Byline: Pat Johnson

Sharing legends of Mossad

Ronen Bergman signs a copy of his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations for an attendee of his talk at Congregation Beth Tikvah Feb. 2. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Ronen Bergman, perhaps the leading historian on Israeli intelligence, spoke in Richmond recently, engaging a packed sanctuary at Congregation Beth Tikvah Feb. 2 with stories that make Ocean’s Eleven pale in comparison.

Bergman, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and senior political and military analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, shared the history of the Mossad as told in his bestselling book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. One had an extremely timely conclusion.

Imad Mughniyeh was the military commander of Hezbollah, who Bergman called “the most wanted and most capable and most diabolical terrorist who ever walked the face of the earth.” Mughniyeh is believed responsible for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and truck bombings in the same city, which killed hundreds of U.S. and French military personnel, and also was involved in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre there, as well as countless other atrocities worldwide.

“He was wanted by 41 different countries and the only thing they had from him is a vague photograph from 1983,” said Bergman. Finally, the Mossad located Mughniyeh in a safe house in Damascus, but, since Israel does not have diplomatic relations with Syria and, therefore, does not have an embassy there, they were at a disadvantage. Embassies are a great boon to spies, he said.

“You can have diplomatic immunity, you have cars, you have diplomatic mail, you can smuggle, it’s wonderful,” he said. “But they couldn’t get to him, they couldn’t kill him in Damascus, because it was so hard to operate, so Mossad turned to the only organization that could: the CIA. Because the CIA had something that Mossad will never have in Damascus: an embassy.”

The CIA required permission from then-U.S. President George W. Bush, so Ehud Olmert, who was then Israel’s prime minister, flew to Washington for a secret meeting with Bush and urged the president to help Mossad take out the terrorist, noting the number of Americans Mughniyeh had killed.

“George Bush was convinced, but he said on one condition – no collateral damage,” Bergman said. No bystanders or associates were to be harmed.

Working with the CIA, the Mossad set up the scenario and then aborted the operation 53 times because the target was not within the defined kill zone or because he was not alone or because, on one occasion, his identity could not be 100% verified because he was wearing a scarf due to inclement weather.

On Feb. 12, 2008, Mughniyeh left the safe house and the Mossad was about to push the button when they realized he was not alone.

“He’s walking with a man,” Bergman recounted. “Someone looks at the monitor and says, oh that’s not just a man, that’s Good Dog. Good Dog was the codename for Qasem Soleimani,” the top Iranian general and commander of the Quds Force, responsible for clandestine operations and global terror.

“So, someone said, how wonderful, let’s take them both,” said Bergman. “They called Meir Dagan [director of Mossad], who was sitting shivah for his mother. He calls Olmert and Olmert says no, abort, I promised President Bush that only Mughniyeh is killed.”

Later that same day, Mughniyeh was found alone outside the safe house and killed by an exploding car as he passed on foot. But Soleimani would live another dozen years – until he was killed Jan. 3 of this year, on orders of U.S. President Donald Trump, sparking a conflict that nearly led to all-out war between the United States and Iran.

Bergman, a lawyer and author of six bestselling books, recently received the Sokolov Prize, Israel’s equivalent of the Pulitzer. In undertaking Rise and Kill First, Bergman discarded all previous work on the subject and interviewed 1,000 intelligence officials and others with inside information on the Mossad and its operations. The book is now being turned into an HBO series.

Bergman recounted how, in 2018, Israel stunned the world when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu invited the media to view a massive cache of documents and other materials related to the Iranian nuclear project. The moment was the culmination of two years of planning, involving 500 operatives, including 18 who located and infiltrated a secret archive outside Tehran, then swooped in, with a five-and-a-half-hour window in the middle of the night, to execute the deed and escape, relocating the ayatollah’s nuclear secrets to Israel.

Even with the Mossad’s expertise at safe-cracking, the team knew that they would not have time, once inside the archive, to fiddle with locks.

“So, Mossad establishes a front company in Europe who orders two empty safes from the same Iranian manufacturer. They ship the safes to Paris, then ship them to the Mossad lab in Tel Aviv, where they start drilling into them, trying to find what’s the fastest way to open them.”

They determined that it would require at least 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit to break into the archives’ security.

“Now imagine what sort of energy you need to shlep with you to Tehran in order to create such energy and do that in four different places because you need to open all the vaults,” said Bergman. They also had to bypass other security systems and interfere with video surveillance to make the cameras continue broadcasting as if nothing untoward was happening.

In the morning, when the heist was discovered by archives security officials, Bergman said, “no less than 12,000 troops, Revolutionary Guards, policeman, army” and others descended on the place, but could not discern how anyone could get in, grab all the contents and get out undetected. It would be two months until Netanyahu went public and the Iranians could finally confirm that the perpetrators were Mossad.

“Someone could ask, why should we write a book about the history of the Mossad? This is secret, right?” Bergman said. He acknowledges he left out a great number of secrets, some of which he will take to the grave, but added that it is impossible to tell the story of Israel without telling the story of the Mossad because any major decisions, any turning points in the dramatic story of the country, have the imprint of the intelligence services on it.

He warned, though, that this is not all derring-do and triumph. “If you want to read a book just glorifying Israeli intelligence, I suggest you don’t read Rise and Kill First,” he said. “Sometimes, the Jewish James Bond looks more like Inspector Clouseau.”

Many people ask Bergman how he got the top intelligence officials in the country – former heads of agency, high-level operatives, spies and agents – to talk, usually quite freely and almost always on the record.

“It was easy,” he said. “I smiled. When you smile to people, they feel comfortable to talk. But that’s not the whole answer. These people wanted to talk because they wanted people to know … what they have done in order to keep Israel safe.”

Some interviewees said they told Bergman things they had never told their spouses. But, when subjects were not forthcoming, he had a trick.

“If someone was not that enthusiastic to speak, I did to him or her the one thing that makes Israelis more ballistic and furious than anything else,” Bergman said. “I told him someone else took credit for his operations.”

He mooted a typical response: “What? He said that he was behind enemy lines, that he planned the operation, that he risked his life? Now I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bergman deadpanned. “Always works.”

In a remarkable number of the interviews, a single phrase frequently stood out: a quote from the Babylonian Talmud: “Whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”

“Because the way they saw it, they had no other choice,” said Bergman, noting that outsiders cannot understand the DNA, the genome, the motives of Israelis, without understanding the imprint of the Holocaust and the determination to never be powerless again.

Hamas has bragged that they have more volunteers for suicide bombings than they have suicide belts.

“It turns out the only thing that stops these people from coming is the most extensive campaign of targeted killing ever launched in history – and not against the suicide bombers,” said Bergman. “When the Shin Bet [Israel’s internal security service] and Israeli Air Force started to target the layer above them – the bomb-makers, the indoctrinators, the recruiters, the regional commanders – then it turns out that these people who have no problem with sending everybody to their death, once the price tag is attached to themselves and their families, they say, well, we’ll die, but maybe not today.”

The targeting approach, said Bergman, was adopted by the United States, whose military leaders came to realize that taking out the top leadership of the enemy was ultimately less lethal and costly than the alternatives.

“And so, the CIA started following the successful Israeli experience, started to perform targeted killings,” said Bergman. “Do you know the president who organized the largest number of targeted killings in history? Barack Obama, because he realized that this is the weapon that, at the end of the day, takes less human lives than going into an all-out war. And it’s effective.”

Leanne Hazon, Beth Tikvah’s vice-president of programming, welcomed the audience and noted the size of the crowd despite it being Super Bowl Sunday. Rabbi Adam Rubin introduced Bergman. The author signed copies of his book after his talk.

War heroism recalled

Prof. George Bluman speaks at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration, Jan. 19. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was honoured in Vancouver this month with a lecture on his wartime heroism – by a man who owes his life to the actions of Sugihara when the diplomat served as consul for the Imperial Japanese government in Lithuania, near the start of the Second World War.

George Bluman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration Jan. 19, which was held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. The annual event is presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and took place 75 years and two days after Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary whose actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, was last seen alive. The actions of Sugihara, vice-consul of the Japanese embassy in Kaunas, Lithuania, paralleled those of Wallenberg in that he issued visas and took extraordinary actions to save the lives of the threatened Jews of Europe.

Bluman’s parents, Nathan and Susan Bluman, fled to Lithuania after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. There, they received transit visas from Sugihara, which enabled them to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan. They then obtained temporary permits to enter Canada and they were aboard the last ship sailing from Japan to Vancouver prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

An estimated 15% of Sugihara survivors became Canadians, many of them remaining in Vancouver, including the Bluman family, which has come to number 23, now including great-grandchildren of Susan and Nathan. It is estimated that Sugihara’s actions facilitated the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees.

In addition to the Sugihara descendants living in Vancouver, Bluman noted an additional local connection. On his way to Europe for the series of diplomatic postings that would lead to his heroic acts, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko arrived by ship in Vancouver in 1937, then took a transcontinental train to the East Coast to board another ship, which would take them to Europe.

A 2017 poll in a Tokyo publication rated Sugihara as the most important Japanese person ever. “Why?” Bluman asked. “Against advice from his superiors in Tokyo, he issued transit visas to Japan that ended up saving about 2,100 Jewish refugees who otherwise would have been likely murdered. Those saved included my parents as well as one of my uncles and his wife.… Perhaps as many as 40,000 people owe their lives due to the extraordinary heroic deeds of Sugihara.”

Two diplomats from the Netherlands played crucial roles in Sugihara’s heroics, Bluman said. After the Nazi occupation of that country, in May 1940, an anti-Nazi Dutch government-in-exile was established in London and remained in charge of all Dutch embassies. The anti-Nazi Dutch ambassador in Latvia, L.P.J. de Decker, dismissed his pro-Nazi Lithuanian honorary consul, replacing him with Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch engineer heading Philips electronics in Kaunas.

“Two young Dutch rabbinical students approached Zwartendijk, requesting documentation to go to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, with the aim of traveling east through the Soviet Union, Japan, the Pacific Ocean and the Panama Canal to tiny Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, about one-sixth the size of Metro Vancouver. They also sought permits for their mostly Polish classmates.

“Why Curaçao?” asked Bluman. “Because no visa was required to enter Curaçao. The local governor had sole authority to permit entry. But this was rarely granted. Zwartendijk was given permission by de Decker, the Dutch ambassador in Riga [Latvia], to issue permits to Curaçao to their fellow rabbinical students that stated, in French, ‘A visa for entry is not required,’ leaving out the condition of the governor’s permission. Moreover, Zwartendijk courageously agreed to issue such permits to all Jewish refugees who applied for them.”

A delegation of Jewish refugees approached Sugihara about obtaining Japanese transit visas, a necessary step for the scheme’s success.

“Without permission from Tokyo, and after getting Soviet approval, signed by Stalin, for refugee transit through the Soviet Union, Sugihara issued transit visas valid for a stay of 10 days in Japan, based on the seemingly sufficient Zwartendijk Curaçao permits,” said Bluman. “Zwartendijk signed 2,300 such permits, until his office was forced to close on the day Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union.… The scam worked.”

With the annexation of the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, all foreign embassies were ordered closed. Though Zwartendijk left, Sugihara managed to stay on for a further four weeks to continue writing transit visas – even for Jews who had not obtained a visa from Zwartendijk.

“These Jews included my parents, who approached Sugihara’s office six days after Zwartendijk had left,” Bluman said.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Jewish refugees issued Sugihara visas survived and about three-quarters made it to Japan. Almost half carried on to Shanghai, China, to wait out the war.

Sugihara’s diplomatic career effectively ended in Romania, where he was posted at the end of the war. When the Soviets occupied Bucharest, Sugihara and his family were imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp for 18 months.

Back in Japan in 1946, Sugihara was dismissed from diplomatic service and spent the next several decades in low-key positions in Japan and Moscow. His retirement from service was ostensibly a matter of downsizing, but some have speculated that his heroic insubordination was a cause.

Only in 1968 did Sugihara learn that most of the Jews he had helped had survived. In 1985, he was recognized by the state of Israel, receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, as well as perpetual Israeli citizenship for himself and his family. Zwartendijk was posthumously honoured in 1997. Sugihara died in 1986, at the age of 86. Bluman retains close contact with the family in Japan.

“In my family,” Bluman concluded, “there is one great hero we always carry in our hearts and to whom we will be forever grateful: Chiune Sugihara.”

After Bluman’s presentation, attendees watched the film Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. Earlier, Alan La Fevre, president of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, welcomed guests, including the deputy mayor of the city of Vancouver, Christine Boyle, who read a proclamation declaring Raoul Wallenberg Day. Diplomats from Japan and Ukraine were in attendance.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was formed in 2013 by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities. The society continues the legacy of the annual Wallenberg Day events in Vancouver, recognizing and honouring individuals who, at great personal risk, have helped others by acting against unjust laws, norms or conventions.

Police incident at shul

No one was injured and police are ruling out antisemitic motivations after an intruder caused a standoff in Victoria’s Emanu-El synagogue.

Victoria police were called to the historic Blanshard Street synagogue shortly after 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 9 after a report of an unwanted man inside the building.

“Upon arrival of officers, they attempted to speak with the man, which was not successful,” according to a police statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team was activated along with crisis negotiators.”

The standoff lasted nearly four hours.

“Shortly before 12:30 p.m., the man, who was suffering a mental health crisis, was apprehended and transported to hospital with non-life threatening injuries,” according to police.

Rabbi Harry Brechner, spiritual leader of Congregation Emanu-El, which is Canada’s oldest synagogue in continuous operation, issued a statement later in the day.

“A mentally ill person brushed past a Gan Shalom (daycare) parent and managed to enter the building not due to any fault of the daycare parent,” Brechner wrote. “Another daycare parent quickly called emergency 911 and the police were dispatched. The police were remarkably responsive, communicative and efficient. Our daycare children were never in a dangerous situation and, for most of the incident, they were not aware that anything unusual was happening.

“This mentally ill man held himself up in the balcony of the sanctuary; we were not successful at talking him down and out of the building. The police provided a transit bus for the daycare to transport the children to the other Gan Shalom daycare and the children felt like they were going on a field trip. It took the police a bit of force to subdue and retain the intruder and we are left with some broken windows and a mess to clean up. I am super-thankful to Victoria’s finest for their professionalism in containing this situation and ensuring that everyone was safe,” said Brechner. “This incident had nothing to do with antisemitism and could have occurred in any downtown building. The incident is a difficult and powerful reminder of the intensity and difficulties associated with our current mental health crisis.”

The rabbi concluded: “I want to also state that the Gan Shalom staff and Gan Shalom parents who stayed by to ensure that the children were safe were remarkable and very calm. We are very safe, our protocols were tested and proved efficient.”

An advocate for two states

Eli Kowaz is communications director at the Israel Policy Forum. (photo from Eli Kowaz)

This article is one in an occasional series about people with British Columbian roots having positive impacts in Israel and elsewhere.

For Vancouver-born Israeli Eli Kowaz, there is only one path to ensuring Israel remains both a Jewish state and a democracy: a two-state solution. The road to that ideal may be long and the slogging hard, but this is the core mandate of the Israel Policy Forum, where he serves as communications director.

Though focused on Israel and its situation, IPF’s mission is to “shape the discourse and mobilize support among American Jewish leaders and U.S. policymakers for the realization of a viable two-state solution.”

Israel currently has military control over the entire land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River but, to continue being a Jewish state as well as a democracy, Kowaz said, Israel faces a decision.

“It can decide to annex the West Bank, keep the entire land and, if it wants to be a Jewish state, it will have to give up on the democracy aspect because, if it was to grant all the citizens living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean equal rights, then already today, Jews would be about 50-50, a small majority,” he said.

The answer is not cut and dry, he acknowledged. The Jordan Valley is a vital Israeli security interest and, come what may, Israel is likely to maintain military control there for the foreseeable medium-term. But both Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump have recently obfuscated their countries’ erstwhile support for a two-state solution. In Netanyahu’s case, it’s at least partly political, said Kowaz.

“He is dependent on his right-wing coalition partners, he’s willing to say things and even do things to secure his position as prime minister, even though he’s already surpassed [David] Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving one,” Kowaz said. “A lot of it is right-wing pandering to those people. Another part of it is a genuine security concern. The research done by the top security experts in Israel and others show that there is a way to keep that area secure while advancing a gradual separation of Palestinians and an eventual two states. Obviously, it’s not something that’s happening tomorrow.”

Kowaz, now 29, grew up in Vancouver’s Oakridge neighbourhood with an Israeli father, Joseph Kowaz, who moved to Vancouver in his 20s, and a mother, Andrea (Rogow) Kowaz, who moved here from New York at a young age. His late maternal grandparents were community leaders and academics Dr. Sally and Dr. Robert Rogow.

He attended Vancouver Talmud Torah and Hebrew Academy for elementary school and Magee and King David high schools, “so I kind of got a taste of Orthodox Jewish education, more of a secular traditional and also public school, so it was nice to have,” he said.

Kowaz did a gap year in Israel after high school, studying at Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University. Returning to Canada, he graduated from McGill University in Montreal and then completed a graduate degree in digital media at Ryerson University in Toronto. His final project for his degree addressed ways to remember and educate about the Holocaust in the 21st century.

“From the beginning, I wanted to do something that was Israel-related,” said Kowaz. “So, it was either move straight to Israel or look for something Israel-connected that was outside of Israel.” He moved to New York City and soon got work at IPF. He moved to Tel Aviv last year and, in July 2018, married Tal Dor, a former graphic designer for the Israel Defence Forces newspaper BaMahane. She occasionally gives Kowaz advice and support from her experience.

Part of a generation that gained political awareness during the Second Intifada, Kowaz said he has been affected by the violent imagery of those days.

“I obviously want the best for everyone, but Israel is most important to me and I want Israel to be a Jewish state,” he said. “I want Israel to be a state that’s also accepted in the world to the best that it can be. Obviously, there will still be people that hate us but I don’t want Israel’s best allies to be Hungary, Poland, these right-wing [governments] with elements of fascism. We don’t want those to be our best friends, so, at the end of the day, I don’t think we have a perfect partner and the Palestinians, they’re never going to be a perfect partner, but we should do what’s best for Israel, which is at least preserve conditions for a two-state solution, a form of separation to secure Israel as a Jewish and democratic state as a goal for the next five, 10, 15 years. Keep that a possibility. And, right now … I think it’s definitely still an option. It’s still on the table. We haven’t killed it. But it’s treading in the wrong direction.”

The Israel Policy Forum began in 1993, said Kowaz, on the very day the day of the famous handshake on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat.

“At that time, Yitzhak Rabin was looking for American Jewish support for his vision of peace,” he said. “Even back then, AIPAC were already becoming close with Binyamin Netanyahu, who [had been] Israel’s ambassador to the UN and, at that time, he was already opposition leader.”

IPF does a lot of work in Washington, D.C., with policymakers, convening roundtable discussions and panels with congresspeople, congressional staffers and opinion leaders, as well as organizing events in synagogues around the United States, all focused on preserving conditions for two states.

Their positions are credibly backed up, said Kowaz, by security experts in Israel, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, which was begun by former major-general Amnon Reshef, a hero of the Yom Kippur War, and includes a cadre of 290 former IDF generals, Mossad and Shin Bet division heads and others.

“They work in Israel, so we work closely with them to relay their policy proposals and their messaging to an American audience,” he said. “It represents about 80% of the retired security establishment. It doesn’t get more legitimate than that. These are people that, I think, between all of them have 6,000 years of experience at the highest positions, making decisions constantly with people’s lives.”

While AIPAC has an upstart challenger on the left, J Street, Kowaz sees IPF as a more fact-based alternative to the politically oriented advocacy groups.

“People are looking for a voice that is different, that’s more policy-based, less trying to rally the troops and more looking at the facts,” he said. “I think we provide that kind of home and, in a way, everything’s very fact-based.”

Kowaz looks forward to continuing to work toward the perpetuation of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.

“It really doesn’t matter to me what the role is, I think that’s where I’d like to see myself,” he said, adding: “I’ve given up on the professional soccer career.”

A bleak take on our times

Bari Weiss, the New York Times columnist, grew up in Pittsburgh and so the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, in October 2017, hit even closer to home for her than for most Jewish North Americans. For many American Jews, she writes, it was the awakening after “a holiday from history.” It seems to have raised the question: Is the postwar reprieve from antisemitism coming to an end?

The majority of her tight, short book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (Crown, 2019) is a litany of bleak, depressing anecdotes and statistics about the rise of antisemitic ideas and violence in North America and Europe. One imagines the title, which suggests action and optimism, being brainstormed by the publisher’s more upbeat marketing department over the alternative The Sky is Falling. But this is not to discount the value of the bleakness. It is a brief synopsis of rightful concerns around the political climate in the West in 2019.

The awakening, Weiss seems to acknowledge, was overdue. She recounts the 2006 kidnapping, weeks of torture and eventual murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris by a gang who assumed that, because Halimi was Jewish, he was also rich. As shocking as the ferocious crime, writes Weiss, was the response by the French authorities and the public, who largely chose to ignore the innately antisemitic nature of what had happened in order to retain a national self-perception that was challenged by the murder.

The consequences of what is happening, she warns, raise the stakes from the safety of Jews to the protection of the very idea of America.

“The object of our protection is not just the Jewish people. It is the health and future of a country that promised to be a New Jerusalem for all who sought it out,” she writes.

I am always disconcerted by the argument that, if we do not stand up for Jewish people when they are threatened, the enemies might eventually come for someone we actually give a damn about. But the evidence accumulates that this may be the best argument at hand.

Weiss summarizes the many antisemitisms – of left and right, of the Soviets and the fascists, of some Muslims and some African-Americans – even “Purim antisemitism” and “Chanukah antisemitism” (an interesting theory first advanced by the writer Dara Horn and it’s worth a Google). In brief, Weiss argues that the right of the spectrum considers Jews insufficiently white and not Christian, while the left contends that Jews are too white and overly privileged. Far-right antisemitism is more familiar, perhaps more clearly identifiable and is fought in partnership with what she calls Jewish people’s natural allies, liberals. Antisemitism on the left puts Jews in an especially challenging position.

She notes that the antisemitism and racism of Steve King, the far-right Republican congressman, is open to widespread criticism. “But criticize Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour for her repeated antisemitic outbursts? Criticize her and you are not just rendered racist and misogynist and an Islamophobe in league with Trump, you stand accused of putting her life at risk for trying to hold her accountable for promoting antisemitism.” (For her part, Sarsour two weeks ago declared that Weiss is “on the wrong side of history,” a statement so brazenly jaw-dropping that the publisher really should issue a revised edition of Weiss’s book just to include Sarsour’s latest.)

Weiss also walks into the lion’s den by making the equation between Muslim migration to Europe and increased antisemitic violence. And the stats she includes make challenging reading. A 2008 Pew poll indicated that 97% of respondents in Lebanon have negative view of Jews, followed by 96% in Jordan, 95% in Egypt and 76% in Turkey and Pakistan. She contrasts this with a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey indicating that, in Germany, 56% of Muslims hold antisemitic views, compared with 16% of the general population. In France, it’s 49% to 17% and, in the United Kingdom, 54% to 12%.

When, at the end of the book, she actually gets to the nub of fighting antisemitism, Weiss outlines a number of strategies, few of which are novel but all of which are worthy.

“Resist hierarchical identity politics,” is one of her steps. “Corrupt identity politics on the right – the Olympics of Purity – tell the Jews that they can never be white or Christian enough. Corrupt identity politics on the left – the Olympics of Victimization – tell the Jews that they can never be oppressed enough.”

She calls on Jews to maintain liberalism for the sake of a healthy democracy, to support Israel, which includes demanding that Israel live up to its ideals, to “lean into Judaism” and “tell your story.”

She calls on Jews to “apply the kippah (or Magen David) test”: “If you would be uncomfortable wearing a kippah or a Magen David necklace in your neighbourhood, you should make a plan to improve your neighbourhood or make a plan to leave it.”

Most of her recommended ways to fight antisemitism presume that the reader is Jewish. This may be a fair assessment on the author’s part, but a non-Jewish person seeking to be an ally, who would find plenty of motivation in the first part of the book, will not find much actionable advice in the last short section. It should not, of course, be left only to Jews to fight antisemitism but, like the pragmatic decision to argue that the safety of Jews is a prerequisite to the safety of the entire society, it is probably a reasonable assumption at this point to accept that Jews are the most likely to do so. Which may simply underscore the problem her book is intended to confront.

Canada’s legacy of trauma

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz and Senator Murray Sinclair. (photo by Jerry Nussbaum)

A succession of unjust Canadian laws piled one upon the other in the last part of the 19th century, enabling the federal government to take indigenous children from their homes and eradicate their cultural identities. The full scope of those laws – and their impacts on generations of First Nations people to today – was outlined by Senator Murray Sinclair, former head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who spoke at the University of British Columbia last week.

The impact of residential schools and the laws that created and sustained them was the theme of Sinclair’s talk, which was presented by the UBC faculty of education and the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada.

Prior to Sinclair’s presentation, Vancouver author Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a board member of the Korzcak association and a child survivor of the Holocaust, contextualized the lecture in the spirit of Korczak’s legacy.

Korczak was an educator and pedagogue who ran orphanages, including one in the Warsaw Ghetto, where Boraks-Nemetz was also confined. Korczak was a respected figure in Polish society, considered by many the originator of the concept of children’s rights.

photo - Dr. Charles Ungerleider, professor emeritus of educational studies at the University of British Columbia and a former B.C. deputy minister of education, left, and Jerry Nussbaum, president of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada, present an award to Stephanie Black, 2019 recipient of the Janusz Korczak Scholarship
Dr. Blye Frank, dean of the faculty of education, University of British Columbia, left, and Jerry Nussbaum, president of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada, present an award to Stephanie Black, 2019 recipient of the Janusz Korczak Scholarship. (photo from Tiffany Cooper)

“Korczak observed and listened to children, never judging, criticizing or showing intolerance,” said Boraks-Nemetz. He cultivated their self-esteem and believed that children should grow into who they want to be, not who others want them to become.

“During the Nazi persecution, Korczak, when offered a reprieve from the depredations of the Warsaw Ghetto, he would not abandon his children in their last journey to the cattle cars heading for Treblinka, the death camp,” she said. “He refused, saying, ‘My children need me. I deplore desertion.’ He went with them and they all perished.”

Sinclair then painstakingly outlined the conspiracy of legal barriers to justice that the government erected to perpetuate what has been termed cultural genocide.

As the federal government began to expand Canada westward in the 1870s, it entered into treaties with the indigenous peoples. One of the demands indigenous negotiators insisted upon in exchange for being limited to reserves was that the federal government create and fund schools on those reserves.

Sir John A. Macdonald sent a representative to the United States to see how they were running schools for Native Americans. In direct repudiation of the treaties, the federal government opted for a similar system and his government created what they called “industrial schools.”

Sinclair said MacDonald believed that, if children went to school on reserves, “the kids would go to the schools in the daytime and they would then return home to their parents, who are nothing but savages, and we would be teaching those children basic skills that all children learn from schools and what we’re going to end up with at the end of the day is nothing but savages who can read and write.”

Because the government wanted to “do it on the cheap,” said Sinclair, “they decided to involve the churches, who were quite willing to get involved because it was great for the churches as well to gain numbers through their missionary zeal.”

Children were punished for speaking their languages and for talking with their friends and siblings, “because they wanted to break your ties to those relationships…. Everything was done in the schools to break down cultural bonds that existed in those children.”

Those who were not physically or sexually abused lived in fear that they would be, Sinclair said.

“And, of course, the children, when they came home, would tell their parents what happened in those schools,” he said.

The natural inclination to stop it from happening led to a cascade of legislative injunctions that took away the most fundamental rights of First Nations peoples.

“In the 1880s, the government passed the law that amended the Indian Act and said that it was an offence, a legal breach of law, if you did not send your child to a school when the Indian agent told you to send the child,” said Sinclair.

When parents tried to hide their children, the parents would be prosecuted and go to jail. Faced with the prospect of indigenous people taking the government to court over the issue, the government passed another law, making it impossible to go to court against the government for anything done under the Indian Act “unless you get permission from the minister of Indian Affairs first.” The government soon made it illegal for indigenous people to consult with a lawyer on anything relating to the Indian Act – with the punishment for the lawyer being disbarment. Then, another step was added, making it illegal for a white Canadian to speak to a lawyer on behalf of an indigenous person.

When it seemed parents might protest the situation, the government made it illegal, in 1892, for three or more First Nations people to gather together in order to discuss a grievance against the government of Canada. It was made illegal for indigenous people to attend large gatherings like the traditional sundances or the potlatch, “not just because of the religious aspect of it but also because, at these gatherings, that’s when Indians got together in order to discuss their grievances,” said Sinclair.

Fears of a violent uprising were dismissed by Northwest Mounted Police in documentation Sinclair has seen, which, he summarized: “We don’t have to worry about the Indians taking up arms against the government because we have their kids. They are not going to go to war against us.”

Children who returned from the schools were scarred and often unable to communicate with their parents in a shared language.

“Their ability to know how to hunt, fish or trap, which is what the communities depended upon, was lost to them,” said Sinclair.

Estimates are that about 35% of indigenous children attended residential schools, but the damage extended to the other 65%, who were taught in public schools the same white superiority/indigenous inferiority curriculum as those who were taken away.

When those children grew up and had children, they had no learned skills at parenting and were burdened with their own demons, said Sinclair. As a result, when child welfare systems were burgeoning in the 1950s, it was mostly indigenous children who went into care. It was, and is, disproportionately indigenous people who are incarcerated.

Indigenous Canadians have the highest suicide rates of any cultural group in the world, said Sinclair. High school dropout rates, substance abuse and violent crime affect indigenous Canadians in exponentially greater numbers than non-indigenous Canadians.

The problems will not be resolved, Sinclair said, by spending more money on child welfare, policing or incarceration. The education system and society must help indigenous young people realize who they are as Anishinaabe, Cree, Sto:lo or Mohawk.

“The educational system is just not giving them what they need,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do, but, if we address that one aspect of how our society is functioning, we will see the most dramatic change that will resolve or redress the history of residential schools in Canada on indigenous people, on indigenous youth in particular.… It begins with recognizing that … indigenous youth, in particular, must be given their chance to develop their sense of self-respect first, and that’s going to take some time to do.”

Nazi auction called off

Under community pressure, a Richmond auction house backed down from selling a collection of Nazi memorabilia last weekend. Maynards Fine Art and Antiques was set to auction items including Nazi flags, military items and other war-era artifacts on Saturday. Two days before that, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs was made aware of the items by a member of the community.

“We spoke to the lead appraiser, the person in charge of auctioning this lot,” said Nico Slobinsky, CIJA’s Pacific region director. “We provided context and tried to explain why auctioning these items was morally reprehensible. I would love to be able to tell you that we got positive engagement and understanding at the time when we had those conversations on Thursday. We did not get that positive engagement. It was clear to us from the response from the auction house that they were going to go ahead with the auction as originally planned.”

Community members and elected officials quickly mobilized and media seized the story. Individuals messaged the auction company and politicians lined up in opposition to the sale. Two members of the legislature from Richmond, Jas Johal and John Yap, spoke out, as did Andrew Wilkinson, leader of the B.C. Liberals.

Mike Sachs, past president of the Richmond congregation the Bayit and a Jewish community activist in Richmond, mobilized his contacts – even while vacationing in Mexico. He said Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie not only spoke out against this incident but promised to proclaim Holocaust Awareness Day in January 2020.

“People were just disgusted that Maynards would do such a thing,” said Sachs. “As a whole, we all agree enough of profiting off Jewish blood. Enough. We’re not going to accept it anymore.”

Sachs and Slobinsky praised community allies who spoke up. They both believe that historical artifacts like these should be in museums or educational institutions, where they can serve as educational tools in proper context.

CIJA is asking Maynards for an apology and a donation to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The organization extended an offer to the undisclosed owner of the items to assist in placing them in an appropriate venue.

 

Child survivors gather

Child survivors Rabbi Joseph Polak, right, and Robert Krell at the Havdalah service Nov. 2, part of the annual conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants. (photo from Robert Krell)

When Halina Levitt was 2 years old in a part of Poland that is now in Ukraine, her mother left her with a Polish farm family to hide through the Holocaust.

“My mother luckily survived and came back to retrieve me,” Levitt told the Independent. “Of course, at that point, I was 5 years old and she was a total stranger to me. I didn’t want to go with her.”

The family who saved her didn’t want to relinquish her, either, and, as the conflict between the birth mother and the Polish family escalated, neighbours gathered and tried to intervene on behalf of the family as the mother tried to reclaim her child.

“She was quite scared for her life until we boarded the bus and got away from there,” Levitt said.

Rose Raport, a retired doctor from New Jersey, was also left with another family.

“I was given away to a Polish farmer at age 4,” she said. But her parents never returned. “I spent six years and, by the end of my stay with the Polish family, I found out that I’m left alone. There were no parents, there was no sibling, no family and that’s it.” She was turned over to the Jewish community and continued her life in a Jewish orphanage.

Karen Komar, a Massachusetts woman, managed to remain with her family in their home in Hamburg, Germany, until 1941. Then, an intervention by a distant American relative – Arthur Bulova, head of the Bulova watch company – succeeded in getting the family a visa to the United States.

These were just three of the experiences of people who convened in Vancouver Nov. 1-4 for the 31st annual conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants.

About 400 people attended the gathering – about 110 survivors, joined by members of the second, third and fourth generations, as well as spouses. Each has a unique experience, yet all who spoke with the Independent said such meetings are an opportunity to share time with those most likely to comprehend what they have endured and the lives they have led.

The conference was co-chaired by Vancouverites Marie Doduck and Dr. Robert Krell, both child survivors of the Holocaust.

The conferences create a feeling of belonging, said Doduck.

“Our survivors feel safe, they talk about their lives, their grandchildren, their past, their future, their thoughts in a safe place,” she said. “And the children felt a safe place to speak about their feelings, that they may not be able to do with their parents or grandparents.”

Child survivors – almost all of whom were hidden children during the war because almost none of the children who were sent to concentration camps survived – were not recognized, by themselves or others, as Holocaust survivors or as a distinct group until the 1980s. Because they were so young during the war, or because they were not in the camps, their experiences were dismissed by adults. A 1988 book by Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors began a reconsideration of the individual and collective experiences of the second generation, but also of those who survived as hidden children and who were not, until then, considered “survivors.”

“We still are the children inside of us,” said Doduck. “When I speak in schools, I speak of the child inside of me, not this mother, grandmother, now great-grandmother that they’re looking at, this old lady. This old lady is really Mariette the child, who is starting, after 70 years growing up … who had no childhood, who lived with bombs and death and starvation and disease. I knew that, if I was sick, I would die, and most of us have these kinds of stories.”

Categories can be fluid, Krell explained. As a hidden child who survived in Holland thanks to a Christian family, he is a child survivor. But he is also a second generation, because his parents survived the camps and came back to claim him. This was statistically extraordinary, as the Netherlands had one of the highest Jewish death rates by country in the Holocaust.

Krell feels a special kinship with Abe Foxman, longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, with whom he organized one of the first child survivor conferences, in 1991. Foxman was hidden from ages 2 to 5, just like Krell. His parents also returned to claim him, an even more statistically anomalous outcome, given that he was in Poland, which had the most catastrophic statistics of annihilation. Krell tried to get Foxman to attend this month’s conference, but the distance was too great to travel.

Location is an important part of the conferences, said Krell, and accessibility is one of the reasons they move annually in Europe, all over North America and to Israel, depending on the year. This year, almost half the attendees were British Columbians.

More than three dozen workshops, panel discussions and plenaries offered a range of topics for attendees, with some exclusive to survivors or successive generations. An art installation and a musical concluding evening added to the weekend experience.

Guest presenters included Rabbi Joseph Polak, a child survivor of Bergen-Belsen and author of After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring; Dr. Catherine Chatterley, founding director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism; Prof. Chris Friedrichs, professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia; and Vancouverite Robbie Waisman, a survivor of Buchenwald, who spoke together with Éloge Butera, a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, about human rights activism. Krell’s plenary address opened the conference on the Saturday morning with a keynote titled The Future of Our Past: Informing and Inspiring Next Generations.

A story of two of six million

Dr. Michael Hayden delivers the keynote address at the annual Kristallnacht commemorative program Nov. 7. (photo by Al Szajman)

In the 1930s, German Jews were required to register all precious metals in their possession, a prelude to having them confiscated. In Hamburg alone, the Nazis collected 20 tons of silver, much of it Judaica. Of this, they melted down 18 tons. Two tons was deemed by the Nazi curator Carl Schellenberg to be of artistic or other value in its existing form.

After the war, Schellenberg was kept on by the British because his scrupulous indexing of artifacts made him valuable. His love of the city of Hamburg meant he ensured that some of the most precious pieces of stolen art and artifacts made their way to that city’s museum.

That is where Dr. Michael Hayden, a Vancouver researcher in molecular medicine and human genetics, and one of the world’s leading researchers in Huntington disease, was able to trace one of the few remaining pieces of his grandparents’ once-extensive collection of Judaica.

A silver Kiddush cup, crafted in 1757 and embossed with a vivid three-dimensional depiction of the story of Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven, which belonged to his grandparents, Gertrud and Max Raphael Hahn, has been restituted to the family. It is now on loan, a small artifact in size but one of the most stunning pieces in a just-opened exhibition at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, titled Treasured Belongings: The Hahn Family & the Search for a Stolen Legacy.

photo - Max and Gertrud Hahn, the patriarch and matriarch of the German-Jewish Hahn family of Göttingen. Photo taken in Berlin, Germany, 1918. While their children, Rudolf and Hanni, emigrated to England, the couple did not survive the Holocaust
Max and Gertrud Hahn, the patriarch and matriarch of the German-Jewish Hahn family of Göttingen. Photo taken in Berlin, Germany, 1918. While their children, Rudolf and Hanni, emigrated to England, the couple did not survive the Holocaust. (photo from Hahn family)

Hayden delivered the keynote address at the annual Kristallnacht commemorative program Nov. 7, before the opening of the exhibition to the public. The exhibit runs to Nov. 27, 2020.

“It’s a story that it’s taken me a long time to confront,” Hayden told the Independent.

Hayden’s grandparents were transported to Riga, Latvia, in 1941, where they were murdered by Latvian collaborators of the Nazis. Max Hahn had been arrested for the first time on Kristallnacht, three years earlier, but, with Gertrud, had managed to secure the passage of many possessions to safe locations in the neutral countries of Sweden and Switzerland. More importantly, they had sent their two children, daughter Hanni and son Rudolf – Hayden’s father – to safety in London.

After the war, the orphaned pair retrieved the remnants of their family’s material possessions. Rudolf, who joined the British army in 1943 and adopted the less Germanic-sounding name Roger Hayden, moved to South Africa. There, more than a dozen boxes sat undiscussed in the family home. When Roger passed away, Michael Hayden shipped the boxes to his Vancouver home, where they sat, unopened, for another two decades.

When he finally confronted the parcels from his family’s past, he discovered a stamp collection, maps, artworks – and 9,000 original documents relating to his family’s history from the 1850s until 1941. These included heart-wrenching letters between Rudolf in England and his parents still in Germany.

While Michael Hayden was growing up, there were some items that his father had not kept stored away. One was a Paul Ritter violin that Rudolf had received on his bar mitzvah. Michael’s daughter, Anna, now a Vancouver hematology oncologist, played on it as a young person and Hayden hopes to one day hear grandchildren also play it. It is part of the exhibit. It is also a hint of how the family got its name. It was not a coincidence that, in anglicizing his name, Rudolf/Roger chose a variation on the surname of a legendary classical composer.

“There were piano recitals and all kinds of concerts in the Hahn family every Sunday,” said Hayden. “They used to have a little chamber orchestra, it was a totally different world. So, he chose the name Roger Hayden from Rudolf Hahn and I’m sure Hayden had some comfort for him because Haydn was so important in his life.”

photo - The silver gilt kiddush cup adorned with the story of Jacob (Germany, 1757), acquired by Max Hahn in the early 1900s and confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, is the only piece of Hahn’s looted Judaica collection that has been restituted to date
The silver gilt kiddush cup adorned with the story of Jacob (Germany, 1757), acquired by Max Hahn in the early 1900s and confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, is the only piece of Hahn’s looted Judaica collection that has been restituted to date. (photo © Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

Hayden credits the German government and museums for supporting restitution efforts. His family recently received a grant from the German federal government to hire a researcher to continue the search. Understandably, the challenges are great. The Hahn family’s collection of Judaica was considered one of the finest and most extensive in Germany, rivaling those of the Sassoon and Rothschild families. Because they had lent some objects to museums, and because of Max and Gertrud’s careful recordkeeping, the family has both photographs and detailed inventories of what the collection included before it was looted. Most families do not have such tangible proof.

Hayden emphasizes that any material value of restituted artifacts is irrelevant and the importance is because of personal significance, and that the process represents steps toward reconciliation and restoring dignity of Nazism’s victims.

“For me, personally, it’s been a process of coming to terms with the unimaginable horror and confronting it,” he said.

He has had very positive and some negative experiences during this work. He is impressed with the German government’s efforts to seek forgiveness for their country’s past, including memorializations like the 70,000 Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, that have been installed outside the last homes of victims of the Nazis, and the fact that the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin is located between the embassies of major countries in the heart of the city.

“When I see Germany and I see what they’re doing, it’s been very instructive for me about confronting your history and confronting it unabashedly,” he said, making parallels with Canada’s reconciliation process with First Nations.

Germany’s response is especially admirable in comparison to other European countries that experienced collaboration and, rather than confronting their past, are actively denying it.

But, Hayden has had negative experiences, including the discovery that the school his father had attended in Hamburg had, as recently as a few years ago, what amounted to a museum to those students who had fought for the Nazis, with not a trace of the fate of the Jewish students who had attended. The Nazi display is now gone and a marker lists the names of Jewish students who were murdered. But he also discovered that the school’s long-held assurance that they had never participated in Nazi activities was fabricated, when photos emerged of the school festooned in Nazi flags and students and faculty making Heil Hitler salutes.

“At a personal level, for me, it’s trying to give up the stowaway of sorrow and pain on my shoulders that I’ve never confronted and to move forward,” Hayden said. “It’s not that I’m at forgiveness, but I recognize that forgiveness is not so much for those you are forgiving, but for the forgiver. You can give up your own toxic anger and move forward. For me, it’s also been a journey to acknowledge my own German ancestry and come to terms with it.”

photo - Dr. Michael Hayden, the grandson of Max and Gertrud Hahn, discovered in the 1980s that this Torah binder was in the possession of the City Museum in Göttingen. The piece of cloth was used to swaddle his great-grandfather Raphael Hahn for his brit milah (circumcision ceremony) in 1831. With the help of Göttingen’s mayor, Hayden organized for the Torah binder to be returned to his family
Dr. Michael Hayden, the grandson of Max and Gertrud Hahn, discovered in the 1980s that this Torah binder was in the possession of the City Museum in Göttingen. The piece of cloth was used to swaddle his great-grandfather Raphael Hahn for his brit milah (circumcision ceremony) in 1831. With the help of Göttingen’s mayor, Hayden organized for the Torah binder to be returned to his family. (photo © Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

He hopes that the exhibit, his family’s story and the larger facts of the Holocaust resonate in today’s world.

“We’ve got to be aware of ourselves as Jews of condemning other populations, we have to be aware of stereotyping, we have to be even more acutely aware from our own history about the struggles and making sure that we learn from that in the way that we conduct ourselves, so recognizing, as we look at children on television separated from their parents, that we too can be horrified by that and do whatever we can to make sure that we are not complicit or even silent in the face of all of this,” he said. “In certain circumstances, unless we really hold onto some deep principles of democratic culture and value of life, your neighbours can become your killers.”

As the search for additional family heirlooms continues, Hayden acknowledges the challenges. “I think it is a needle in a haystack to be honest, but it’s worth pursuing.”

Of the entire experience, he said: “It’s been an opportunity to give individuality and identity for two of six million people who were murdered, to rescue them from generalizations and understand who they were and understand their distinctiveness and to bring my grandparents out of obscurity and give them the warmth and respect they deserve.”

The Kristallnacht commemoration where Hayden spoke began with a candlelight procession of survivors. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim. Philip Levinson, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), introduced the event and Nina Krieger, the VHEC’s executive director, introduced the keynote speaker. Rabbi Jonathan Infeld offered reflections after Hayden’s address. Jody Wilson-Raybould, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, offered greetings, and Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung read a proclamation from the City of Vancouver. The event was presented by the VHEC, in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment Fund of the VHEC.

Jewish war brides talk

At the University of British Columbia on Nov. 21, Prof. Robin Judd will speak on What’s Love Got to Do With It? Jewish War Brides and North American Soldier Husbands after the Second World War. (photo from Robin Judd)

Prof. Robin Judd noticed that a significant number of the earliest Holocaust memoirs written by women were penned by “war brides” who had married American, Canadian or British soldiers.

In the course of teaching about the Holocaust at Ohio State University, the coincidence struck her and, as happens in research, led her onto a new topic. She is nearing completion on a book about the experiences of Jewish women – and a few men – in Europe and North Africa who married Allied service personnel and moved to Canada, the United States or Britain. She will give a guest lecture on the subject at the University of British Columbia next week and the public is welcome to attend.

The lecture is titled What’s Love Got to Do With It? Jewish War Brides and North American Soldier Husbands after the Second World War, and Judd told the Independent that love certainly played a key role, but some of the other factors at play also interest her.

“What prompts individuals from radically different cultures, who may not necessarily speak the same language, what prompts them to create relationships with one another and long-lasting relationships, relationships that are going to result in marriage and then bring the civilians to Canada, Britain or the United States?” she asked.

Most of the soldiers that Judd is studying were Jewish themselves, though there are exceptions to the rule.

In some cases, the wives would arrive in the new country before or otherwise apart from their new husbands or fiancés. An entire infrastructure was in place to accommodate and integrate them.

“The war brides, particularly if you come to the United States or to Canada as a war bride, first you live with other war brides at least temporarily in a kind of war bride home or war bride camp and you travel on a war bride ship and there are particular Red Cross workers who teach English and show films and cooking classes,” she said.

If the fiancés or husbands were not yet decommissioned or were traveling with their units, the brides may have found themselves in the position of living with their new in-laws.

“These were not the spouses they were planning for their sons,” Judd comments. “And all of a sudden here you have this woman show up. You are processing stories that you are hearing about the war and all of a sudden here comes this person and you might not be able to communicate, you might not have a shared language, you might not know how to even ask questions about what this person had experienced.”

Feeling isolated and foreign, some of these women used the opportunity to express their experiences privately, to themselves, in writing.

“Some of the women that I’ve spoken to have told me that they used that time to write out their story, to put it to paper, because they needed to kind of get it out and there was no one with whom they could talk, literally,” she said. “But then, as they began to create networks, make new connections, maybe by that point their now-husbands have returned to Canada, Britain or the U.S., a number of them tell me that they then destroyed them.”

By an apparent coincidence, though, Judd concluded that it was disproportionately the women who had married soldiers who were among the first to publish English-language Holocaust memoir narratives for general readers in the 1970s and ’80s. She has a theory about this, but admits she could be wrong: these may have been some of the first women who were asked to speak about their early life and Holocaust experiences to Jewish women’s groups, federations and other community audiences, acclimating them to become among the first to put them on paper for general readers.

“But, again, I could be completely wrong,” she said.

Judd’s lecture is supported by a Holocaust education fund in UBC’s department of history to support undergraduate education on the Holocaust. The fund supports a biannual lecture, alternating years with the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture, and is incorporated into an undergraduate course, History of the Holocaust, taught by Prof. Richard Menkis, who is also chair of the committee that manages the fund. The public is welcome to attend on Thursday, Nov. 21, 5-6:15 p.m., at Buchanan D217 at UBC.