Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt is a Jewish-American graduate student at Hiroshima City University. Since the deadly attacks by Hamas last October and the start of military retaliation by Israel, she has stood with her peers almost every day outside the dome to appeal for a ceasefire.
"Every day, every moment, more people are dying," she says. "We are here to make a statement and demand our governments as well as citizens around the world take a stand for the people of Gaza and Palestine."
Rebecca's great-grandfather and great-grandmother were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Her father is from Israel, and she says she was brought up with a strong sense of her Jewish identity.
"We grew up fully supporting the state of Israel and with strong ties to it," she says. "We were raised to believe there was only Israel. We constantly talked about peace, but we never talked about Palestine."
However, she says, the more she learned about the history of Israel and Palestine, the more the ideas she had taken for granted began to change.
"To go against everything you know, growing up, it is overwhelming," she says. "The Israeli government and military have become major violent oppressors of the Palestinian people. And that's what took me a long time to understand. Israel and the people of Israel have a responsibility. I feel very sad for everyone in this situation."
In late November, Rebecca and her fellow demonstrators spent three hours reading out the names and ages of people who had died in Gaza.
To draw more attention to her cause, they also staged an art event in which people painted with red water, to represent "tears of blood."
Even when it rains, Rebecca and others continue standing in front of the dome. She speaks of her feelings for Hiroshima, which was devastated by an atomic bomb.
"As someone whose family died in Auschwitz, I believe I can relate to the feelings of hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, and their descendants. They also want to end all wars because they know in their bodies the feeling of being bombed," she says.
"What I've learned from Hiroshima is that we must speak out and act, and demand peace."
Rebecca's activities have attracted attention on social media — and the sympathy of people in Hiroshima. A man who came to the dome said, "I saw on Twitter that you were doing this every day, so I came." A woman visitor said, "I wanted to do something to stop this massacre."
Sato Yu attends the same university as Rebecca. While thinking about what she could do after seeing news about the war, she was invited to join the vigil by a faculty member who had a connection with Rebecca. The two are now working together.
"We're not organizing demonstrations, but I believe we can all quietly join together in prayer, and spread the word little by little, talking to people who pass by," says Sato.
"The background is different from Japanese history. It is complicated, and I think it is difficult to fully understand or get a sense of, but people are being killed. I really want this situation to stop."
Rebecca believes the only way to achieve change is to speak out and take action.
"Our voices together have to be louder than the bombs," she says. "We have to create an energy across the planet that is so strong that what's happening there — the deaths and murders of thousands and thousands, and the sounds of the bombs and the feeling of the bombs — we have to be stronger and louder than that. Such a thing is possible, even as one person, even as a single voice."
