Dying Toronto girl gets love from hero, peers

Young people in Toronto’s Jewish community came out in large numbers last week to support one of their own, a 16-year-old girl named Olivia Wise, who has terminal brain cancer.

Inspired by a video of Wise singing Katy Perry’s hit song, “Roar,” which has gone viral on YouTube and attracted worldwide attention, some 1,500 university and high school students participated in making a video for her. They wanted to send Wise their best wishes and let her know how much they admire her.

The students’ video came hot on the heels of a 30-second video message of support directly from Katy Perry herself.

“I love you. A lot of people love you, and that’s why your video got to me. It moved everybody that saw it,” the singer told Wise. “I just wanted to send you some love and some light and tell you that I’m thinking about you. Thank you so much and keep roaring!”

Wise’s cousin Jeff Kassel told ET Canada that he helped arrange for Los Angeles music producer Jon Levine to come up to Toronto to record Wise at The Orange Lounge Studio. Wise, despite being confined to a wheelchair and having trouble breathing, was not going to miss her chance to make her first studio recording.

“Olivia has always been a joyful, ambitious, positive girl with a great sense of humor who loved to sing, not with the hopes of being a pop star, but for the joy of it,” Kassel said.

“When she was diagnosed with brain cancer just after her 15th birthday in January 2012, she didn’t let the grim prognosis or the wearing treatments change her spirit. She focused on the positive and kept on singing. As her treatments proved to be ineffective against the cancer and her deterioration was becoming apparent, a sense of urgency set in to have her recorded properly and to give her the experience of being in a real recording studio.”

Zev Gasner, a 20-year-old student who sits on the student executive board at Hillel at York University, was so moved by Wise’s video that he felt he had to do something more than just make a donation to a fund in her name raising money for pediatric brain cancer research.

“I think what struck me the most is that I can see myself in her shoes,” he said. “Because it [the video] is going around the younger generation, everyone can see themselves in her shoes. That could be anyone you know. That could be you,” he told the Toronto Star.

‘Everyone can see themselves in her shoes. That could be anyone you know. That could be you’

According to Tamara Caplan, director of Hillel at York, Gasner and his friends mobilized students at five Ontario Hillels and eight local high schools to express their wishes for Wise on small posters and be photographed with them for a “Roar for Olivia Wise” video. The posters — approximately 1,500 in total — were bound in to four scrapbooks and delivered to Wise’s family home this past weekend.

“Neither Zev nor anyone else at Hillel knows Olivia or her family,” Caplan told The Times of Israel. “The students were just so inspired by her and they wanted to come up with a way for young people to demonstrate a quick gesture of kindness toward her.”

The project spread by word of mouth and social media, with students streaming in over the course of a few day to designated lounges and rooms on college campuses and at schools to participate.

It’s clear that Wise has touched many people. The Liv Wise Fund has already reached the halfway mark toward its goal of $150,000, with donations continuing to come in as more view the video.

“It feels like it takes a lifetime to make an impact. It’s nice to know that you can make an impact in such a little time,” Kassel said of 16-year-old Wise, who at this point is reportedly slipping in and out of consciousness.