Jaime Stein hopes to bring a Jewish voice to the table at Vancouver City Hall. He is vying for one of the two seats that will be filled in a by-election April 5.
One seat opened after Councilor Christine Boyle was elected as a New Democrat to the BC Legislature in the provincial election last year. She had been the sole representative on council for the OneCity electoral organization.
The other seat opened after Councilor Adriane Carr, one of two Green party councilors, resigned, citing frustration with the governing style of Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC majority.
Jaime Stein said that, when meeting with a couple of hundred voters every day, he and his running mate, Ralph Kaisers, are hearing that people are “really happy with how ABC is willing to take on difficult issues.” (Courtesy Jaime Stein)
Stein is on the ABC slate, with running mate Ralph Kaisers. They hope to increase ABC’s existing majority on council. ABC currently holds the mayor’s chair and six of the 10 councilor positions.
Aiming to prevent a larger ABC majority are four electoral organizations.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver has nominated former city councilor Colleen Hardwick and community organizer and urban researcher Theodore Abbott.
The three other groups have nominated one candidate each. OneCity has nominated schools and street safety activist Lucy Maloney. COPE, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, has nominated writer and punk musician Sean Orr. The Green party has nominated filmmaker and advocate Annette Reilly.
There are six independent candidates running: Jeanifer Decena, Guy Dubé, Charles Ling, Karin Litzcke, Gerry Mcguire and Rollergirl.
The dual by-election is the first test of the ABC majority on Vancouver city council since Sim and his party were first elected in 2022.
Stein said that, when meeting with a couple of hundred voters every day, he and his running mate Kaisers are hearing that people are “really happy with how ABC is willing to take on difficult issues, whether it’s in the Downtown Eastside or whether it’s with crime and safety or whether it’s just examining new ways to do things that maybe councils in the past haven’t done.”
He thinks there is a silent majority that doesn’t make a lot of noise but who are generally pleased with the direction the city has been taking in the past three years.
The issues that led to the ABC victory in 2022 have not changed significantly, according to Stein.
“I think the biggest issue, number one, is crime and safety,” he said. “People want Vancouver to be a safer city, one that they can get out and enjoy.”
The second most common issue he hears about, he said, is “making Vancouver open for business again.”
“That means reducing red tape for businesses,” said Stein. “It means making it easier for people to interact with the city, whether they need permits, etc., and also opening it to the world, like bringing more festivals and events here, like FIFA or Web Summit, and trying to generate tourism dollars in the city for folks.”
While Stein sees value in having a Jewish voice at the table, he said Vancouver already has Canada’s “most friendly mayor and council to the Jewish community.”
Although Vancouver’s second mayor, David Oppenheimer, was Jewish, there have never been a great many Jews in elected positions either locally, provincially or federally from British Columbia. Stein hopes his candidacy inspires other Jews to get involved.
“It’s a voice that needs to be at the table, not only to advocate for our community but also to serve as a role model for others to get involved in either the political process or in civic discourse in general,” he said.
Stein has corporate and nonprofit sector leadership experience, including in the technology sector at companies including BroadbandTV, Taplytics and Hootsuite. He partnered with Canadian Blood Services to raise $12.5 million for establishing Canada’s national public cord blood bank, inspired to do so by the loss of his father, Howard Stein, to leukemia, in 2006. He is also on the board of an agency advancing Alzheimer’s research.
In the Jewish community, Stein was selected as a 2024 Wexner Fellow, a two-year educational program focused on Jewish learning and leadership development. He chairs a committee on the Antisemitism and Israel Crisis Response Team. With the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, Stein has worked with elected officials to develop public policy to strengthen community safety and security. He has been a volunteer and fundraiser supporting Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Centre and has volunteered in different capacities with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and others.
Last year, Stein was nominated as the BC United candidate in Vancouver-Langara, but did not run in the provincial election after the party folded its campaign and endorsed the BC Conservatives.
Polls are open election day, which is Saturday, April 5, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., but there are opportunities to vote early at Vancouver City Hall, on Tuesday, April 1, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and people can also cast their vote by mail. For full details, go to vancouver.ca/vote.
Australian TV personality Erin Molan at Schara Tzedeck in Vancouver March 19. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Security was tighter than usual at Congregration Schara Tzedeck when Australian media personality Erin Molan spoke to Vancouver’s Jewish community March 19.
The non-Jewish commentator has become a lightning rod for anti-Israel activists since becoming a vocal voice in support of Zionism and Jews, particularly after Oct. 7, 2023. She is dumbfounded by the controversy.
“If you said to me two years ago, there’s going to be a terror attack, Hamas will slaughter 1,200 people, they will take hostages, they will burn children … you are going to come out very strongly and publicly and condemn those actions and you’re going to support the victims of those atrocities and that’s going to be controversial and you will be in the minority, I would have said you are dreaming, there is no chance in hell,” Molan told the audience. “But here we are.”
Since that October day, Molan has lost the four jobs she held in Australian journalism – her main gig as a commentator on Sky News Australia, a radio position, a column in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and a regular magazine spot. Molan has not explicitly said she was fired for her pro-Israel views.
“Pure coincidence, of course,” was her response to a direct question put to her by Amir Epstein, executive director of Tafsik, the organization that brought her on a cross-Canada tour.
In February, she became host of 69 X Minutes, a news program conceived and funded by Elon Musk, which airs on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Molan received a loud ovation for her comments on US President Donald Trump.
“You might love him, you might hate him,” she said. “Would I want him to marry my daughter? No. Do I think that in some ways he is the right person for this time given the alternative? Absolutely.”
She said Trump is shaking up a situation that demands new approaches.
“At least he’s throwing something different out there,” she said. “How many two-state solutions do you want to give the Palestinians? How many chances do you want to give? What are we up to, eight? Eight more chances for the same people that, at the last ceasefire, came on TV seconds after the ceasefire began and said, just FYI, we will do Oct. 7 again at the first available opportunity.
“You can’t keep doing the same thing,” she continued. “That’s insanity.”
Her assertion that Trump’s disruptive tactics are right for the time and place come in part from watching, she said, every second of available recorded footage from Oct. 7. Many of the perpetrators wore body cameras, in some cases livestreaming their attacks.
“I thought I understood how depraved they were, well prior,” she said. “I’d seen enough, I’d heard enough, I knew that they were probably as low as you could get. Watching the raw vision [recorded footage] gave me the next-level understanding of who you are dealing with and … I left there saying, there is no way you can coexist with those people.
“I watched a video of a dad jumping out of a window with a 4-year-old under his arm and then maybe a 6-year-old running beside him,” she recounted. “Just that fear on his face that … he knew that they were coming. He was not going to be able to do anything, but he was doing whatever he could. The terrorists killed him, then went to the fridge with two kids covered in blood, shaking, [having] just watched their dad killed and then pulling drinks out and they’re laughing. I watched their faces as they hacked the head off a young man. That, to me, is what I can’t ever forget, the joy that they derived in what they were doing. Two little girls and a little boy being burnt alive – they shot their parents and then they burnt them alive. I just don’t think you can keep pretending that this is just a dispute over land or this is just two countries that don’t really get along well. No, there are not two sides to this. They are evil, depraved, bloodthirsty murderers who will never, ever stop. So, whatever the solution is moving forward, it cannot have Hamas in existence at all and, from there, I don’t know, but I think you’ve got to try something different.”
Molan’s experiences with domestic partner violence have influenced her approach to the Oct. 7 attacks – and provided a contrast between the way she, as an Australian woman, is perceived differently from Israeli women.
“I was in a couple of very violent relationships that resulted in me being hospitalized a lot,” she said, noting that she shared the story for the first time publicly only a few months ago.
When Molan did so, she said, “all the feminists in Australia … were public and effusive in their sorrow and their praise for my bravery, for sharing.”
She said, “These were the same people who deny what happened to Israeli and Jewish women on Oct. 7, the same people who have not said a word about any of it. [They are] completely OK with Hamas raping, slaughtering, killing women.”
She experienced firsthand the very different reactions to her, “an Irish Catholic girl,” and to the rapes and murders of Israeli women, she said.
While she said everyone should be speaking up in support of Israel and against Hamas and global antisemitism, she had particularly harsh words for Islamic community members and leaders, not least because Islamic extremism hurts Muslims, she said.
“They should be at the forefront of this fight,” she said. “Where are they? That’s what’s really disappointed me in this space. There’s the odd one or two and they are incredible and they’re brave and they’re powerful, but … this was a perfect opportunity for [Muslim community organizations] to come out and say, ‘That’s not who we are, that doesn’t represent us or our religion.’ But, instead, they tried to downplay it, they tried to make it OK, they tried to normalize it.”
Molan has been critical of Canada’s now-former prime minister Justin Trudeau, as well as leaders in her own country and elsewhere, who she says have allowed the bar to be lowered on acceptable discourse.
She cited the example of a hate rally at the Sydney Opera House, hours after the atrocities in Israel, during which people expressed antisemitic chants and threats.
“If I were in power, if I were the leader of a nation and that had occurred on my watch, you could not have held me back in terms of what action I would have taken,” she said, adding that this was a moment when hateful and potentially violent people were gauging what would be accepted and what would not be accepted in society.
At that point, Molan said, leaders should have come down hard and police should have acknowledged that support for terrorism and incitement of violence against identifiable groups is illegal, freedom of speech notwithstanding. In Australia, Canada and elsewhere, she said, that did not happen.
She credited the Jewish community worldwide for their collective reactions to the challenges they face.
“You would be justified in being the most hateful people in history,” she said. “You would be justified in having hearts full of hate and no one could ever judge you for it. Every time you gather, all you say is, ‘Bring them home.’ That’s it. Every gathering I’ve seen of Jewish people since Oct. 7, the only focus there has been ‘Bring them home. Bring our people home.’ The other side, every gathering is ‘Intifada,’ ‘River to the sea,’ ‘Death to Jews.’ How can the world not see the stark difference between these two groups of people?”
Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt opened the event with a prayer for the hostages.
Mijal BenDori, vice-president, community planning, partnerships and innovation, of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, thanked the Vancouver Police Department, hired security and the community volunteer group Bitachon for keeping British Columbia’s Jews safe.
The event was co-sponsored by Federation, Schara Tzedeck and Tafsik, a new national organization that Epstein said targets “the Islamists, the Marxists, the communists, the keffiyeh Karens, the Jew-haters.”
His group, he said, has a number of projects in development, including an app to identify and remove anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate graffiti; a group called LGBTJew, to provide a place for queer Zionists; and a support group for people who have been alienated by their Jewish families for their support of Israel.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, coined the term “genocide” in 1944. (photo from Arthur Leipzig Estate, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, via ushmm.org)
Anna-Mae Wiesenthal was in the United Kingdom recently and passed a table in Dublin that was accusing Israel of perpetrating genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. She engaged the people at the table in conversation.
It was a small act of dialogue between a few individuals, but it reflects what Wiesenthal views as a vital act in mutual understanding.
Encouraging conversations like these is one of the reasons the Vancouver educator recently led a course at Temple Sholom on the definition of genocide.
Wiesenthal holds a master’s degree in Holocaust and genocide studies and is about to defend her PhD dissertation in the same discipline. Both degrees are from Gratz College, in Pennsylvania. She retired last year as a teacher at Vancouver’s King David High School.
The three-class course at Temple Sholom addressing the emotionally and academically challenging topic of genocide comes at a time when
Israel is being accused of perpetrating crimes against humanity in Gaza. The topic has immediate resonance. Wiesenthal’s intention, however, was to take a more nuanced approach to the subject.
“My goal when I retired is to continue to be an educator in different capacities,” she said. After discussions with Temple Sholom’s Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, she put together the course, which ran on three consecutive Wednesdays, ending March 19.
The focus, she said, was an examination of the concept, introducing students to when and why the term “genocide” was coined, in 1944, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, and looking at its definition, examining the wording and identifying problematic components.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined “genocide” as: “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions intended to destroy the group in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
“The word ‘intent’ in the definition is problematic,” Wiesenthal said, as an example of the exploration the class undertook. “How do you prove intent?”
The goal of the course, she said, was “to come out possibly with more questions or appreciation for the complexity of the definition.”
The small group of students analyzed the 10 Stages of Genocide, a framework developed and introduced in 1996 by Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, to help identify the warning signs of genocide and prevent it before it escalates.
These steps include classification (dividing people into “us” versus “them” based on ethnicity, race, religion or nationality); symbolization (assigning symbols or names to distinguish groups, such as the yellow Star of David for Jews in Nazi Germany); discrimination (dominant groups deny rights to a specific group, often through laws or policies); dehumanization (the targeted group is compared to animals, vermin, insects or diseases to strip them of their humanity); organization (genocidal acts are planned and coordinated, often by governments, militias or extremist groups); polarization (propaganda and hate speech are used to drive society further apart, making violence seem justified); preparation (authorities or groups begin making lists, planning logistics and even building camps or weapons for mass killing); persecution (victims are identified, isolated and deprived of rights, for example, forced deportation, concentration camps, starvation); extermination (the mass killing of the targeted group begins, often justified as “cleansing” or necessary for national security); and denial (perpetrators cover up evidence, deny crimes, blame victims or rewrite history to avoid accountability).
“It’s not always linear,” Wiesenthal said of the 10 stages. “Some of the stages can overlap, some of the stages may not necessarily be present, but it’s a way to identify and help you predict. If we see conditions of the stages unfolding then perhaps we can predict more accurately that there is groundwork being laid for genocidal actions.”
While Wiesenthal wanted to encourage depth of understanding on the topic, its immediacy – with Israel being accused of genocide by groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – led some students, and the Independent, to pressure her to comment on current events.
“What do we say when somebody says Israel is committing genocide?” Wiesenthal asked. “I could ask a question like: What is your understanding of genocide? What does that mean to you?”
If Israel wanted to commit genocide, Wiesenthal noted, they have the military capacity to have done so on the first day of the war. This is perhaps the most immediate, if not entirely nuanced, response.
“You can make all kinds of arguments about how there was or wasn’t enough humanitarian aid and food trucks entering Gaza,” she said. “The fact is there were food trucks entering.”
There could be legitimate discussions about what Hamas did with that aid once it entered Gaza. But, she said, the larger issue is that governments that plan on committing genocide do not provide victims with humanitarian aid, nor do they provide vaccines for children, as Israel has done.
Military experts, such as John Spencer, who specializes in urban warfare, has said that the civilian casualty ratio in Gaza is “historically low for modern warfare” and cites Israeli Defence Forces estimates that 50-60% of Gazans killed have been civilians, well below the 80-90% of civilian casualties typical in modern conflicts.
Spencer has praised the Israeli military’s efforts to minimize non-combatant harm, citing mass warnings to Gazan civilians, providing evacuation and relocation directives to reduce casualties, and the use of “roof knocking” techniques before airstrikes.
While Israel has been condemned for using 2,000-pound bombs in urban areas, Spencer has claimed that these are standard for penetrating fortified underground structures, like Hamas’s extensive tunnel networks, and contends that their use is not intended to cause unnecessary destruction but to legitimately and effectively serve military objectives.
Wiesenthal turns the genocide narrative around, noting that Hamas has explicitly dedicated itself to committing genocide against Israelis and Jews, both in writing and in its repeated expressed statements.
“It is part of Hamas’s charter and something they verbally repeated, that their goal is to get rid of Jews, and their readiness to commit Oct. 7 over and over again,” she said.
This goes to the challenging issue of intent on the part of both Israelis and Hamas, she added.
“If given the opportunity, Hamas [has said it] would kill every Jew in Israel and destroy Israel,” said Wiesenthal. “Israel is not targeting the Palestinian people or the Palestinian population in Gaza. Their campaign is solely directed at the terrorist organization Hamas, which is existentially threatening Israel. Israel is responding to a genocidal attack.”
Light projections on the internal walls of the Tower of David, in Jerusalem, part of the Night Spectacular. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Tourism to Israel plummeted after Oct. 7, 2023. For example, January 2024 saw an 80% drop in visitors from a year previous. Those who did travel to Israel were often on solidarity missions or volunteer programs.
In March, I visited for 10 days, speaking with scores of Israelis about the situation, their grief, determination and changed attitudes, among other things. During that period, there was not a single siren in central Israel, though, days after my departure, the ceasefire ended and war in earnest began again.
It may seem frivolous or disrespectful to speak of “tourism” or “sightseeing” in moments such as these. The example of Israelis, however, is, as ever, resilience and getting on with it. Museums are open and, no matter what brings you to Israel, making time for recreation is necessary and, in many cases, adds depth to the understanding of what is happening now. A few of my destinations and choices are a bit odd – not what every visitor might choose – but others, like the Tower of David, should be on your must-see list.
Story of Jerusalem
The Tower of David Museum tells the story of Jerusalem. With a multimillion-dollar investment in new technologies upgrading the experience, the centrality of the city of Jerusalem in multiple traditions is underscored by the imagery of the city as the “navel of the world.”
From 5,000-year-old idols and 3,000-year-old stamps indicating a thriving bureaucracy, to Theodor Herzl and the modern state, the museum tells the story of a place with more history than geography.
A not-to-be-missed component is the immersive, after-dark sound and light show called the Night Spectacular. Perhaps less informative than just, well, spectacular, the 40-minute program projects the epochs of the city’s history (that is, its litany of invasions) onto the interior walls of the imposing citadel. Combo tickets to the museum, permitting evening entry for the show, are available. The effect is all-immersing, more powerful and moving than I could have anticipated. It will captivate visitors of every age.
History of Jewish militias
Like the Haganah Museum in Tel Aviv (see below), the Museum of the Underground Prisoners Jerusalem takes a politically ecumenical approach to the history of Jewish militias fighting the British in pre-state Israel.
Located in the former British Mandate-era jail, the museum tells the story of resistance fighters from the Haganah, the main defence force of the pre-state Jewish community, the Revisionist Irgun (Etzel) and the more radical Lehi (“Stern Gang”).
Jewish prisoners were captured and punished for sabotage against the British, including the smuggling of Holocaust survivors and others into Palestine. Some of the prisoners were executed in the prison yard and these lives are commemorated movingly.
Holocaust remembrance
Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre is always a moving pilgrimage. The primary exhibit space – an A-frame hall with windows at the peak, reminding us that the events took place in full view of the world (and, arguably, God) – provides a chronological history of the Shoah. The slash across the top of the Moshe Safdie-designed building also represents the permanent scar this history has left on humankind.
Like the Tower of David, Yad Vashem has had a huge infusion of money to update the exhibits and add high-tech components.
The eternal flame, at Yad Vashem. (photo by Pat Johnson)
A simple, but crucial, aspect of the exhibit is at the start, after visitors traverse the “bridge to a vanished world,” and a short film loops the story of the pre-Shoah Jewish civilization that was destroyed. This contextualizing of what was lost is an irreplaceable part of the experience.
The permanent exhibit, including the emotional Hall of Names, is what the public most often sees and it provides the history of the Holocaust for people of all levels of knowledge. The vast work of the centre remains mostly out of sight, with archives, research, recording and publication being a less visible but no less important component of Yad Vashem’s mandate.
Har Herzl Pathway
For a British Columbian, it is hard to fathom what Israelis call “mountains.” The Mount of Remembrance (home to Yad Vashem) and Mount Herzl (or Har Herzl) are hardly recognizable as distinct geographic places, let alone mountains.
Monument to Israeli victims of terror, part of the many cemeteries on Mount Herzl, final resting place of soldiers, leaders and the fallen. (photo by Pat Johnson)
In any event, from Yad Vashem, it is a relatively short walk to the Herzl Museum, which is adjacent to the grave in which the founder of political Zionism was reinterred in 1949 from his original resting place in Vienna.
Between these two destinations are the resting places of most of Israel’s leaders, as well as cemetery after cemetery filled with soldiers and civilians killed in Israel’s successive wars and terror attacks.
It was only by happenstance – well, if you are arriving by foot, you can’t miss it, but those arriving by vehicle might – that I discovered a memorial walking path between Yad Vashem and the Herzl Museum, snaking through these sad, chronological rows of graves.
The trail, as a distinct entity, is a bit of a mystery. A post-trip web search indicates there is seemingly not even an agreed-upon name for the path. The information at the entryway says that it was developed by Jewish youth movements but the specific groups go unnamed. The signage is likewise a bit perplexing, without always clear directions or explanations. The larger message, though, does not require plinths: Israel and thousands of Israeli families have paid an enormous price for the country’s existence.
Learning about Herzl
Having meandered through the sombre cemeteries of Israel’s war dead and the resting places of most of the country’s prime ministers, presidents and other historical greats, you arrive at the imposing grave of Theodor Herzl. Nearby, the museum bearing his name tells the story of the man with the crazy dream of a Jewish state.
Replica of Theodor Herzl’s office, including his original desk and other artifacts, at the Herzl Museum, Jerusalem. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Museum-goers are given a guided tour from room to room, following a cheesy video of a pair of dramatic impresarios didactically directing an actor preparing for the role of Herzl but who has no idea who the man was. The actor (and, not at all subtly, the visitor) is educated on the Dreyfus Affair, which was the polarizing moment when the secular, assimilated Herzl concluded the Jews would never be free without a state of their own. The displays take visitors through his activism, and we eventually join delegates at the First Zionist Congress.
The museum includes the re-creation of Herzl’s home office and many important relics of his life.
Connecting past, present
Gush Katif Museum is an unexpected little museum in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighbourhood, which tells the story of the 17 Jewish settlements that were evacuated during the “disengagement plan” from Gaza in 2005.
The Israeli government withdrew from Gaza two decades ago in hopes of allowing a sort of pilot project in Palestinian self-government. In the process, and amid (yet another) emotional national dialogue, Jewish settlements in the enclave were evacuated.
With a decidedly political agenda, the museum finds relevance today, as many Israelis look at the situation in Gaza and, with 20/20 hindsight (or something like it), question every decision that may have led to today’s realities.
In an interesting thought experiment, a Jewish resident evacuated from Gaza, speaking in the museum’s introductory film, inverts the common perception of Jewish settlements in the area. Rather than the probably prevailing view of Jewish settlements as an imposition on Palestinian land, he makes the case that Israel gave 90% of Gaza to the Arabs and some still wanted to erase the Jewish presence entirely. (Ignoring the ideological point and contesting the details, Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip took up something around 20% of the land in the small area.) It’s a perspective that challenges the idea that, even absent a negotiated two-state solution, the Palestinians deserve 100% of the occupied territories. Presumably, it is just this type of questioning the museum hopes to engender.
The Gush Katif Museum explores more than modern history, of course, going back to the earliest Jewish settlement in the area, and the successive expulsions by the Romans and the Turks.
Origins of the IDF
Moving on to Tel Aviv, the Haganah Museum tells the story of the Jewish militia that morphed, upon statehood, into the Israel Defence Forces.
The museum is located on Rothschild Boulevard, in one of Tel Aviv’s oldest buildings, originally the home of Eliyahu Golomb, a founder and ideological leader of the Haganah.
The home of Eliyahu Golomb, founder and ideological leader of the Haganah. This was the site of many clandestine and pivotal meetings of the underground resistance. (photo by Pat Johnson)
While there were other military operatives, the Haganah was the de facto militia of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community. The museum, though, takes a broader view, beginning with the role of “tower and stockade settlements” on the peripheries of the proto-state, through the First World War Zion Mule Corps, the Jewish Legion (which helped the rise to prominence of Revisionist leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky), and touches on the roles of Revisionist Etzel (the Irgun) and its breakaway group Lehi (the “Stern Gang”) in taking the fight to the British. In an ideological and military skirmish after independence, these groups would be forcibly unified into the IDF.
The museum includes the crucial role the Haganah played in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal migration of Jews into pre-state Israel during the period of British blockade of Jewish refugees.
At the entry to the building is a relief mural by Israeli sculptor Moshe Ziffer, with figures in traditional kibbutz-style clothing, linking the movement to the pioneering Zionist ethos, as well as fighters shielding and defending Jewish families. There are also ancient symbols in the artwork, implying the Maccabean revolt, and including modern symbols of the transition to statehood, in 1948.
Statues of David Ben-Gurion and his wife Pola, by artist Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, on Tel Aviv’s Independence Trail. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Independence Trail
The Haganah Museum is a central part of the cobbled-together tourist route branded “Independence Trail.” What would ostensibly be the centrepoint of the trail – Independence Hall, the home of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, and the place where David Ben-Gurion read aloud Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 – is surrounded by scaffolding amid ongoing renovations without a set date for reopening.
An easy-to-follow map of the ambling tour is available at the tourism kiosk in the pedestrian boulevard between the Haganah Museum and Independence Hall. The tour begins (if you want to do it in un-Israeli orderly fashion) at the city’s first kiosk, a restoration of which still serves refreshments to Tel Avivians and tourists.
The site of the first kiosk in Tel Aviv. The location is still a destination for refreshments. (photo by Pat Johnson)
The walk continues past the Nahum Gutman Fountain, which depicts the history of Jaffa and its sister-city-come-lately Tel Aviv, from the setting-off place of Jonah on his way to the fish’s belly, through Egyptian invaders, Crusaders, Napoleonic forces on up to Herzl and to the Declaration of Independence that took place a few steps away.
Other stops on the trail include the site of Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, the world’s first modern Hebrew-language high school; the Palatin Hotel, the resting stop for famous names of the 20th century; Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue; several buildings that are notable more for being examples of the Bauhaus or International Style of architecture than for historical import; the Tel Aviv Founders Monument; a statue of Dizengoff, astride his horse; and several others. The map and trail provide a quick and easy guide to important sites that you might otherwise overlook in a small area of central Tel Aviv.
Tragic walking tour
An unusual, if not terribly uplifting, activity is the Tragic Tel Aviv Walking Tour, which visits sites in the city centre where terror and even Second World War attacks killed civilians.
Easily missed: A monument to one of Tel Aviv’s many terror attacks. (photo by Pat Johnson)
On Sept. 9, 1940, Italian war planes operating from the island of Rhodes, made sorties over Haifa and Tel Aviv, killing 137 people, with many more injured. The attacks targeted no Allied (that is, British) military infrastructure and shattered what, to then, had been a feeling of relative isolation from the European war among the residents of pre-state Palestine. The monument to the bombing in Mikhoels Square, at the corner of Levinsky and Aliyah streets, is modest and easily overlooked if you are not explicitly seeking it – or even if you are.
Led by former Torontonian Jeffrey Levi, the tour then proceeds through sadly seemingly endless locations of suicide bombings and other terror attacks, many of which took place during the Second Intifada. In some cases, the historical events that left Israelis dead or wounded are not commemorated at all, or are marked by likewise inconspicuous markers.
If there is an uplifting message in this tour, it is in the innocuous manner in which most of these historical tragedies are commemorated (or not). As Levi recounts the devastations of the past, Tel Avivians hustle by, literally and figuratively moving past the past.
Heterodox Academy is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting viewpoint diversity, open inquiry and constructive debate in higher education. It works to counter ideological conformity on campuses by providing research, resources and programming that foster an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and critically examined.
If that sounds like what a university is intended to be, says one local professor, it’s a commentary on the state of contemporary campuses that such an organization is necessary to encourage the academy to live up to its principles.
Dr. Rachel Altman, associate professor in the statistics and actuarial science department at Simon Fraser University, is one of the campus co-chairs of the Heterodox Academy chapter at SFU.
“Heterodox Academy is an organization that fosters free, open inquiry and free discussion even about controversial issues,” she said. “It’s not just about freedom of speech. It’s also about our conduct, the way we have these conversations. I think that’s what really distinguishes it from the general free speech advocacy groups.”
Dr. Rachel Altman is one of the campus co-chairs of the Heterodox Academy chapter at Simon Fraser University. (photo from SFU)
Heterodox Academy provides guidelines that urge interlocutors to present their case with evidence, bring data when possible, assume the best of one’s opponent and be intellectually humble, among other principles.
HxA, as it is shorthanded, offers events, conferences, resources and other materials that “try to teach our society, especially within academia, how to interact in a productive and civilized way, even when we disagree,” she said.
These tools are intended to help bridge the divide between the ideal of a university and the reality of creating a dynamic marketplace of ideas.
“Just because we have it in our head that in the academy we should be able to discuss anything in a civilized way doesn’t mean we actually know how to do it,” she said. “They provide tools and modeling of those tools to actually teach people how to be civilized.”
The HxA chapter at SFU emerged after a group of scholars got together because they were concerned about the state of academic freedom at the university. They founded the SFU Academic Freedom Group.
Within a few months of that group’s founding, Heterodox Academy launched its Campus Community Program, recognizing chapters on individual campuses. Some SFU professors applied and were accepted among the first chapters chartered.
“We hosted a so-called Heterodox Conversation event this past September,” she said. “That’s a model developed by HxA where you invite two people who have different views on a topic and they sit down and have a conversation with the model [called] the Heterodox Way and then the audience gets involved and we have a group discussion.”
The topic of that dialogue was “The purpose of today’s Canadian universities.”
“The timing was perfect because, just the previous week, our president had issued a statement on institutional neutrality,” she said, referring to an announcement by SFU’s president, Joy Johnson, on maintaining an environment where scholarly inquiry remains unbiased by partisan agendas. “For me, I was celebrating like crazy, but there were others on campus who were very unhappy.”
Altman can’t say whether the Heterodox Academy chapter or the SFU Academic Freedom Group deserve credit for the president’s statement or for other recent developments she and her colleagues view as positive.
“I’m a statistician, so I rarely claim causation,” she said wryly. “I’m very conservative that way. But I think so.”
The groups are comparatively small, but they may be having an outsized impact.
“Everybody knows about us,” she said. “The administration clearly knows and it’s just been so gratifying to see the change in the whole tenor of the administration’s approaches over the last couple of years. It’s a clear change.”
Numbers may remain relatively small, Altman suspects, because of a false perception of their group.
“We are consistently being cast as this right-wing, conservative group and it’s not true,” she said. “We have people across the political spectrum in the group. It is a nonpartisan group.”
The idea that academic freedom and institutional neutrality are right-wing positions, she said, is belied, for example, by the gay rights movement, which emerged in the 1960s, in part thanks to the viewpoint diversity of campuses.
It is not a coincidence, Altman believes, that several HxA members, including herself, are Jewish.
“Jews have a long tradition of arguing and debating in a civilized way, the whole ‘two Jews, three opinions’ thing,” she said. “Jews are just a natural fit with the HxA model.”
In contrast, the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) model that has become increasingly prevalent on North American campuses in recent years is antithetical both to the academic ideal and to Jews, she argued.
“For some Jews like myself, I realized very early on that the EDI ideology that’s become so predominant in academia and elsewhere, that it was terrible for Jews,” she said. “This model of the oppressed and the oppressor, it didn’t work. Jews did not fit into that mold.”
EDI is the opposite of what it claims to be, said Altman.
“I think it’s exclusionary, it discriminates against groups,” she said. “It’s antithetical to everything I believe in because I truly believe in inclusion and anti-discrimination.… I was very unhappy about the rise of the EDI ideology and, in my groups of people who are also similarly concerned about that ideology, I think Jews are overrepresented. That would suggest I’m not the only Jewish person who sees the fundamental conflict, the contradictions in the EDI ideology.”
Altman said few people would openly admit they oppose academic freedom.
“Really, it becomes about the definition of academic freedom,” she said. “When I say I support academic freedom, that’s the end of my sentence. What I look for when I’m talking to people is the ‘but’ that can follow. ‘Of course, I support academic freedom, but … there are limits.’ Things like that.”
In some cases, Altman thinks, this equivocation comes from a lack of understanding around the core principles of academic freedom.
“But then, there are some people who truly want to change the foundation of the term, the concept,” she said. “They truly believe that we should have limits on both our academic freedom and our freedom of expression more generally.”
In addition to the SFU branch, Heterodox Academy has a chapter at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. While there are some HxA members at the Vancouver campus of UBC, Altman said, there is not yet an official chapter there.
Terry Glavin, right, in conversation with Rabbi Dan Moskovitz Jan. 30, traces the evolution of anti-Israel extremism in Canada. (photo by Pat Johnson)
At times, the world seems to be going off the rails, with Canadian activists overtly cheering on terrorists and celebrating the atrocities of Oct. 7. But Terry Glavin, a BC writer and thinker with a lifetime of experience on the ground as a journalist in the Middle East, thinks a reckoning is coming.
Speaking with Rabbi Dan Moskovitz at Temple Sholom Synagogue Jan. 30, Glavin, who says he comes from the political left, sees “a very, very disturbing and destructive phenomenon in all of the places where the left used to be.”
Part of that is a consequence of a change in global dynamics.
“Where there was once a fairly robust sort of proletariat internationalism on the left, there was something that was emerging by the ’60s and ’70s that was kind of a Third Worldist, anti-Western substitution for a genuinely progressive working-class internationalism,” he said. “That has had enormous implications in the trajectory of human history – very disturbing implications.”
The socialist or communist ideal never took hold in the West and that sent proponents seeking a spark that could catch fire.
“The working class simply didn’t take up the offer of overthrowing the state and seizing the means of production,” said Glavin, “so a lot of people on the European left went looking for a new proletariat and found it in Third World revolutionaries. Sometimes that was actually a legitimate thing to do. But, in the context of the so-called Arab world, what has often as not occurred is that bonds of solidarity would be forged with some of the most reactionary, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, theocratic, fascistic movements.”
Lacking a coherent political ideology, the movement coalesced around “anti-imperialism,” whose unifying principle was simply sharing the same enemies.
“All you have to basically do is say ‘I’m against the Americans, I’m anti-imperialist,’ and you’re in,” Glavin said.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was disorienting to the left, which then discovered the politics of anti-globalization. This created more strange bedfellows, Glavin said, because denouncing the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum had once been the purview of the right.
Then, after the 9/11 terror attacks, anti-globalism took a backseat to what its adherents called an “antiwar” movement. Glavin takes exception to the term, because he said it was not an antiwar movement so much as a movement that sided with the West’s enemies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“That’s a fairly serious charge to levy,” he said, “but organizationally and institutionally, that is actually a fact, in Canada particularly.”
A series of annual conferences in Cairo during the first decade of this century brought together global organizations including Canadian groups like Toronto Stop the War Coalition, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Vancouver Coalition to Stop the War and others. In Cairo, they were joined by representatives of terror groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These ostensible antiwar groups, and these decidedly violent groups, developed a program that opposed “imperialism.” And, vilified above every evil was the perceived imperialism of Zionism.
“At its very birthing, at its very centre, was anti-Zionism,” Glavin said.
While most of these Canadian activists probably self-identified as leftists, they had made common cause with the descendants of history’s most extreme right.
“We sort of imagine that there was this horrible phenomenon of Nazism that consumed millions and millions and millions of people in a world war and then we won and then it was over,” he said. “People forget that the same philosophy, the same ideology, the same antisemitic hatreds, were spreading throughout the so-called Arab world, throughout the Maghreb and the Levant, and Iran as well, in the 1920s and 1930s. It persisted.”
Glavin explained the direct line from the Nazi collaborationist Arab leaders of the 1940s and successive decades of forces in the region that translate and promulgate Mein Kampf and keep the flame of fascism alive.
Despite this seeming ideological incongruity, Canadian activists returning from Cairo found some receptive audiences for particularly Canadian reasons. Canada is a decentralized, multicultural constitutional monarchy, post-nationalistic and less driven by a cohesive patriotic impulse than some other states, according to Glavin. These fluidities caused Canadians to search for an identity.
“We needed to find a way to figure out our place in the world,” he said.
Canadians were very engaged with the creation of the United Nations, including its Declaration of Human Rights. “So, the United Nations and its protocols have always significantly informed Canadian foreign policy,” he said. “If you vest your foreign-policy principles in an institution that, without anybody noticing for some reason, became largely a function of the police-state bloc and the Organization for the Islamic Conference, you’re going to find yourself in a bit of a spot.”
This may have created fertile soil for the sorts of ideas that these activists brought back from Cairo, he said. It may also explain why “Israel Apartheid Week,” a global anti-Israel phenomenon, began at the University of Toronto and why an anti-Israel boycott movement began in Canada three years before the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement was originated by Palestinians.
Meanwhile, as activists claimed to be advocating for peace in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, Glavin said they were instead often working at direct cross-purposes with those peoples’ self-defined interests. Such was the case, he argued, with those who opposed Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan.
“The Afghan left, the Afghan women’s movement, the Afghan student movement, Afghan intellectuals, poets, Afghan socialists, liberals, were all ‘troops in,’” he said. “All these white people in North America and Europe were all ‘troops out.’ Right away, that should tell you something. Something has been broken in the traditions of left-wing solidarity among and between working people around the world.”
Journalists Glavin knew in Afghanistan were baffled by Canadian activists.
“They would see another protest in Toronto,” he said, and they would ask: “Why would they do that to us?”
The left has to be held to account, Glavin said, naming the New Democratic Party specifically.
“Where the hell were you when this was happening? What were you saying when trade union leaders were meeting with Hezbollah, were meeting in Damascus with these blood-soaked tyrants? Where were you?” he asked. “The women of Afghanistan were begging – begging you – to stay with them, just hang on for a couple more years. [They were saying] ‘We’ve got an entire generation of young people coming up now, they’re graduating and they are going to be taking over, and you walk away from us? How could you do this?’”
All of these threads of ideological extremism came together with a particular fervour after Oct. 7, 2023, Glavin argued.
“Immediately, across this country, people were pouring into the streets celebrating the bloodiest pogrom since the time of the death camps,” he said.
This was new, Glavin noted. A couple of decades earlier, at the height of the antiwar movement, activists were not overtly championing the terrorists.
“You didn’t have hundreds and hundreds of people in the streets saying, ‘We are Al Qaeda, we support Al Qaeda, yay Al Qaeda,’” he said. “You have that now – people who are openly, enthusiastically, deliriously, hysterically praising Hamas. That’s different. Something big has changed. Something very big has happened.”
This has affected Canadian Jews severely.
“On Oct. 8, Canadian Jews just didn’t wake up to find that the fabric of the country had been kind of torn by this, but rather that something had been woven into the very fabric of the country itself,” he said.
As things have deteriorated to the point where clusters of Canadians are literally celebrating the mass murder of Jews, Glavin sees a ray of hope. By showing their true colours, these activists have made it more difficult for aware Canadians to ignore the extremism that has consumed parts of our society, including the anti-Israel left. He foresees a reckoning.
“I am optimistic,” he said, “because I do think that most normal people, on any number of fronts, have simply had enough.”
Dr. Peter Suedfeld speaks at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the Bayit. (photo by Pat Johnson)
As a child in Budapest, Dr. Peter Suedfeld’s family spoke Hungarian in the home and considered themselves Hungarians first and Jews second.
“If you asked us, ‘What are you? Who are you?’ The answer would be Hungarians,” he said. “Interestingly, we thought that that’s what the people around us thought also, that that’s what we were – Hungarians. It turned out a little later that we were mistaken.”
Suedfeld shared his family’s Holocaust story and his survival Jan. 26 at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration (IHRD) at the Bayit synagogue in Richmond.
Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary during most of the war, did not share Hitler’s determination to destroy the Jewish people, Suedfeld said. As a result, the status of Jews in the country was not markedly worse than that of other Hungarians during the early war years.
“By 1944, things were very different,” Suedfeld said. “It was increasingly likely that Germany, contrary to all expectations, was not going to win the war.”
The Soviets had pushed back the German advance on the Eastern Front and the Western Allies were close enough to bomb Budapest routinely. Food was scarce, as resources were being pilfered and transported to Germany.
Realizing that the Hungarians had chosen the wrong side in this war, as they had at other times in history, Horthy went on the radio and announced that his country wassurrendering, Suedfeld explained, whereupon Hitler directly occupied Hungary for the first time. Horthy’s government was replaced with an overtly fascist regime, the Arrow Cross.
“They took it upon themselves to carry out the full Nuremberg Laws and all the persecution that had happened in Germany and Poland,” said Suedfeld. “It came later to us than it had many other countries in Europe but, when it came, they were determined to catch up.”
Adolf Eichmann himself, mastermind of the “Final Solution,” was sent to oversee operations in Hungary. Jews were forced to wear the yellow star for the first time and executions of Jews began in earnest.
Jews were taken to the banks of the Danube, where they were lined up in groups of three, tied together, their shoes removed, and then the middle person in the trio was shot. When the middle person fell into the river, the other two were dragged down and drowned, accomplishing the objective with one bullet rather than three. Suedfeld said 30,000 are estimated to have been murdered in this fashion.
Suedfeld’s paternal grandfather, a hero from the First World War, had died a few years earlier. He had assumed that his military accomplishments would shield his family from whatever antisemitic legislation was passed.
“He died before he found out that he was wrong,” said Suedfeld, whose paternal grandmother astonishingly survived the Holocaust. His mother’s parents entered the ghetto, where they soon died from the privations there.
Young Peter’s own story of survival was improbable. His mother was taken from their home while 8-year-old Peter watched, not knowing it would be the final time he saw her. She was taken to a holding camp in Hungary and from there to Auschwitz.
His father was drafted into forced labour and later experienced a death march and incarceration at Mauthausen, “one of the worst of those cruel, vicious camps.”
“But he survived,” Suedfeld recounted. “After the war, he was given a job, because he spoke English, interrogating suspected war criminals and SS officers captured in the vicinity. He enjoyed it.”
Young Peter survived after his mother was arrested because his aunt discovered him alone at home. She took him and decided, with his grandparents, that he should be hidden.
“They somehow found out that the International Red Cross had some orphanages started around the city. They were for war orphans but they smuggled a few Jews in when they thought they could get away with it,” he said. “I was a good candidate for hiding because I was blond and had blue eyes so I could get away with pretending I wasn’t Jewish.”
Like many survivors, Suedfeld’s existence is a result of an incalculable number of close calls and lucky chances. In just one instance, near the end of the war, the group of orphans he was with were being transported from one location to another. They were lining up to cross over a little fence when some soldiers saw them and may have assumed they were enemy forces. Machine gun fire burst forth.
“Shots were fired and the kid on my left was hit,” said Suedfeld. “And the kid on my right was hit. But when it was pointing at me was the time that the next cartridge was being fed into the gun and so there was no shot. Pure dumb luck.”
Peter and his father fled Hungary when the communists took power. Suedfeld made his way to the United States in 1948, served in the US Army, eventually received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1963 and taught at American universities before moving to Vancouver. He was appointed professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in 1972. His work and research are concerned with how human beings adapt and cope with challenge, stress and resilience.
At the commemoration, the Bayit’s Rabbi Levi Varnai reflected on the word zachor, remember.
“We are obligated to remember, today, tomorrow and really every single day,” he said. “Zachor is always important but it feels like today it’s even more important than ever before.”
He acknowledged the nine Holocaust survivors in attendance and expressed regret that, after their childhoods were stolen, their golden years are now tarnished by witnessing a new surge of antisemitism.
“As much as we want to focus on the future and as much as we want to continue to build and not always think about our dark past, the only way to ensure a proper future is by remembering the atrocities, the hardships of the past,” the rabbi said. “We are lucky that we still live in an age that we can come into a room to witness survivors and share their testimonies. It is our obligation to take these stories and make sure that they will never ever be forgotten.”
Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, noted the significance of the presence of elected representatives at the event.
“If only our ancestors had public officials showing up like this and talking about how we have to create a safer space,” said Shanken, who said that people have asked him how bad antisemitism needs to get in Canada before Jews consider leaving the country.
“When do we get out of here?” he asked. “We get out of here when the government starts making laws against us.” Governments in Canada of all parties, he said, “have been steadfast in trying to voice the need for safety and security for the Jewish people and for all people across our country, our province, our cities. I want to thank them for spending time with us tonight.”
Michael Sachs, director for Western Canada of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre and a past president of the Bayit, who initiated the annual Holocaust remembrance event six years ago, noted that the commemoration was taking place “amidst the worst, most sustained amount of antisemitism that Canadian Jews have ever experienced.”
“Survivors are a constant source of inspiration and wisdom for us,” he said. “No one can speak with a greater authority on what can happen when hate is left unchallenged than these survivors. For them, having witnessed firsthand and paid a dear price for society not standing up to the worst impulses of humanity, this is not academic.”
He asked everyone in attendance to redouble their efforts toward education about the Holocaust and about modern-day manifestations of antisemitism.
“Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone, nor should we – not if we want a better society for all,” said Sachs. “The light of education shall lead our way.”
Steveston-Richmond East Member of Parliament Parm Bains represented the federal government and read greetings from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Kelly Greene, MLA for Richmond Steveston and minister of emergency management and climate readiness, brought greetings from Premier David Eby. All three of Richmond’s other MLAs – Teresa Wat (Richmond-Bridgeport), Steve Kooner (Richmond-Queensborough) and Hon Chan (Richmond Centre) – were present. Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brody read a city proclamation and was joined by councilors Bill McNulty, Andy Hobbs and Alexa Loo. Richmond RCMP chief superintendent Dave Chouhan was also in attendance. Bayit president Keith Liedtke emceed.
Nine Holocaust survivors lit candles. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim. Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, associate director of programs and community relations at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced Suedfeld.
The event was co-sponsored by the Bayit, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and Kehila Society of Richmond.
Claire Sicherman read from her book Imprint, about intergenerational trauma, at UBC Hillel on Jan. 21.(photo by Pat Johnson)
Understanding of intergenerational trauma has expanded in recent decades. Two granddaughters of Holocaust survivors discussed the larger phenomenon and their personal experiences recently at the University of British Columbia’s Hillel House, part of Hillel’s Holocaust Awareness Week.
Claire Sicherman, author, workshop facilitator and trauma-informed somatic writing coach, shared her experiences and read from her book, Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation, which was published in 2017. She was in conversation with Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, associate director of programs and community relations at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which co-sponsored the Jan. 21 event with Hillel BC.
Sicherman attributed to psychologist Dr. Arielle Schwartz the definition of intergenerational trauma as the ways in which the unresolved experiences of traumas, losses and griefs of one generation can become a legacy that is passed down to the next generation.
“In other words,” said Sicherman, “the experiences of my grandparents are passed down through my parents to me.”
In addition to the “nurture” component of family legacies, there is the “nature” component of epigenetics, which Sicherman described as “the study of how genes turn on and off in response to environmental change.”
“I’ve heard it talked about like it’s sort of like light switches switching on and off in the body,” she explained. “Whatever switches switched on for my grandparents would then be switched on, passed down to my parent, passed down to me.”
Experts in the field say it’s not a biological prison, Sicherman said. “They are actually malleable, so what you’re born with, you are not necessarily stuck with. We do have the ability to change certain things. There is hope in that.”
Growing up, Sicherman knew little or nothing about inherited trauma.
“When I started reading about it, I began to understand that what was going on with me wasn’t really my fault or that it wasn’t really something wrong with me,” she said. “It was just that I was carrying this huge thing.”
Reading excerpts from her book, Sicherman recounted being “disconnected from my body.” The inherited trauma manifested as a nervous system on overdrive and a tendency to hypervigilance. She was always ready to bolt out the door, looking for exit signs, aware of potential dangers, unable to fully rest, and prone to stress and anxiety.
She said that untold stories often pass more powerfully from generation to generation than stories that are recounted.
“When you think about that,” said Sicherman, “it’s what we don’t talk about that has more weight. It’s the silence. It’s the secrets.… That’s why it’s also important to me to speak out about these things, because it’s healing that goes across generations.”
Her survivor grandparents thought they were protecting their children through silence, Sicherman said. In response, the second generation learned not to ask questions.
There were other silences. In addition to the limited discussion around the Holocaust, Sicherman did not learn until well into her own adulthood that, when she was 4 years old, her grandfather had taken his own life, and not died of a heart attack, as she had been led to believe.
As someone who writes about and works with others on issues of healing intergenerational trauma, she urges people to embrace the totality of what they have inherited.
“Aside from trauma, what are the legacies that your ancestors bring to you?” she asked. “What are the gifts? What are the strengths? That’s also an important question to ask yourself, and a way of connecting with Jewish heritage. What are the strengths of your lineage? Is it survival? Is it tenacity? Is it humour? Is it creativity? Those are questions that you can ask yourself.”
Her son, Ben Sicherman, a UBC student, was present and also spoke of his family’s legacy of trauma. He described struggling with anxiety when he was younger and learning mechanisms for addressing issues through his parents’ modeling. He also spoke of carrying the legacy of his ancestors in ways like choosing 18 as his hockey number, not only because it represents chai, life, but because the numbers on his great-grandmother’s Auschwitz tattoo added up to the number 18.
Intergenerational trauma is a major component of her life’s work, said Sicherman.
“I do feel a sense of obligation, as a third generation,” she said. “But I also feel like this is part of my calling, too. It’s very meaningful. It’s an obligation that is not homework. It’s part of what I was set out to do.”
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Richard Lowy stood in the spot where his late father, Leopold Lowy, davened and kibitzed for decades after arriving in Vancouver as a young man who had survived some of the most grotesque inhumanity history has known. Leo Lowy was a “Mengele twin” and a survivor of Auschwitz.
“This is where my father sat in synagogue,” Lowy said Jan. 27 to a packed audience at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue, beginning a unique and emotional commemoration that doubled as the launch of Kalman and Leopold, Lowy’s book about his father’s survival.
Leo Lowy was just one of many survivors who joined Schara Tzedeck after their arrival on the West Coast in the late 1940s and 1950s. They didn’t burden others with their stories of survival, the son told the audience.
Wearing his father’s tallit and carrying his siddur, Richard Lowy shared a little of his father’s story. The complete narrative of Leopold’s survival in Auschwitz – and the relationship the 16-year-old developed with a 14-year-old boy named Kalman Braun – is detailed in the book, which took Richard Lowy years of work to complete.
As twins, Leopold and his sister Miriam, as well as Kalman and his sister Judith, were of special interest to physician Josef Mengele, known to his victims and to history as Dr. Death.
“My father was a boy when he arrived in Auschwitz,” said Lowy. “He and his twin sister Miriam were sent to the twin barracks, torn apart from the rest of their family.” Leo and Miriam’s parents, grandparents, eldest sister and the sister’s baby were murdered on arrival. His three other sisters were taken to a forced labour camp.
Leopold and Kalman were recruited as servants in the guard barracks.
“In that unimaginable darkness, they became brothers, bound by a hope to survive,” Lowy recounted. “In Auschwitz, my father became Kalman’s protector, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. Kalman was a naïve, religious boy. He was dangerously unaware of the brutal reality they faced. His innocence threatened to draw the attention of the SS guards. Leopold knew that even the smallest misstep could lead to a beating or worse. Leo, my father, wanted to be invisible. When there was a roll call, he would go to the back of the line. He didn’t want to draw attention. He refused to make friends. He was unwilling to endure the anguish of getting to know someone and then they would end up on the pile. He buried his emotions deep, forcing himself to see the heap of bodies as nothing more than lumber. Yet, despite his efforts to remain detached, he was now compelled to guide Kalman, shielding him as a means of survival. What began as a necessity slowly evolved into a bond of friendship. Together, they endured the horrors of the SS guards and Mengele’s experiments.”
When the camp was liberated, the survivors parted with little fanfare. Kalman and Leopold assumed they would never see each other again.
In 2000, Richard Lowy produced a documentary film, Leo’s Journey, about Leopold’s survival. A year later, it aired on Israeli television.
Reading from his book, Lowy described the moment that Kalman Bar On (né Braun), by now an elderly Israeli, was stunned to see a photo of the young Leo on his TV. There was not a doubt in Bar On’s mind that this was the boy whose protection and friendship had saved his life.
A few months later, Richard reunited the two.
“Their reunion was a moment beyond words,” he recalled. “Two men, now in their 70s, embraced as if no time had passed at all, as if the decades of separation had simply melted away. In that instant, they were no longer old men. They were boys again, transported back in time to when their survival depended on each other.
“For the first time in over 50 years, they stood face-to-face with someone who truly understood the horrors that each of them went through and endured. In each other, they found more than the shared memories,” said Lowy. “They rediscovered the unshakable bond of two souls who had witnessed, experienced and survived the unimaginable together.”
Leo Lowy was a collector of cantorial recordings, which Richard Lowy entrusted to Vancouver Cantor Yaacov Orzech, who chanted El Moleh Rachamim at the book launch. Also at the event, Lowy presented to Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt a 78 RPM recording of the rabbi’s great-grandfather, the renowned Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt.
Speaking to the audience, Rosenblatt reflected on the amount of desensitization that has to happen to get to the pinnacle of evil that Leo Lowy experienced.
“Our presence here tonight is our attempt to ensure that our culture does not approach even the distant horizon of the periphery of such atrocities,” he said.
Peter Meiszner, Vancouver city councilor and acting mayor, brought greetings from the city.
“May we work together to ensure that the tragedies of the past are never repeated and that the principles of justice and equity guide our way forward together,” he said.
Selina Robinson, former BC cabinet minister and author of the recently published book Truth Be Told, introduced Lowy.
“Richard’s work is a call to action,” Robinson said. “It challenges each and every one of us to remember, to teach and to prevent hatred and antisemitism from taking root. That’s incumbent on all of us as we bear witness. It reminds Jews of our ability to overcome these hatreds. In sharing Kalman and Leopold’s journey, their memory lives on, guiding us to build a more compassionate and tolerant world.”
The book is available at kalmanandleopold.com, where the video of Leo’s Journey can also be viewed.
The new historical novel by Vancouver writer David Spaner, Keefer Street, is as much about the idea of Keefer Street as it about the real East Vancouver avenue. This is appropriate, because the book is a reflection on the Spanish Civil War and its Canadian, especially its Jewish, volunteers. For the dead and the survivors, the war was a living hell. But for the survivors and anyone else with a direct or inherited memory of the 1936-39 conflagration, it is an idea. It has been called the Last Great Cause – and that is the underpinning of Spaner’s story.
Spaner takes part in the Feb. 26 JCC Jewish Book Festival event Jewish Fiction from Western Canada, in which Saskatchewan writer Dave Margoshes (A Simple Carpenter) is also featured.
Keefer Street toggles back and forth between the Spanish Civil War and a 1986 reunion of fighters and hangers-on (with occasional detours to family vignettes in other eras and areas). The storyline follows veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the ragtag Canadian volunteers who made their way to Spain in direct defiance of their own government, joining American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, as well as French, Poles and others signing on in a pre-Second World War proxy against Hitler and Mussolini and their Spanish incarnation, Francisco Franco.
The narrator, Jake Feldman (later Jack Fields), is a Mac-Pap from the neighbourhood – that is, the Strathcona area of East Vancouver, specifically Keefer Street, where waves of immigrants have planted their first roots in Canada. By the time we join Feldman’s spirited (if predictably stereotypical) Jewish family, Strathcona’s Jews have already begun moving to the Oak Street corridor and its environs, but the Jewish element remains prominent among the multicultural milieu of the area.
Spaner, who has written extensively about Vancouver’s left-wing (see Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983, jewishindependent.ca/history-of-left-coast), list-ticks a raft of momentous and minor Vancouver signposts and events, including Stanley Park’s hollow tree, the Sylvia Hotel’s Jewish roots, the lost, lamented Woodward’s flagship department store, Theatre Under the Stars (still going), Eastside firebrand Rose Barrett and her boy Dave, the Carnegie Library turned Downtown Eastside community centre, and the blacklisted singer Paul Robeson singing at the Peace Arch for binational audiences.
Obscure local trivia is also tucked into the pages. The Industrial Workers of the World got their nickname Wobblies here in Vancouver. David Oppenheimer, Bavarian Jew, became the city’s second mayor and has an eponymous park in the Downtown Eastside where the fictional Feldman family frolics. Local gal Sadya Marcowitz became Mary Livingstone and married Jack Benny, going on to become a major radio star.
More momentous local events are introduced, including the On-to-Ottawa Trek, the 1935 Ballantyne Pier riots and the upheaval around the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsbad earlier that year.
The life of Jake/Jack takes on a bit of a Forrest Gump feel with his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, such as when he just happens to be watching an amateur baseball game in Toronto when Nazis descend in what we know now as the infamous antisemitic (and anti-antisemitic counteroffensive) Christie Pits riots.
Keefer Street is sometimes a didactic (perhaps necessarily, given the times) 101 on antisemitism in Canada, including Toronto’s Swastika Club and Quebec’s philo-fascist Adrien Arcand.
The flashbacks feature the parents’ hardscrabble migrant experience and their engagement in the shmata and fur trades, as well as the moderately idyllic life of Vancouver kids and teens in the 1930s. Apparently before the advent of Netflix, something called “shooting pool” was a popular pastime.
Hindsight allows Jake to reflect on the legal proscriptions against enlisting with a foreign militia, then the socialostracism on their return due to the associations of Spanish partisans with communism, then McCarthyism, then the apathy and ignorance of the Me Generation and its aftermaths, in which successive generations don’t know the role the Spanish Civil War or its belligerents played in 20th-century history.
The 1986 reunion allows for the exploration of the emotions of former fighters, wondering what their impacts were and what their lives have become.
Jews played a major role in the Spanish Civil War, as Keefer Street’s central protagonists demonstrate. This was understandable as a first military salvo against fascism, but Spaner illuminates another massive historical consonance that may be overlooked.
“Along with everything else the Civil War stood for, it meant a Jewish return to Spain after centuries in exile,” says one of the characters at the reunion. “During the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century, the country’s considerable Jewish population, though it had lived there for eons, was given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Many were expelled. In the 1930s, Jews returned to Spain, volunteering in disproportionately large numbers – over half of the American nurses, for instance, from a country three-point-something percent Jewish. One personal note. In 1937, I crossed the same ocean going to Europe that my parents had fled across, coming from Europe just a generation earlier. My parents fled the barbarism of pogroms, inquisitions. I came back to fight it.”
Says Spaner through his character Jake: “Funny how a short time can define a lifetime. For a lot of the volunteers, the Spanish Civil War years are the big memory but, when you think about it, the war lasted less than three years. I was there about a year-and-a-half and so much of it’s a blur.”
