Whatever directly affects a particular person
also indirectly affects all his fellow human beings.
I can never be what I ought to be
until you are what you ought to be.
And you can never be what you ought to be
until I am what I ought to be.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
You have a name
the memorial cloth
Over 100 people hand-embroidered and sewed a 24-piece memorial cloth for the children who were killed in Israel and Gaza. The contributors live in all Austrian states, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Ireland, Romania, and Switzerland. Seventy-seven women and four men embroidered and sewed the cloth, while the others supported the production in various ways. Each person embroidered on their own, we are united by our grief for the people who lost their lives violently in Israel and Gaza.
The youngest embroiderer is 26 years old, the oldest 92. Doctors, accountants, housewives, historians, teachers, speech therapists, pensioners, psychotherapists, restorers, writers, sociologists, students, textile artists, and economists worked together to create the memorial cloth. Around 3,500 volunteer hours went into the cloth. Thanks to the commitment of so many people, the 36-square-meter cloth was produced in eight months in 2025.
Powerlessness
Violence is being perpetrated. We can offer nothing to counter this violence except our rejection of it and our thoughts for the victims. A memorial cloth cannot stop violence. It can only express to the victims of violence and their families: We care about you. We are thinking of you. Whether you were killed in Israel or in Gaza, we mourn for you and with your loved ones. When the feeling of powerlessness becomes unbearable, it gives rise to the urge to do something. The memorial cloth was born out of our powerlessness.
Mourning
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is highly charged politically. The language of weapons and extremists dominates this conflict. The voices of individuals are drowned out, the voices of those who are weeping, despairing, and falling silent. Even the voices of those who sympathize and mourn are lost in the din of missiles and opinions.
The memorial cloth is an expression of our mourning for those who have been killed. By giving each child whose name we embroider their own name field, we want to remember these individuals. We do not mourn collateral damage. We mourn people who have been killed violently. Sharing suffering and loss and mourning together – could this pave the way for us to come together?
Compassion
We are unable to commemorate the thousands of children who were killed. We only grasp something horrifying in its entirety, not the individual child to whom the horror happened. If we could imagine the individual child, we would not speak of commemoration, but would say: I think of you, I miss you.
We try to perceive the suffering on both sides of the conflict. That is easy to say. In the course of our work on the memorial cloth, we experienced how difficult this intention is to realize. It required us to confront the dark sides inherent in ourselves, which we are all too happy to attribute to others. Perhaps it was similar experiences that led Mahatma Gandhi to call self-reflection the first step toward nonviolence.
Pause
We printed the names in Hebrew or Arabic and Latin alphabet with lavender oil on gray fabric, then embroidered them by hand and finally applied and sewed them onto black cloth.
Hand embroidery allows us to pause. It requires us to slow down, to give our full attention and to remain focused. Hand embroidery requires calm, takes time and does not tolerate shortcuts. This slowing down is the opposite of the speed of bombs and bullets. Is hand embroidery perhaps another name for meditation? As the hand moves the needle and thread, the mind finds time to connect with the name that the hand is embroidering. The German language itself expresses the invisible process: the word “sewing” (nähen) contains the word “closeness” (Nähe). Time to pause and time to mourn are privileges that we only have in times of peace.
877 Names
As our project took shape, the names of those killed in Israel and Gaza between October 7, 2023, and the end of March 2025 were published. We took the names for the memorial cloth from these publications.
Forty children were killed in Israel, three of them before their first birthday.
In Gaza, over 17,000 children had been killed, 874 of them before their first birthday.
For the memorial cloth we chose the age group of children who had been killed before their first birthday because people who cannot yet speak cannot be accused of being sympathizers of an extremist group. The memorial cloth is dedicated to all children who were killed in Gaza and Israel.
Data Sources
The names of the children killed come from two lists:
Swords of Iron: Civilian Casualties
These two lists are structured differently.
The Israeli list does not give dates of birth, but rather the age of the children at the time of their death. We have used this information for the memorial cloth.
The Palestinian list does not give the date of a child’s death, but rather the “date of report,” i.e., the date on which the death of a person was reported to the authorities. Often, those killed lay under the rubble of buildings for a long time, and the exact time of death could not be determined. For this reason, the memorial cloth does not give the dates of death of the Palestinian children, but only their dates of birth.
Exhibition
The first exhibition of the memorial cloth took place from May 21 to 25, 2026, in the Kollegienkirche Salzburg.
If you are interested in an exhibition of the 24-piece cloth at your venue, please contact us:
youhaveaname@a1.net.
Hanna Sukare und Esche Schörghofer, Initiators of the memorial cloth