Pat Johnson – Page 37

Mayor debate all over map

A full house came out to the CIJA-SUCCESS townhall Sept. 23, which featured six Vancouver mayoral candidates. (photo from CIJA)

The refracted nature of Vancouver’s civic politics was on full display at a candidates meeting featuring six of the perceived front-running candidates for mayor. The near-implosion of the governing Vision Vancouver party, combined with divisions among erstwhile Non-Partisan Association members, has led to a race with both the left and right sides of the political spectrum divided and struggling to gain traction in a campaign with 21 contenders.

The afternoon event Sept. 23 was co-sponsored by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the multicultural organization SUCCESS, which is rooted in the Chinese-Canadian community. Veteran Vancouver broadcaster Jody Vance handily moderated the occasionally raucous meeting.

Housing affordability topped the list of issues, with Kennedy Stewart, a former NDP member of Parliament for Burnaby-South who resigned that seat to run for Vancouver mayor as an independent, said his plan to attack unaffordability calls for building 85,000 new homes over the next 10 years, including affordable and market rentals.

Ken Sim, an entrepreneur who founded Nurse Next Door and Rosemary Rocksalt Bagels and who is the candidate for the centre-right Non-Partisan Association (NPA), responded by claiming that the construction industry does not have the capacity to meet Stewart’s construction schedule.

Wai Young, a former Conservative member of Parliament for Vancouver South, is running with a new party, called Coalition Vancouver, which was originated by a group of former NPA members who felt betrayed by what they call a lack of democracy in that party.

“Vancouver does not have a supply issue,” Young said about the housing situation. “There are no millionaires wandering around Vancouver that are unable to buy a house or a luxury condo. The issue is that we are not able to keep our young people, our young families, here because they can’t afford to buy a house. We have an affordability issue in Vancouver.”

“If I am mayor, we will have a three percent vacancy rate,” said Shawna Sylvester, who is running as an independent but has roots in Vision Vancouver. The rate today is about zero. She supports more co-ops, cohousing and what she called “gentle densification,” as well as addressing how the housing situation has particular impacts for women, who experience poverty in greater proportions than men.

photo - Left to right are David Chen, Hector Bremner, Wai Young, Ken Sim, Kennedy Stewart and Shauna Sylvester — Left to right are David Chen, Hector Bremner, Wai Young, Ken Sim, Kennedy Stewart and Shauna Sylvester. (photo from CIJA)

Partly related to the affordability issue is the topic of Vancouver’s reputation as a place that is welcoming of people from diverse backgrounds.

David Chen, who is running with another new party, ProVancouver, noted that racism is alive and well in the city.

“My parents were first-generation Taiwanese [Canadian],” said Chen. “I was born in St. Paul’s [Hospital] because, at that time, it was the only hospital they were allowed to go to. During this campaign, I heard somebody say to me, ‘Go home.’ Well, I am home.” He added: “We haven’t progressed as much as we should or could.”

The NPA’s Sim echoed the experience and extrapolated it to the Jewish community.

“I’m 47 right now,” said Sim, “and I still remember the hurtful comments that I faced when I was 5 years old. It was tough. I think of what’s going on to our Jewish community right now. We still have a lot of issues. I’m acutely aware of what our Jewish community goes through because, when something happens halfway around the world, our friends in the Jewish community have to worry about their physical safety. That’s terrible. We will have zero tolerance for that, as mayor of Vancouver. We’re going to work with community groups, work with the Jewish community, work with all communities identifying threats to our communities and working on solutions to protect us, to protect our communities, and we will monitor our results.”

Hector Bremner, another former NPA member now leading another new party, YES Vancouver, is the only candidate for mayor currently sitting on Vancouver city council.

“Racism is a symptom, it’s not the disease,” Bremner said. “When do racial tensions flare up, when do they happen? They happen in a time when the people feel that resources are scarce and they feel pressure economically. It’s really a function of tribalism and nativism that occurs when people feel that it’s hard for them to make it. We look for scapegoats.”

Sylvester, who among many other roles is director of the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, said people need to stand up to extremist voices and actions.

“There are forces in our communities, whether we want to acknowledge them or not, that are trying to divide us,” she said. “What we need to do [is] not be tolerant of any kind of hate crime, not be tolerant of antisemitism.”

Stewart said those who don’t subscribe to Canadian ideas of tolerance should be helped to change their minds.

“Immigration is really one of the best things about being Canadian,” he said. “We travel around the world and we brag about it. Multiculturalism is a Canadian word and it’s something we’ve exported. It’s something we should embrace, and most of us do. Those that don’t, we have to help them understand, change their opinions.”

Accusations of intolerance and implications of racism emerged in the debate.

Young, who had originally sought the NPA mayoral nomination, implied that her supporters, many of whom were from the Chinese community, weren’t welcome in the NPA. This brought a sharp rebuke from Sim.

“Guess what, I’m Chinese,” he said. “Here’s the real issue. When you [say] inflammatory statements like that to win a political agenda, you create divisions in our communities. People don’t like that. You put a wedge. That is a problem and you’ve got to knock it off.”

Sim went on to accuse politicians of stoking already existing embers of intolerance around foreign purchasers of Vancouver real estate.

“For political expediency, what politicians are doing is pointing at groups and blaming groups for problems,” he said. “We have a lot of issues with affordability and there are a lot of things that affect affordability and housing. I’m not saying foreign purchases do not affect housing. But, when we point to it and we blame a group, that starts a slippery slope. That’s what’s dividing our city, our province and our country. I call on everyone here to knock it off, because there are a lot of things that affect affordability – permitting delays, interest rates, the economy – but to point to something for political expediency because it wins votes is dividing people and it’s hurtful.”

The meeting took place in a SUCCESS building in Chinatown, close to the Downtown Eastside. Candidates agreed that more needs to be done to confront the seemingly intractable challenges facing that area of the city.

Young said she had visited a seniors home in Chinatown earlier in the day and was told residents are afraid to go outside.

“They can no longer walk outside of their building,” she said. “That should not happen in our beautiful city. There was a time I remember coming down here to Chinatown when it was vibrant, when it was safe, when you didn’t feel like you couldn’t be on the wrong side of the street here.… This city has gotten dirtier and grittier…. There are needles everywhere, there is defecation everywhere. We are one of the top 10 cities in the world and yet, currently, it’s embarrassing to have your friends come visit.”

She promised to be “John Horgan’s worst enemy,” referring to the B.C. premier, in demanding provincial help to address the issues in the area.

Stewart touted his connections with former NDP member of Parliament Libby Davies, who previously represented the area in Ottawa.

“Last week, I was very proud to stand with Libby Davies in the Downtown Eastside and announce that, as mayor, I would immediately strike an emergency task force to deal with the opioid epidemic and homelessness,” Stewart said. “We cannot have the number of deaths that are happening and the number of overdoses. We can’t have the impacts on the people that are suffering through illness and addiction problems.”

Another perennial issue candidates addressed was transportation and congestion.

“Vancouverites spend 88 hours of your life every year sitting in congestion,” said Young. “That’s like a two-week holiday.”

Sim promised an independent review of congestion in the city.

“The number of cars has not increased in the city in the last 20 years but congestion has,” he said. He blamed a range of factors, including bike lanes, left-hand turns, people running yellow lights and getting stopped by police, pedestrians crossing after the indicator says “don’t walk,” and roads that are closed for construction longer than necessary.

Chen said getting people to switch from cars to transit requires improving the system.

“If you use negative reinforcement, you’re not going to get people to switch,” he said. “It’s not reliable, it’s not convenient, it’s not cheaper, it’s not faster. You [improve] those four items and suddenly people may just switch.”

The would-be mayors mooted the availability of culturally appropriate services, such as seniors care, community security for institutions like synagogues and the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, and unisex washrooms.

During the debate, Stewart repeatedly emphasized that he, Bremner and Young were the only ones with elective experience, a tack that may be motivated by the few polls on the race, which have indicated that Stewart’s toughest opponent is Sim.

Candidates for office

Members of British Columbia’s Jewish community have been involved in many pursuits over the decades. With some notable exceptions, few have pursued elective office. And this election continues the tradition. Of the hundreds of people running for city councils, school boards, regional district boards and the Vancouver park board, the Independent has identified only four members of the community running in the Oct. 20 elections, though there may be others. Here is a glance at their platforms and motivations.

Herschel Miedzygorski
Independent candidate for Vancouver city council
voteherschel.ca

photo - Herschel Miedzygorski — Herschel Miedzygorski

Herschel Miedzygorski’s priorities include clean and safe streets, increased night transit and more funding for the arts. He wants to deter real estate speculation and speed up permitting processes for middle-class homes.

Miedzygorski has had a career as a restaurateur in Vancouver and Whistler, running Southside Deli in the resort municipality for 25 years and being involved in food ventures in the city. He has sold his food interests and now represents Giant Head Estate Winery, based in Summerland, B.C., to restaurant clients.

“I was born and raised in Vancouver,” he said. “My father had a secondhand store on Main Street for 60 years, it was called Abe’s Second Hand. That was my mom and dad.… We all grew up on Main Street.”

Miedzygorski has coached football and soccer and spends time at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. He was asked to run with a couple of the city’s political parties, he said, but “I just want to be an independent voice.”

Ken Charko
Coalition Vancouver candidate for Vancouver city council
coalitionvancouver.ca

Ken Charko owns Dunbar Theatre. He is president of the Hillcrest Community Centre and a director of the Motion Picture Association. He considers himself a “champion of the arts.”

“I’m very supportive of the arts,” he said. Charko wants to make arts and culture more accessible to all.

He also seeks a line-by-line review of the city’s budget and wants fair bylaws for hardworking people and small businesses.

“I’ve got good business credentials,” Charko said. “I understand small business. I’ve been there. But I’m really going to try to focus on the arts and things that matter to the arts community.”

He is running with Coalition Vancouver after breaking with the NPA because they appointed, rather than electing, their nominees.

“There is no party that completely represents all my views,” he said. But Coalition Vancouver aligns with his approach to fiscal accountability and socially progressive outlook, he said.

Steven Nemetz
Independent candidate for Vancouver park board
stevennemetz.com

Steven Nemetz is running for Vancouver park board because the time is right.

“It speaks to me at this stage of my life – father, grandfather – and I grew up in the city,” he said. “I grew up intimately familiar – because my father was a great outdoorsman – with these parks.”

Nemetz is a lawyer and holds a master’s in business administration and a rabbinic ordination. He created the “pop-up shul” Shtiebl on the Drive for the High Holy Days this year.

Having lived in various cities, notably New York, Nemetz wants to bring to Vancouver some ideas that have worked in other places. Inspired by the High Line, a park created from an old elevated railway in Manhattan, Nemetz suggests saving the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts (which are slated for demolition) and creating an elevated park in the space between them and extending that park east and west. A second High Line-style recreation space could work along the Broadway corridor, he said, incorporating transit hubs, Vancouver General Hospital and other existing assets.

He advocates a “privileges card” for city residents that would mean they pay no parking fees at any parks.

“There are 650,000 residents of the city of Vancouver,” he said. “There are over 10 million visitors a year.” A slight price increase for non-residents could offset the loss of revenue from locals, he said. “The residents of the city of Vancouver pay taxes. They support their infrastructure. They shouldn’t have to pay more for the use of facilities that they primarily support by way of small nickel-and-diming, like parking at Kitsilano Beach and Jericho.”

Nemetz looks at Mountain View Cemetery, 106 acres at the heart of the city, and sees potential for repurposing it to respectfully accommodate more living residents.

“We are not talking amusement park,” he said. “It could be something very unique, world-class in a way, that’s different.”

Norman Goldstein
Richmond First candidate for Richmond school board
richmondfirst.ca

photo - Norman Goldstein — Norman Goldstein

Norman Goldstein is a former Richmond school trustee seeking to return to the board.

“The best thing for all people, including the Jewish people, is an open, accountable government that adheres to the rule of law,” he told the Independent. “The laws need to be crafted by caring, competent people, who understand that the strength of a society rests on how fairly and inclusively all citizens are treated. This is what I believe and this shapes who I associate with and trust politically.”

His priorities for education include moving forward with the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) policy passed by the Richmond school board.

“This has been, unfortunately, a very polarizing issue in Richmond,” he said. “To my understanding, the opposition to SOGI is based either on misunderstanding what the policy says – please, read the policy – or on deep-seated prejudice that is not self-recognized as such.”

Goldstein holds a doctorate in mathematics and taught and researched at the university level. He later completed a master’s of computer science and spent 21 years at MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates in Richmond, retiring in 2013.

“The Richmond School District has had a long, proud history of inclusion,” he said. “A major tool in this endeavour has been to integrate all learning levels into the same classroom. This socializes students to understand and appreciate each other.”

Election day for municipal governments across British Columbia is Saturday, Oct. 20. In Vancouver, advance voting opportunities are available until Oct. 17, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Advance voting dates and times differ by jurisdiction. More details are at vancouver.ca/vote or on the website for your municipality.

Courage in a time of change

Rabbi Irwin Kula speaks in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. (photo from JFGV)

The world is in a time of historic shifts and the way we interpret and respond to what is happening can make each individual a player in this civilizational drama.

This is the promise of Rabbi Irwin Kula, who will speak in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. Kula is co-president of Clal, the National Jewish Centre for Learning and Leadership.

“We are living in one of the most dramatic, exciting times in human history,” Kula told the Independent in a telephone interview. “Whenever one lives in a dramatic transitional moment, the call to responsibility is also dramatic. The fear and the anxiety that we are feeling is all understandable. But managing the fear, managing the anxiety and, therefore, managing some of the loss that comes in these great moments of transition, is how we move on the journey.”

Kula promises audience members more than an interesting talk.

“Anyone who is going to be in that room, anyone who is willing to speak about it this way, really has an opportunity to be a part of not only the solution but one of the great adventures in the human drama right now,” he said.

At Clal, Kula is part of a team that is “reimagining Judaism for this era.”

“And not only Judaism, but religion in general,” Kula said. “What is religion and Judaism going to look like in an information age? In an age of globalization? In an age when the borders and boundaries of their identities are more permeable?”

Kula is an eighth-generation rabbi and holds a degree in philosophy. He has served congregations in Jerusalem and St. Louis, Mo., and, over the last 30 years, has been involved with Clal, which describes itself as a “do-tank” – “The thinking actually has to apply to people’s doing,” he explained.

Kula works “at the intersection of religion, innovation and human flourishing,” he said. “Those are the lenses I use.”

Kula analyzes how information, entertainment, media, retail and other components of society are affected by innovation. In his 2007 book Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, Kula considers the relationship between what we desire and how we live.

“Yearnings is a fancy word for desires,” he said. “The central insight in the book is that what animates us, what animates our lives, are our desires. They are sources of great wisdom for who we are as human beings. We know our most intense desires – our desire for love, our desire for the truth, our desire for meaning, our desire for happiness, our desire to be creative and have a purpose and to contribute.… The interesting thing about looking at our desires is, the more one can understand our desires, the wiser our lives are.”

Whatever the day’s headlines, Kula said, maintaining optimism is critical to making positive change in the world.

“Being an optimist doesn’t mean you have to be Pollyanna,” he said. “You can be an optimist and be 51-49 about it. The difference between being a 51-49 optimist and 51-49 the other way may be the biggest difference of all.”

And when the nightly news brings stories of authoritarian ascendancy or other alarming developments, the long view is an antidote.

“I use a long-term, macro-evolutionary take,” said Kula. “This is where Martin Luther King, I think, is right. The arc of history bends toward justice. But it doesn’t bend linearly. It’s not one plus one plus one plus one. It’s sometimes two steps forward and a step backward. We are in now a very, very significant moment of transition. There’s a lot of ways to talk about that transition – postmodern, information age, technological age – and all of the changes are hard to metabolize. So, it takes a very serious responsibility for elites and cultural creatives and people who experience themselves at the cutting edge of these changes to take very seriously the costs and pains and dislocation of these changes for different people. That is what I think we are all called to do.”

People may look at the state of the world and feel helpless or hopeless. But the better response, Kula said, is not only to acknowledge the ways in which we might affect improvements, but also to take individual responsibility for the situation.

“Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, said, in the face of trauma and in the face of political tragedies, the first thing to ask is how am I complicit in what is transpiring,” said Kula. “Not in a giant moral drama of blaming, because, if we are actually interdependent … then what’s happening with people with whom we deeply disagree is connected to us. It’s not some other, evil person over there.”

This is not to say there is not evil in the world, he cautions. But, asserting that those with whom we disagree are evil can potentially misallocate cause.

“In America, there aren’t 60 million evil people who voted for Trump that want America to be destroyed and become a homophobic, primitive, psychologically regressive place in the world,” Kula said. “It behooves us, says Maimonides, to address very seriously what have I missed and, therefore, perhaps been complicit in allowing this to emerge?”

Courage and a sense of adventure can help us navigate times like these.

“If we mitigate a little bit the fear and just stand at that burning bush and not be so scared, know there is tremendous possibility,” he said.

For tickets to FEDtalks, at the Vancouver Playhouse, visit jewishvancouver.com.

Global, contextualized access

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre has developed a collections management system (CMS) that integrates the components of the centre’s diverse holdings into an online platform featuring educational resources aligned with the B.C. secondary curriculum to support teaching with primary source materials.

The CMS allows visitors to the VHEC and online users to explore the various holdings in a way that eliminates divisions between the museum, archives, library and audio-visual testimony collections.

“When you search for a keyword term, it will return records from each collection,” said Caitlin Donaldson, the VHEC’s registrar, who was on the project team that coordinated the development of the system. “We worked collaboratively to design the metadata so that catalogue records are fulsome and so that users will get really rich relationships between items.”

The user-centred design approach prioritized the needs of the centre’s educational mandate and community.

“The VHEC’s system has some administrative modules and features that can track conservation, storage location, loans, accessions and donations,” said Donaldson. “So it’s a really powerful tool for us as a nonprofit organization with a small staff.”

A researcher, student or visitor to the VHEC can view the video testimony of a survivor, then easily see all the centre’s holdings that relate to the individual, such as books written by or about them, documents or artifacts donated by them and broader information about their place of birth, their Holocaust experiences and the camps, ghettoes or other places they survived.

The VHEC is committed to assisting teachers to use primary sources effectively in the classroom to teach about the Holocaust and social justice broadly. The centre has created materials to guide students through searching the CMS and analyzing artifacts. Lightbox is a tool within the CMS through which users can create, manage and share collections of items from the catalogue. Students can use this digital workspace to collaborate on projects and further independent research.

The CMS was developed using Collective Access, an open-source collections management and presentation software created by Whirl-i-Gig, which provided development services for the VHEC. Collective Access is also used locally by the Vancouver Maritime Museum and the newly opened Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia.

“The open-source software allowed us to benefit from the collected knowledge of other institutions and to also contribute back to that base of knowledge through the development of some modules that were created just for our needs,” said Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC. “This collections management system allows us, our visitors, researchers, students and anyone in the world unprecedented access to our collections, with the opportunity to contextualize artifacts and information in ways that were not remotely possible when the centre was created two decades ago.”

The VHEC is continually adding records and digitized items to the catalogue. Researchers are encouraged to contact VHEC collections staff to inquire about its full holdings and to access non-digitized materials.

The development of the online catalogue and CMS was made possible through a gift from the Paul and Edwina Heller Memorial Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver. To explore the VHEC collections online, visit collections.vhec.org.

A version of this article was published in Roundup, Spring 2018, issue 272, by the B.C. Museums Association.

Coping with a legacy of loss

Claire Sicherman began writing Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation after her grandmother passed away. (photo from VHEC)

Claire Sicherman’s grandmother didn’t share much about her experiences in the Holocaust. There were three stories – one about bread in Auschwitz, another about her tattoo, a third about washing – none of them overly traumatizing. It was in the silences, though, in what her grandmother did not share, that Sicherman sensed the deep trauma permeating her family.

“When I grew up, there was a constant heaviness that I couldn’t name,” Sicherman told the Independent. “I grew up knowing about the Holocaust but not really knowing too much about my family’s personal struggle with it, the stories.”

Her understanding of the Shoah came more from reading Anne Frank and watching Schindler’s List than hearing firsthand accounts from her grandmother.

These unspoken traumas, conveyed across generations, are what Sicherman will speak about at the High Holidays Cemetery Service, an annual commemoration presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Schara Tzedeck Congregation and Jewish War Veterans. The event takes place this year on Sept. 16, 11 a.m., at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery, in New Westminster. Her presentation is titled Honour and Remember: Breaking the Silence in the Third Generation.

Sicherman explored the topic in her book Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation, which she began writing after her grandmother passed away. (See jewishindependent.ca/long-enduring-trauma.)

“After my grandmother died, it was safer to start uncovering the silences,” she said. “I think it’s much safer for the third generation to explore the stories of their families. For the second generation, especially for my mom, for example, there was this not wanting to hurt her parents.

“I experienced a bit of that when my grandmother was alive in that we just knew automatically not to ask certain questions, not to go there. For some of the second generation, the silence was a normal part of life. For others, the opposite is true. It was constantly talked about to the point that it became unhealthy that way. But, for my family, the silence was the norm. I think, in third generations, now you’re seeing more people wanting to talk about it, wanting to get back and explore the roots and figure out what they are carrying.”

Sicherman cites the relatively new science of epigenetics to suggest the weight of family history. As a response to that possibly inescapable legacy, Sicherman practises forms of yoga that release stresses in the body, journaling as a form of therapy and an Ayurvedic diet, which incorporates healthy foods and mindful eating rituals, all of which can potentially ameliorate the effects of inherited trauma.

Sicherman’s grandparents, who were from Prague, were the sole survivors in their respective families. They escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the Vancouver area. When Sicherman was 4 years old, her grandfather passed away. The cause of death, she was told, was a heart attack. In her 30s, Sicherman learned that her grandfather had committed suicide. This was another of the family’s secrets.

Despite the hidden past, Sicherman thought her family was entirely ordinary.

“For me, growing up, it was really normal,” she said. “I didn’t know that what my family went through, what I was carrying, what everyone was carrying and not talking about, was not quite normal. For me, I thought I came from a Leave it to Beaver kind of family.”

Sicherman’s dawning realizations of her family’s story and the weight of that history represent a sort of metamorphosis, she said. The cover of her book features a caterpillar, a cocoon and a butterfly.

“This sort of represents being third generation,” she said. “The symbolism around the butterfly is one of transformation and I feel, in writing this book, I was able to carry the story of my ancestors in a different way, and that’s where the transformation comes from.”

Jewish history’s next chapter

The JDC’s Zoya Shvartzman is part of the FEDtalks lineup Sept. 16. (photo from JFGV)

In returning to Vancouver, Zoya Shvartzman is retracing the route that has seen the Moldova-born woman help “write the next chapter of the history of European Jewry.”

Those words, while spoken by Shvartzman, are not about herself – she was crediting North Americans and others who support the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) with helping revivify communities that were almost annihilated under Nazism and then suppressed by communism. But the work Shvartzman does in her role at the JDC means she could rightly claim to be among a number of authors altering the future for Jews in Europe.

Shvartzman and her parents made aliyah from the East European nation when she was 8 years old. At 15, she and her mother migrated to Vancouver. Here, the family had some hard times and they turned to the Jewish community.

“The Jewish community welcomed us with open arms and gave us almost a second home,” she recalled recently in a phone interview with the Independent. “It was a very, very fond memory of my time there and it has a lot to do with the Jewish community that became our family.” She will speak about this time when she presents as one of four speakers at FEDtalks, the opening event of the 2018 Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign, Sept. 16.

Shvartzman chose to pursue a degree in international development studies and political science at McGill University and so, after four years on the West Coast, she and her mother decamped for Montreal.

“After that, I decided to move to Budapest to pursue my master’s in political science because I was focusing on Eastern European politics and transitions from communism to democracy,” she said. “Because I’m from that part of the world, it made sense to go back and be there, be where it’s taking place.”

She completed her studies at Central European University, which was founded and funded by the democracy philanthropist George Soros, and, after graduation, worked for the Canadian embassy in Budapest. In 2007, she was offered a position at the JDC, where she is now director of strategic partnerships.

Shvartzman’s role is to identify on-the-ground needs of Jewish communities in Europe and convey those needs to potential funders, primarily in North America. Federations, foundations and philanthropists then contribute to help the JDC complete its projects.

“In Europe, basically, our main mission is that we build resilient communities,” she said. “We help build communities where they were shattered after the Holocaust and after communist regimes.

“In Eastern and Central Europe, we help poor Jews with basic services like food and medicine and winter relief, help to pay their utilities,” she explained. “Most of the elderly are Holocaust survivors. We work extensively with Holocaust survivors together with the Claims Conference funding. In the last 10 years or so, we developed services for children and families, modeled on the JFS [Jewish Family Services] model that you’re familiar with in Canada and the U.S., addressing the needs of poor children and families.”

Examples of projects that the JDC has spearheaded or supported include a Jewish community centre in Warsaw and a summer camp in Hungary, where children from 25 countries come to strengthen – or, in some cases, learn about for the first time – their Jewish identity. But the work is not limited to Eastern and Central Europe.

In France, the JDC has opened a “resilience centre,” to help Jewish schools, social workers, teachers, children and families respond to threats experienced by Jews in the country. Several acts of anti-Jewish terror in recent years in France have compounded existing anxieties about the security of its Jewish population and institutions.

The decade-plus that Shvartzman has been with the JDC has been a time of challenge for Jews and others across the continent.

“Especially the last four or five years have been particularly tumultuous for Jews in Europe,” she said. “There are different threats – external, internal threats. We see communities that have nearly collapsed, like the community in Greece, in terms of the economic crisis that really, really shattered it.”

In addition to the generalized economic challenges experienced by people in many countries, Jews have faced particular difficulties. Rising antisemitism and political extremism in places like Hungary and Poland have stoked once-dormant apprehensions.

Even so, Shvartzman is bullish about Jewish life in Europe and plans to share her enthusiasm with Vancouverites.

“There are many causes for optimism,” she said. “When you look at the revival of Jewish life in Europe and how these communities have gone from survival to really thriving Jewish communities, I think that’s a big cause of optimism.

“This is quite remarkable when you consider the history and some of the deep, deep traumas that this community has suffered and, today, Jews are reclaiming their heritage and are proud to be Jewish,” she continued. “All of this gives us great causes of optimism that Jewish life in Europe is thriving.”

Shvartzman’s Moldovan childhood and her current work both reflect and embody the JDC’s mission to save and build Jewish lives, said Michael Geller, the JDC’s North American director of communications.

“In her professional life and her personal life and in her life’s journey, she understands quite deeply the importance, the critical importance, of the work we do every day to ensure that needy Jews have the basic needs to continue to live their lives and, in addition, to have a strong Jewish identity, one that is their own, that they make themselves, and one that we help strengthen and empower through the kind of work that we do,” he said.

Returning to the theme of writing the next chapter of European Jewish history, Shvartzman credits overseas allies with making possible all of the achievements she and the JDC have realized.

“It’s only possible because of the support of the North American communities, North American Jewry, that chose to invest in that part of the world over the past 20, 25 years,” she said. “If I had to underline one message, it would be that: North American Jewry helping to write the next chapter of the history of European Jewry.”

FEDtalks features keynote speakers Rabbi Irwin Kula, Pamela Schuller, Arik Zeevi and Zoya Shvartzman. The event takes place at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sept. 16, 7 p.m. Tickets ($36) are available from jewishvancouver.com.

Forgiving but not forgetting

Robbie Waisman, left, and Chief Robert Joseph, will speak at Temple Sholom’s Selichot program Sept. 1. (photos from Temple Sholom)

Two men who have built bridges between Canada’s indigenous and Jewish communities will speak about reconciliation, forgiveness and resilience at Temple Sholom’s Selichot program.

Robbie Waisman, a survivor of the Holocaust who was liberated as a child from Buchenwald concentration camp, and Chief Robert Joseph, a survivor of Canada’s Indian residential schools system, will address congregants on the subject of Forgiving But Not Forgetting: Reconciliation in Moving Forward Through Trauma. The event is at the synagogue on Sept. 1, 8 p.m.

Waisman is one of 426 children who survived Buchenwald. At the age of 14, he discovered that almost his entire family had been murdered. He came to Canada as part of the Canadian War Orphans Project, which brought 1,123 Jewish children here under the auspices of Canadian Jewish Congress.

Joseph is a hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, located around Queen Charlotte Strait in northern British Columbia. He spent 10 years at St. Michael’s Indian Residential School at Alert Bay on the central coast of the province. He recalls being beaten for using his mother tongue and surviving other hardships and abuse. A leading voice in Canada’s dialogue around truth and reconciliation, the chief is currently the ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Waisman and Joseph have become close friends over years of discussing, publicly and privately, their respective histories and the challenges of building a life after trauma. Waisman has become a leading Jewish advocate for indigenous Canadians’ rights.

“I think we have a duty and obligation to give them a stand in the world,” Waisman said. “For many, many years, many people ignored them, and their story about truth and reconciliation was just in the background, they weren’t important. I think that now that we give them an importance – and it is important that they speak up and speak about their history and so on – [it is possible] to make this a better world for them.”

Waisman believes that the experiences of Holocaust survivors and the example that many survivors have set of assimilating their life’s tragedies and committing themselves to tikkun olam is a potential model for First Nations as they confront their past and struggle to address its contemporary impacts.

“We were 426 youngsters who survived Buchenwald and the experts thought that we were finished,” Waisman said of his cohort of survivors, who have been immortalized in The Boys of Buchenwald, a film by Vancouverites David Paperny and Audrey Mehler, and in a book by Sir Martin Gilbert. “We wouldn’t amount to anything because we’d seen so much and we’d suffered so much and lost so much. And look what we have accomplished. We have little Lulek [Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau], who became the chief rabbi of Israel, Eli Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and I can go on and on. When I speak to First Nations, I say, ‘look what we’ve done,’ and then I quote [Barack] Obama and say, ‘Yes, you can.’”

One of Waisman’s first experiences with Canadian indigenous communities was when he was invited to the Yukon. His presentation was broadcast on CBC radio and people called in from all over the territory, asking that Waisman wait for them so that they could come meet him.

“They kept phoning in and saying, ‘Don’t let Robbie leave, we are coming in to see him,’” Waisman recalled. “It was just amazing. I would sit on a chair and they would come and touch me and then form themselves in a circle and, for the first time, they were speaking about their horrors and how to move on with life.”

This was a moment when Waisman realized the power of his personal story to help others who have experienced trauma gain strength.

The Selichot program was envisioned by Shirley Cohn and the Temple Sholom Working Group on Indigenous Reconciliation and Community, which Cohn chairs.

“It’s the right thing to do given the political atmosphere, the increased awareness about indigenous issues and just the fact that, as Jews, I think we need to be more tolerant of others, and these are really the first people in Canada, and they’ve suffered discrimination, as we have, and I think it’s important,” she said.

The message is especially relevant at this time of penitence and self-reflection, she added. “It’s a time for thoughtfulness and looking inward,” said Cohn, who is a social worker.

Rabbi Carrie Brown said the Temple Sholom community sees the topic as fitting.

“We want to look at this further as a congregation,” said Brown. “Selichot is a time of year when we really start to think about ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a community and the conversation between Robbie Waisman and Chief Joseph really fits nicely into that, about trauma and reconciliation and forgiveness and all of these major themes of the season.”

This is “not just a one-off program,” the rabbi stressed, but the beginning of a process of education and conversation.

B.C. helps JCC re-do

Left to right: The Hon. Selina Robinson, B.C. minister of municipal affairs and housing; Michelle Pollock, past president of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver; and Eldad Goldfarb, JCCGV executive director. (photo from JCCGV)

Selina Robinson, British Columbia’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, visited the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver last month to make an announcement regarding the centre’s planned redevelopment.

On June 13, Robinson announced a provincial contribution to support the planning phase of the redevelopment, which intends to replace the existing JCC with a new facility where the existing parking lot is located, as well as a multi-use tower to be located on the site of the existing JCC, most of which will be housing. (For details of the plan, see jewishindependent.ca/jcc-site-to-be-redeveloped.)

“The B.C. government is committed to increasing the affordability and availability of housing in B.C. and we welcome opportunities, like the community centre-led project, that can support these goals,” the ministry of municipal affairs and housing said in a statement to the Independent. “A total of $200,000 has been provided to the Jewish Community Centre to support further development of the housing component of their plan. This plan has the potential to serve people at all ages and stages of life with housing, a new community gathering place, and services for seniors, children and their parents.”

Eldad Goldfarb, executive director of the JCCGV, said the province’s support for this component of the process is an important recognition of the value of the project for the community.

“It’s a very helpful contribution toward the planning process. It’s not money that will be used toward bricks and mortar because, at this point, we’re doing the planning, the rezoning, the budgeting and all these parts that are comprised of planning,” he said. “It’s an initial infusion of support, an investment by the province, to help us move the planning along towards getting this project started and completed.”

The redevelopment dovetails with a number of the provincial government’s priorities, including affordable rental housing, the creation of new childcare spaces, supports for seniors and cultural spaces.

Goldfarb said the community centre is keeping federal, provincial and civic officials closely informed about the project’s progress.

The City of Vancouver is expected to convene a public hearing on the proposed redevelopment this fall.

“We’re excited to see the B.C. government provide planning funds for the JCC redevelopment,” said Karen James, board chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, in a statement to the Independent. “This will be a transformational project for our community and the Oakridge area.”

*** This article has been edited to reflect that the redevelopment will no longer include a new home for the Louis Brier Home and Hospital. ***

VHEC reopens with exhibits

Jannushka Jakoubovitch, a Holocaust survivor, looks at her portrait, taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Marissa Roth, part of the Faces of Survival exhibit at the VHEC. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Two new original exhibits opened at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre recently, concurrent with the opening of the centre’s redeveloped space.

Following the annual general meeting of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance on June 20, attendees moved from the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Rothstein Theatre to the Holocaust centre for the official opening of the exhibits and a first look at the revamped space. (An article on the centre’s renewal project will appear in a future issue.)

photo - Following the AGM, attendees moved from the Rothstein Theatre to the Holocaust centre for the official opening of the exhibits and a first look at the revamped space — Following the AGM, attendees moved from the Rothstein Theatre to the Holocaust centre for the official opening of the exhibits and a first look at the revamped space. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

Both exhibits emphasize local relevance of broader Holocaust history.

In Focus: The Holocaust through the VHEC Collection includes items that the Holocaust centre has assembled over decades. Thematic aspects of Shoah history are illustrated through documents, photographs and artifacts. Interactivity is incorporated through replica items in adjacent drawers, which visitors can handle and explore. Electronic kiosks encourage deeper and broader exploration of topics, including cross-referenced databases that connect, for example, all holdings related to an individual, a place, an event or other search query.

Among the items on display are a yellow Star of David worn in the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, a fragment of a prayer book burned during Kristallnacht in 1938 and found on the street in Berlin after the violence temporarily subsided, and a photo album of life in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, created from negatives that were developed in 1981 and donated to the VHEC.

photo - A souvenir pin from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, part of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s permanent collection and the exhibit In Focus: The Holocaust Through the VHEC Collection — A souvenir pin from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, part of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s permanent collection and the exhibit In Focus: The Holocaust Through the VHEC Collection. (photo from VHEC)

Also on display is a Torah scroll from Prague, which, along with 100,000 other Czechoslovakian Jewish religious objects, was gathered by the Central Jewish Museum in Prague at the behest of Nazi officials.

A souvenir pin from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, featuring a replica of the Brandenburg Gate, and a porcelain figurine of an idealized Aryan woman produced around the same time speak to that portentous international sporting event.

Artifacts from life in hiding include a wooden toy dog that belonged to local child survivor Robert Krell. Among the most unusual items on display is a chess set modeled from chewed bread and sawdust, then painted and varnished.

“These finely articulated pieces are believed to be the work of a Polish Jewish man interned in the Warsaw Ghetto,” according to the exhibit descriptor. “He likely offered the set to a soldier stationed as a guard in the ghetto, in exchange for food.”

Photographs illustrate life in the ghettos, life in hiding and the “Holocaust by bullets,” the process of mass murder in Eastern Europe perpetrated by Einstatzgruppen (Nazi death squads) and collaborators.

Also on display is a recipe book compiled by Rebecca Teitelbaum, the aunt of Vancouver-area Holocaust survivor Alex Buckman. While working in a Siemens ammunition factory in the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück, the exhibit explains, “At great risk of being discovered and killed, she stole pencils and paper to record her recipes and those of other inmates.”

A child’s shoe recovered from the Kanada barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau is on exhibit. “This shoe, belonging to a child of age 3 or 4, was retrieved after the Second World War. Young children deported to Auschwitz were among the first to be selected for the gas chambers. An estimated one million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust – 220,000 children died in Auschwitz alone.”

photo - A fragment of a Torah scroll found on the street in Berlin following Kristallnacht, in 1938, part of the VHEC's permanent collection and the exhibit In Focus: The Holocaust Through the VHEC Collection — A fragment of a Torah scroll found on the street in Berlin following Kristallnacht, in 1938, part of the VHEC’s permanent collection and the exhibit In Focus: The Holocaust Through the VHEC Collection. *(photo from VHEC)*

Also on display is a letter, dated April 20, 1945, from U.S. soldier Tom Perry to his wife Claire after arriving in the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

“I want to write you tonight about one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had, as well of as one of the most horrible things I have ever seen.… With the idea not of pleasing you, for what I saw there was really too horrible to be seen by any decent human being. But with the thought that as my wife you would want to share with me my most horrible as well as my pleasant experiences. And because I think the rest of the family and our friends should know from personal observations what bestial things the Nazis have done, and what a dreadful menace they have been to people all over the world.” The letter proceeds in graphic detail.

The second exhibit is even more intimately connected with the local community. Faces of Survival: Photographs by Marissa Roth consists of portraits of British Columbians who survived the Shoah. Roth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who created a similar exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance / Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, took portraits of survivor volunteers, including both past and present VHEC outreach speakers and board members. In cases where the survivors themselves have passed away, the portraits feature family members holding a photo of the survivor.

The subjects were asked two questions: “Why do you think it is important to remember the Holocaust?” and “What message do you want to convey to students?” From their answers, captions were created to accompany the portraits in the exhibition, which was made possible by the Diamond Foundation.

Accompanying Agi Bergida’s portrait are the words: “My great hope is in the young people, the new generation. Racism is ignorance, to which the answer is education.”

Marion Cassirer, who died in Vancouver in 2014, is pictured in a photograph held by her daughter, Naomi Cassirer. “The Holocaust happened a long time ago, but for our family and for many others, it never ended,” said her daughter. “Marion spent the rest of her life speaking to groups about her family’s experiences, hoping that people would learn and understand that no society is immune.”

Serge Haber said, “It is important to remember the Holocaust because it can happen again, and it can happen here.”

A photograph of the late Paul Heller, held by his daughter Irene Bettinger, is accompanied by her words: “Dangerous human behaviour continues to this day, including antisemitism. Every one of us must participate in efforts to combat such behaviour if our freedoms and democracies are to survive.”

Accompanying Evelyn Kahn’s portrait are her words: “In a world where the media reports events absent of historical truth, the most essential tool becomes survivor testimony.”

The photograph of Peter Parker, who survived Birkenau and Dachau as well as a death march and died in Vancouver in 2015, includes words from his 1987 testimony: “Every human being has good and bad in them, we are capable of the highest noble things and the lowest deeds.”

Claude Romney, who survived in hiding, said: “We, as the last witnesses, have a duty to warn the world of the dangers of targeting any ethnic or religious group; for discrimination and persecution can lead to extermination, as it did under the Nazis.”

The late Bronia Sonnenschein was a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Birkenau and Stuthoff concentration camps and a death march from Dresden to Theresienstadt. Dan Sonnenschein, her son, said, “In her many years of Holocaust education, my mother honoured not only the memory of the murder victims and the other victims who survived, but understood the virulent intensity of antisemitism as ‘the longest hatred’ and the need to combat its current forms.”

Louise Stein Sorensen, a survivor of the Amsterdam Ghetto who survived in hiding, said: “The Holocaust teaches us to arm ourselves against the abuse of human rights.”

Both exhibits continue until next year, and information on opening hours and other details can be found at vhec.org.

After the routine business of the annual general meeting, Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, VHEC education director, presented the 2018 Meyer and Gita Kron and Ruth Kron Sigal Award to educators Sharon Doyle of South Delta Secondary and Julie Mason of David Oppenheimer Elementary in Vancouver. The award recognizes excellence in Holocaust education and genocide awareness in B.C. elementary and high schools.

Ed Lewin, past president of the organization, conferred life fellowships on Ethel Kofsky and Dr. Martha Salcudean.

Introductions and explanations of the new exhibitions, as well as of the renovated centre, were presented by Nina Krieger, VHEC executive director, architect Brian Wakelin, principal of Public: Architecture + Communication, and Shulman Spaar. Hodie Kahn offered reflections from a second-generation perspective.

Growth, change at Yaffa

Avie Estrin at Vancouver Yaffa Housing Society’s new laneway house. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Fred Dexall used to live in a group home in Kerrisdale. “I didn’t like it there,” he recalls. “The problem is they were very unfriendly. Everybody [kept] to themselves.”

When the Vancouver Yaffa Housing Society opened the first home for members of the Jewish community with mental health issues, in 2001, Dexall was the first resident. He remains there today.

“I’m happy here,” he said. There is more freedom to do one’s own thing than in the “dictatorial” group home he left, he said. Plus, the residents enjoy a Jewish lifestyle, celebrate the holidays, have Shabbat dinners on Fridays, attend the Bagel Club on Mondays and participate in other aspects of Jewish communal life. Every day, volunteers shuttle kosher meals from the kitchen at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital for Yaffa residents.

“Some of us have other disabilities besides mental illness,” said Drexall. “I have epilepsy and it’s all looked after.”

The organization is in the midst of a significant expansion. The house where Dexall has lived for 17 years is operated by Yaffa under a lease from the Vancouver Resource Society, a nonprofit providing accessible housing to people with disabilities, which owns the home in a quiet south Vancouver residential neighbourhood.

In 2010, Yaffa bought the house next door, welcoming more residents. Now, a sparkling new two-storey laneway house has just been completed behind the second home and renovations are taking place on the two houses to further increase capacity. Yaffa also has five units in a 51-unit building in Dunbar, which offers more intensive 24/7 care for residents. In an agreement with the Coast Foundation, B.C. Housing and the City of Vancouver, Yaffa has perpetual lease of these five spaces in return for funding a kosher kitchen in the facility.

Avie Estrin, the president of the society, is carrying on a family tradition. His parents, Aaron and Tzvia Estrin, were among the founding members of the Vancouver Yaffa Housing Society and Aaron was pivotal in raising the capital to launch the residential facility and purchase the second home. Their collective passion comes from firsthand recognition of the need. Avie Estrin’s brother, Marc, is a resident.

“I think it was front and centre for us because we had the awareness that many people – most people – simply aren’t privy to,” said Avie Estrin. “You see what people go through and the reality is, there was no other option. Remarkably, even though mental illness has been around forever, there was simply nothing in the Vancouver Jewish community to address it. Montreal had Jewish mental health housing facilities, Toronto had facilities. Vancouver had nothing.”

An ad hoc group of families came together to form the Vancouver Yaffa Housing Society, with no organizational support at the outset.

“We had to do something and it was meeting after meeting after meeting in somebody’s private home and, ultimately, they did make it happen,” said Estrin. “Once it got a little bit of momentum, then there was a little bit more attention. It got the ball rolling, but those first few years were very much uphill.”

Now, the facilities house 13 people. With the completed laneway house and upcoming renovations to the unfinished basement in the second house, the organization will welcome five more residents.

With 13 people in the south Vancouver homes, plus five in Dunbar, that makes 18, Estrin noted, “which is chai, which, again, is quite significant to us.”

photo - Avie Estrin outside of Yaffa’s new laneway house — Avie Estrin outside of Yaffa’s new laneway house. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

Estrin said that, even with this expansion, the organization is only making a dent in the demand. With a rule of thumb that 10% of the population has a mental illness and half of those are acute, the Vancouver Jewish community, he estimates, probably has about 1,200 people who would meet Yaffa’s criteria for residency, which is based on DSM-IV Axis 1: “Schizophrenia, manic-depressive, things like that,” Estrin said.

He acknowledges the organization’s limits.

“We are doing what little we can,” he said, “and you might say, ‘well, it’s a little,’ but I would respond by saying something is better than nothing.” With the increase in capacity to 18, he reframed his response: “At this point, I would suggest to you that more is better than something.”

One of the other things the renovation project will ameliorate, Estrin hopes, is the gender imbalance. Because the nature of Yaffa House is a collective living model, there have been logistical challenges in mixing genders.

“By happenstance, we’ve become kind of an all-guys facility as things stand right now and it’s not because there are less women out there who are affected. There is an equal number of them,” he said. As the redevelopment continues, plans will incorporate accommodations for women, adjacent to the men’s accommodations, but with added privacy.

To complete the development and to support daily operations, Estrin is making a call for support, not only financial – though he stresses that is most welcome – but also for volunteers who can fill various capacities either as members of the board or in helping out at the homes.

For more information, visit yaffahouse.org.