Nominations for this year’s Courage to Come Back Awards are open until Feb. 12, 2016, 5 p.m. The annual awards recognize abilities, celebrate differences and give centre stage to six British Columbians who have overcome tremendous challenges, yet reach out to help others in the province.
Courage recipients show us that people can walk again despite the predictions of some of the best medical minds. They teach us that disabled does not mean unable. They prove that hearing voices in one’s head does not mean a lifetime in hospital. These are valuable members of our community despite injury or illness: they are role models.
Nominations are open only to residents of British Columbia and the nominee must agree to be nominated for a Courage to Come Back Award. All nominees will receive a special certificate of nomination, which pays tribute to their outstanding courage.
A team of volunteer health professionals and community leaders will select one recipient in each category to be honored with an award. If your nominee is unsuccessful, he or she can be nominated again next year.
Any material submitted to Coast Mental Health will not be returned. Coast makes every effort to verify nominee stories but takes no responsibility for errors or omissions, and Coast reserves the right to place nominations in their award categories. Video or CD nominations are not accepted.
To nominate someone, tell the nominee’s story of a courageous comeback accurately and in detail. Submit only one nomination form for the nominee, and submit a minimum of three letters of support and testimonials, and optional supplemental documents, to [email protected]. Nominations will not be considered complete or eligible until a completed nomination form and all mandatory letters of support have been received.
Once you have clicked “submit,” an immediate message should appear confirming your nomination has been successfully submitted. You will also receive a confirmation email.
The Noah’s Ark Project began in 1997 as a response to the B.C. law stating that a newborn may only be discharged from a hospital in a regulation, rear-facing infant car seat. (photo from JWI-BC)
The Noah’s Ark Project, a Jewish Women’s International-BC (JWI-BC) program that supplies regulation, rear-facing infant car seats and essentials for newborns to 14 major British Columbia hospitals and other family agencies, is celebrating its 18th year of providing this essential service to needy families in the province.
Noah’s Ark began in December 1997 as a response to the B.C. law stating that a newborn may only be discharged from a hospital in a regulation, rear-facing infant car seat. The law negatively affected families who could not afford to purchase them. Since the car seat requirement did not apply to taxis, hospital social work departments were obliged to provide these families with taxi vouchers or coupons to transport newborns home without car seats.
However, hospital staff were dismayed at the lack of safety for an infant riding without a car seat in a taxi on their first trip home, as well as the likelihood of riding in a parent’s lap in the future. They were also aware that non-driving single moms without infant car seats would likely be unable to accept transportation offers from family or friends without putting the baby at risk, each and every trip.
In response to this situation, a volunteer program was started in 1997 by Isabelle Somekh to provide nearly new rear-facing infant car seats to St. Paul’s Hospital’s social work department. These rear-facing infant car seats were allocated to working-poor parents, refugees and single parents of newborns at the hospital’s maternity centre. In November 2000, the Noah’s Ark Project was taken on entirely by members of JWI-BC, as one of their many service projects.
Barbara Lucas, a social worker at B.C. Women’s Hospital, said of the program, “B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre delivers 7,000 babies a year and we want them to stay safe after they leave the hospital. We appreciate the wonderful generosity of Jewish Women International-BC for donating hundreds of infant car seats over the years so that families in need can bring their babies home safely.”
Debbie Rootman is a member of the basic resources team and coordinator of the Lower Mainland’s Jewish Food Bank, which is co-funded by Jewish Family Service Agency, JWI-BC and donors from the community. She said, “We are grateful for the assistance received from Noah’s Ark – 2015 was an extraordinary year for pregnant clients and JFSA requested and received many nearly new items to assist these new mothers in the community. Noah’s Ark has provided essentials such as a new crib mattress, cuddle cloths, newborn diapers, sleepers, complete layettes, strollers and infant car seats. All we had to do was ask. It is very much appreciated to have this partnership to support us.”
Since the services that are provided by JWI-BC’s Noah’s Ark Project depend on community support and grants, cheques or Visa donations are appreciated to keep this vital service available for all who depend on it. Donations can be mailed to Jewish Women International-BC, c/o 106-7580 Columbia St., Vancouver, B.C., V5X 4S8. Donations over $18 receive tax receipts.
For more information on the rear-facing infant car seat program, call 604-838-5567 and leave a message for Somekh, the Noah’s Ark Project chair, or e-mail [email protected].
Limmud Vancouver 2016, which takes place Jan. 30 and 31, includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a wide range of topics. This second article in a two-part series features a few of the presenters.
The love of two women
People who have a familiarity with modern Jewish and Zionist history know the name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as the man who nearly single-handedly revived Hebrew into a modern language. Ben-Yehuda’s grandson, also named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, contends the history of modern Hebrew, Judaism and Israel would be very different were it not for the two women in his grandfather’s life.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)
“The story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is really very, very interesting and there’s an aspect of it which is really overlooked very often and it’s the issue of the women,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida.
Ben-Yehuda was married, consecutively, to two women – sisters – and the grandson contends that they are the reason the world still knows his name.
“Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, at the beginning of his path, was doomed to an early grave and all his dreams and all his great ideas about reviving the Hebrew language and reviving the Hebrew people in their land could have come to naught,” he said.
At age 21, while studying in Paris, Ben-Yehuda nearly died of tuberculosis. He wrote to his fiancée, his childhood sweetheart Devora Jonas, breaking off their engagement. “He wrote a letter and said forget about me, find yourself another man who is going to give you a life,” said the grandson. “She refused to be jilted. She said, you promised to marry and by God I’m holding you to your promise.”
The couple had five children before Devora died of tuberculosis. Three of the children died of diphtheria in short succession after their mother’s passing. Before she died, Devora insisted that Ben-Yehuda marry her sister, Paula Beila, who later took the Hebrew name Hemda.
“Hemda got this letter from her sister and it said if you want to be a princess, come marry my prince, my husband,” said the grandson. “Hemda decided that, yes, she wants that … and she says I’m going to come to Jerusalem, I’m going to marry you, I’m going to take care of your children for my sister and we’ll have our own children and I will help you in your job.”
They did have children – six, although only three survived, including the father of the Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who will be in Vancouver this month. He credits the two women for everything his grandfather accomplished.
“The first one [Devora] rebuilt his morale,” he said. “He was really quite resigned to the fact that he was going to die.… He married her and she filled him with hope and with strength through love and through her enthusiasm and through her caring of him.”
Hemda was the force that got a world-leading publisher to print Ben-Yehuda’s magnum opus Hebrew dictionary and, after he died with six of the 17 volumes completed, pressed her son Ehud (father of Eliezer the grandson) to complete the series.
Ben-Yehuda’s work changed the course of Jewish history, but his grandson assigns credit elsewhere. “The thing that made it possible was the love of two women,” he said.
Progressive Zionism
Kenneth Bob’s Zionist credentials are pretty strong. He is national president of Ameinu, the progressive Zionist organization, he chairs the board of directors of the American Zionist Movement and serves on the Jewish Agency for Israel board of governors. He believes it is those like him, who identify as progressive Zionists, who can have the most impact confronting the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.
Kenneth Bob (photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)
“We share some of the criticism of Israeli policy,” he said of progressive Zionists and the BDS movement. “Where we differ is the BDS movement generally doesn’t support Israel’s right to exist and we are very strong supporters of Israel’s right to exist, we just disagree with some of Israel’s policies. Because the criticism of Israel is coming from the left, it is best for the left Zionists, the ones who can speak the language of the left, to combat their attacks.”
Some commentators argue that BDS is having little real impact, while others see it as a genuine advancing threat. “I take the middle ground on this,” said Bob. Most of the BDS resolutions are emerging on large or elite campuses and gain much media attention, “so the number of BDS resolutions is actually maybe smaller than people might think. It’s in the dozens, not in the hundreds.” However, BDS is making inroads in the trade union movement.
In a world that sometimes seems awash in inhumanity and rights abuses, some people suggest singling out Israel for approbation is evidence of bigotry. As a strategic argument, he said, this approach is not very useful.
“We did some focus group work and liberals … don’t claim to be consistent. When you ask them in focus groups why you’re picking on Israel, they say, well, Israel wants to be like the West, so we’re going to treat Israel like we would the West. And I say, yes, I think we can hold Israel to a higher standard than we do Libya or Syria. I think that’s valid.”
His approach is that single-mindedly attacking Israel isn’t going to resolve the problem of Palestinian statelessness.
“If you really want to try to bring about a two-state solution, then let’s work with those coexistence NGOs on the ground in Israel and Palestine,” he said. “Let’s invest in Palestinian businesses and Israeli businesses that are trying to work across the border. Let’s do all kinds of positive things to encourage our kind of people on the ground in Israel and Palestine, but just punishing Israel doesn’t make sense.”
Life before 1492
The topic of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula immediately raises the spectre of 1492, the year the Jewish people were expelled from Spain. In his Limmud presentation, Robert Daum will delve into the dramatic history that came before that fatal date.
Robert Daum (photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)
“It would be a distortion of the history of any European Jewish context to focus only on the catastrophes that punctuated many centuries of dynamic community life, intellectual creativity and fascinating politics,” said Daum, a rabbi and academic with appointments at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, among other positions. “To use an analogous case, the Shoah more or less destroyed European Jewish civilization, but it does not represent or describe European Jewish civilization. At the same time, one cannot ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak, and, of course, 1492 is a critical part of the story. We also need to understand what happened before 1492.”
The lasting impacts of Spanish and Portuguese life on the following half-millennium of Jewish history, Daum said, is panoramic.
“Just as one cannot begin to understand the history of Spain without knowing about the history of Romans, Christians, Jews and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula,” he said in an email interview, “so, too, one cannot begin to understand many aspects of Jewish civilization, from politics to law to Talmud study to poetry to the development of the Hebrew language, without knowing more about developments in Jewish communities on the Iberian Peninsula before 1492.”
Daum said that most people know that the history of the Jews in Iberia is a rich and storied one, but, he added, “the history is even more interesting than this!” Moreover, this history is still having an impact on Spain and Portugal today, something he will touch on during his presentation.
“In addition to exploring a few fascinating stories, one should expect to come away with a sense of some of the major debates about Jewish (and Muslim) history on the Iberian Peninsula, and an awareness of how these debates are deeply connected to heated debates within Spain today about that fascinating country’s founding narratives and its place in the region,” he said.
Old meets new
For a city that is so new – it celebrated the centenary of its founding in 2009 – Tel Aviv has become a global hotbed of artistic and literary ferment. That’s no coincidence, says Naomi Sokoloff, a professor of modern Jewish literature and Hebrew at the University of Washington.
Naomi Sokoloff (photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)
“It was designed to be that way,” she said. “It’s been a magnet for writers and artists and publishers almost from the beginning.”
Tel Aviv was created not only as the first Hebrew city, but also as a secular sibling to Jerusalem, the sacred city.
“The city was founded by visionaries,” she said. “Some of them were more utopian and some of them were more pragmatic, but they really founded the city as an idea and as an ideal.”
The name itself is a figment of literature. Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel of a Jewish state, Altneuland (Old New Land), was almost immediately translated into Hebrew and the title of the book was Tel Aviv. Aviv means spring, representing the rebirth of the Hebrew nation, while tel reflects the ancient heritage, meaning accumulated layers of civilization.
Sokoloff’s presentation at Limmud will look at the literature and art of Tel Aviv through the writings of S. Yizhar, a song by Naomi Shemer, a story by Etgar Keret and some paintings of Tel Aviv, all of which may shed light, she said, on the tension between the founding ideas of Tel Aviv and how things turned out.
Madrichim at Camp Miriam palling around in summer 1990. The author is in front. (photo from Mira Sucharov)
On a little corner of Gabriola Island lies an enclave of old-style Jewish utopianism. Modeled after a kibbutz, campers (chanichim) and counselors (madrichim) talk about heady topics like radical justice, equal worth, unionization, socialism and Labor Zionism.
They learn Hebrew, engage in physical labor and debate topics like whether O Canada adequately addresses the reality of First Nations, the fate of the Palestinians, and how to make a radically inclusive society within Israel. It’s Camp Miriam, part of the network of Habonim-Dror camps across North America. Among the founders of the camp was my grandmother, Marian Margolis, and I spent one memorable summer there as a counselor in 1990.
A lot has changed in Israel – and especially across the kibbutz movement – over the decades. I spoke to the current rosh (director), 22-year-old Leor Laniado, a student at the University of British Columbia majoring in environmental and sustainable geography.
The camp instils in its campers the value of “shivyon erech ha’adam,” a principle that every human being is of equal worth. It’s heady stuff for 10-year-olds who don’t measure themselves in terms of professional status anyway, but the idea is there. Alongside the usual fare of swimming, sports and crafts, campers choose a daily work branch where each task is valued. Fittingly, bathroom-cleaning detail has become one of the most popular options, Laniado tells me.
Campers also have a long tradition of running a kupah (common fund). An initial donation of pocket money is placed into a pot where campers decide how to spend it. Maybe the kids want to pool the funds for a party, maybe a portion will be donated to charity, maybe one camper needs a new toothbrush and applies to the treasurer – who is, of course, a fellow camper.
Rachel Fishman logged eight years as a camper before joining the staff. She values how much she sees Camp Miriam embodying the ideals of youth empowerment. Within limits, she points out, “youth are given space to make their own society.”
Trilby Smith spent 13 summers at Camp Miriam and is currently vice-chair of the camp committee. She sends both her kids to Miriam so “they can develop a sense of community defined by their peers, so that they can be in an environment that is open to questioning and thinking critically about Israel and what it means to be Jewish, and so that they can learn to be leaders.” And, she added, “So that they can have fun!”
Socialism isn’t the only tricky concept permeating the walls of the dining hall. (Yes, campers even do the dishes.) So, too, is Zionism. “I think that Jews in the Diaspora are facing a crisis of how to support Israel. A lot of madrichim struggle with this internally, especially studying in liberal universities,” Laniado said. It’s about “simultaneous love and criticism” at Miriam. “Recognizing that we’ve created a vibrant Israeli society, there’s a lot of work that remains to be done,” she said.
In Israel, Habonim-Dror partners with Hanoar Haoved on projects such as teaching English in Arab high schools. Called the Shared Existence project, it seeks “a joint liberation of both Israelis and Palestinians, striving towards a diverse and vibrant Israeli commonwealth,” in Laniado’s words.
Struggling with Israeli-Palestinian relations and with Zionism is a common refrain these days, but what Camp Miriam – and Habonim in general – manages to do is offer a way for youth to grapple with these issues head-on rather than abdicate altogether. Abdication – or what sociologists have been calling a “distancing” from Israel and Jewish life – is one of the biggest challenges.
These days, the radical secularism that I recall from the summer of 1990 has been replaced by an inching towards Judaism. While they still forego the Hamotzi in favor of a Labor Zionist chant, campers are now more likely to hear about Jewish values, embrace Jewish texts or be treated to a discussion by the rosh on the weekly Torah portion.
While the simple porridge my Baba Marian made for the campers in the 1950s when she was the first “camp mother” has been supplemented by scrambled eggs, fruit salad, yogurt and granola, along with gluten-free and dairy-free options, Zionism is wrestled with rather than taken for granted as a simple solution to the ills of antisemitism, and a commitment to Hebrew is now paired with a desire to “engage with Arabic language and culture.” The big values – leadership, debate, a commitment to Israel, Jewish identity, justice, labor and inclusiveness – remain.
For more information on Camp Miriam, visit campmiriam.org.
Mira Sucharovis an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is a columnist for Canadian Jewish News and contributes to Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward, among other publications.
A typical day at camp is split between the waterfront, where campers learn to swim, ski, sail, canoe and kayak, and land, where campers participate in sports, drama, crafts and Jewish programming. (photo from Camp Hatikvah’s Facebook page)
Established in 1937, Camp Hatikvah in the Okanagan offers campers a summer experience that provides balanced emphasis on skill development and relationship building. Campers are immersed in a group setting where they must learn to live, cooperate with and embrace one another. In doing so, they learn a great deal about themselves and what it means to be a member of a community.
During any given summer, close to 400 campers attend Camp Hatikvah. While the bulk of participants are from the Greater Vancouver area, close to 30% come from cities such as Calgary, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, New York, Edmonton, Tel Aviv and Mexico City.
At Hatikvah, campers learn of their shared culture and values, and of their homeland in Israel. During a summer at Hatikvah, campers have an opportunity to participate in Jewish cultural experiences, such as Shabbat, Israeli dancing and Hebrew singing, as well as educational programs about the history and importance of the state of Israel. A typical day at camp is split between the waterfront, where campers learn to swim, ski, sail, canoe and kayak, and land, where campers participate in sports, drama, crafts and Jewish programming.
The camp staff are comprised of approximately 70 Jewish youth from across Canada, the United States and Israel. Most were campers with Hatikvah or its Young Judaea sister camps across Canada. Indeed, when current director and head of staff Liza Rozen-Delman was hired in 2007, she was completing a circle that began years before, when she was at Hatikvah for eight summers, and went from being a first-year staff at 17 to an assistant director at 24.
For more information about Camp Hatikvah, visit the camp’s website, camphatikvah.com, or contact Rozen-Delman at [email protected] or 604-263-1200.
The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society will honor Chief Dr. Robert Joseph, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, on Jan. 17. (photo from Jack P. Blaney Awards, Simon Fraser University)
The release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report last year was a turning point in the relationship between Canada and its aboriginal peoples. It is part of a longer and ongoing trajectory of healing, according to Chief Dr. Robert Joseph, who is being honored this weekend as a courageous civic leader.
The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was founded by members of the local Jewish and Swedish communities, including the honorary Swedish consul, to recognize individuals who help others at great risk to themselves. Joseph, hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation on northern Vancouver Island, is the recipient of this year’s Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award.
Chief Dr. Robert Joseph (photo from Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society )
Joseph is ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, an organization intended to “revitalize the relationships among indigenous peoples and all Canadians,” and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council.
“At significant personal risk and after facing severe oppression, Chief Dr. Robert Joseph courageously stood up against social injustice to help others,” notes the award citation. “As a residential school survivor, he courageously chose to publicly share his story and the consequences of the abuse and trauma he had endured. This was at a time when the indigenous community was conflicted about bringing the experiences in the residential schools to light and when the larger community was in denial about what happened. Chief Dr. Robert Joseph chose to turn his experience into a vehicle for healing through reconciliation and a will to make sure that this would never happen again.”
In an interview with the Independent, Joseph discussed the progress toward healing his community has made in recent decades.
“Our First Nations people were absolutely in deep despair, not understanding what had happened to us over the course of all that time that residential schools existed,” he said. “But, in the last 20 years, we’ve made remarkable, remarkable progress. And one of the breakthroughs in all of that was survivors like myself began to feel confident enough to tell our stories. We had been walking around in deep shame and despair and brokenness and suddenly we found a way to begin to tell our story.”
A crucial first step, he said, was the federal government’s 1998 Statement of Reconciliation. Though the statement itself was equivocal and not universally appreciated, Joseph said, it was accompanied by funds for survivors and resources for the affected communities.
“I was part of the movement because I was executive director for the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, which was the only organization of its kind at the time,” he said. “So, we began to hold meetings and circles where circles of survivors began to tell their stories and it was deeply, deeply liberating.”
The process expanded, he said, to include representatives of the churches who were complicit in the schools system and later the government and other Canadians.
“We began to recognize that indeed there is a common humanity that exists between all of us and if we can’t harness that common humanity, we’re going to always have these atrocities going on around the world,” he said. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a culmination of that progress and Joseph is uplifted by the response of Canadians since the report’s release last year.
“We’ve had a tremendous interest and response from many Canadians about their desire to reconcile,” he said. Even so, the impact of the report was double-edged, he said.
“When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report was submitted in June, it said that because of a whole number of initiatives and policies, Canada had created, impacted, effected a cultural genocide against the aboriginal people of this country,” he explained. “For me, even as I sat and listened to that, it was sort of a bittersweet report. On the one hand, all of our suffering had been acknowledged and identified in this report. But, on the other hand, as a country together, you and I and everyone who are Canadians were told that genocide was a part of our history.”
He added that he is humbled to receive the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award, which is named in honor of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara, diplomats who, during the Second World War, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
“I’m really moved by the idea that people who suffered huge indignities, human suffering, who have been through it all like no one else has before, are thinking that somebody as little as I am can be acknowledged by them,” Joseph said.
As he prepares to receive his award, the chief said he is optimistic that Canada is at a crossroad.
“We are so blessed in this country,” he said. “We have all of the rainbow and color of the human race here and we have a chance to engage with each other, to nurture our relationships, to embrace our differences and indeed celebrate them.… But it calls us to our highest order as Canadians to be all that we can be in treating each other with respect and dignity because there is nothing more important than respect and dignity. I think that we are on the right path.”
Joseph will receive his award at an event on Sunday, Jan. 17, at 1:30 p.m., in the Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The ceremony will be followed by the screening of the film Carl Lutz: The Forgotten Hero, about a Swiss diplomat in Budapest who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
Limmud Vancouver, a now-annual festival of Jewish learning, takes place Jan. 30 and 31. The “pan-denominational” event includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a diverse array of topics. This week and next, the Independent features a few of the presenters who will participate in the local version of the international phenomenon that has now reached more than 60 Jewish communities worldwide.
A national fish story
Eve Jochnowitz calls gefilte fish the national dish of the Ashkenazi Jewish people.
“Wherever you have Ashkenazic Jews, you have the Yiddish language and you have gefilte fish,” she said. “It’s like DNA. It’s in many different permutations and incarnations, but the gefilte fish pretty much goes wherever the Yiddish-speaking Jews go.”
A culinary ethnographer who hosts a Yiddish-language cooking show, Jochnowitz doesn’t want to tip her hand too much in advance of her presentation here this month.
“Let’s just say there are some very surprising variations on gefilte fish out there and let’s just say that the Ashkenazic Jews will come up with ingenious ways to have gefilte fish in the most unexpected situations,” she said in a phone interview from her New York home.
If there are so many variations, then what, at root, defines geflite fish?
“Usually it is made of freshwater fish; in Eastern Europe, most frequently carp, pike and whitefish,” she said. “The more carp there is, the more dark and the more fishy, more flavorful, it is. Some people like it to be more fishy, some people like it to be almost a tofu substitute with the fishiness very understated and the gefilte fish itself being more of a base for some horseradish or egg sauce or whatever it is you choose to put on your gefilte fish.”
It may or may not have matzah meal, it may or may not have sugar, she said.
“This is another very controversial issue with gefilte fish – should it be sweetened or salted or both?” she said. The term itself means “stuffed fish,” but stuffing a fish is very difficult and labor-intensive, so “most gefilte fish is not gefilte.”
Although she is a gefilte fish maven, Jochnowitz stressed that Ashkenazi food is not limited to the familiar.
“Yiddish food is a universe,” she said. “There is much more to Yiddish food and Yiddish cooking than just challah and kugel.”
Her other presentation at Limmud will focus on the little-known phenomenon of Jewish vegetarian cookbooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Two sides to the story
David Matas, a noted human rights lawyer who represents the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, says the world needs to recognize that Palestinians are not the only refugee population that emerged from the war of 1948-49.
David Matas (photo from Limmud Vancouver)
“What we see is two refugee populations that were generated as a result of the Arab invasion to stop the creation of Israel,” he said. “The Jewish population is, in fact, more numerous than the Palestinian.”
The United Nations, with a few exceptions, has been concerned about the Arab refugees from that time, but not the Jewish ones who were forced from their native lands across North Africa and the Middle East, he said. Israel has also not taken a strong lead on the issue until recently, he added.
“Israel, on the whole, has not been a great advocate on this issue historically because there has been the Zionist mythos that people wanted to come to Israel rather than the fact that they came because they were refugees,” he said. “It’s only recently that Israel has itself adopted this position that these people are a refugee population and should be treated in any overall refugee settlement.”
There is also the fact that Jewish refugees have been given citizenship in Israel or other countries, while the Palestinian populations have largely remained stateless.
“The Arab population mostly has not been resettled and, in fact, they’ve grown because their descendants have been classified as refugees,” Matas said. “They’ve remained as a perpetual refugee population. There’s been an attempt to keep this population as a refugee population, as an argument for the destruction of the state of Israel.”
Matas and his organization believe both refugee groups should receive justice. Most likely, he said, a resolution might involve a compensation fund that wouldn’t necessarily come from Israel or the Arab states, but possibly from the United States or third parties willing to facilitate a larger peace settlement.
“That compensation fund would be available to people who were victimized from both refugee populations, as well as their descendants, or something like that,” he said. The idea of compensation for massive human rights violations is not new. “There’s been lots of experience with the Holocaust, amongst other [cases]. You’ve got a kind of jurisprudence and experience to draw on in order to make these programs work.”
While some commentators contend that the refugee issue can wait until later stages of any negotiated settlement, Matas disagrees.
“I think it’s important to bring it in at this stage of the negotiations,” he said. “This Palestinian notion that we are the refugees and the Jews aren’t plays into this false narrative there’s only one victim population when in fact there are two.”
A Polish journey
Jewish Canadians often travel to Poland in search of their family’s roots or as an exercise in history. Norman Ravvin travels there frequently, but he is as focused on the present as on the past.
Norman Ravvin (photo from Limmud Vancouver)
“You can visit Poland on different terms,” said the Montreal academic and author. He will lead a session on traveling Poland that focuses on the major cities of Warsaw, Kraków, Lodz and Poznan, as well as his maternal ancestors’ hometown of Radzanow.
“The overall depiction will be of Poland as a place that is alive and contemporary,” he said. “Aspects of that are related to Jewish memory and parts of it have to do with contemporary Polish life and then the way that one feels as you go back to the ancestral place.”
Things are changing fast in Poland, Ravvin said. The end of communism, the integration into the European Union and the general march of time means things have altered significantly since Ravvin first toured there in 1999. One area of progress relates to Jewish and war-era history.
“In the last 25 years, they’ve become very effective at commemorating Jewish prewar life,” he said. “If you had traveled to Poland in 2000, this wouldn’t necessarily have appeared to be true, but now certainly it is true and, when you walk in Warsaw, the sidewalks are marked with these remarkable inlays which say this was the ghetto wall, so that you step over it and you actually feel that you understand the prewar and the wartime city and now the postwar city.”
Some of the efforts, he speculates, are for the purposes of tourism, but he also acknowledges Polish efforts at education.
“They’re doing a reasonable job of confronting how to live with the shadows of the past,” he said.
Ravvin’s mother’s family fled Radzanow in 1935 and all those left behind were murdered. The family made their way to Canada, eventually to Vancouver, where Ravvin’s grandfather, Yehuda-Yosef Eisenstein, was a shochet (kosher slaughterer).
Ravvin welcomes people to bring their own family history to his presentation.
“If they’re carrying their own version of this story,” he said, “they might warm that up in their minds, their own families’ Polish past, what they know about it, what they wish they knew, if they’ve gone, whether they might go, so that the possibility is the thing they’re considering and then maybe my talk will change the way they think about that.”
If there’s one thing Dan Ruimy is good at, it’s getting people together and promoting dialogue.
Ruimy is the new Liberal member of Parliament for the Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge riding. A 53-year-old son of Jewish Moroccan immigrants to Canada, Ruimy’s parents, Andre and Jacqueline, moved to Montreal’s Cote-des-Neiges in the mid-1950s. There, they raised their five sons and ran Cantor’s Bakery in Cote-des-Neiges and a grocery store in Habitat 67. Ruimy attended synagogue with his family on the High Holy Days. Later, a career in food and beverage led him all over the country for 27 years, as he filled positions at McDonald’s, A&W and Quiznos.
All that traveling took its toll and by 2011 he was ready to settle down, get grounded in one community and find a place to call home. He chose Maple Ridge and purchased a secondhand bookstore that sold loose-leaf tea. Today, he is still the owner of Bean Around Books & Tea, and credits the tea and coffee shop as having played a pivotal role in his decision to enter politics.
“At Bean Around, I saw what happens when you include people in your community,” he reflected. “Having spent my life in the hospitality industry, my personality is all about social contact. At the tea shop, I saw there was a craving for that, so I’d introduce people to each other and help make connections. It’s quite an amazing thing to watch a 15-year-old engaging an 86-year-old in dialogue. When I started thinking about running for public office, I realized that this is what I could do for my community: create dialogue, bring people together and help people find solutions for the challenges they encounter every day.”
Ruimy feels strongly about community and what comprises it. “The Syrian refugees are a perfect example,” he said. “By including them, we become a stronger community. Isn’t that what Canada is all about? We’re a nation built on immigration. We shouldn’t shun people, we should welcome them with open arms, because that’s our future as well.”
Since being sworn in as a member of Parliament in November, Ruimy has hired extra staff for his shop to accommodate a busy schedule commuting to and from Ottawa. While he’s no stranger to traveling for work, it’s different this time, he said. “This is my home base now, I have a community to come back to. In the past, I’d come back to an empty place where I didn’t know my neighbors and wasn’t involved but, for the first time in my life, I can actually say I’m coming home.”
He plans to open his constituency office in Maple Ridge soon. It’s “tough” to be Jewishly affiliated in Maple Ridge, he said, given that there are few Jews living there. But, in Ottawa, he’s joined the Canada-Israel Inter-Parliamentary Group. “Having those roots is important to me, and I think we lose sight when we’re not involved in that part of our community,” he said.
Ruimy said the key issues he’ll be working on are homelessness, affordable housing, helping struggling seniors, and providing assistance to youth trying to find jobs. “There’s lots of opportunity in Canada but, for some reason, people have difficulty finding the programs,” he said. “I hope to be an agent of change and help bring those opportunities to young people.”
The most exciting moment of his parliamentary career to date was attending the first session in the House of Commons, he added. “For the first time, you’re seeing the 338 people who got elected and, at that moment, it sunk in how lucky I am to have been given this opportunity. It’s a privilege really and I feel proud that people sent me here to represent them, that they put their trust and confidence in me.”
Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net. This article was originally published in the Canadian Jewish News.
Keynote speaker Senator Anne Cools with Janusz Korczak Association of Canada president Jerry Nussbaum. (photo from JKAC)
The third session of the six-part Janusz Korczak Lecture Series “How to Love a Child” took place Nov. 25 at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre. Co-sponsored by the University of British Columbia faculty of education and the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada, this well-attended lecture – The Evolution, Current Status and Future of the “Best Interests of the Child” Principle in the Protection of Children’s Rights – drew people from all walks of life. Among the attendees were teachers, children’s rights activists, Janusz Korczak association members, the general public and students.
The lecture’s moderator, Dr. Edward Kruk, associate professor of social work at UBC, who specializes in child and family policy, opened the evening’s program, while I brought Dr. Janusz Korczak into focus by briefly discussing the fate of children in war zones, relating the topic to Korczak’s care of children during the Second World War.
The Hon. Anne Cools, senator for Toronto Centre-York and Canada’s longest serving senator, was the keynote speaker. Among her many accomplishments in social services, she founded one of Canada’s first battered women’s shelters. Her talk centred on what has been done in the best interest of the child. She spoke about the ramifications in her areas of expertise – domestic violence, divorce, child custody and shared parenting – and how the interaction of politics, government and the law provide a complex arena in which the child’s fate is often lost.
The three panelists that followed Cools each shed light on a different aspect of children’s well-being.
Beverley Smith, representing the field of child care, is a longtime women’s and children’s activist from Calgary. Among many honors, she received the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award for her work. She spoke about working parents and daycare, including how this separates children from their loved ones and how the worth of a stay-at-home parent’s work (usually the mother) is undervalued by the government. In this context, she referred to Korczak, who, among other things, acted in the best interest of the child by advocating that children’s voices need to be heard on the subject of their own care and needs.
The second panelist, Cecilia Reekie, a member of the Haisla First Nation, is an adoptee. Sitting on many boards, her expertise is in the areas of aboriginal culture, truth and reconciliation. She represented the field of child protection, speaking from the heart and sharing her story with the audience. She said that she was lucky to eventually have been adopted by people who became caring and supportive parents, thus enabling her to grow and succeed in life. However, she said, many other aboriginal children have not had such luck. In fact, she said, “indigenous children are disproportionately represented in the child protection/welfare system across Canada.”
The final panelist, Eugenea Couture, is an author, mentor and advocate for child custody law reform. She is the recipient of the 2014 YMCA Power of Peace Medal and the 2014 Foster Children’s Day Award. Because of her own experience of having gone through divorce and child custody trials, she knows how divorce can become a war zone, the children its casualties. “How can we expect a child who is ripped from their family environment to feel worthy of love and belonging?” she asked. “It will not matter what they hear, because the backlash of taking them into care already speaks volumes of trauma.”
To register for the next lecture in the Janusz Korczak series – The Human Rights of Aboriginal Children, with keynote speakers Dr. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C. representative for children and youth, and Dr. Michael DeGagné, president and vice-chancellor of Nipissing University – visit jklectures.educ.ubc.ca. There is no cost to attend. The lecture takes place on Jan. 21, 7 p.m., at the alumni centre.
Lillian Boraks-Nemetzis a Vancouver-based author and a board member of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada.
Three Vancouver-area teachers who traveled to Israel last summer for an intensive three-week symposium on teaching about the Holocaust now plan to share their knowledge with other educators throughout the region.
The three were chosen to study at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, with many of the world’s foremost scholars on the Shoah. The focus was on how to educate students of diverse cultures and faiths about the Holocaust and to leverage that knowledge as a framework for teaching about human values, responsible citizenship and social justice.
Eyal Daniel, former head of school at Vancouver Talmud Torah elementary and high school, the latter of which became King David High School, now teaches at Buckingham elementary in Burnaby. As a Jewish person and a native of Israel, Daniel said his experience was somewhat different from most of the other participants from across Canada, but he tried to go into the process ready to absorb everything presented.
“The symposium was three weeks, from 8:30 to 5:30 every day,” he said. “It included lectures about all the different facets connected to the Holocaust by really top lecturers.”
The group also visited different parts of Israel, including Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz, formed by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. In addition to teachers, participants included Christian clergy, researchers and some people from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The Canadian teachers were sponsored by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem.
Among the most impactful aspects, said Daniel, was meeting and hearing from people with perspectives on well-known aspects of the Shoah.
“One of them was Anne Frank’s childhood friend, a woman at the age of 94, who knew her personally because she met her before [Frank] died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,” he said. “The second one was a couple that was on Schindler’s list, people that worked in Schindler’s factory and knew him personally.” Hearing firsthand accounts leaves a deep impact, he said. “You’re part of this history.”
He was also impressed to see how many non-Jewish people are touched and moved by the Holocaust and how committed they are to teach people from different cultures, he said.
The provincial education ministry curriculum does not require educators at any grade level to teach the Holocaust, although it usually comes up when studying the Second World War. It falls to the individual teacher to determine what to emphasize. Daniel has incorporated the topic into social studies, language arts and art. His students, for example, wrote poems about the Holocaust and Daniel sent the seven best to a competition for young writers by the Poetry Institute of Canada. All seven were published in an anthology.
He also incorporates books like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Old Brown Suitcase (by Vancouver writer Lillian Boraks-Nemetz) or Anne Frank’s diary, and films like the documentaries Paper Clips and Freedom Writers.
“The Holocaust is a one-time event, but it is also connected to racism and prejudice and stereotypes and genocide,” he said. The multicultural students of Metro Vancouver can often personally relate to the historical or contemporary manifestations of these topics.
“The idea is to show that, first of all, you need to learn about this kind of an event because even though it’s an exceptional event, it can happen – or may not happen – because of you,” he said.
Delta high school teacher Stephanie Henderson participated in the program, as well. She too tries to weave the topic into the curriculum when appropriate. When studying the history of Venice, for example, she will note the history of the Venice ghetto, the original Jewish ghetto but not the last.
“The Holocaust is getting to be far away,” she said. “Slowly, people are forgetting about it. This is giving us the ability to keep talking about it.”
The third local teacher on the program was Surrey high school teacher Mark Figueira. “Having been there, it’s something that I think about every day now, whereas before I had been to Israel, it was a topic that I covered in my class, but now it’s become much more than that,” he said. “When I teach about the Holocaust now, it’s so much more rich. It’s stories about people that we met. Just having been there gave me such a really good context for it now.”
The three have created a presentation they will share with other teachers during professional development days, beginning in Delta next February. They will offer advice and approaches on educating about the Holocaust for teachers at every level of knowledge and experience.
In the last decade, the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem has sent more than 200 teachers to attend the summer seminar, where they acquire pedagogical tools for teaching about the Holocaust to Canada’s multicultural students.
