Passover 2022 | Pesach 5782
The Canadian Jewish News
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The CJN Daily
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Menschwarmers
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Bonjour Chai
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Treasure Trove
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Rainbow challahs and all-gender cabins
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The haggadah with a difference
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Who By Fire
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“I gave a voice to those who lost it in Auschwitz-Birkeneau”
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Canadian Jews in the United Arab Emirates
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The Back Pages
ELLIN BESSNER
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AV I F I N E G O L D, I L A N A Z AC K O N A N D DAV I D S K L A R
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Sending good wishes for spring with better days ahead and a very happy Pesach! THIS year in Jerusalem You can make your mark in Jerusalem through a gift to the Canada Culture and Community Fund which will be acknowledged on the Canada Pathway in the centre of Jerusalem. Supporting communal strength, creative culture and future leadership. Safra Square City Hall
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ha
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To learn more about ways to support Jerusalem and opportunities to honour your loved ones on the Canada Pathway contact: Nomi Yeshua, Executive Director Tel: 437 253 7823 nomiy@jerusalemfoundation.ca
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Who knows... anything? T
he Exodus story we recount around the seder table is a testimony to trust. Our enslaved ancestors, we are told, were brought to conviction by an unlikely leader and an unfamiliar power—then waded into nationhood in the face of a charging enemy. No such achievement could have been possible without a fundamental base of trust. It’s always an apt lesson, and maybe that’s why we are instructed to retell it every spring. These days, however, it carries a very real message for a fractured world where trust has seemingly gone out the window. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest societal trust is at an all-time low; despite having the knowledge of the world at our fingertips (or seemingly because of it), we’ve lost the ability to make clear-headed choices. We struggle to find reliable facts; we’re plagued by efforts to distinguish between data and disinformation. In the process we’ve become so skeptical that, increasingly, we’re not so sure we can trust ourselves. At the end of the seder we sing the timeless classic, “Who Knows One?” It’s an homage to the entirely Jewish process of asking questions, seeking out answers and then applying that knowledge to cast about for new questions and new answers ad infinitum (or at least until the fourth cup of wine kicks in). These are the cornerstones of building a trusting and functioning community—knowing that we can be comfortable asking questions, and that there are objective answers to be found.
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Sure, we may not always find what we’re searching for, but as the song reminds us each year, there are at least a few things we can trust. And keep on trusting.
The Canadian Jewish News Yoni Goldstein CEO and Editor-in-Chief
Whether you frequent The Canadian Jewish News website at thecjn.ca, or contributed to our hundreds of thousands of podcast downloads in the past year, we appreciate your trust in the mission to deliver the best information and inspiration.
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Flipping through this first of four quarterly magazines for 2022 should give you a taste of what we’ve been up to. Some of it draws from the past, but the history is in the context of looking to the future—kind of like the spirit in which Jewish people gather at Passover.
Michael Fraiman Podcast Director
And, like the Haggadah, we’ve got pieces designed for sharing between different generations. The CJN has been infused with an increasingly inclusive attitude, whether it comes to covering politics, religion, culture, business, society or sports. News stories are now published online as soon as they can be written and edited. We’ve gotten more serious about covering the community—and the personalities who keep it ticking—but we’ve also added more irreverence to the perspectives we publish. (Read on for what we mean.)
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Pesach Sameach, yoni
Cover Illustration: Etery Podolsky Inside Photos: Shutterstock, Wikimedia Commons, Adobe Stock, Freepik Printed in Winnipeg by Kromar Printing Ltd.
The CJN Daily with Ellin Bessner This is what Jewish Canada sounds like. For the past year, The CJN has started each Monday to Thursday with a bite-sized podcast inspired by whatever’s happening now. The conversations cover breaking news, online social trends and eclectic encounters. Host Ellin Bessner also produces videos and articles based on the podcast, which makes The CJN Daily your first place to find out about developments like these:
Pulling a rabbit out of their virtual hat, these magicians transformed a pandemic into virtual success Ben Train and Jonah Babins of The Toronto Magic Company parlayed their university degrees into an entertainment business—to the disappointment of their parents. thecjn.ca/magic
Canada’s first permanent Jewish postmark comes from Disraeli— a Quebec town with no Jews Irv Osterer is the Ottawa philatelist (the official term for “stamp collector”) who arranged for it to happen in time for Hanukkah, via a town that was named for the British politician. thecjn.ca/disraeli
For this Montrealer, building the newest NHL team was a lifelong dream Seattle Kraken co-owner Mitch Garber went from hosting a cable TV sports show in Montreal to a business career that led to his position as a minority owner and board member. thecjn.ca/kraken 8 |
Winning over hearts and bellies as a contestant on CBC Television’s The Great Canadian Baking Show Steven Levitt had a pie-in-the-sky dream to become a professional baker, something he finally got a taste of last year at age 54, when he became one of the national finalists. thecjn.ca/baking
Canadians freaked out when this macaroni and cheese vanished from kosher supermarket shelves Wacky Mac became harder to find than toilet paper at the outset of the pandemic—forcing grocers to find creative solutions. thecjn.ca/wacky
At 13, he got an Apple Watch. At 14, he built WatchSiddur, the first daily prayer app of its kind Eitan Steinfeld designed it after imagining the possibilities of the bar mitzvah present from his grandmother, resulting in hundreds of downloads and rave user reviews. thecjn.ca/watchsiddur
The world’s first female rabbi got her moment 350 years after her death, thanks to a children’s book Osnat and Her Dove is the story of Osnat Barzani as told by Sigal Samuel, a Montreal-born writer who gained acclaim for telling a tale she personally related to. thecjn.ca/osnat THEC J N. CA | 9
Menschwarmers with James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver
Debating the GADYA The Greatest All-time Diaspora Yiddish Athlete What’s a GOAT worth? On Passover, approximately two zuzim. However, to The CJN’s pre-eminent Jewish sports podcasters, the GOAT Jewish athlete—the Greatest Of All Time—is worth far, far more. Just in time for the seder, after March Madness gives way to Mensch Madness, the men behind the Menschwarmers podcast present their picks for the GADYA: the Greatest All-time Diaspora Yiddish Athlete. Amar’e Stoudemire During the early 2000s, Amar’e Stoudemire and the “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns changed the way basketball was played. Up-tempo and offence-focused, they created a new style of play that’s since become de rigueur in the NBA. In 2016, the six-time all-star and former Mount Zion Christian Academy star signed with Hapoel Jerusalem and in 2019 he received Israeli citizenship, formally converting to Judaism in 2020 and adopting the Hebrew name Yehoshafat Ben Avraham. Stoudemire has since returned stateside to help coach the Brooklyn Nets—but not on Shabbat.
Sue Bird Five Olympic gold medals. Four WNBA titles. Twelve all-star selections. The GOAT of women’s basketball is internationally acclaimed— and for good reason. Stewarding the WNBA and the U.S. national team through the last 20 years, Sue Bird is running it back this year with the Seattle Storm. There simply is no more decorated Jewish athlete, let alone one with the stamina to do it 24 straight years and counting.
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MATCHUP
1
MATCHUP
Sandy Koufax In October 1965, Sandy Koufax became Everyone’s Favourite Jewish Athlete™ when he refused to pitch on Yom Kippur during the World Series. He’d later pitch a shutout in Game 7 to win it all, along with the World Series MVP award, confirming the importance of repentance for Jewish baseball fans the world over. He’s the winner of three Cy Young Awards, spinner of four no-hitters and the second-most strikeouts for any lefty—ever. Realistically, if this debate was exclusively up to the rabbis of Los Angeles, it would be over before it started.
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Al Rosen It wasn’t uncommon for young American soldiers to return from the Second World War and enjoy successful careers. What was extremely uncommon was for those men to play 10 years in the major leagues, win a World Series and MVP award, and later become president of the New York Yankees. But that’s Al Rosen’s life story. Legend has it, Rosen was so proud of his heritage that when rival players or fans would shout antisemitic slurs at him, he’d walk off the field and get into fist fights with them. As a former college scholarship boxer, he rarely lost.
Jason Lezak Few remember who was actually behind the U.S. men’s relay swim team’s storybook come-from-behind victory in 2008. Even though celebrity teammate Michael Phelps got most of the glory, it was Jason Lezak whose final stretch nudged the Americans into victory. Less than a year later, Lezak was competing at the Maccabiah Games, where he lit the torch as the final torchbearer—a great kavod. The winner of eight Olympic medals, Lezak was a stable veteran who starred in one of the greatest moments in American sporting history.
MATCHU Mark Spitz Until it was broken in 2008 by Michael Phelps, Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in 1972 was considered one of sport’s unbreakable records. Spitz was a national icon, a titan in a sport that got precious little TV time beyond the Olympics. His medals remain a shining light for Jewish sports fans that starkly contrasts the horror of the Munich massacre that same year.
P3
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THEC J N. CA | 1 1
MATCHUP
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Aly Raisman There’s a long history of Jews in gymnastics, but few have enjoyed the cultural impact or championship longevity of Alexandra Raisman. The winner of six Olympic medals, including two golds, Raisman’s power and rhythm on the floor and beam have turned her into a global superstar. Her bravery in coming forward to describe how USA Gymnastics doctors had been abusing athletes for decades cements her legacy as a fearless trailblazer and international icon—and, thankfully, one who’s proudly Jewish.
Kerri Strug At the 1996 Olympics, Kerri Strug suffered a third-degree ankle sprain and tore a tendon during her final event. But she knew her fellow Team USA athletes were relying on her to win gold. To accomplish this, she needed to land a second attempt on both feet. In one of the most iconic moments in modern Olympic history, Strug nailed her second jump, landing on her maligned leg, winning the hobble-off gold medal. Photos of her coach carrying her around the arena so she could wave at her fans remains a testament to both her grit and the endless tsuris of the gymnastic legend.
Dolph Schayes At 16, Dolph Schayes was playing basketball for New York University in the NCAA championship game while working toward an aeronautical engineering degree (which he’d later complete). By 35, he retired as the greatest scorer of his generation. A six-foot-seven kid from the Bronx, Schayes played almost his entire career in Syracuse, where he helped his team make the playoffs 14 out of 15 seasons. Schayes was recently named to the NBA’s list of the 75 greatest-ever players in recognition of his career double-double average and 12 all-star appearances.
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5 MATCHUP
Sid Luckman Before the AFL–NFL merger in 1970, the Chicago Bears were a dominant football team, winning four NFL championships in the 1940s. In that era, their quarterback and leader was Sid Luckman. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Lithuanian immigrants, Luckman put himself through Columbia University washing dishes in a fraternity house. Drafted second in 1939, Luckman and coach George Halas went on to revolutionize pro football by implementing the T-formation offence. Luckman was awarded MVP in 1943 and elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1965.
Have your say! with thecjn.ca/gadya
Happy Passover
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MATCHUP
6 Dara Torres The child of a Cuban-Jewish casino owner, Dara Torres has gambled on herself several times—and it’s paid off, as she’s competed in an unprecedented five separate Olympic games. Torres’s longevity is so great, she became the oldest American swimmer at the Olympics—twice. First in 2000, when she won five medals, and then again in 2008, when she set a national record in the 4x100-metre relay. She retired in 2012 as the most decorated female American swimmer of all time.
Amy Alcott With five major championships and 29 career wins under her belt, Amy Alcott was one of the greatest golfers in the world in the 1970s and ’80s. A member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Alcott earned her own named tournament on tour in the 2000s. Three of her major wins came at the Dinah Shore Classic, where in 1988 she started the tradition of diving into the pond on the 18th green after sinking the winning putt.
Hank Greenberg
MATCHUP
On Sept. 10, 1934, Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg hit two home runs to beat Boston and ring in the year 5695, after deciding last-minute to play on Rosh Hashanah and help his Detroit Tigers chase the pennant. (He got approval from his rabbi.) The following day, the Detroit Free Press ran a Hebrew headline that read “L’shanah Tovah.” Considered the first Jewish-American sports superstar, Greenberg followed up his high holiday heroics with two World Series victories, two MVP awards, four years served in the Second World War and a well-earned retirement in 1947, having signed the richest contract the MLB had seen to that point.
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Shawn Green If you were a Jewish baseball fan growing up in Toronto or Los Angeles in the 1990s and 2000s, Shawn Green was your idol. He hit dingers, threw guys out and went to shul. Rumours of Ira and Judy’s kid appearing at Rosh Hashanah or Kol Nidre services rippled through day-school courtyards like news of a marriage from the local yente. While his years in Toronto were great, he really emerged as a power hitter in Los Angeles, where he followed Koufax’s lead and refused to play on Yom Kippur, instead donating that day’s salary to charity each year.
UP MATCH
Barney Ross Young Dov-Ber Rosovsky was on track to become a talmudic scholar, but after growing up on the mean streets of Chicago, and losing his father in a brutal murder, Rosovsky learned to daven with his fists. He started running errands and throwing muscle for Al Capone, who recognized Rosovsky’s talent and fostered his professional boxing career. To hide the violence from his family, he adopted an anglo name, Barney Ross—but kept funneling his fight winnings to his mother, who remained oblivious to her son’s true profession until he became lightweight champion of the world in 1933.
Have your say! 14 |
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Bill Goldberg For a good portion of the 1990s, Bill Goldberg was the biggest, scariest man on television. With a totally legit, not-at-all-scripted wrestling record of 173-0, it took chicanery and a taser to bring him down, finally losing after half a year as champion to Kevin Nash. Now in year 27 of his wrestling career after a brief stint in the NFL, Goldberg has embraced his heritage, even once being threatened by fellow member of the tribe Paul Heyman with the Mourner’s Kaddish on a recent episode of Monday Night Raw. n
Who should win the title of GADYA? Head to thecjn.ca/gadya to vote in each matchup.
How can we protect Canada’s Jewish community?
Download 4 More Questions: Protecting and Preserving Jewish life in Canada download at cija.ca/4morequestions Canadian. Jewish. Advocacy. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs is the advocacy agent for the Jewish Federations of Canada
Bonjour Chai with Avi Finegold, Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Jewish nostalgia ain’t what it used to be Nostalgia is in vogue these days—in politics, pop culture and food trends. And Judaism is no different. As North American Jewry evolves, nostalgia for our mid-20th century cultural traditions, from deli sandwiches to the Yiddish language, has taken hold as perhaps the dominant definition of Western Jewish identity. Rachel B. Gross has studied these trends for her book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. She argues that, in an era of conventional religious decline, this focus on nostalgia should be considered the new North American Jewish religious practice—which would itself counter the very idea that religion is even in decline. In fact, what religion looks like may simply be changing. To help us understand why nostalgia is not just a thing of the past, she joined The CJN’s weekly current affairs show Bonjour Chai for a discussion with hosts Avi Finegold, Ilana Zackon and David Sklar.
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Avi Rachel
How do you see nostalgia fitting into contemporary Judaism?
I think about a very particular kind of nostalgia as a type of religious practice. I’m looking at nostalgia by Ashkenazi Jews, especially in the United States from eastern European heritage, at the turn of the century. I’m looking at nostalgia for that moment, for that culture, and how it manifests in different institutional and material forms. And I am making the argument, really broadly, that if we think about American Jewish religion to include these nostalgic forms that we often think of as cultural, it gives us a better handle on American Judaism—and Canadian Judaism as well. So I’m looking at four case studies: Jewish genealogists, historic synagogues that are used as museums in the United States, children’s books and dolls, and new artisanal Ashkenazi food practices.
David
While I was reading your book, I felt like I really fit into this category. If I go to a Jewish museum, I get excited. But at the same time, I also feel your book gave me a sense of tragedy: are we, the Jewish community, just a spent force if we’re always looking at the past and never really engaging with the future of what this means? What does it mean to move ahead if we’re always just focusing on a Jewish museum or a synagogue that is closed?
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More conversations with the Frozen Chosen The very Jewish legacy of Ivan Reitman. Meatballs and Stripes screenwriter Len Blum discussed how his late friend became Canada’s most successful comedy filmmaker. What is the future of progressive Zionism? An expert panel was assembled to ponder how the movement can make its pitch in a climate marked by extreme polarization. Sitting down with a few new Jews in the Order of Canada. We discussed the honour with Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, Olga Korper, Jane Heyman and Cara Tannenbaum. The secret history of Jews and Indigenous communities. York University professor David Koffman talked about his ongoing studies on this increasingly relevant topic.
Hear it here thecjn.ca/bonjour
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Rachel
I think of nostalgia as a longing for an irrevocable past. It’s a sentimental longing. I don’t think that’s all bad. It’s very easy to criticize nostalgia, and most of the popular and scholarly work on nostalgia tends to criticize it. But I think nostalgia actually helps us form a community. I think that this particular kind of nostalgia of eastern and central European heritage allows Jews to come together around certain institutions, around certain materials, and share an emotion that connects them to their past—and even helps us think about the future. Think about what values Jews want to pass on to their children that they valued in the past.
Ilana
But is nostalgia enough to sustain us? Because you’re making the argument that nostalgia acts as religion for people who might not fit into the typical religious box. But in this hypothetical reality where nostalgia becomes the one form of Judaism, if we lose practices like Shabbat or Kashrut or attending a synagogue—I had a hard time being convinced that a pastrami sandwich is going to be the thing that maintains us.
Rachel
Absolutely. I want to clarify a couple of things that I’m doing and not doing. First of all, I’m engaging in an academic theoretical
conversation. This is an academic book— folks who are not academics are welcome to read it. And when I present my work to non-academic audiences, I say, “Look, you can take or leave this, I don’t care. But I’m presenting to you a way of thinking about religion that might be useful to you.” I’m not making an argument for what Jews should or should not be doing. I’m a scholar who did ethnography, observing living people like anthropologists. I do it as a religious studies scholar. And I say, “This is happening.” People who run Jewish communities can take this information and do with it as they choose. People really want to think my book is about what we might call “unaffiliated Jews,” what the Pew studies have called “Jews of no religion,” what other sociologists call “religious nones.” But the fact is, my study includes Jews who identify as every denomination and no denomination. If we look at things like going to historic synagogues, or doing Jewish genealogy, that’s a practice that cuts across all streams of Jews and is a way that people find meaning in their lives. And that’s really important. That’s a huge part of how I define religion; that it helps us find meaning as individuals, as communities, as peoples, and helps us answer existential questions about who we are in the world.
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Avi More conversations with the Frozen Chosen Social media communities are toxic echo chambers— but they might be necessary to live a Jewish life. Canadaland podcast maven Jesse Brown dropped by to discuss. To cut or not to cut: Debate over circumcision is heating up. Bruchim is a new organization that represents Jews opposed to the practice, and board member Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon made his pitch. Canadian housing is unaffordable. Jewish housing is even worse. The surrounding complications were discussed with Zev Mandelbaum of Altree Developments. Jewish youth groups have a toxic sexuality problem. A conversation with Rahel Bayar, the consultant who’s been working with camps and schools to try and change things.
Hear it here thecjn.ca/bonjour
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One thing that connected with me personally was, when we were naming our kids, it wasn’t enough to just find an ancestor or grandparent. It was like, “What are the values that Zayde stood for, and how are we going to name our kid for the values that are being transmitted through history?” It wasn’t just the value of history. When the person eats the pastrami sandwich as a sacred practice—which can be a sacred practice if you’ve ever really engaged in the ritual of a pastrami sandwich— what do I do with that information?
Rachel
I think that varies according to individuals. The children’s books I look at are often more forward-thinking because they’re explicitly thinking about different values. They might be thinking about particular rituals, about kindness and inclusivity, things like that. The book in the doll that I look at—distributed by American Girl, Rebecca Rubin—has those particular values. The kind of artisanal delis I’m looking at are actually forward-thinking, thinking about what it means to have this emotional connection to the past and to a particular cuisine that has developed in the United States and Canada. What does it mean to think about the values that we have now, as contemporary people? What is the responsibility that we have to the Earth, especially for restaurateurs? Values like sustainability, buying local food, local produce—they’ve told me, they think about those universal values as Jewish values.
Avi
I’m a little suspicious of those people, because there’s commerce involved. I read last night to my daughter—she’s 10 and has a Rebecca Rubin doll—and I read to her from Pleasant Rowland, who is the founder of American Girl, and she says these dolls give girls a sense of self and an understanding of where they came from and who they are today. That is American Girl’s mission. And my daughter looked at me and she goes,
“That’s just marketing.” That’s what they say to get you to buy a really expensive doll. I don’t trust American Girl with my religion. I don’t trust the artisanal deli people with religion. I don’t trust PJ Library, to be honest, because to me, PJ Library is “Birthright for babies”—it’s a way to get free Judaism into people’s minds. There’s this ulterior motive.
Rachel
I think that all communities are shaped by commerce—at least the communities we know of under capitalism. We can think about the intersections of religion and commerce that we like, and that we don’t like, but I don’t think we’re going to escape it. Everything that we have in our traditional religious communities—however you want to define that, whatever you think about as non-debatable religion—that’s shaped by commerce. I don’t think that makes things good or bad. The early Jewish communities of North America were merchants. What’s different today, in the case studies that I’m looking at, is that commerce—that nostalgic commerce—has been institutionalized in different forms. When I interview these restaurateurs, the vast majority are in it to make a living, but they’re also super sincere. Folks who sell things can do both. They’re trying to make a living—that doesn’t denigrate or lessen the religiosity of it in any way. That seems to me, honestly, kind of silly. We buy Torah scrolls.
Avi
What isn’t religion, according to this definition? What are the boundaries?
Rachel
My teacher, the wonderful Kathryn Lofton, she wrote her first book about Oprah as religion. Her second book, Consuming Religion, looks at all kinds of things as religion—parenting guides, binge-watching the Kardashians, high-end office furniture. Look, if it connects you to meaning and the world has placed you in a kind of foundational narrative, I see no reason not to use that word. If you don’t find it, that’s fine. But I find it a really useful theory. n
This interview was condensed and edited for print. To hear the full thing, visit thecjn.ca/bonjour.
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The CJN is back to print each week NOVEMBER 12, 2021 / 8 KISLEV 5782
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NAOMI ROSENFELD
RALPH BENMERGUI
sees a Jewish future in Atlantic Canada
on becoming not that kind of rabbi …plus highlights from his podcast
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/ page 5
SAUL RUBINEK
on sharing his family’s Holocaust story
ELLIN BESSNER
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is telling our stories daily / page 7
Canadian boat to Gaza compensated
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Jews and Mennonites: It’s complicated
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DECEMBER 3, 2021 / 29 KISLEV 5782 A tween novel about death and dying page 8
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Toronto high school rally slogans get probed
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Meet a teen obsessed with internet chess
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DECEMBER 10, 2021 / 6 TEVET 5782 Hal Niedzviecki: How a Jewish writer is born page 8
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Foodbenders discrimination charge dismissed
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Alberta retracts the pro-Nazi education advice
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A Jewish view from the climate disaster in B.C.
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17, 2021 / 13 TEVET 5782 ‘Hava Nagila’ comes to life in aDECEMBER children’s book page 8
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/page 5 MEL LASTMAN
SANDY HOFSTEDTER
PETER SILVERMAN
LEA HOCHMAN
RABBI HOWARD JOSEPH
JOHN SYRTASH
RENÉE UNGER
NAIM KATTAN
hosts of our weekly podcast Bonjour Chai
VS.
FEDERAL POLITICS UNMASKED Ya’ara Saks
HALLMARK HANUKKAH
IN MEMORIAM
Annamie Paul
/page 6
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and other holiday cultural appropriations
RABBI REUVEN BULKA
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2021 The CJN’s tales of 10 intriguing lives
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ASHLEY WAXMAN BAKSHI
RONEN HOFFMAN
stare down our current crisis in ‘Pandemish’
Israel’s new ambassador to Canada (with Gov.-Gen. Mary Simon) / page 5 CANDLE LIGHTING TIMES SYDNEY
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Rabbi Daniel Korobkin’s sermon about Chaim Walder
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Holocaust museum overhauls all across the country
The 21 new Jewish recipients of the Order of Canada
the Canadi an influence r in Israel
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Ottawa considers expanded security measures
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Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker’s friend in Winnipeg
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Aruba’s new Torah has a Canadian connection
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Cecile Klein: Canada’s oldest person dies at 114
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How a Timmins teacher got his licence revoked A pair of antisemitism subplots in Ontario election
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Vancouver’s national online Jewish book festival
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Jews to root for at the Winter Olympics in Beijing
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A fresh collection of our favourite articles The weekly edition of The Canadian Jewish News
MARCI SURKES on keeping the pieces in place for Justin Trudeau
is designed for offline reading on Shabbat and
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ERNA PARIS (1938-2022)
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obituary / page 6
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Keira’s Law is tabled by Liberal MPs in Ottawa
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New missions from philanthropists in Montreal
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Jewish-Canadian roles in the Spanish Civil page 8 FEBRUARY 18, War 2022 / 17 ADAR 5782
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Get yours today
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Amnesty International and the University of Toronto vs. Israel
page 2
Conservative MP wants Holocaust denial to become criminal
page 3
Justin Trudeau says the Tories support standing with swastikas page 4 An unusual aftermath to reports of Toronto school antisemitism page 5 Writer asks who killed his great-great-grandmother in Winnipeg page 8
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thecjnmagazine MARCI SURKES
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Jewish Community Organizations, Synagogues and Schools join our brothers and sisters in Israel in celebrating a Happy and Kosher Pesach. We pray for peace with security and honour.
HAPPY PASSOVER Adath Israel Congregation Beit Rayim Synagogue & School Bernard Betel Centre Beth David B’nai Israel Beth Am Beth Sholom Synagogue Beth Tikvah Synagogue Beth Tzedec Congregation Canadian Friends of Ezrath Nashim - Herzog Hospital Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University Canadian Magen David Adom for Israel Congregation Beth Haminyan Congregation Habonim Hebrew Beach Institute Synagogue & School Holy Blossom Temple
פסח כשר ושמח Israel Bonds/Canada-Israel Securities, Limited Na’mat Toronto Reena Temple Emanu-El Temple Har Zion Temple Kol Ami Temple Sinai The Song Shul
Treasure Trove from the collection of David Matlow With a collection of more than 5,000 items related to our history, the Treasure Trove of David Matlow has found a home at The CJN, with new items regularly added. The treasures weave together a story about the longing for a Jewish homeland and the significant effort expended to make it happen. From hockey cards to sun hats, travel bags to wine labels, comic books to postcards—they’re all pieces of the evolution and revolution of Zionism. But sometimes he finds a reason to give something to someone who would appreciate it more, a phenomenon he calls “reverse collecting”.
Sadie Weiss The Jewish Colonial Trust was established in 1899 by Theodor Herzl as a financial institution to help fund the ongoing settlement and development work of the Zionist organization. Shares were sold to hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world as the first tangible way to support the Jewish homeland effort. In a grouping of share certificates sold at auction, I acquired one for five shares bought in 1923 by Sadie Weiss of Monticello, N.Y. Google led me to her 82-year-old grandson in San Diego. Marty Weiss had never met his grandmother and didn’t know of her interest in Zionism—even though he’d been to Israel many times himself. (Also, his daughter Andrea is a prominent Reform rabbi.) A story about the return of the century-old share certificate was published in the San Diego Union Tribune and syndicated to multiple newspapers. In the process, a global audience was exposed to this part of the legacy of Herzl.
David Matlow is a partner at Goodmans LLP and the owner of the world’s largest private collection of Theodor Herzl memorabilia: herzlcollection.com
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Rivka Klein A popular photo album in Israel during the 1940s and ’50s had an image of Theodor Herzl on the cover. I accumulated many over the years, but never bothered to see what was inside them. But on one pandemic winter’s day, I set out to reorganize the albums and saw that a number were filled with personal family photos. David Sela, the founder of the website Nostalgia Online, agreed to help with the search. He highlighted the first album in his popular Israel Hayom newspaper column, in the search for a baby named Rivka Yosipovitz, who was born in Haifa in 1954. Within minutes of publication, he received 800 emails about how to find her. (The one from Rivka’s husband was the only one he really needed.) Rivka had another look at her childhood memories that she thought were lost forever when her parents died and their apartment was cleared out. She gave up searching by the time it landed in the Jaffa flea market where it was purchased, then passed on to me. Now, the album is back where it belongs.
Devora and Aviva The second album belonged to a young girl named Devora, born in the late 1930s, who had a twin sister named Aviva. It contained photos of their trips throughout Israel during the 1950s. Once again, David Sela included a picture with an invitation for readers to contact him with any information based on these details. As a result, we soon learned that Devora passed away, but Aviva was alive and well at age 83. “My heart is pounding,” she said upon the discovery—which hopefully won’t be the last. Sela considers it a great mitzvah to have his Israel Hayom column serve as a conduit to connect pieces of my collection to the faces I manage to find at home in Toronto. As for me, I’m not worried about giving away items from the Treasure Trove, given how I have enough items to highlight a new one each week from now through 2122. (I’m currently working to get us through the rest of the following century too.)
Find more from the Treasure Trove at thecjn.ca/treasures
THEC J N. CA | 2 7
Rainbow challahs and all-gender cabins How non-binary kids (and their allies) are changing Jewish summer camp. STORY BY LILA SARICK ILLUSTRATIONS BY SAUL FREEDMAN-LAWSON
S
aul Freedman-Lawson was especially nervous on the first day of camp.
A counsellor who met Saul that first day remembers watching the teenager step off the bus, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed solidly on the ground. “I was never much of a summer camp kid,” Saul recalled. A previous attempt at a traditional summer camp hadn’t gone well. Despite everyone’s best efforts and kindnesses, Saul felt like an “imposter.” And in the end, the camp director had to agree and called the family. The camp just wasn’t a good fit. For kids who are gender-fluid or trans, traditional camp is complicated. Residential summer camp is a strictly gendered place. Cabins and washrooms are designated for boys and for girls. Communal living means there is little privacy and not much room for a kid who is different than the norm. But for Saul, Machane Lev, a one-week Jewish camp for kids (and staff) who identify as LGBTQ and their allies, would prove to be different. 28 |
“Up until that point I had felt, and many people had made me feel, that something was wrong with me, and that I was in some way unnatural” - Saul Freedman-Lawson
“It was very exciting. I had never been in queer space like that before. I hadn’t been around trans adults before, I hadn’t been around small trans kids before. It really reshaped how I thought about myself in the world. “Up until that point I had felt, and many people had made me feel, that something was wrong with me, and that I was in some way unnatural,” Saul said. “I had this moment of meeting trans kids and going, ‘They’re fine, they’re perfect and there’s nothing wrong with them and therefore maybe there’s nothing wrong with me.’”
Machane Lev, which will host campers for a fifth year this summer, started when Gaela Mintz, a social worker who works with trans and non-binary kids, was looking for a Jewish summer camp for a little trans girl she knew. As Mintz began to research the options, she found the camps she approached were “weird” about the idea and she was worried the child would be the guinea pig for a trial run. Frustrated, Mintz turned to Risa Epstein, national executive director at Canadian Young Judaea, and wondered aloud, “What do we need to do, start our own camp?” And so Machane Lev (Camp Heart) was born. It runs on the site of Camp Solelim in Sudbury, Ont., when Solelim’s session is over and is the only Jewish camp of its kind in Canada. Other camps are starting to rethink how to find a place for campers who are non-binary or just need something a little different. At Camp Gesher, an Ontario camp that’s part of the left-leaning Habonim Dror movement, they have had trans, non-binary and gender-fluid kids and staff at camp for years, said camp director Shoshana Lipschultz. Campers have been placed in the cabin that matches their biology.
THEC J N. CA | 2 9
about swimming in public and finding a suit that they are comfortable wearing. Most of the 50 campers at Machane Lev don’t attend another camp. “All Young Judaea camps try to accommodate LGBTQ+ in their camp,” says Risa Epstein. “But there are still camp institutions, there’s still other kids there that might not be as open or there’s bullying incidents. That doesn’t exist at Machane Lev. “No one has to play any stereotypes. You’re going to find your people.” Saul came to Machane Lev as a camper the first year it opened, in 2018, and has come back on staff every year since. “It’s been really magical to watch people come in and leave at the end of the week completely different, with so much new confidence, with such a sense of themselves and the ways that they are valued. “I think all of our campers come in with a lot of hard stuff. I think it’s hard to be a queer Jewish teenager.”
But this summer, they are trying something new and offering what they’re calling a “genderful”—a portmanteau of gender and wonderful—cabin that will be home to all genders. The camp has for years made a point of asking everyone what pronouns they use, even if it means explaining what a pronoun is to the youngest campers, and has adopted gender-inclusive Hebrew (see sidebar on next page). But there are campers who may not have been comfortable being assigned to a girls or boys cabin, Lipschultz said.
“In some ways it’s great we’re doing this and in some ways we’re behind the eight-ball.” - Shoshana Lipschultz
“In some ways it’s great we’re doing this and in some ways we’re behind the eightball. It’s not like non-binary and gender-fluid children have just appeared in the last year. We’re continually growing and doing better as we understand issues,” Lipschultz said.
A number of Jewish camps in the United States have offered all-gender cabins, but Gesher is the first in Canada. Camp Moshava, a Habonim Dror camp in Maryland, has had a gender-inclusive cabin for a number of years, said director Talia Rodwin.
The genderful cabin will house campers of different ages, and most of the time they will do activities within their age groups. But there will also be some specific programming for the group, usually around the times of the day that had been a challenge for non-binary kids in a traditional cabin, such as getting ready for bedtime.
The all-gender cabin is part of Moshava’s relaxed approach to gender. In addition to the regular camp activities, there is also a “Queer Kids Club” campers can join.
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Moshava also has no rules around what is an appropriate bathing suit, Rodwin said, which relieves the tension some kids feel
Exploring and celebrating the dual identity of queer and Jewish is woven into much of Machane Lev’s programming. On Shabbat they’ll eat rainbow challahs and they learn about Jewish “queeroes” instead of Jewish heroes. Friday night prayers are gender-inclusive. Spending one Shabbat a year together at camp is a balm for both campers and counsellors. Rach Klein, educational director at Machane Lev and a PhD student in art history, says for many of the staff, it’s the camp they needed when they were kids. The first year Klein worked at camp she was living in Halifax and doing Shabbat by herself every week. “To suddenly be in community and not just with other Jewish people but with other queer Jewish people was revelatory. This extends to a lot of our staff who live in queer space a lot of the time but don’t always find communities to pray with or feel good showing up as themselves in.” Some campers attend Jewish day schools, where they hide their identity, while other
From Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and your Liberal MPs De la part du premier ministre Justin Trudeau et de vos députés libéraux
Happy Passover · Joyeuse Pessah Chag Pesach Sameach · חג פסח שמח
Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau Papineau
Don Valley North
Han.Dong@parl.gc.ca
York Centre
Yaara.Saks@parl.gc.ca
Hon. Carolyn Bennett
Mississauga Centre
Toronto—St. Paul’s
Hon. Marco Mendicino
Hon. David McGuinty
Hon. Bardish Chagger Waterloo
Omar.Alghabra@parl.gc.ca Carolyn.Bennett@parl.gc.ca Bardish.Chagger@parl.gc.ca
Han Dong
Ya’ara Saks
Hon. Omar Alghabra
Eglinton—Lawrence
Ottawa South
Marco.Mendicino@parl.gc.ca David.McGuinty@parl.gc.ca
Hon. Judy Sgro
Humber River— Black Creek
Judy.Sgro@parl.gc.ca
Francesco Sorbara Vaughan— Woodbridge
Hon. Mary Ng
Markham—Thornhill Mary.Ng@parl.gc.ca
Leah Taylor Roy
Aurora—Oak Ridges— Richmond Hill
Francesco.Sorbara@parl.gc.ca Leah.TaylorRoy@parl.gc.ca
Shaun Chen
Scarborough North
Shaun.Chen@parl.gc.ca
Hon. Rob Oliphant
Don Valley West
Rob.Oliphant@parl.gc.ca
Rechie Valdez
Mississauga— Streetsville
Rechie.Valdez@parl.gc.ca
Julie Dabrusin
Toronto—Danforth
Julie.Dabrusin@parl.gc.ca
Ruby Sahota
Brampton North
Ruby.Sahota@parl.gc.ca
Tony Van Bynen
Newmarket—Aurora
Tony.VanBynen@parl.gc.ca
Anita Vandenbeld
Ottawa West— Nepean
Anita.Vandenbeld@parl.gc.ca
The revolution starts in Hebrew In 2015, the Habonim Dror movement voted to change the Hebrew language spoken at its North American summer camps to make it gender-inclusive. “Whereas we in Habonim Dror North America recognize that gender binary is a false dichotomy,” began the resolution passed at the movement’s conference addressing the fact that Hebrew is a gendered language. “[A]t least a few of our chaverimot are such people who do not fit into the gender binary,” the resolution continued. The solution was to add a third non-gendered ending to the singular and plural words used for people at camp, such as campers, counsellors and the names of units or sections. A third ending, “chol”, from the Hebrew word for inclusive can be added to singular nouns, so a counsellor becomes madrichol, in addition to the traditional madrich/a. Groups of people, including the names of sections or units, take an “imot” ending, so the Bonim unit became the Bonimot. Gender-inclusive Hebrew is now used at all Habonim camps, said Talia Rodwin, director of Camp Moshava, a Habonim Dror camp in Maryland. “We use it if we don’t know the gender of the person, or if they prefer it,” Rodwin said. The gender-inclusive language was based on what similar groups were pioneering in Israel, but it’s “definitely not common practice,” she said. It took about one summer to become accustomed to the changes and rewrite camp cheers and songs, but now it feels natural, she said. “Within Habonim Dror circles it’s completely recognized and I think it makes a really big difference to the campers who are hearing it and using it and feeling very seen and recognized by this language.”
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“We found at Lev, it’s not only non-binary kids who need non-gender specific spaces. We have kids who are just kind of different and need a space to be themselves” - Rach Klein
campers may have little experience of Jewish life, she said. To keep the feeling of Jewish community going, Machane Lev started year-round programming for campers, most of whom live in the Toronto area. There are Hanukkah parties, family Shabbat dinners, and during COVID, camp programs on Zoom. Joe, who has gone to Machane Lev for years, adores it all, says his mother. Sari says her fourth child was born “a very cute girl,” but from the time he could walk, he raided his brother’s closet and dressed in typical boy clothing. By Grade 1, he had changed. Joe and Sari are not their real names, because almost nobody knows that the outgoing, strapping high school kid who loves to play hockey is biologically a girl. (Joe takes a hormone-blocker to delay puberty and will soon be old enough to start testosterone, his mother says.) Joe has “confidence in spades” but is probably the only trans kid in his high school. Camp, however, has shown him he is not alone, says Sari. Campers and staff from Machane Lev, along with his school friends and his hockey team, all showed up to help him celebrate his bar mitzvah not long ago, she said. Even the most confident trans kids grow up with some secrecy, that becomes “almost second nature to them,” but the staff at camp are great role models, says Sari.
“They’ve gone on to university… and they [campers] see how successful these kids are, there’s no barriers, there’s nothing holding them back,” she said. “When you go somewhere like this [camp], you’re focused on being the best version of yourself, celebrating diversity, not trying to fit into a mold,” she said. Camps like Machane Lev and Gesher are also showing mainstream camps how to be more welcoming to a camper population that is increasingly diverse. Rach Klein has consulted with the directors of the camp she attended as a child. “It’s not going to be easy because we have these inherited systems… But at some point if we want to prioritize the benefit of our kids we’re going to have to make a shift in how we’re thinking about gender,” she said. Some of the changes aren’t especially difficult, says Klein. It can mean renaming boys camp and girls camp to lakeside and mountain, and making sure there are gender-neutral washrooms and changing spaces. It also means offering all-gender cabins, so campers can choose where they want to live. “We found at Lev, it’s not only non-binary kids who need non-gender specific spaces. We have kids show up who are straight and cisgendered who are just kind of different and just need a space to be themselves,” she said. But the lessons to be learned from a place like Machane Lev are deeper than just gender-neutral washrooms. It’s also about changing attitudes, said Saul Freedman-Lawson. “All of our youth benefit from more expansive ideas around gender…from letting go of some of that kind of pressure to be a certain kind of Jewish girl or Jewish boy,” they said. “Are we on some level sending our kids to camp because we hope they will build Jewish networks and date Jewishly and form straight Jewish marriages, or are we hoping that they will build a more expansive community?” n
Chag Sameach! Wishing you much joy and a Happy Passover!
A
t the sedar table we relive the deeds of our ancestors as though we ourselves had been there. Thus are the generations bridged, the past propelling us into the future with a renewed sense of purpose, and commitment... one that we accept as a sacred trust.
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Looking into the haggadah with a difference Asufa is the name of the Israeli design collective that has published a new haggadah with remarkable artwork every year for the past decade. The process each year involves assigning about 40 designers to produce their own two-page spread based on the traditional Hebrew text. (A bilingual English-Hebrew version was published in 2015.) Some of the pages are playful—like one of a rabbinical discussion of plagues depicted as a wrestling program.
מגיד · דב א ברמסון
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Others are whimsical—like a grace after meals depicting John Lennon and Elvis Presley in heaven. And a few of the illustrations are meant to be provocative—like the medieval-inspired gory drawings for a section that calls for the nations persecuting Israel to be punished. David Zvi Kalman distributes the effort in North America, through the Philadelphia-based publishing house Print-O-Craft, which is named for the business that his grandfather once owned in Toronto.
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מגיד · יותם כהן
דם ,צפרדע ,כינים ,ערוב ,דבר ,שחין,
ברד ,ארבה ,חושך ,מכת בכורות
ב א ח ” ב
חזרת 07
זרוע קערת פסח · גל בן דוד
ביצה
כרפס
THEC J N. CA | 3 5
חרוסת
עבדים היינו לפרעה במצרים .ויוציאנו יי אלוהינו משם ביד חזקה ובזרוע נטויה. ואלו לא הוציא הקדוש ברוך הוא את אבותינו ממצרים .הרי אנו ובנינו ובני בנינו ,משועבדים היינו לפרעה במצרים , ואפילו כולנו חכמים ,כולנו נבונים ,כולנו זקנים ,כולנו יודעים את התורה ,מצוה עלינו לספר ביציאת מצרים ,וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים הרי זה משובח
מעשה ברבי אליעזר ורבי יהושע ורבי אלעזר בן עזריה ורבי עקיבא ורבי טרפון שהיו מסובין בבני ברק והיו מספרים ביציאת מצרים כל אותו הלילה עד שבאו תלמידיהם ואמרו להם ,רבותינו הגיע זמן קריאת שמע של שחרית .אמר רבי אלעזר בן עזריה ,הרי אני כבן שבעים שנה ולא זכיתי שתאמר יציאת מצרים בלילות ,עד שדרשה בן זומא ,שנאמר למען תזכור את יום צאתך מארץ מצרים כל ימי חייך ,ימי חייך הימים ,כל ימי חייך הלילות ,וחכמים אומרים ,ימי חייך העולם הזה ,כל ימי חייך העולם הזה, כל ימי חייך להביא לימות המשיח;
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מגיד · לי דרור
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מגיד · אוהד ג בעתי
Check out more pages of the Asufa Haggadah at printocraftpress.com The hagaddah will be available in Canada at East Toronto Judaica east-toronto-judaica.company.site
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H A P P Y PA S S OV E R Chag Sameach from Amica On The Avenue and Amica Thornhill. Sending warm thoughts and blessings as you gather at the Seder to celebrate with those you love.
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Who By Fire BY MAT TI FRIEDMAN
S
ome of the men on the sand look up at the visitor with his guitar. Others look down at their dirty knees and boots. Cigarettes glow in the dark. The heat has broken and the desert is still for now. They’ve been fighting for 14 days and no one knows how many days are left, or how many of them will be left when it’s over. There aren’t any generals or heroes here. It’s just a small unit getting smaller. In the wastelands around them, thousands of Egyptians and Israelis are dead. The visitor, dressed in khaki, is Leonard Cohen. This makes little sense to anyone at the outer extremity of the Sinai front in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Not long ago he was playing for a half million people at the Isle of Wight Festival, which was bigger than Woodstock. Here it’s a few dozen. None of the soldiers know how Leonard Cohen came to be here with them, or why. Cohen is 39. He’s been brought low and thinks he’s finished. News of his retirement has appeared in the music press. “I just feel like I want to shut up. Just shut up,” he told an interviewer. He might have come to this country and this war looking for some desperate way out of his dead end, a way to transcend everything and sing again. If that’s what he was looking for, he seems to have found it, as we’ll see. Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echo of this trip. Anyone reading these lines remembers the elderly gentleman grinning out from under a fedora at packed concert halls around the world, and knows that in 1973 his greatest acts are yet to come. But right now this isn’t clear to him or to anyone else. Cohen addresses the soldiers in solemn English. A reporter who is there describes the scene in a dispatch for a Hebrew music magazine. In the yellowing newsprint you can tell the reporter is a cynic. He mocks the star as “the great pacifist” come from abroad, a glorified tourist. A reader has the impression that the reporter doesn’t want to be moved but is.
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When the soldiers join Cohen for the chorus of So Long, Marianne, their voices are the only sound in the desert. He introduces the next number. “This song is one that should be heard at home, in a warm room with a drink and a woman you love,” he says. “I hope you all find yourselves in that situa- tion soon.” He plays Suzanne. The men are quiet. They hear about a place that doesn’t have blackened tanks and figures lying still in charred coveralls. It’s a city by a river, a perfect body, tea and oranges all the way from China. “They’re listening to his music,” writes the reporter, “but who knows where their thoughts are wandering.” Sometimes an artist and an event interact to generate a spark far bigger than both: art that isn’t a mere memorial to whatever inspired it, but an assertion of human creativity in the face of all inhuman events. It isn’t necessary to know the convoluted course of Spain’s civil war to grasp Picasso’s Guernica. A listener can wonder at Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, composed amid the Napoleonic Wars, without recognizing the bars of a French revolutionary song hidden in one of the movements. It’s possible to appreciate the beauty of a shard of glass without knowing how the window looked before it was smashed, or what the moment of shattering was like. But it seems to me that if we can know, our understand- ing is enriched—not just our understanding of a momentous occurrence or of the personality of an artist, but of the nature of inspiration, and of art’s supernatural ability to fly through years and places and lodge in distant minds, helping us rise beyond ourselves. The moment, in this case, was a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest. The tour might have produced a celebrated rock documentary or live album— but no one thought to film it and hardly any recordings survive. It happened in the midst of an Israeli war but isn’t documented in the country’s military records. The account you just read is the only
Photo by Isaac Shokal
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description of any of the concerts to appear in print at the time, and even that magazine, a local version of Rolling Stone, has been defunct for years. The tour has lived on as underground history—in word of mouth, in photographs snapped by soldiers, in notebooks filed in an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, in a box of papers in Hamilton, Ont., and recorded between the lines of a few great songs. Reconstructing what happened has meant piecing together these scraps over many years. While no detailed account has appeared before, and while this cultural moment is known even to Cohen’s fans as a footnote, if at all, its importance keeps growing in a curious way. Here in Israel, for example, before the anniversary of the war every fall, more and more articles appear in the press, as if the story must be told and retold each year. Some of the descriptions are repetitive or inaccurate. But all are genuine expressions of the fact that the memory of that terrible month, October 1973, has somehow become linked to the strange appearance of Leonard Cohen.
If Cohen’s tour is now part of the Yom Kippur War, the war itself is inseparable from a date in the Jewish calendar. The fighting began with a surprise attack by Syria and Egypt at two p.m. on the Day of Atonement, when Jewish tradition demands introspection and tells us that our fates are decided for the coming year—who will die, and how. The symbolism here is so clumsy that it seems to beg an apology. The war’s timing has lent a kind of awful grandeur to the grim proceedings. In fact the war is sometimes called the War of Atonement, as if it were itself a penance for the pride and blindness that preceded it, for the failures of leadership that left Israeli soldiers exposed on October 6, 1973, when the Syrian army attacked through the basalt outcroppings of the Golan Heights and the Egyptians across the sand embankments of the Suez Canal. Israel’s judgment had been clouded by victory in the Six-Day War, six years earlier, and the country had allowed itself to sink into arrogance and complacency. The borders were defended by a handful of ill-fated infantrymen and tank crews.
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For a few desperate days on the Golan plateau there were nearly no Israeli troops left between the Syrians and Israel’s heartland beneath the heights, in Galilee. On the southern front, the one of interest to us here, the Egyptians captured the Israeli outposts along the Suez Canal, drove into Sinai, and shredded the defenders’ frantic counterattacks. Israel’s air force, which was supposed to win the war, was instead crippled by new Soviet missiles, and within days the defence minister, the one-eyed war hero Moshe Dayan, was heard despairing that the “Third Temple is in danger,” meaning Israel itself. Only with extraordinary exertion, and at the cost of more than 2,600 fatalities, did the soldiers in the field turn the war around and, by the end of the month, deliver a victory that still felt like a defeat. When the battles ended, the prestige of Israel’s generals and political leaders, the icons of the founding generation, was shattered. The country became less confident, less united, and more introspective; after the war this was, in many ways, a different country. The mistakes would be picked apart in hundreds of anguished memoirs and critical histories whose publication began at the end of the war and continues to this day. When I served in an Israeli infantry unit 25 years later, our training involved imaginary battles against columns of enemy tanks invading through the desert, a scenario which had little to do with the actual warfare Photo by Isaac Shokal of the late 1990s—it was recognizably Yom Kippur, the war the army was still fighting in its mind. For people in Israel, the ancient fast day and the dark anniversary of the war are so intertwined that they can no longer be detached. And so Leonard Cohen—who many considered a poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet human desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual, who despised violence and thought little of states—made himself not only part of this Israeli war but of the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. How this all came to pass has never been explained: the meeting of young soldiers at a moment of extreme peril with one of the great voices of the age. That’s the subject of this book. n
Photo by Sebastian Sheiner
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Excerpted from Who By Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen by Matti Friedman. Copyright ©2022 Matti Friedman Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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More products of the Leonard Cohen Afterworld Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories by Toronto journalist Michael Posner will have its third volume published by Simon & Schuster in October—completing an oral history that ends with its subject’s death on Nov. 7, 2016. Another recent book by British scholar Harry Freedman focused on The Mystical Roots of Genius, which followed Tangle of Matter & Ghost by Montreal-based Rabbi Aubrey Glazer. Leonard Cohen: On a Wire by Quebec cartoonist Philippe Girard, published in fall 2021 by Drawn & Quarterly, illustrated the occasionally intimate interactions of its protagonist. Leonard Cohen: A Woodcut Biography, published a year earlier by Firefly Books, contained 82 images featuring celebrity encounters, engraved by George Walker. (But two memorial murals overshadow it all in Montreal.) Death of a Ladies’ Man was a Canadian-Irish co-production released in 2020, starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Paré. The film, built around the use of seven songs, sparked a series of cover versions by independent recording artists in quarantine. The sale of Cohen’s 278-title songwriting catalogue to Hipgnosis Song Management by his estate means more multimedia tieins are inevitably ahead. 46 |
A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories, scheduled for Canadian publication by McClelland & Stewart in October, is a collection built around a novel rejected by publishers in 1965. The posthumous book follows the 2018 appearance of Cohen’s final poetry collection, The Flame, and the 2019 album Thanks for the Dance. And at the end of 2022, the Art Gallery of Ontario will debut a new archival exhibition called Everybody Knows.
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« J’ai donné la parole à ceux et celles qui l’ont perdue à Auschwitz-Birkenau »
Entrevue avec le journaliste et écrivain portugais José Rodrigues Dos Santos PAR ELIAS LEVY
Le
dernier livre de José Rodrigues Dos Santos, Tome 1 : Le Magicien d’Auschwitz, Tome 2 : Le manuscrit de Birkenau (Éditions Hervé Chopin, 2021), est une œuvre de fiction puissante et bouleversante qui aborde d’une façon inédite une tragédie ineffable : la Shoah.
les origines juives du célèbre explorateur, découvreur des Amériques–, Furie divine –roman décapant sur l’islamisme radical–, Vaticanum, Immortel… traduits en une vingtaine de langues, ont connu un grand succès mondial. José Rodrigues Dos Santos a été l’invité d’honneur du Festival sépharade de Montréal 2021.
L’auteur plonge le lecteur au cœur de l’horreur de cette hécatombe en nous relatant l’histoire véridique d’un magicien professionnel juif allemand, Herbert Levin, alias le « Grand Nivelli », déporté avec son épouse et son jeune fils du camp de Theresienstadt, en Tchécoslovaquie, à Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Comment est née l’idée d’écrire ce récit sur la Shoah ?
Dans ce camp de la mort, il croisera un soldat portugais SS, ancien légionnaire, Francisco Latino, qui, pour essayer de sauver la femme dont il est éperdument amoureux, Tanusha, une jeune juive russe qu’il a connue dans le front de l’Est, emploiera moult stratagèmes pour aider Herbert Levin à survivre dans cet enfer. Ce roman historique coup de poing est un autre grand tour de force littéraire de ce brillant écrivain non juif. Journaliste, ancien reporter de guerre et présentateur vedette du Téléjournal de 20 h au Portugal, José Rodrigues Dos Santos s’est imposé comme l’un des plus grands auteurs contemporains de thrillers historiques et scientifiques. Ses romans, La Formule de Dieu, L’ultime Secret du Christ, La Clé de Salomon, Codex 632. Le secret de Christophe Colomb –livre sur 48 |
« Au Portugal, les mélanges entre les populations juive et chrétienne ont été très importants. Il est fort probable que mes ancêtres étaient aussi Juifs » - JOSÉ RODRIGUES DOS SANTOS
Le point de départ de l’écriture de ce livre a été ma rencontre impromptue sur un plateau de télévision, il y a trois ans, avec Werner Reich, aujourd’hui âgé de 94 ans, survivant du camp d’extermination nazi d’Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nous étions invités au programme de télévision d’un prestidigitateur portugais très connu. Werner Reich nous raconta qu’il avait appris l’art de l’illusionnisme à Auschwitz-Birkenau auprès d’un grand magicien professionnel juif allemand, Herbert Levin, surnommé le « Grand Nivelli ». Leurs destinées se sont croisées dans ce sinistre lieu de mort. Son récit concentrationnaire nous tétanisa. Le lendemain, je l’ai invité chez moi. Nous avons passé toute la journée ensemble. Il me raconta avec plus de détails ce que fut sa vie à Auschwitz-Birkenau et l’histoire insolite de Herbert Levin, qui parvint à survivre dans cet enfer grâce à ses dons de magicien. Werner Reich vit à Newark, aux États-Unis. Nous avons échangé ensuite des centaines de mails qui m’ont permis de colliger de nombreuses informations sur
la vie de Herbert Levin et les rouages du fonctionnement d’Auschwitz-Birkenau. L’écriture de ce livre n’a pas dû être un labeur aisé. J’ai songé à abandonner avant même de commencer à l’écrire bien conscient que l’histoire que je devais raconter était tellement effroyable que l’on répugnerait à la lire. La Shoah est un sujet très sensible dont la portée est universelle. Cette tragédie ne concerne pas que les Juifs, mais tous les êtres humains. En tant qu’écrivain, il faut avoir une certaine maturité pour traiter un sujet aussi délicat et douloureux. Pour moi, la littérature n’est qu’un moyen de raconter la vérité, et d’une façon dure quand c’est nécessaire. En écrivant ce livre, j’avais une grande responsabilité : être fidèle à la réalité des faits. Dans le cas d’Auschwitz, la vérité est bien plus noire que les récits généralement narrés dans des romans ou des films. J’ai remarqué que la grande majorité des romans sur Auschwitz édulcorent la réalité historique afin de ne pas choquer les lecteurs. L’abominable processus d’extermination dans les chambres à gaz est rarement décrit. Au risque de rebuter bon nombre de mes lecteurs, j’ai décidé de raconter tout ce qui s’est passé dans ce lieu maudit. Je me devais de narrer cette sinistre histoire car elle était profondément ancrée dans ma mémoire et ne cessait de me troubler. Les nazis étaient obsédés par les sciences occultes et la magie. L’idéologie nazie puise ses fondements dans le nationalisme, l’antisémitisme, le racisme, l’eugénisme et le socialisme. Mais il y a une dimension moins connue du nazisme : l’ésotérisme. Herbert Levin était un illusionniste qui savait que la magie n’est qu’une pure illusion. Les nazis, au contraire, croyaient résolument à la magie, à la lévitation, à l’astrologie, à l’origine divine des Aryens… Adolf Hitler était obnubilé par la magie noire, Heinrich Himmler consultait régulièrement son astrologue personnel, Rudolf Höss, le commandant d’Auschwitz, était membre d’une société d’ésotérisme. Les nazis voulaient créer un « surhomme ». Les idéologues du IIIe Reich
ont été très influencés par un livre d’ésotérisme, The Secret Doctrine. The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, écrit en 1888 par une Américaine d’origine ukrainienne, Helena Blavatsky. Les principaux préceptes de l’idéologie nazie sont fondés sur la théorie pseudo-scientifique étayée dans cet ouvrage : les Allemands sont les héritiers de la race des Atlantes, habitants de l’Atlantide, citée engloutie par les eaux, de grands blonds aux yeux bleus qui ont « perdu leur étincelle divine » lorsqu’ils se sont mélangés à d’autres races. L’obsession des nazis : faire renaître en Germanie la race pure des Atlantes. Le Rabbin portugais Shlomo Pereiras considère que votre livre est « une vision totalement nouvelle de la Shoah parce que vous donnez la parole à ceux qui l’ont perdue à Auschwitz ». Ce n’est pas le devoir de mémoire qui m’a motivé à écrire ce livre, mais plutôt le devoir de donner la parole à tous ceux et celles qui l’ont perdue à Auschwitz-Birkenau. On oublie souvent que la majorité des déportés juifs n’ont pas survécu. Les récits sur la Shoah souffrent de la myopie du survivant, c’est-à-dire qu’ils tendent à
mettre l’accent sur l’histoire des déportés qui, après avoir fait face à des épreuves existentielles atroces, ont réussi, en défiant toutes les probabilités, à survivre. Des gens simples devenus des héros. Ces récits sont admirables mais ils négligent une donnée fondamentale : ceux qui ont vécu l’expérience monstrueuse de la Shoah dans son intégralité ne sont pas les survivants, mais les morts. Le pire du pire n’a pas laissé de témoins. Aucun des Juifs exterminés dans les chambres à gaz n’a pu raconter ce qui lui est arrivé, ce qui s’est passé dans cette salle hermétiquement close où l’on entassait trois mille personnes nues, serrées les unes contre les autres. Certes, nous ne disposons pas de leurs témoignages, mais nous avons accès aux récits de ceux qui ont partagé leurs derniers instants de vie : les membres des Sonderkommandos. Ces unités spéciales juives travaillaient d’arrache-pied dans les crématoires. Chaque jour, ils ont été les témoins du gazage de milliers de leurs coreligionnaires. Ils faisaient le sale boulot que les nazis ne voulaient pas accomplir. Les membres des Sonderkommandos savaient qu’ils allaient mourir car ils étaient des témoins. En effet, la majorité d’entre eux ont été assassinés. Leurs témoignages sont capitaux. Absolument. Des membres des Sonderkommandos ont caché des manuscrits recelant leurs témoignages à proximité des crématoires. Ces documents ont été découverts après la libération d’Auschwitz-Birkenau. Par ailleurs, dans les années 80, l’historien israélien Gideon Greif découvrit qu’une trentaine de membres des Sonderkommandos étaient encore en vie. Craignant les inévitables accusations de trahison et de collaboration avec les nazis, ces derniers avaient préféré jusque-là se cantonner dans un silence abyssal. Gideon Greif les a convaincus de lui livrer leurs témoignages. Les manuscrits retrouvés aux abords des crématoires de Birkenau et les descriptions très détaillées d’anciens Sonderkommandos interviewés par Gideon Greif ont été les deux principales sources qui m’ont permis de reconstituer les diverses étapes du processus d’extermination des Juifs à Auschwitz-Birkenau.
THEC J N. CA | 4 9
Plusieurs de vos livres ont suscité de vives controverses, particulièrement celui que vous avez consacré aux origines juives de Jésus-Christ. Ces polémiques vous affectent-elles ? En tant qu’écrivain, j’ai un compromis avec la vérité. Pour moi, écrire une fiction, c’est dire la vérité déguisée en mensonge. Je m’attaque à tous les sujets, même aux plus sulfureux. Mon livre L’ultime secret du Christ a déclenché une grande polémique au Portugal. Cependant, je ne rappelle dans ce livre qu’une grande vérité : Jésus est né Juif, a vécu Juif et est mort Juif. Il n’a jamais pensé à créer une nouvelle religion. L’Église catholique portugaise a sévèrement critiqué ce livre. Un dimanche matin, un communiqué rendu public par les plus hautes instances catholiques potugaises, fustigeant le livre, a été lu par les prêtres dans les églises du pays. Une publicité gratuite ! J’ai posé alors une question aux
dirigeants de l’Église catholique portugaise: mon livre contient-il un mensonge ou des erreurs factuelles ? Si oui, je m’engage à les rectifier dans une prochaine édition. Les dignitaires ecclésiastiques ont reconnu que le livre ne relatait rien de faux, mais que « les Portugais n’étaient pas prêts à entendre de telles choses ». J’ai leur ai répondu que j’étais désolé d’avoir provoqué autant de remous, mais que comme écrivain ce qui comptait avant tout pour moi, c’était la quête de la vérité. Ne jamais transfigurer la vérité pour la rendre plus convenable, et donc plus lisible pour certains. Comment qualifieriez-vous aujourd’hui les relations entre le Portugal et les Juifs ? Des liens étroits continuent à unir les Portugais au peuple juif. Un jour, j’ai rendu visite au grand écrivain américain Philip Roth dans sa maison au Connecticut. Il m’a soudainement demandé : « Où sont les
Juifs au Portugal ? » Je lui ai alors raconté qu’après l’attaque terroriste contre les Twin Towers à New York, le 11 semptembre 2001, pour retrouver les restes mortels des victimes, des scientifiques américains ont mis au point de nouvelles techniques génétiques très sophistiquées basées sur l’ethnicité d’une personne. L’Université de Lisbonne et l’Université de Caroline du Sud ont utilisé cette technique pour réaliser une large étude afin déterminer les origines génétiques de la population du Portugal. Les conclusions ont sidéré beaucoup de Portugais : 3% de gènes arabes, 8% italiens, 12% celtiques, 10% visigoths... 40% hébraïques. Chaque Portugais est presque un demi-Juif ! Il ne faut pas oublier que le Portugal compte dans sa population des milliers de descendants des nouveaux chrétiens. Les mélanges entre les populations juive et chrétienne ont été très importants. Il est fort probable que mes ancêtres étaient aussi Juifs ! n
Behind this story (in English) José Rodrigues Dos Santos, journalist, war reporter and star presenter of Téléjournal, the evening news program in Portugal, has established himself as one of the greatest contemporary authors of historical and scientific thrillers. His novels include The Einstein Enigma, The Ultimate Secret of Christ, The Key of Solomon and Codex 632: The Secret of Christopher Columbus (on the Jewish origins of the famous explorer). His work has been translated into 20 languages. Among his most recent books is 2021’s The Magician of Auschwitz, in which the author immerses the reader in the horrible heart of the Shoah by telling the true story of a German-Jew-
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ish professional magician Herbert Levin—alias the “Grand Nivelli”— who is deported with his wife and young son to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, Levin meets a Portuguese SS soldier and former legionnaire Francisco Latino, who is trying to save Tanusha, the young Russian Jew he is in love with. Throughout the novel, Latino employs many stratagems to help Levin survive the hell of the death camps. Rodrigues Dos Santos was the guest of honour at the 2021 Montreal Sephardic Festival, where The CJN got the opportunity to ask him how he came up with the idea for a Holocaust-based novel.
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Meet the powerhouse Canadians building a Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates (entirely from scratch) Ellin Bessner talks to three cultural diplomacy pioneers who are bringing a little maple syrup to a different side of the Middle East.
I
t sounds like the opening of a joke: A rabbi, an ambassador and a fashion mogul walk into a bar. Except the location was Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. And the occasion was the November 2019 gifting of a new Torah scroll by the fledgling Jewish community to Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.
The trio of high-profile Canadian Jews—Canada’s ambassador Marcy Grossman, Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates Yehuda Sarna, and Jewish cultural chair Almira Cuizon-Conway—are transforming the tiny, once hidden community in the Emirates into the newest, and the only flourishing one in the Muslim world. In 2020, the UAE became the first Arab nation to sign the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations with Israel. This resulted in an explosion of business opportunities for Israeli Jews and an influx of tens of thousands of Jewish tourists to Dubai. And now, the country has become a must-see destination for Jewish organizations. The newfound welcome has attracted high-profile Jewish Canadians to relocate. In fact, many say they feel safer living openly as Jews among 2,000 similarly permanent residents in the UAE than they do in North America. 54 |
Almira Cuizon-Conway General manager for Guess fashions in the Middle East and North Africa, and of the Chalhoub Group, a luxury fashion retailer. Formerly vicepresident of Roots and Holt Renfrew. Married to Toronto fashion industry veteran Mark Conway and has three children. She chairs the new Jewish cultural centre in Dubai, the Abraham’s Miracles Centre for Learning. When she first moved to Dubai, Cuizon-Conway went looking for the local Jewish community, but all she knew was that the synagogue was in a villa, which everyone calls the shul with the pool. “You couldn’t find it. You had to know somebody to get you in,” she says. “It was kind of like a secret club.” Now, tthe St. Catharines, Ont., native serves as the volunteer chair of the latest Jewish institution to open in the UAE.
Almira Cuizon-Conway Chair of the new Jewish cultural centre in Dubai, the Abraham’s Miracles Centre for Learning
Rabbi Yehuda Sarna Chief Rabbi to the Jewish Council of the Emirates
Marcy Grossman Canadian Ambassador to the UAE in Abu Dhabi
THEC J N. CA | 5 5
Almira Cuizon-Conway, with her husband Mark Conway and Rabbi Levi Duchman, completing letters in the Torah scroll gifted to the UAE’s Crown Prince, November 2019
The Abraham’s Miracles Centre for Learning (AMCL) in Dubai isn’t like the traditional North American JCCs: there’s no gym and no pool. But it does have afternoon school classes for the kids, Hebrew classes for adults, shluchim from Israel, a speakers series, Hanukkah parties, yoga and martial arts classes, and a coffee bar.
The location is kept confidential for security reasons, but Cuizon-Conway says it is located in a converted villa in a very Arabic neighbourhood. A family with Canadian and Jewish roots donated the 6,000-squarefoot building, in partnership with a local Emirati. It is open to everyone, not just Jews, and that’s on purpose. It will also help promote Jewish culture to the Muslim residents of the oil-rich Gulf state. “The king imposed a law that all Jews are welcome. That happened overnight. But what doesn’t happen overnight is… there’s been this mindset that we weren’t welcome for a period of time,” she said. “So this is why this cultural centre is so important, 56 |
“This was a civilizational moment, a spiritual moment, really. There was that feeling of family reunion.” - Rabbi Yehuda Sarna
because it is about helping people understand that mind shift.” Its name hearkens back to the Abraham Accords. “It really pays a nod to that moment in time where we could feel comfortable about being Jewish in public. That is a change in history,” she says. “When I arrived in Dubai, it was not something that you really spoke about.” What made her decide to take on the job as chair of the AMCL, on top of her jet-setting career in the fashion world? When she isn’t
attending glammed-up red-carpet evenings at the Dubai Opera or Milan runway shows, Cuizon-Conway likes going to synagogue. She likes connecting with the community even more. “I have a natural tendency to host events, whether it be a Hanukkah event or Rosh Hashanah.” So when Rabbi Sarna approached her to get the AMCL up and running, “I welcomed it with open arms because I’m a community-builder at heart.” It helps that she embodies the Canadian belief of celebrating cultural diversity. Cuizon-Conway is a convert to Judaism, and straddles both the Filipino expatriate community in the UAE as well as the Ashkenazi Jewish culture of her husband’s family. “Dubai has it all. With nine million expats in a population of only 10 million, everybody is from a different place,” she says. “So this is a great project for me because not only does it fulfil my need to help the community grow, but it also teaches me a lot about other Jewish communities from around the world.”
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Rabbi Yehuda Sarna greeting the Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed upon the donation of the Torah from the Jewish community to the leader of the UEA, November 2019 (From the film Amen-Amen-Amen)
Rabbi Yehuda Sarna New York University chaplain and executive director at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life. Attended Hebrew Academy high school in Montreal before earning his rabbinical smicha at Yeshiva University in New York. Married to psychologist Michelle Waldman Sarna and has six children. He became chief rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates in 2019, and is president of the Beth Din of Arabia, a rabbinical court. When the Canadian Embassy threw a gala Hanukkah party last December at the Canadian pavilion of Expo 2020 in Dubai, the honour of lighting the first candle went to a former Montrealer, who insisted chief rabbi should be a strictly volunteer job. And yet, he’s become the de facto ambassador for Judaism at the palaces of the UAE’s ruling family. This included playing an important role in the documentary film Amen-Amen-Amen, about the gifting of a new Torah to the UAE’s crown prince. Describing the 2019 ceremony still makes
Rabbi Sarna emotional. “For a Jewish community to offer a gift like that, the first Torah ever gifted to an Arab ruler, and dedicated to an Arab ruler, it’s beyond powerful,” he says, as he recalls watching the UAE ruler speak with the scribe as the last letters were filled out. “I’ve got to tell you, being in the room, there were a few times when His Highness actually teared up. This was a civilizational moment, a spiritual moment, really. There was that feeling of family reunion.” And that Torah isn’t going to be locked away. The gift was conditional on allowing the Jewish community to use it, especially on the High Holidays. It might eventually wind up in the UAE’s new state-funded synagogue being built in Dubai. (It’s part of the interfaith Abrahamic Family House project.) With the approval of the government and the Catholic Church—the pope came to bless the project in 2019—a synagogue, a mosque and a church are being constructed as a showcase of the three Abrahamic religions. Rabbi Sarna has been advising the designers and architects for what is to be named the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue, with a mikvah whose water is going to come from
Canada. As for the rapid societal transformation, he credits the “warm peace” that permitted the “unlocking of possibilities” between Israel and other Arab countries. “The key word is ‘normalized.’ Any Emirati person and member of the foreign ministry will say the same thing. They’ll say that this agreement does not mean that it agrees with everything that Israel does. But what it was is a normal relationship.” While he tries to travel to the UAE four times a year, Rabbi Sarna leaves the day-to-day religious work to Rabbi Elie Abadie, a Lebanese-born New York-based clergyman. Before the recent explosion in kosher facilities and restaurants since the Abraham Accords, Rabbi Sarna approved a certificate for Elli Kriel, who became the first kosher caterer in the UAE. “People ask me what’s the difference between pre-Abraham Accords to post-Abraham Accords? I tell people it’s about 10 pounds. I used to lose about five pounds because I was eating only fruits and vegetables. “And now I go and eat like a king.”
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Ambassador Marcy Grossman Canadian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates since 2019. She developed the Canada pavilion for Expo 2020 in Dubai. Previous appointments included Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles and Denver, followed by a stopover with Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa before moving to Dubai as consul general in 2018. The Montreal native attended Carleton University. She has two children. When she learned that she was being posted as consul general of Canada to Dubai, Grossman wasn’t sure her credentials would be accepted, despite three decades of diplomatic experience in the Canadian foreign service.
While she didn’t advertise her background when her posting started, that changed when she was became ambassador in November 2019. “Being Jewish is actually what’s defining my posting. Emiratis come to me. They want me to interpret for them. They call on me as a representative of all the things that they want their country to be.” And just a few years in the UAE have actually made her a more enthusiastic Jew. “I do Shabbat here. Every week. I started it with the Israeli ambassador. We had challah that was hot and delivered from Chabad,” she says. “I’m really embracing my Jewish life here. And it’s really been beautiful.”
She thought it was a “bold” move for Canada to send a Jewish woman to a Gulf country that had no official ties with Israel.
When she planned the gala Hanukkah party at Expo 2020, which was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, one of Grossman’s team members called her the “godmother” of the Jewish community.
“I arrived here in 2018, well before the Abraham Accords. And then I thought it was an even bolder move for the UAE to accept me.”
“It was like a bat mitzvah, like, I was the MC, and I would get on and do my thing and say my speeches,” she laughs.
Marcy Grossman, Canada’s Ambassador to the UAE, with an Emirati guest at the Canada Pavilion’s Hanukkah Party, December 2021 in Dubai
Dinner for 55 at the pavilion included Canadian-style blueberry Beaver Tails substituting for sufganiyot. Grossman had to ensure the kitchen was made kosher, complete with a mashgiach to supervise. The candle-lighting was done on a specially constructed menorah, five feet high. “We had to use artificial lights because Canada Pavilion is made up of wood—so we did not want to take any chances.” Among the guests were Emiratis, imams from France, diplomats from the Israeli embassy, local Jewish agency staff and musicians from Toronto. Aviva Chernick was flown in with her band La Serena as Canada’s gift to the UAE. “They sang in Hebrew, Ladino, Arabic, Yiddish and English. And it was really just so symbolic of the entire vibe and what we wanted to achieve for Hanukkah.” Grossman herself has adapted her wardrobe somewhat to navigate the very conservative culture in the UAE, particularly in the capital city of Abu Dhabi. The self-described fashionista wore a below-the-knee length dress—with long sleeves—to present her ambassadorial credentials to Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, the UAE’s prime minister. Just as surprising as her acceptance has been the freedom she now feels to outwardly identify as a Jew. “And many Jews who come here say that,” she adds. “They feel safer wearing a kippah in Dubai than they do in Western countries.” Grossman’s term comes to an end in late 2022, at which time she’ll retire from the Canadian government. But her plan is to stay in the region, with the feeling that she’s got unfinished business to complete, even if she’s not sure what that business will be. “I put a lot of messages out to HaShem. And I’m going to see the way she responds.” n
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Marsha Lederman goes looking for signs of her life in The Canadian Jewish News I
am emerging from a years-long exercise that could have been accomplished in a few days or even hours at my mother’s kitchen table. But instead of getting the information I needed while sitting with her in her Toronto condo, nursing tea and her famous apple cake, I have travelled to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Md., the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York—and, through the internet, all over the world. Only a pandemic stopped me from going back to Lodz, Poland, and Kaunitz, Germany. I was hours away from my overseas flight when then-president Donald Trump announced the U.S. was closing the borders with Europe and I decided to stay put. And still, I don’t have all the answers, not even close. Over the last few years, I have been working on a book about grief and intergenerational trauma, a memoir, and one for which I needed as much information about my parents’ lives as possible, especially their experiences during the Holocaust. My mother became a forced labourer at 15 in the Radom Ghetto, then a forced labourer in a munitions factory, and was later deported to Auschwitz. After three months, she was transported to a satellite camp of Buchenwald, again to make weapons for her enslavers. At the end of March 1945, she was forced on a death march, and three days later, liberated by the U.S. Army in the village of Kaunitz. My father, from Lodz, and a slave labourer in the Piotrkow-Trybunalski Ghetto, managed to procure false papers and escape into Germany. He spent more than two years on a farm, pretending to be someone else: Tadeusz Rudnicki, Catholic Pole. I knew these basic facts, but there were so many gaps. I started digging to find out whatever I could. Of all the exercises I could have chosen to get me through a pandemic—and some personal grief— maybe this wasn’t the wisest one. But there was more that I wanted from this pursuit: not just to know about my parents’ traumatic experiences and horrific losses, but to learn more about their lives. The good parts. Their childhoods, but also how they rebuilt their lives in Canada, where they were able to buy a little house, a business. Raise a family of three daughters.
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Jacob (Tadek) and Gitla (Jean) Lederman in Germany, after the Second World War. Photo courtesy of Marsha Lederman
My father died in 1984, four days after my 18th birthday. I’d asked him almost nothing about his life. My mother died in 2006, also unexpectedly. I didn’t ask her everything I should have. To get a window into their lives, I’ve done an intense amount of reading. Most of it, deeply disturbing. But this year, with my book done and delivered to my publisher, I started a different exercise. I went back and did some reading—though old issues of The Canadian Jewish News weekly paper. It was a staple in our home, always. The newspaper I would leaf through as a kid, and then, as an adult visiting my mother in the condo where we moved after my father died—a connection to where I came from, and to my parents. I realized for them, this newspaper must have been such an important connection, too—to a community in a new place, in a new language, after the hell they had emerged from. So, I gave myself a project: Learn something about what your parents might have been experiencing in their Toronto world, reading this paper that came to their door for many, many years. Choose dates that would have been monumental for them—to give myself a little bit of context to help me understand theirs, through my three formative decades, starting with my birth.
JULY 22, 1966: A BIRTH This edition of what claimed to be “the largest circulation of any Jewish newspaper in Canada” is dated 10 days after I was born at Mount Sinai Hospital, and named after my two murdered grandfathers: Moshe Aron and Moshe Rafael (I was my parents’ last chance at having a boy to take on their names). My middle name, Estelle, came from the murdered identical twin sister of my father’s mother, Esther. In our Bathurst Manor home, my mother would have been in the midst of postpartum life—the hormones, the sleep deprivation, the (cloth!) diapers. One front-page story may have been triggering for her, headlined “Tarnopol Killers Get Life”. A West German court had sentenced two former SS guards to life in prison for “murder and complicity in the extermination of Polish Jews during the Hitler era.” Five others received lesser sentences for their roles in the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Tarnopol. Three others were acquitted; two for lack of evidence, and one because the court found he was just following orders. I looked up Google’s map of the place, which is now in Ukraine. And then I read up on what happened there during the Second World War: according to Yad Vashem, about 11,000 Jews were murdered in Tarnopol itself, and approximately another 6,000 Jews were deported to the Belzec death camp. THEC J N. CA | 6 3
Marsha Lederman as a baby with her sisters Rachel (left) and Doris in their home in Bathurst Manor, circa 1966-67. Photo courtesy of Marsha Lederman
But these statistics, and any details of these horrific slaughters, were omitted from the front page. The CJN’s story was only four paragraphs long. Meanwhile, all of page three was devoted to promoting family vacations in Holland—with a lengthy article and several ads (surely not a coincidence). The report began by telling readers that “The Jewish traveller feels at home in Holland because it is one of the very few countries where there is absolutely no antisemitism.” OK, if you say so. Holland also offered kosher restaurants and synagogues. The stewardesses took great care of the writer’s children, especially the baby. When they arrived at customs, they had nothing to declare, and “the courteous official took our word for it.” (And this was possibly the longest article in the entire issue; a slow midsummer news week, perhaps.) An ad for KLM offered 15 points of interest to Jewish visitors in Amsterdam, including Anne Frank House and the memorial site of the Dutch playhouse. “It was in this theatre that Amsterdam Jews were locked up before deportation to concentration camps.” Many more front-page inches were devoted to a World Council on Jewish Education vote supporting Jewish day schools. Did my parents read that and consider sending me to one? Or did they want me to be as integrated, as Canadian, as possible—to help ensure what had happened to them would never happen to me? There seemed to be some concern that a day school education
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would remove Jewish youngsters “from the mainstream of democratic life.” (For the record, they ended up sending me to public school, with part-time Hebrew school three days a week.) On the second page there were a bunch of photographs and a report from the recent capacity-filled annual dinner of the Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto (shortened, when I was growing up, to simply “Associated”). The president of Associated, Joseph Levine, warned the more than 500 guests that extensive high-quality Jewish education was essential to “halt the exodus from Jewish identity.” The article referred to the growing Jewish population in North Toronto’s Sheppard to Steeles area. My family was part of that. An article on page four caught my eye; it reported on a “new denomination” or, as the headline read, Judaism Without the Synagogue. It quoted Labour Zionist movement leader Samuel Lapin: “One does not have to think of the synagogue as being the focal point of Jewish survival,” he said. What should be stressed: “language, literature, cultural aspects, the observance of customs and holidays and the bringing of religious observances into the home. All those things are part of our ethnic identification.” Cultural Judaism, essentially. Funny, this was my experience growing up in a Jewish home: we observed all the holidays—quite religiously. Passover was strictly kosher, we were kosher in our house, two sets of dishes, the whole megillah. And yet, we didn’t attend synagogue other than during the High
Holidays and for yizkor services. I had wondered why we almost never went; certainly it would have been something my mother had done growing up—or at least her father and brothers—and possibly my father, too. At one time, maybe to earn points at Hebrew school, I started going to shul on Saturday mornings—but I went alone. Neither parent joined me. Had they read this article? Meanwhile, on the other side of the same page, the Sermon for the Week called for the synagogue to be the central focus of the community, “the meeting place of the community of souls.” The following week was the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, Tisha b’Av. One page was dominated by an ad which was quite something to see in big bold letters in the year 2022: “Important notice to everyone born in 1898: you should apply for your old age security pension immediately.” Did my parents come across that and think about their own parents? Was there a pang for a moment, knowing that their parents were not able to live to collect social security? My father’s mother, Sara Sierpinski, was born in 1889. She would have qualified nine years earlier. On the back page of this slim eight-page paper, a short article was headlined “Austria Reopens Case of Infamous Hitlerite”. It
was actually about two people; brothers who had been Polish Army officers and became Austrian citizens after the war. They had been acquitted by a Salzburg jury on charges in the mass murder of Jews in Stanislav, Poland. The judge refused to accept the verdict. And in the classifieds, there were ads for homes for sale—in our Bathurst Manor and beyond: Bathurst and Finch, Betty Ann Drive, Bathurst and Glencairn, Forest Hill. The description of many of the homes in my area exactly matched the one I came home to as an infant: bungalow with L-shaped living and dining room; natural wood kitchen with breakfast area; attached garage; basement apartment. For my parents, Holocaust survivors from Poland, a castle.
JUNE 4, 1971: A WEDDING Next, I went looking for an issue from around the time of my first significant memory: the wedding of my oldest sister, Rachel, to her husband, Jack, in June 1971. I was four. (They’re still married!) The newspaper, dated two days before their June 6 wedding, was filled with news about a visit to Toronto from Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. A state dinner was to be held for him on June 10. But it was preceded by a fundraiser for Israel Bonds, which merited a lengthy paragraph listing the attendees. I scoured it for familiar names, people I knew growing up. I didn’t find a single one.
The wedding of Rachel and Jack Brass, June 6, 1971. Also in photo: Jacob and Gitla Lederman and their two other daughters, Doris (in peach dress) and Marsha (in green). Photo by Ben Adler
THEC J N. CA | 6 5
This was not the crowd my parents ran with. But there was a lot of anguish in this issue. The big front page headline was “Terrorists Waging Sadat’s War”. There was a lot of coverage of troubles in the Middle East. Also, uncertainty for Jews in Latin America. And several pieces focused on concerns over the treatment and fate of Soviet Jews: worldwide protests denouncing show trials; concerns over Soviet political influence in the Middle East—in Egypt and Jordan. A front-page commentary by The CJN’s editor and publisher M.J. Nurenberger referenced statements Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau made about similarities between Canadian democracy and Soviet political structure. “We ask ourselves: Have we all been wrong to fear Communism as practiced in the U.S.S.R.?,” wrote Nurenberger. “Is it really true that American television and American business are more dangerous to our future as free men than propaganda emanating from the Kremlin?” This thread appears throughout the edition, right until the last page, with a headline reading “Moscow Mobilizing Anti-Zionist Jews”. There was concern about the handling of the so-called “Jewish Question.” And comparisons made to activities before the Second World War. Were my parents worried about what kind of world their daughters were growing up into; what kind of world their oldest daughter, about to marry, would bring her own children into? Elsewhere, two side-by-side features concerning marriage were particularly disturbing for me, especially an advice column. The woman seeking advice was complaining that her husband’s sister kept calling and asking for help with her own husband, who was beating her. The sister-in-law had started drinking to deal with her unhappy, abusive marriage. The advice, from Dr. Rose N. Franzblau, was not great: “When she calls to complain… she is not asking for help, but trying to adulterate her brother’s happiness. She is also envious of you for becoming the first woman in your brother’s life.” Dr. Franzblau said the writer and her husband cannot take responsibility for this abused wife’s marital issues or her psychological problems. “In any unhappy marriage,” the column concluded, “each of the partners contributes a share to the tensions and dissentions that follow.” This appeared next to the syndicated column A Woman’s World by “Ruthie” (no last name). I take it this was supposed to be a humour column, but… oh my goodness. Ruthie started by pointing out that men commonly die at a younger age than their wives, and often by heart attack. Consider, she advised, how rough men have it: having to help with the children in the morning, taking emergency phone calls from the frantic wife while at work, being asked to perform tasks upon arrival home such as starting the barbecue. And on weekends, picking up the slack while the wife takes her “beauty nap” or the part-time help doesn’t show because they must attend a funeral. “Is it any wonder that he drops dead one day?” Ruthie asks. She urges her readers to be a little more considerate of their men. “After all, they DO support us, or at least try to. Why can’t we let them be when they come home from work? They have their job, and we have ours… Let him help you, only when he wants to.” That, Ruthie says, will lead to a happier marriage, and a longer life for hubby. 66 |
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JULY 19, 1984: A DEATH On July 11, 1984, my parents flew to Stockholm, where my middle sister, Doris, and her husband, Sam, were about to have their first child. Before they left, they gave me a triple-strand freshwater pearl bracelet for my birthday. Five days after their departure, my father died—heart attack. He did not live to see his granddaughter, Melissa, born 12 days later. Thursday, July 19, was the day my mother returned home to Toronto, with a casket in the cargo hold, carrying my father’s body. Did she have the energy to even glance at the Jewish newspaper which had been such good company for her over the years? If she did, she may have received some comfort from the banner at the top of the front page: “Zundel Committed”. On page seven, the details: the German-born, Toronto-based Holocaust denier would be going to trial on charges of unlawfully publishing false information about the Holocaust in written works that included Did Six Million Really Die? Other materials offered by his publishing company, according to the article, were The Hitler We Loved and Why, The Six Million Swindle and Auschwitz: Truth or Lie? No, my mother, survivor of Auschwitz, would have taken no comfort from any of that. On another page, an article quoted the president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Milton E. Harris, as saying the best way to deal with Nazi war criminals in Canada was to strip them of their citizenship and deport them. Did my mother get any satisfaction reading this? Or was it impossible for her to care about anything? Or to even manage to get through a single article about the first big tragedy in her life? The front page also compared the three federal party leaders— Conservative Brian Mulroney, Liberal John Turner, New Democrat Ed Broadbent—on their stances toward Israel; there was an elec68 |
tion coming up Sept. 4. “As Canadians get ready for a summer of picnics and politics…” the article began. Not us. Still in shock, my mother and I would travel to the school gym in my former elementary school to cast our ballots. My first election as a voter. It felt wrong that my father didn’t get a say. Under different ownership, The CJN had grown exponentially since 1971, when it was still eight pages long. Now, at 44 pages, it was filled with news about Canada, Israel and elsewhere—including an article by a certain Wolf Blitzer in Washington, about Ariel Sharon’s $50-million (US) libel lawsuit against Time magazine. An editorial called on the federal government to issue an official apology to Japanese-Canadians interned during the Second World War. There were columns like Living Halacha by Rabbi Moses Burak, the rabbi at the synagogue we attended, Beth Jacob. And there were Toronto event listings, including one that looked extraordinary: a walking tour co-led by Ed Mirvish and Jane Jacobs, beginning at Bloor and Markham streets. Not far from where my parents owned their first house. Things must have been going well in the weekly Jewish newspaper industry back then, because The CJN was filled with ads. An ad from General Foods explaining (and apologizing for) a problem with erroneous kosher certifications on certain Jell-O products. An ad for Sunnybrook, where we did our grocery shopping. A jewelry store promoting, oh, freshwater pearls. An ad for Steeles-College Memorial Chapel, where my father’s funeral was held that week. An ad encouraging readers to give Jewish National Fund trees “for all occasions.” We later planted a grove of 1,000 trees in a place called Zippori in the Lower Galilee in my father’s name. On page 43, I read through a list of obituaries. My father’s name was not there. He died too late for that week’s deadline.
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Marsha Lederman. Photo by Ben Nelms
Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust Once Removed by Marsha Lederman, published by McClelland & Stewart on May 3, 2022. Learn more at thecjn.ca/marsha
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Does history repeat itself? Or do the same horrible things just never stop happening, in one form or another, in one place or another? In February 2022, I was preparing to moderate a virtual event for the Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver, my home for the past 15 years. The guests were the authors of two terrific, provocative books: American writer Dara Horn with People Love Dead Jews: Notes from a Haunted Presence, and British comedian/writer/football-anthem guy David Baddiel, whose book is called Jews Don’t Count. The discussion would address how and why antisemitism is somehow tolerated in today’s world when other kinds of racism are not, how allies are silent and how conflating Jews with the actions of Israel is, in Baddiel’s opinion, in and of itself racist. And often a red herring. I was also flipping through The CJN archives that morning. And I came upon, in the issue dated June 4, 1971, coverage of a huge controversy brewing at the time involving the United Church’s stance on Israel. The piece referenced an op-ed that ran in the Globe and Mail, the newspaper I now (with great pride) work for. The article was headlined: “Is Antizionism A Coverup For Antisemitism?” The CJN’s commentary noted that “those involved in propaganda against Israel, and her defensive position against smear and slur, only have changed the term antisemitism to antizionism because in the post-Auschwitz era, to speak against Jews would be too shocking.” The editorial made the case that there was a fine distinction between antisemitism and antizionism. “Those who raise a hand against Israel, battling for survival, are the enemies of the Jewish people and are out to destroy us.” This article at first made me chuckle at the coincidence, the irony of me reading this 50 years later, as I was about to moderate a panel on the “new” antisemitism. And then, it made me feel tired. So tired. And then it made me resolved. I have been worried about releasing my book into the world. Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed is extremely personal, it makes me feel incredibly vulnerable, and I have suffered antisemitic and misogynistic attacks already in a harrowing way, mostly over social media. How would releasing this book into the world exacerbate all of that? People kept asking me: was I excited? And my stomach was in constant knots. Instead of enjoying this accomplishment, savouring it, I was terrified. Reading this 50-year-old commentary clarified to me why I am doing this, something my editor at McClelland & Stewart has been reminding me regularly during our editorial/therapy sessions: I wrote this book to help people, and to share information that might in some way galvanize people to ensure that this never happens again. Even as, in different ways in different places all over the place, it is still happening again. n
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