How a Canadian Rabbi Became a Lifeline for Gaza Residents

In 2019, Anwar Sanaa was thirty-five years old and a freelance photojournalist struggling to support his wife and three children. He and his family lived in Gaza City.

Sanaa (a pseudonym) took whatever work he could find—which, in Gaza, wasn’t much. He sold photos to news agencies and various websites. He sold shoes in a market and sometimes found work with a glass and aluminum installation company. He kept taking photos of daily life in Gaza and posting them on his Facebook and Instagram accounts.

It wasn’t enough to feed his family. With no food in the house and no income on the horizon, Sanaa turned to an unlikely person for help—a Canadian rabbi in Hamilton, Ontario.

Rabbi David Mivasair hails from Baltimore, where he grew up in a secular Jewish family. He was sixteen when race riots took place in the city in 1968 in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. That same year, the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists, burned hundreds of draft papers to protest conscription for the Vietnam War. The events affected him deeply. He found himself drawn to Reform Judaism—a more flexible, inclusive, and modernized version of the Jewish faith—for its emphasis on social action. “I thought Judaism could contribute to fixing the world,” he says. “I thought, if more Jewish people understood Judaism that way, and got involved with it in that way, that could really make a difference.”

During his sophomore year at college, Mivasair lived in Israel and studied at Hebrew University. The experience exposed him to the complex politics of the area. He saw Palestinian land expropriated and ethnic discrimination laid bare. One vivid memory: Israeli police refusing to help a young Palestinian boy who had cut himself on glass and was bleeding on the sidewalk. “I was full of Jewish prophetic scripture,” recalls Mivasair. “And then that happened. It seemed so, so unjust.” Mivasair felt deeply that, as a rabbi, he could use Jewish teachings to bring people together.

Back in the US, Mivasair graduated from rabbinical college in 1991. Four years later, he moved to Vancouver, where, in 2003, he eventually founded the Ahavat Olam synagogue, a progressive-minded congregation. As a young rabbi, Mivasair supported the state of Israel in all the ways expected of him, such as selling Israeli bonds and encouraging congregants to buy a tree to be planted in Israel for the holiday Tu B’shvat—Jewish Earth Day. During those years, he came across The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a book by Israeli Jewish historian Ilan Pappé, which discusses the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic—the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation.

Mivasair brought ideas from the book to his congregation at Ahavat Olam for discussion—to mixed reception. Solidarity with Palestinians is a controversial and divisive topic in North American Jewish communities, even for Reform Jews. Mivasair was undeterred. “If the idea of Israel as a homeland means anything to me, I have to be concerned with what’s going on there. I can’t just have it be a religious fantasy.”

Mivasair left Ahavat Olam in 2018 to be with his partner, Lil, in Hamilton. He was in a new city and missed being part of a congregation. One day, moved by Sanaa’s photographs of life in Gaza, Mivasair liked and shared some of them on Facebook. He contacted Sanaa via Facebook Messenger. “What are you doing these days?” Mivasair asked. Israel had tightened its twelve-year blockade of Gaza in 2018, making it even more difficult for people in Gaza to access basic necessities. And work was hard to come by for Sanaa. “I make proposals to the Chinese news agency,” he wrote. “Gaza, every day worse than before.”

A couple of months later, in 2019, Sanaa reached out and, “with great reluctance and in total desperation,” says Mivasair, asked for help to put food on his table. Mivasair didn’t hesitate. He sent Sanaa money through MoneyGram. A month later, he sent more cash.

Other people in Gaza found Mivasair through Facebook and started writing to him. He began supporting them as well. They included, he says, a single mother with six daughters and another single mother with two daughters. He sent what he could, any way he could. Sometimes via a wire-transfer service like MoneyGram or Western Union, or sometimes through PayPal. At times, Mivasair’s help was overtaken by events: he says he sent one mother money to replace the bombed-out windows in her apartment—only for them to be shattered again in another bombardment a month later.

Food and fuel became increasingly scarce and expensive after 2018. But after October 7 last year, Israel closed the Erez border crossing, and with only one crossing, Rafah, still open, prices skyrocketed. The cost of a twenty-five-kilogram bag of flour was about $10 (US) before October 7, but since then, it has soared and dipped wildly, ranging from $40 to $100. A kilo of tomatoes now costs nearly $6 (US), compared with 30 cents before the war. Bread tripled in price. But even cash became scarce. At the time of writing, in early May, crowds lined up at an ATM to make a withdrawal, and fights commonly broke out.

Added to that, Mivasair found his wire transfers sometimes didn’t go through. Lil volunteered to send the money. It went through until she was blocked too—at which point another donor would try. Once, with several donors and recipients blocked, they found a way to send the money by leap-frogging through several wire-transfer services in different countries, starting in Turkey, before the money finally landed in the hands of the intended recipient in Gaza.

Eventually, Mivasair started a GoFundMe, which he shared via Facebook and X so any followers could contribute. To date, he has raised $103,985 from 800 donors—$20,000 of which, he says, recently helped a single mother of two escape to Egypt. Mivasair says many people send him money via e-transfer to avoid GoFundMe fees. He has raised approximately $70,000 in direct transfers, he adds.

As for Sanaa, Mivasair has started a GoFundMe for him and his family too, in hopes he can raise the $20,000 (US) needed to get them across the Rafah border to Egypt, if they survive Israel’s current bombardment.

Mivasair’s beliefs have gotten him into trouble. Last June, B’nai Brith, a Jewish advocacy body, took legal action against him for tweets calling the organization an “anti-Palestinian hate group,” “racist,” and an “agent of a foreign power.” (According to Mivasair, he removed some of the offending tweets, and B’nai Brith withdrew the action in February.) A few months later, a congregation in Thunder Bay dropped him as their rabbi after members complained about his support for Palestinians.

“I was born into comfort and privilege,” he says. “I have an obligation to help people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in excruciating need.” In these feelings, he is not alone. “I have huge respect for David,” says Brant Rosen, a Chicago-based rabbi and classmate of Mivasair’s from rabbinical college, who belongs to an outreach group that delivers food aid to Gaza. Rabbi Alissa Wise, the lead organizer of the group, in 2023 herself founded Rabbis for Ceasefire, which has 338 signatories—of whom Mivasair is one.

In the first five years after he began sending money, Mivasair was helping five families regularly. After October 7, that number increased to over a dozen. Mivasair receives constant messages from Gaza, day and night, via Facebook and WhatsApp, asking for help. People taking care of children or babies, or who have pregnant women in the family. Single parents. People with the fewest resources. “I can’t help everybody. But if I can help anybody, I’ve done something good.”

When things feel truly overwhelming, Mivasair gets rabbinical, quoting the Talmud: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”