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June 19, 2009
Refugees turned back
Holocaust education gets federal support.
DAVE GORDON
Seventy years ago, in late spring 1939, Hitler's extermination camps had only been outlined in blueprints and schematics, and Poland had yet to be invaded by the Nazis. Some six months earlier, however, the Kristallnacht pogrom killed about a hundred Jews. Thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed, and anti-Jewish laws had already taken effect in Germany and Austria. Those who could afford to board a boat to flee the country, or could secure the correct paperwork to do so, were luckier than most. But being at sea did not guarantee being welcomed to safety at the port of entry. The St. Louis is one of the more famous examples.
About 150 participants gathered for a conference, The St. Louis Era: Looking Back, Moving Forward, at the Sutton Place Hotel in downtown Toronto June 1-2. Hosted by B'nai Brith Canada's League for Human Rights, seminars focused on Holocaust education, immigration past and present and panel discussions about what happened to the St. Louis steamship.
The ship, with some 900 Jewish refugees, fled Germany for Cuba, in May 1939. A combination of corruption, bureaucracy, immigrant quotas and anti-Semitism held the vessel in port for about a month. In the end, they were turned away by Cuba, the United States and Canada, only to be forced to return to Europe.
Eventually, a number of refugees were granted asylum in Holland, France, Great Britain and Belgium. However, more than a third were murdered in the Holocaust, as the Nazis overtook Eastern Europe.
Giving a keynote address at the conference was Jason Kenney, minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. "I find it particularly appropriate to stand before you as a member responsible for immigration to Canada," said the Conservative MP from Calgary Southeast, referencing the St. Louis incident. "If we are to learn the lessons of the past ... there must be learning of the entire civil society," he said.
To those ends, the federal government has pledged nearly a million dollars to help B'nai Brith fund its Task Force for Research and Holocaust Education, announced Kenney. This funding is earmarked for scholarly works, services, high school curricula and to train educators.
Kenney drew parallels between the Nazi murders of 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, the terror attacks on the Chabad House in Mumbai and the attack at the Dolphinarium discothèque in Israel, which occurred eight years ago to the day of the conference. Kenney said he had visited each site, and noted that they all held the common thread of Jews being singled out for murder, regardless of time and place.
Irwin Cotler, Liberal MP for Mount Royal, reinforced the uniqueness of last century's Jewish tragedies and this century's ongoing threats against the Jewish people.
"We are witnessing today the resurgence of anti-Semitism. We cannot treat this as any other hatred. We always appreciate the act of remembrance, as an antidote to denial and trivialization of the Shoah," he said.
Frieda Miller, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), discussed how to pass on the lessons of the Shoah to future generations. She took the dais with others, in a presentation called One Country, Many Realities: The Role of Canadian Holocaust Museums. Other Holocaust museums in Canada were represented by Yude Henteleff and Carla Divinsky from Winnipeg, Alice Herscovitch from Montreal and Carson Phillips from Toronto.
VHEC reaches some 25,000 students per year, Miller said. The Holocaust "is a daunting topic to teach," she added, though it is "increasingly growing in curricula, and we hope to have more of an opportunity to reach more people."
Miller lamented that school instruction on Holocaust is at the discretion of teachers. Nevertheless, she said, the VHEC "likes to think that it offers teachers the support and incentives they need."
Dave Gordon is a freelance writer in Toronto. His website is DaveGordonWrites.com.
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