Ben Mizrachi was 22, a King David High School graduate and a trained IDF medic. He was at the Nova festival when Hamas attacked, using his training to treat the wounded until he, too, was killed. In his yearbook he wrote: “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” In the days after Oct. 7, 2023, I told a Vancouver crowd it was only a matter of time before each of us was personally connected to this tragedy. I was right.

On Oct. 7, 2026, we mark three years since Hamas terrorists crossed into southern Israel and murdered roughly 1,200 people on Simchat Torah, maimed thousands and took 251 hostages into the tunnels beneath Gaza. Some never came out alive. Here in British Columbia, our community gathers each year to mourn. For three years running, we have had to ask a question no community should have to ask of its own grief: is nothing sacred?

In 2024, Canadian flags were burned on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery while a masked speaker praised Hezbollah and Hamas amid chants for Canada’s and Israel’s death. This year, organizers have again announced rallies, campus actions and online campaigns, from Oct. 7 through 11. We should stop being surprised. Seventeen days before this anniversary, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue in Belleville, Ont., on Yom Kippur. Const. Jeff Smith took multiple bullets holding the line so the congregation would live. Days later, antisemitic flyers appeared on that community’s doorsteps.

Is this British Columbia? Is this Canada? Is this who we want to be?

Every other day of the year, the Palestinian cause has its place in our democracy. We believe in open dialogue, in the right to speak and protest, even against us. But having a right is not the same as it being right to exercise it on Oct. 7.

A cause is not made innocent by its goal; it is judged by what it celebrates. Even King David mourned Saul, the enemy who hunted him for years. Some things are not to be celebrated, whoever they happen to.

What is the human thing to do, when a people is grieving? While we stood holding candles and praying for peace, others burned our flags and called for war. We have told ourselves to grow thicker skin. I no longer believe it. The answer is to say, plainly: enough is enough. Give us this one day.

If you are considering joining this year’s counter-programming, I would ask you to consider staying home and giving us that day instead. Nothing good comes from cheapening another person’s pain.

In the days after Oct. 7, 2023, footage showed celebrations in Gaza, candy handed out as though the slaughter were cause for joy. I mourn every innocent life lost in this war, Palestinian and Israeli alike, and ask why that mourning is so rarely returned. Elie Wiesel said that to forget the dead is to kill them again. Explaining away Oct. 7, softening the killing or the sexual violence, is its own kind of forgetting.

There is no context for the murder of roughly 1,200 people on a holy day, the burning of families in their homes, the rape of women, or the taking of 251 hostages, including children. Some, like the Bibas children, never came home alive; their bodies not returned for more than a year.

Desecrating this one day costs our neighbours nothing to stop, and would give us back what we have lost three years running. That is what neighbours do for one another. We deserve better than counting the days until the next attack or antisemitic incident.

This year, we will gather in Vancouver to remember, though for the first time we cannot even say where until the day itself. A Jewish community that must hide the location of its own mourning has already answered the question this piece asks.

We ask only for what any grieving family asks: a little room, a single day, to mourn without having it taken from us. Give us this one day. Keep it sacred.

Ezra S. Shanken is the CEO of Jewish Federation of British Columbia, the third largest Jewish community in Canada.