How 1967 changed everything

Six Day War and Holocaust memory had huge impact on Canada's Jews.

PAT JOHNSON REPORTER

The psychological effects of the Holocaust played a pivotal role in Canadian Jews' reaction to the Six Day War in 1967 and fundamentally changed the Jewish community in this country, according to a respected academic who delivered the lecture at the annual Kristallnacht memorial service Sunday night.

Prof. Harold Troper said a confluence of events led to a galvanizing reaction among Canadian Jews when they saw the Jewish state under siege by its Arab neighbors. Only six years earlier, in 1961, the Adolf Eichmann trial had brought the Holocaust into the collective consciousness of the world. Until then, according to Troper, many survivors had repressed their memories of the Nazi atrocities.

Moreover, it was only at the time of the trial that a definitive historical documentary of the Final Solution was compiled. Before that event, the Holocaust did not stand out in the stark way it does now in the larger scheme of history.

Because of that new-found understanding of genocide, the reaction of world Jewry to the impending war with the Arabs was dramatically different than it might have been a few years earlier.

"What if Israel did not win?" asked Troper. The idea of the Jewish state being overrun by Arab enemies brought images of a second holocaust in a generation.

World events at the time gave Jews reason for further desperation. While the Soviet Union was generously supplying arms to the Egyptians, the Americans were bogged down in Vietnam and did not want to get involved in the Middle East crisis.

"Jewish survival hung by a thin thread and nobody seemed to care, nobody seemed to understand," said Troper.

The acts of individual Canadian Jews at the time were remarkable. At the beginning of the war, Troper was a young volunteer at the Zionist Centre in Toronto. An elderly woman walked in and dropped her Shabbat candlesticks, jewelry and some cash on the table, saying Israel needed them more than she did. A family remortgaged their home to send funds to Israel. Young Canadian Jews volunteered to travel to Israel, both to fight and to fill the vacuum in the civilian community created by the soldiers going off to war. Jewish industrial leaders and people of modest means opened their wallets for the cause.

The weeks leading up to the war were excruciating. Each day brought further sabre-rattling by Egypt, which was blocking critical access to Israel's southern port of Eilat and demanding the United Nations withdraw from the Sinai peninsula, a precursor to a full-fledged attack on Israel proper.

Instead of a concerted Arab attack on Israel however, Israel on June 5 launched a pre-emptive attack, destroying the Egyptian air force. When Jordan's King Hussein entered the war, Israel turned its attentions to the east and reunited Jerusalem under the Star of David. Within six days, Israel's victory was complete.

The mobilization for Israel's defence and the jubilation with which victory was met proved a permanent turning point in the Canadian Jewish community, said Troper, who is working on a book on the subject. After 1967, being a Jew became for the first time essentially synonymous with being a Zionist, he said. The events rekindled Jewish connection among previously unaffiliated Jews. Synagogue attendance went up. Day school enrollment soared, fund-raising for Jewish causes increased, internal differences were papered over and activities of the organized community became more focused.

At the same time, Canada was celebrating its centennial and a feeling of optimism reigned in the country. The perception of Canada as an Anglo-Saxon state with a French Catholic minority was being replaced with official multiculturalism. Troper said that Jews, who had always felt somewhat apart from the fabric of Canadian society, began to feel a greater sense of Canadian-ness at the same time that their communal structures were being invigorated.

In keeping with tradition, the Kristallnacht memorial began with the lighting of six candles in memory of the six million Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. The annual memorial service commemorates the date Nov. 9-10, 1938, in which well-orchestrated pogroms led to the burning of hundreds of synagogues throughout Germany and Austria, the killing of almost 100 Jews, the arrest of 30,000 more, destruction of businesses and a "night of broken glass" that gave us the infamous word Kristallnacht.

The annual commemorative event was sponsored by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Society and Beth Israel, with financial support from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver Endowment Fund.

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