12 minute read
Six of the top stories covered this summer
Where our story about El Al took ight
Spotting a petition
We noticed it making the rounds on social media with a growing number of signatures, but where was it coming from? Asaf Halperin is a Toronto insurance agent—and a fan of El Al’s security protocols— who caught wind of the news early. We found him, and he told us he was mostly wondering if El Al would change its mind if support was shown.
Tweeting the news
Digital stories from The CJN are usually distributed a er we’ve produced a full report, but this one seemed like it was worth an early alert. News editor Lila Sarick handled the rst story with the essential details. We followed up by asking questions about El Al’s motivation for ending the route, and found Halperin at home excited to share his perspective for a podcast.
Israel’s ag carrier deciding to suspend its Canadian operations on Oct. 27 was one of The CJN’s biggest news items of the summer. Here’s how we got a scoop...
Getting the lowdown
While on-the-record comments from the company remained elusive, making it tough to report why the Tel Aviv-Toronto route was being cut, a company spokesman in New Jersey conceded a few thoughts. With airlines everywhere trying to get their sea legs back a er the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a likely factor here. El Al would have preferred to maintain a presence in Canada.
Finding this family
We talked to Reena Ostro, a Toronto woman whose family had El Al tickets for mid-December to celebrate her oldest son’s upcoming bar mitzvah. When informed of alternative routes, they decided to cancel due to added expenses and complications. A shorter trip has now been planned via LOT Polish Airlines instead.
WEEKLY PRINTABLE EDITION JULY 8, 2022 / 9 TAMUZ 5782
Reaching an expert
Fred Lazar, who teaches at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, had a di erent spin on these developments. While predicting the withdrawal would lead Air Canada to raise its ticket prices, he also predicts that El Al will notice the demand and return to the country it served for over 50 years—initially via Montreal, and later via Toronto.
EL AL
is flying away from Canada
(but will it come back next year?)
/ page 6
CANDLE LIGHTING TIMES MONCTON 8:53 MONTREAL 8:26 OTTAWA 8:34 TORONTO 8:43 NIAGARA 8:39 WINNIPEG 9:19 EDMONTON 9:44 VANCOUVER 9:00
WWW.THECJN.CA
Obituaries: Irving Abella and Sheila Goldbloom
McGill University's antisemitism probe findings
Rabbi reflects on kidney donation to a stranger
Faith and grief in a ballet by Avinoam Silverman page 2 page 4 page 5 page 8
WELCOME TO THE 23RD EDITION OF OUR PRINTABLE WEEKLY DIGEST.
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK: INFO@THECJN.CA
Printing the article
The CJN produces a digest designed for reading on tablets or for printing out for Shabbat and the weekend. We put the El Al story on the cover of the July 8 edition, with a feature article that summed up everything we discovered. Tens of thousands of people read and listened to the kind of coverage that they couldn’t have found anywhere else.
The real rabbi who did Drake’s fake wedding
The music video for “Falling Back” premiered on June 17 with the premise of the Toronto hip-hop icon marrying 23 women at once.
And he didn’t want to do it without a rabbi.
The call came to Rabbi Ari Sitnik, who drove downtown to the Fairmont Royal York hotel, and then pretended to pronounce them “husband and wives.”
It wasn’t hard to find him on the day it premiered, even as global curiosity grew over whether this guy was the real deal.
He is indeed a rabbi, ordained through the Chabad Lubavitch movement—although he has a day job in IT. He also has an accent from his birthplace of Brazil.
After following his bride to Toronto 26 years ago, he settled in the city’s Clanton Park neighbourhood.
And, a couple of times each year, he does some dabbling in show business.
It’s a hobby that found him contributing some shtick to an annual backyard wrestling fundraiser, Slammin’ for Shabbos, organized by Magen Boys Entertainment.
Two fellow volunteers, Adam Rodness and Stu Stone, got the gig to produce a secret video shoot for Drake’s surprise summer album Honestly, Nevermind, which found him pivoting to more of a dancemusic singing style.
It was commemorated with a fantasy wedding that the Jewish rapper invited his mother to attend.
Rabbi Sitnik clarified that there was nothing Orthodox about the pseudo-ceremony. For starters, none of these 23 women were Jewish.
But the producers arranged for his own kosher catering to be delivered from uptown restaurant The Chicken Nest, and they adjusted the production schedule for him to appear on Sunday rather than Saturday.
Instead, he thought it was terrific that of all the clergy that could’ve been recruited for this role, Aubrey Drake Graham chose somebody Jewish.
Besides, their actual face-time was fleeting. The technicalities surrounding the shoot meant Rabbi Sitnik didn’t speak off-camera with the star.
But he knows what he would’ve said, given the chance.
“I would have asked Drake to put on tefillin.” n
Mr. Begin meets Mr. Bennett
(thanks to Gabriel Emanuel)
Gordie Wiseman (a.k.a. Gabriel Emanuel) accepting the Prime Minister’s Prize from Naftali Bennett on May 12, 2022.
Ellin Bessner meeting Gordie Wiseman on the patio of Aroma Espresso Bar in Toronto’s Forest Hill Village on July 19, 2022.
His mother wanted Gordie Wiseman to be a lawyer—just in case he needed something to fall back on if the theatre didn’t work out.
But the 92-year old Winnipeg matriarch was proud when Wiseman, a playwright (and lawyer—yes, he listened to her) won a prestigious prize from the Israeli government for his play about Menachem Begin.
Mr. Begin is a one-man show, with an actor portraying the life and career of Israel’s former freedom fighter-turned-statesman. Begin, who died in 1992, served as the country’s sixth prime minister.
The play addresses how the right-wing leader made peace with Egypt in 1978 that resulted in the Nobel Prize. But it doesn’t gloss over Begin’s responsibility for the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon.
It also covers Begin’s origins as a Polish survivor of the Holocaust, to his years with the Irgun helping to kick the British out of Palestine, to the founding of the State of Israel.
“Frankly, I don’t think there would be an Israel if there wasn’t an Irgun that opposed the British and basically forced them out. But history will judge that,” Wiseman told me during his summer visit with family—including his mother, Elaine.
The play debuted in 2013, in Hebrew. It hasn’t been performed outside of Israel–yet. Hopefully, attention to the award will spark interest elsewhere, and perhaps a translation to English.
Wiseman thinks Begin’s legacy has lessons for current events in the Middle East.
“It took a right-wing, some would say extremist right-wing leader, to have made peace with Egypt, which was Israel’s greatest enemy and the most powerful of the Arab nations at the time,” he said, adding that the Arabs trusted Begin because he was a man of his word.
“All the ones who talked about peace on the left and from the Socialist leftist roots could never do that.”
With a dozen or more plays to his credit. Wiseman now lives and works in Had Nes, a small settlement in the Golan Heights. He is known professionally there as Gabriel Emanuel. It’s a nod to his late father Manny.
During the pandemic, he embarked on a new sideline as a singer/songwriter, following in the footsteps of brothers Bob Wiseman (the founding keyboardist for Blue Rodeo) and Ron “The King of Jewish Reggae” Wiseman.
His country-and-western-style songs are now on Spotify—where he discovered a fan club of about 100 people… listening in Norway. n
www.robapp.com @robinsapplebyllp @RobinsAppleby
“When I came here, I discovered all the lakes and the nature, and going on a hike for one or two days and not meeting anyone, just you and the nature,” says Nicky Rosenberg, an electrical engineer who left Israel in 2011. “Sometimes you meet a bear or a moose.” “Mosquitoes are flying around for five minutes until they decide to land on you and then, maybe, they will bite you,” says Amir Dembner, who’s lived in Whitehorse since 2009. “Once you get out of the car you have thousands, like Kamikaze. Didn’t the Jewish people suffer enough?”
Greetings from the
Jews of Yukon
Nowadays, seeing the Israeli flag and hearing Hebrew is a lot more common than you might expect North of 60. A sizeable number of Israeli expats are currently calling the rugged Canadian territory home.
Of the 38 current members of the Jewish Cultural Society of Yukon, 10 are Israelis. And those who have survived a full year in the territory are considered a “sourdough.” (Or, as they say in Hebrew, a “machmetzet.”)
Rick Karp and his late wife Joy were Ottawa natives who moved to Whitehorse in 1986 to open the first McDonald’s franchise in Northwestern Canada.
At the helm of the community since 1997, he’s welcomed the Israeli newcomers to a region which has had a Jewish presence for about 125 years. When the Klondike Gold Rush began in 1896, Jewish prospectors and merchants flocked to the territory to seek their fortunes.
Over a century later, in 2014, the community restored a long-neglected Jewish cemetery in Dawson City, where five of those early adventurers were laid to rest. The Beth Chaim burial ground is now a popular tourist attraction—although that city has just a handful of Jewish residents today.
Karp now feels the timing is right to push Whitehorse to commit to observing the territory’s first-ever Jewish Heritage Month next May. n
Nick Yudell:
A war hero’s art finds an audience (80 years later)
Nick Yudell was a budding artist who took black-and-white photos of everyday life in Winnipeg during the 1920s and ‘30s, and in rural Manitoba, where he was raised in the province’s southern city of Morden.
But after enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, he left his extensive collection of prints and negatives behind with family for safekeeping.
Yudell died in action during a bombing raid over German-occupied Tunisia in 1943. He was 26.
Now, thanks to art professor Celia Rabinovitch—a cousin who discovered the contents of Yudell’s collection in a box in her father’s basement—a major exhibit called The Lost Expressionist has been mounted.
It’s currently on display at the Manitoba Museum until Dec. 18, 2022.
As a military historian of Canada’s Jews in the Second World War—something I chronicled in my 2019 book, Double Threat—I’d always known about Yudell’s service. I’ve lectured about him to audiences around Canada. I had even travelled to the island of Malta to pay my respects at the memorial column in Valletta.
His name is engraved on the Air Force memorial column, alongside others who served in the Mediterranean Theatre but have no known grave.
After knowing only how he died, I was deeply moved to see his collection of personal photos—which showed me also how brightly and vibrantly he lived. n
Dan Markel’s mother fights for his memory
The true-crime story of Canadian law professor Dan Markel’s murder-forhire is well-known across much of the United States.
He was executed outside his home in Tallahassee, Fla., in July 2014. It was part of a custody dispute with his former wife, Wendi Adelson, who wanted to move with the couple’s two sons to Miami.
Three assassins hired by the Adelson family have since been convicted; a fourth suspect—Markel’s former brother-in-law—is facing trial.
Ruth Markel of Toronto is the victim’s mother, who has a new book written from her own perspective, The Unveiling.
And her goal is to make fellow Canadians aware of how her son’s killing had a profound impact on his grieving family members. She wanted to answer questions that haven’t come up in other coverage.
“What is it like to be a homicide victim? What does it feel like? What is the family going through?”
Aside from the tragedy of losing her only son, who was 41, the saga has resulted in Ruth—and Dan’s father, Phil Markel—becoming estranged from two grandsons.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new law in June, which is named for Dan Markel. It covers grandparent alienation in specific cases where one parent is convicted of murdering the other.
- Ruth Mariel
While it doesn’t help Dan’s parents at the moment, since their former daughter-in-law hasn’t been charged, Ruth believes the law had other personal benefits.
Lobbying for it gave her a purpose during the darkest days of the investigation and court proceedings—which are still going on.
The Unveiling was published by Simon & Schuster on Sept. 20. Promoting it provides yet another important focus for Ruth.
“The book doesn’t end the grief. The book is a way of finding some meaning.” n
