A group of Harrisonburg-area Mennonites broke a 40-day collective intermittent fast with an event in Downtown Harrisonburg on Sunday calling on elected officials to end the siege and stop starving Gaza.
Members of the Mennonite Action community have been fasting each week on Wednesdays and Fridays, with a weekly public vigil on Wednesday evenings at local congregations. Sunday’s action was a way for the group to break their collective fast by holding a public action to hear from members of a recently returned Mennonite Action solidarity delegation to Palestine.
“The attempt to survive is being met with a death sentence,” said Jonathan Whittall, head of the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs, adding that the situation in Gaza is a massacre where starvation is being used as a weapon, among other factors, in the process of the erasure of Palestinian lives in Gaza.
Fasting is practiced across many faith communities, as a collective action during periods of grief, oppression and global violence, such as the genocide in Gaza.
“This action is both a personal and collective way to ground and recommit ourselves and our community,” said Emily Hershberger, a resident of Harrisonburg who attends Shalom Mennonite Congregation. “We do this to strengthen our solidarity, to raise public awareness and consciousness. In moments like this, we recall Jesus’ words in the gospel of Mark that alongside all of our efforts to effect change, some things can be changed ‘only through prayer and fasting.’”
“The most vulnerable, primarily children, are already dying of starvation,” said Holly Herr Stravers, a resident of Harrisonburg who attends Community Mennonite Church. “We know that thousands more lives will be imminently taken in this horrific manner if the blockade is not lifted immediately.”
Local Mennonites have helped organize several public actions, including a 135-mile, 11-day march from Harrisonburg to Washington, D.C, last summer. Almost 50 marchers were arrested in the Senate Hart Building on July 30, 2024, while singing hymns.
This followed an action of nonviolent civil disobedience in the Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 16, 2024, in which 135 Mennonites from across the United States were arrested while singing hymns and calling for peace, many of them coming from Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.
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Chris Graham
