza that make headlines daily.
While each of the organizers is passionate about bringing attention to the conflict, the group is neither pro-Palestinian or Israel.
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“We are about protesting for all life,” Kovari says. “We are not representing any particular political, religious, or activist views. These horrors in Gaza are happening right in front of us, and we need an outlet to express it with something meaningful. What they did in the Netherlands felt right.”
Kovari, who is Jewish, wants people who take part to know that criticism of the current Israeli government and their actions in Gaza does not equate to antisemitism.
“Actually, we have several Jewish members on the organizing committee,” she says. “Including myself.”
Kovari says while she’s not a tribalist, but her family’s harrowing history makes what’s going on in Gaza personal.
“My parents both are survivors of the Holocaust,” she tells SFR. “They were born in Hungary and grew up in Budapest as children. I heard stories from my family about what happened. I just grew up with this, wondering: ‘How did the world allow that to happen?’ And so to me, I draw a very different lesson than some other Jews in this community, and that's why I think it's really important, because it's the people who are still connected to those kinds of stories that can speak the most to what's going on right now. They’re saying it's being done in my name. They're saying that this is making Jews around the world safer. I completely reject that, and I feel that it's my responsibility to stand up and say, ‘No, not in my name.’
Kovari also believes it’s important to drum up awareness in this country for practical reasons.
“America has the most influence, and until American public opinion shifts, this will not change,” Kovari says. “I don't know if it will change under Trump, I don't know, but I can be completely sure that until the American public opinion demands it, nothing will change.”
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Reading of the Names
When the sun goes down on the Shrine of our Lady of Guadalupe on Oct. 1, Kovari says volunteers will start by reading the names of people killed on or after October 1, 2023 and continue until they’ve read the names of those reported dead through August 2025.
“We know without a ceasefire, people will continue to be murdered during our event,” Kovari says. “The list has already grown.”
But the list of names won’t be limited to Palestinian victims. In addition to the 65,000-plus Palestinians killed thus far, the group will read the names of more than 800 civilians (Israeli and other nationalities) killed on October 7, 2023.
Dave Cathey
Esther Kovari
“We will include the names of all people of various nationalities who were killed on October 7, as we are well aware of the loss and trauma inflicted on that day,” Kovari says. “While we choose to center on the genocide being waged through targeted bombing of civilians, expulsion and forced starvation in Gaza, we also seek to recognize and respect the loss and grief of Israelis and other civilians.”
Kovari says the group is reading the names to acknowledge the human cost of violence, “in silence, with dignity.”
She continues: “Naming all the victims does justice to the humanity we strive for, and brings us closer to peace.”
The reading of the Israeli names will take about 90 minutes, while the reading of Palestinian names will take the remainder of the estimated 120 hours.
“The disparity in violence and suffering endured by the people of Gaza is heartbreaking,” she says. “So far, we are seeing this event draw in a large number of people from all around Santa Fe and even people down in Albuquerque. They’re all people who have, up until now, watched the horrors in Gaza unfold but haven’t found a way to express their feelings about it.”
Why Oct. 1?
Sunset on October 1, 2025 is the beginning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish faith. It is a time of deep reflection, mourning, forgiveness, and atonement, and that’s why Kovari and her friends chose it.
She said the day meant for communal introspection was ideal because, “we acknowledge collective tragedy and as we read the names of all who have died, we remember that each life lost is a lost universe.”
Kovari says acknowledging “mistakes and wounds” is at the heart of Yom Kippur. She and her friends believe acknowledging them is a “step towards mending the threads between us—one human being to another.”
The group’s goal is promoting peace, justice, and alleviating suffering. To meet it, the key is outreach.
“We're asking people to go to our website, sign up on a little contact form. We receive that, and then we send an email back inviting people to sign up for a time slot to read names.”
Kovari says they are looking for a total of about 300 volunteers to fill out the five days and nights in two-hour increments. With one week to go before the event, they had about a third of the slots full. Even though the event begins tonight, Kovari says they will leave the sign-up live until the event is over.
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What to Expect
Santa Fe Witnessing for Gaza is meant to bring people together, but for once that doesn’t include food trucks, vendors or merch tables. If the organizers get their wish, the reading will draw people from every culture, religion, tax bracket and age group.
“We've invited the City Councilors and the Mayor,” Kovari says. “We just found out state representative Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe, D-46) signed up to read.”
As of press time, none of the city council had signed up. Mayor Alan Webber gave a statement: “I got an invitation and Wednesday night and Thursday are Yom Kippur. I’ve been staying well-informed as to what’s going on in Gaza and the Netanyahu government and find both the fact that the Israeli hostages haven’t been returned and the scale of the destruction and death in Gaza absolutely inhumane and profoundly upsetting. We need to see the hostages freed and the war ended. The killing has to stop.”
Among those planning to take part is 21-year-old Leander Laga Abram. He’s already signed up for a two-hour shift during the five-day event and hopes it inspires more people his age to express themselves.
Abram’s mother, Grietje Laga, is among the core organizers, but her son has been involved in activism since high school at The Masters Program—class 2022. Now a student at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, Abram said he’s gotten an even clearer view of the tragedy.
“We spent a lot of time actually studying the history of Gaza, Israel and Palestine,” Abram tells SFR. “And I'm half Jewish on my dad's side.”
Abram says between high school and college, he traveled around Europe on his own, using some money from a car settlement. He said his travels took him to many places, Auschwitz among them.
“After that, I spent a lot of time really thinking about trauma,” Abram tells SFR.
“Trauma in our minds and bodies and in history, and how we keep playing them out, especially when we don't have places to actually grieve or move that kind of intense anger and grief, right? I think it's really hard to look at the news these days without kind of just becoming really overwhelmed.”
Abram says his experience with activism has been similar.
“I’ve found it's kind of impossible to say the right thing or to engage in a way that feels like it's actually creating conversations instead of just kind of entering into the narratives portrayed in various media outlets, and they're valid narratives.”
Abram says he’s passionate about what’s going on in the Middle East for many reasons, but not the least of which is the variety of relationships he holds with people from the region.
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Leander Laga Abram
“I have friends who are from the West Bank. I have friends who are Israeli and friends who are in the IDF, and I'm unwilling not to humanize everyone in that situation. I'm also unwilling to not choose a side and not call what's going on genocide—it's so deeply horrific. But I think at least for myself, politics or activism has to be about being able to see everyone as human but stuck in really flawed or broken systems inside of really complex, traumatic histories.”
Abram says it’s not about saying “that everyone's equal, or that it's all the same, but actually really acknowledging that and then saying, ‘okay, I believe we need to stop treating each other that way now.’
“It's really about people here coming together and witnessing the grief with respect.”Abram continues. “Yes, it's gonna take a long time, and most people are not going to sit there for five days and five nights, but there will be someone reading for five days and night or more if that’s what it takes.”
Abram says part of what makes the Gaza tragedy resonate so strongly is its parallels with Santa Fe.
“One of the things that matters a lot in this is that Santa Fe and this land has such a deep and rich and complicated history that often reminds me of Israel when doing research about both of them,” Abram tells SFR. “Israel used to be the land of milk and honey and Santa Fe used to be the place where all the water flowed from when we had many springs here. And it was also kind of this, like, slice of paradise—just like Israel.”
Abram says both Israel and Santa Fe suffer from competing histories that remain unrecognized or marginalized.
“There's at least five different histories of Santa Fe, and they all exist side by side, but they don't actually communicate.”
Abram says Santa Fe’s struggle with how to handle the controversy around the Plaza Soldiers’ Monument is a prime example.
“I care about Santa Fe so much, it’s my home,” he tells SFR. “But I also have spent a good amount of time doing research on the obelisk after it came down, and about the history of the obelisk. I read a lot about the commission that was created during reconciliation, and read their report and then saw how nothing actually happened, and I got really disillusioned by the concept of looking to government to do that kind of work, especially when there is no agreement about the facts. The obelisk is a primary example of that complexity.”
He says reconciliation and truth can only come from the people.
“One of the things that's really powerful is we're gonna do this at the Guadalupe statue, which was brought here from Mexico City, and we're gonna be talking about something that's happening somewhere very far away, which a lot of us are intimately connected to, but which is also really far away.”
When Witnessing for Gaza ends in five days, Abram said he hopes people walk away “open to grief.”
“It's so hard when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and you're watching the news like everybody else and basically surviving,” Abram says. “It’s easy to be overwhelmed by how the world is and the many ways in which it feels like it's falling apart but hard to find a way to actually express it. My hope is that people will come and sit and really be moved to be angry, to be sad, or to be shocked, just moved to feel.”
Abram paused and thought about it a little longer, “Regardless, I hope that the space we create is one where we can express those emotions together.”
Sign up for a slot at the event here.
Brief History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people is one of the longest-running and most violent disputes in the world with origins stretching back more than a century. Along with East Jerusalem and Gaza, it is part of what are widely known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinians have always opposed Israel's presence on these lands and want them to be an independent state. Israel maintains control of the West Bank, but since the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority has run most of its towns and cities.
Here’s a look back at how the conflict has evolved:
- Between the 1920s and 1940s the number of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe increased the population in Palestine. Following World War I, Palestine fell under British rule. Despite protests from every Arab nation, the UK granted Israel a “national home” in Palestine as part of the Balfour Declaration. Jews had historical links to the land, but Palestinian Arabs dated back centuries there
- The murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust gave added urgency to demands for a safe haven. The Jewish population in Palestine reached 630,000, just over 30% of the population, by 1947. In May of 1948, the UK withdrew rule from the area, passing the issue of sovereignty to the UN.
- As British rule nears its end, Jewish leaders in Palestine declare an independent state, called Israel, only hours before. The day after declaring independence, Israel is attacked and surrounded by the armies of five Arab nations.
- Fighting subsided in 1949 with Israel controlling most of the territory. Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, Jordan the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel occupied West Jerusalem. About 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes, on land which became Israel, and became refugees. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Jews left, or were expelled from, Muslim majority countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Israel becomes the destination of many of the exiled.
- In 1967, the Six-Day War changed boundaries in the Middle East again with major consequences for Palestinians. Israel fought Egypt, Syria and Jordan, beginning when it launched a strike on Egypt's air force. Israel goes on to capture the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, most of the Golan Heights from Syria, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. About a million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem fell under Israel's control and remain so to this day.
- The latest hostilities began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 815 civilians. Another 251 were taken hostage to bargain for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
- In July 2024, the United Nation’s International Court of Justice ruled Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal. It said that Israel should withdraw all settlers and that it was in breach of international agreements on racism and apartheid.
- A report from the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, reports 2,208 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians that resulted in either casualties or property damage between January 2024 and June 2025.
- The Gaza Health Ministry reports that the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 surpasses 66,000 at the end of September 2025.
