In the Wisconsin town of Baraboo, high school students in their final year before graduation take formal pictures on the steps of the town’s courthouse. Census figures say that the town of 12,000 in the country’s heartland is 94% white.
Among the pictures available for purchase on the website of a local photographer was one with only the boys and in which many – most, it appears – were performing a Nazi salute. (The photo disappeared from the site on Monday but is widely available online.) One of the students near the front did not make the Nazi salute – instead he made a hand signal made popular by far-right white supremacists. He’s the real rebel, we suppose.
Actions like these can often be sparked by the dumb idea of one or two kids, with others following along. It would be distressing and disgusting at the best of times but, now, when there is a clear, genuine resurgence of white supremacy, antisemitism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance in the United States and worldwide, this takes on a deeper resonance. Is this an example of a bunch of high schoolers thinking (perversely) that this would be funny or kooky or somehow amusing? Or is there, among the crowd, a few or a lot who know what the salute really means, identify with the ideology behind it and, because of the mainstreaming of “alt-right” ideas in the country, felt emboldened to make this statement?
Certainly, there are worse hate crimes and other catastrophes in the United States – including racially motivated and gun violence – that deserve attention. Yet, this incident sticks out for a number of reasons.
The picture is jarring. Kids – young adults almost – well-dressed in their graduation suits, nearing a turning point in their lives, standing in front of the embodiment of justice and rule of law in their society, raising their arms aloft en masse in a motion determined to provoke.
But this is not the most alarming thing about the photo and how it came to be. Deep into the New York Times story about the incident, a recent alumna of the high school said she was disappointed but not shocked, knowing that a group of boys in the school were noted for bullying and offensive remarks. “I’m not surprised by them doing this,” she said.
Then she added: “But I’m surprised that there’s so many of them doing this. Photographers were there; the parents were there; community members were there.”
There’s more to the story. The photo was apparently taken months ago and it took this long for anyone to raise alarms.
Still more: a young man in the back of the photo whose arms remain by his side said, on Facebook, that the salute was the idea of the photographer. Should this make us feel better? If true, the photographer should suffer professional and social consequences. But were there parents and other community members who witnessed this live and stood by silently?
In a world not lacking in tragedies or social ills, this is not the worst of the week’s news. Yet it resonates because these young people are part of the next generation we are depending on to fix society’s ills and improve the world. Have their parents, grandparents and educators done their jobs in preparing them for the world and their responsibilities in it?
In a letter to parents, the superintendent of the school district said her team was “extremely troubled” by the image.
“Clearly, we have a lot of work to do to ensure that our schools remain positive and safe environments for all students, staff and community,” she wrote. “If the gesture is what it appears to be, the district will pursue any and all available and appropriate actions, including legal, to address the issue.”
Fair enough. But, first and foremost, perhaps they should look at their curriculum and also consider what messages are being sent consciously or unconsciously by teachers, administrators and other role models before they initiate legal or any other actions against the students.
While school administrators and teachers have much on their plates – shrinking budgets and broadening demands, as well as trying to prevent their charges from being murdered in yet another gun rampage – this should be a warning for educators everywhere to remember that success is not only measured in grades and that a proper education includes more than academics.
Richmond Jewish Day School principal Ronit Amihude with the award-winning children’s book What Do You Do With An Idea? by writer Kobi Yamada and illustrator Mae Besom. (photo by Coleen Lou)
Ronit Amihude is a leader with a vision. The new principal at Richmond Jewish Day School (RJDS) has been working in Jewish education since high school and in day school settings for more than two decades. She brings with her a passion for relevant, pluralistic Jewish education, and training in forward-looking pedagogical theory and practice.
Amihude was born in Winnipeg and moved to Toronto in the early 1990s to work at the Heschel School, at the time a small progressive Jewish school with a dream of crafting creative education that involved children in a way that was individualized and relational. Amihude did a little bit of everything in her 18 years there and was able, she told the Jewish Independent, “to see how you can take a small beautiful seed and turn it into a gorgeous garden.”
Amihude got a master’s in education while at Heschel and went through the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Day School Leadership Training Institute, a 15-month program which, according to their website, “prepares new and aspiring heads of school for their work in Jewish day schools by providing engaging experiential learning opportunities, cutting-edge leadership development, ongoing mentoring, and the chance to collaboratively problem-solve with cohort peers.”
While at Heschel, Amihude took on multiple leadership roles. After her tenure there, she was recruited to Atlanta, where she became the principal of learning, teaching and innovation at the Epstein School.
Richmond Jewish Day School began looking for a new principal after Abba Brodt, a beloved educator and administrator who had been with the school since 2010, left in 2017. Amihude had heard about RJDS over the years and felt it had “the same heimish [homey] feeling as Heschel” and was “a beautiful little school community” that believes all Jewish kids deserve a Jewish education and could be helped to get one.
“The feeling I got was that RJDS is a wonderful place where kids are supported and appreciated, where it is not just STEM that is taught, but kindness, perseverance and acceptance,” she said.
Amihude applied for the job last December and, after multiple Skype calls and phone chats, she flew out in February of this year and contracts were signed around Pesach.
When Amihude spoke with the Independent, it was her fifth day on the job and she generously made time in her hectic schedule to talk. Her first impressions of life at RJDS were resoundingly positive.
“It is a really diverse population where that is celebrated,” she said. “It’s a place where children of all levels of observance and non-observance from all over the world – Israel, Russia, Colombia and elsewhere – learn together. Kids who think everybody eats matzah balls on Yom Tov learn there are lots of ways to be Jewish.”
Amihude said a balance between tradition and pluralism is important for her, and the school community is open to different styles of being Jewish. This approach is showcased, in part, by their pluralistic approach to tefillah (prayer), which embraces Orthodox and progressive rituals. “If kids are given a hard line, telling them that only one way is authentic,” said Amihude, “then what message does that give them if that’s not the way of themselves or their family – that they’re not Jewish?”
This fall at RJDS, students took part in the international Kindness Rocks movement, where kids decorate rocks with messages of encouragement and kindness and place them out in the community. The school put a unique spin on this practice by integrating it into the days of teshuvah (repentance/return) between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Amihude said an essential part of her mission at RJDS is giving kids the tools to find their own Jewish selves outside of school and to help their families figure out who they are and what they want to be doing. She wants to see a collaborative space where kids can work together to create, to learn perseverance and problem solve.
“Can the kids build a model sukkah? Can they create a double-decker chanukiyah for parents and kids to light together? There is so much we can be doing with 21st-century skills, while celebrating the Jews that we are and the people that we want to be.”
Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He is Pacific correspondent for the CJN, writes regularly for the Forward, Tricycle and the Wisdom Daily, and has been published in Sojourners, Religion Dispatches and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
Michael Schwartz speaks at the launch of East End Stories on June 24. (photo from JMABC)
When Louis and Emma Gold arrived in Granville, precursor to Vancouver, the merchant family from Kentucky became the first members of what would grow into the booming Jewish community in the Lower Mainland.
Like most of the first Jewish immigrants to British Columbia, the Golds moved to the eastern end of downtown, where they opened a general store. Two waves of European Jews would come to Vancouver in the late 19th century and the Strathcona neighbourhood would become their home. It was an era during which new Jewish arrivals to North America largely found employment as merchants or doing various trades and Vancouver’s East End provided affordable and accessible housing for the working class.
“So many immigrant communities passed through there,” said Michael Schwartz, director of community engagement for the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.
The Jewish history of Strathcona is no secret, and the museum has offered walking tours of the neighbourhood for decades, beginning with a self-guided one in 1986, which grew into the current monthly guided tour. But, while those familiar with Jewish Vancouver may already know about the community’s past, Schwartz is hoping that a new school curriculum and video series created by the JMABC will make that history significantly more accessible.
East End Stories, completed in June, includes six short online videos and a 43-page study guide intended for use with students in grades 7 through 9. In addition to making some of the information offered on the walking tour available to those who can’t attend in person, Schwartz said the project also unveiled new information about early Vancouver Jews.
“It gave us the opportunity to do more research, to dig deeper, to find stuff we hadn’t before,” he told the Independent.
The result is the six videos, covering the first arrivals, the early community institutions and history of philanthropy, as well as Vancouver’s second mayor – David Oppenheimer – entrepreneur and philanthropist Jack Diamond, and the Grossman family. (Among other things, Max Grossman started this community newspaper.) Each running just under five minutes and offering encyclopedia-style capsule histories, the videos feature narrators from the local community. Schwartz said the photographs used were drawn from 17 archives across the world, including ones in California, Jerusalem and Poland.
The study guide covers the material in each video but is structured slightly more broadly, wrapping the Oppenheimer and Diamond biographies into a single lesson focused on how Jews shaped Vancouver, for example.
Schwartz said the impetus for creating the educational resources came after a vice-principal in the city asked whether there was a way to bring the information from the walking tour to classrooms at his school, as the logistics of bringing dozens of students to the neighbourhood itself was too complex. The museum offered the school replicas of wall panels that appear along the tour, but the study guide goes further, and meets current provincial guidelines for social studies curricula. Schwartz said museum staff will attend the B.C. Teachers Federation Conference in October to publicize the project, which was made possible by a $50,000 grant from the Canada 150 grant program.
“That provided the anchor funding and we were able to build the rest of the budget with smaller grants,” Schwartz explained. “It had always been a wish list thing and, when this funding opportunity arose, I thought, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’”
The lesson plans are intended to be used in conjunction with other Vancouver ethnic histories and video series created by Orbit Films, the company that produced East End Stories. The other histories are Black Strathcona, Nikkei Stories, which focuses on Japanese Canadians in Vancouver and Steveston, and South Asian Stories.
“All these different communities … faced struggle, rose to the occasion and relied on each other to be able to do that,” said Schwartz.
Highlighting the Jewish community’s roots in Vancouver and the similarities that the community shares with other immigrant groups is one of the goals of East End Stories, Schwartz said, adding that it could help combat certain stereotypes about Canadian Jews.
“Jews are assumed to have always been successful and that’s just not true,” he said. As can be seen in East End Stories, “many of us are stable or in some cases successful today [but] that’s new history.”
The videos and study guide also highlight a period of Jewish history in the Lower Mainland that was different for the way in which Jews were geographically concentrated in a certain quarter of the city, a phenomenon that remained true even after Jews largely left Strathcona but which has changed in recent decades.
Schwartz said that, during the 1950s, the community left Strathcona and clustered around Oakridge and Kerrisdale. The Baby Boomer generation dispersed but would return to the community to visit parents and attend community functions. But, while community institutions like the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver remain along the Oak Street corridor, fewer Vancouver Jews are calling the area home.
“We’re in a moment of transition,” Schwartz said. “We’re seeing a decline in gathering places and institutions where people come together.”
While online resources like the East End Stories videos, which are available on the Jewish Museum’s website, jewishmuseum.ca, can help bring people together figuratively and in shared knowledge and history, Schwartz said that in-person activities like those enabled by the walking tours and the classroom guide remain essential.
“There’s Jewish history in all corners of the city and it’s important for us to be present in not particularly Jewish areas to share the history of our community and spark dialogue about diverse histories of the city,” Schwartz said.
Arno Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist based in Vancouver. He has covered Canadian Jewish issues for JTA and the Times of Israel.
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.
Lu Winters, academic and student wellness counselor at King David High School. (photo from Lu Winters)
In the fourth of a series of articles on sexual harassment and violence in the Jewish community, the Jewish Independent speaks with Lu Winters of King David High School, Elana Stein Hain of the Shalom Hartman Institute and Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom.
The first step in reducing bullying and other abuse in schools is to work with the students, said Lu Winters, academic and student wellness counselor at King David High School.
“I build connections with students in class,” she told the Independent. “And, with various groups in the school, I sometimes take them on trips. After the connection has been built, then the helping relationship can happen. It can happen one-on-one, in groups, in gender groups and through workshops.
“At King David, I’ve created a wellness program. Each grade receives a workshop, or two or three, depending on what’s going on during the year, on specific topics that I think are age-appropriate. I wish I could do every workshop for every single grade, but then the academic part of school would fall to the wayside.
“We run workshops on topics like LGBTQ awareness; healthy relationships with your body; self-esteem; stress and anxiety; drugs and alcohol; choices and values; and sexual health.”
Since the start of the #MeToo movement, Winters has seen some momentum. People have a lot to say about the movement, she said. “We haven’t had a specific workshop about it this year, but it’s on my radar for next year. During our sexual health education classes, we do address sexual harassment and consent, including talking about the roles of everyone involved, people’s faith, and making appropriate decisions for themselves at the right time … what to do if, G-d forbid, anything happens: who to talk to, what kind of support you can get.”
Elana Stein Hain, scholar resident and director of faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute. (photo from Elana Stein Hain)
In the greater Jewish educational sphere, the Shalom Hartman Institute has produced a series of videos about related topics and examines how scripture has educated Jews on the subject over the years. Elana Stein Hain, scholar resident and director of faculty, has been leading the project.
“What we do is essentially develop curriculum around challenges facing the Jewish people,” Stein Hain told the Independent. “And I wouldn’t even say it’s about developing curriculum as much as developing conceptual frameworks for thinking about issues that arise. We’re an educational think tank. We ask ourselves what issues are now facing the Jewish people and consider how to develop educational material that deepens how we think about these issues. Then, we speak with change agents in the Jewish community about some ways of thinking.”
Stein Hain and her team began by looking for Torah teachings that address the topic of harassment directly. They came up with a three-part video series, which launched with a presentation that addressed the question of how, as a 21st-century teacher, you can educate people with our most sacred text and have the value proposition of our most sacred text being very important and continuing to give us the wisdom we seek, said Stein Hain. “And, also, we address the absence or relative absence of women’s voices and women as an audience.”
The next video talk was by Dr. Paul Nahme, a member of the institute’s Created Equal Team. He speaks on how definitions of manhood are dependent on cultural context.
“There’s this ‘boys will be boys’ kind of assumption and he says that, actually, there are places in Jewish tradition where that assumption had been challenged,” explained Stein Hain. “Young men were being trained to not be bravado macho, arrogant and assertive – to instead be trained to think about what it means to have doubts, to need someone else’s help. That was in contrast to what masculinity was understood to be.”
The last talk in the series was done by another member of the team, Dr. Arielle Levites, who discusses the portrayal of women in some Jewish traditional texts.
“It’s a deep folk story about women who try to move beyond their station or to move beyond the assumptions of them being portrayed as monsters,” said Stein Hain. “And she relates that to the … women who come forward with claims of sexual harassment or sexual violence who become seen as the offending party, getting questioned and vilified in certain ways.”
“The idea is really to get to the root of education,” said Stein Hain. “We are glad that people are going to do trainings on sexual harassment, on mandated reporting and on how to respond in the moment. We’d like to get to the root thought process of a culture that has come to this. And we want to learn how we can educate better, so we can have an adaptive change in the way people think, talk and act. Then, society and the Jewish community in particular can be built upon a different foundation.”
The educational realm within synagogues has also felt reverberations of the #MeToo movement, according to Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom.
Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom. (photo from Carey Brown)
“I have seen an incredible amount of conversation among rabbis about this issue,” said Brown. “Some have been from within female rabbinic circles of women … some confronting it … things that people had kept within themselves for years or decades … and, now, gaining the courage to talk about it – everything from struggles to trying to understand the situation insofar as its professional implications for female rabbis … major discussions are being had on the topic at our annual conferences.
“Within the congregation, I haven’t had any individuals come to talk to me about personal experience,” she said. “But I have had a sense that women are feeling more free to bring up topics having to do with abuse, with safety, within the congregation, [at the] board level or [from a] staff perspective.”
A couple of months ago, the synagogue’s Men’s Club had a program on the #MeToo movement and sexual harassment in the workplace, including panel discussion on the topic in which Brown participated.
“I was really glad they took the initiative to have this program,” said Brown. “This didn’t come from the rabbis; it came from their leadership wanting to have an opportunity to talk about it. The conversation was really good and those who attended were very engaged and didn’t want to leave.”
Brown spoke about the Jewish perspective, discussing its tradition of values and ideas around sexual harassment, as well as her own personal experience with harassment.
“We talked a lot about consent,” said the rabbi. “A few different pieces of Talmud were discussed. We looked at this one that was about what happens if a man – one who counts money for a woman from his hand to her hand in order to look upon her – even if he has accumulated knowledge of Torah and good deeds like Moses, he will not be absolved from punishment.
“We talked about how, if someone even has a good reputation in the community, is known for their knowledge, good deeds and business … if they are abusive or using their power in a way that puts someone else in a position in which they are abused and powerless … our tradition says that, no, that is not OK.”
Abuse can be as simple as the way one person looks at another – if there is a misuse of power or position to objectify someone, Jewish tradition says that is not acceptable, stressed Brown.
“We talked about how we need to stand up when someone is being objectified, abused or put into a difficult situation,” she said. “That is part of our Jewish imperative – not to look away. It is part of what the Torah teaches us: that we can’t be indifferent and we must act.”
Over the years, Brown has had inappropriate comments directed at her. She said, “I’ve received comments like, ‘You don’t look like a rabbi’ or ‘If my rabbi looked like you, I’d have gone to shul a lot more when I was younger,’ or comments on my clothing and hair, and such.
“I mentioned at the event with the Men’s Club that my experience, both in Vancouver at Temple Sholom and in Boston, has been that the longer that I am the rabbi of a community, the stronger the relationships. And, I feel some of those things begin to fade away … within the regular, active population of the synagogue.
“It’s often when I’m in a new environment with people who don’t know me – at a shivah minyan, a wedding or something like that – my antennae go up. I’m very aware that it’s very likely I’ll get comments that are really inappropriate or that I have to psyche myself up a little bit to deal with.
“If I’m at a shivah minyan, I’m there to comfort the bereaved. I’m generally not going to confront in that situation,” she said. “I will take it with a grain of salt and maybe grumble about it to a friend. But, sometimes I’ll say, ‘That’s not appropriate.’ Sometimes, I’ll hear things like, ‘I’ve never kissed a rabbi before.’ And, I’ll say, ‘Well, we don’t need to kiss.’ I’ll push back a little bit to establish some boundaries.”
The Pacific Torah Institute’s Rabbi Noam Abramchik, left, and Rabbi Aaron Kamin. (photo from PTI)
As Vancouver’s only Orthodox yeshivah, Pacific Torah Institute (PTI) holds a unique place in the community. Since the talmudic era, when the rabbis of what is now Iraq gathered to debate Jewish law and texts and created the intense intellectual culture at the heart of traditional Judaism, the house of study (beit midrash) has been at the heart of Orthodox Jewish religious culture. In recognition of this, even non-religious Jews have long prided themselves on the presence of a yeshivah in their community and been willing to materially support it.
Located at 41st Avenue and Oak Street near a cluster of Jewish community organizations and services, PTI teaches traditional Jewish textual learning, including Talmud b’iyyun (with in-depth analytical study) and musar (the practices of ethical self-discipline and character transformation), thus carrying on the centuries-old twin focus of the Lithuanian-style yeshivah. So, when news spread that PTI, which has operated in the community since 2003, was considering relocating to Seattle, ripples of urgent concern spread throughout some quarters of the Jewish community.
A town hall meeting was organized, which took place at Schara Tzedek Synagogue. The discussion elicited strong support, both emotional and financial. Heads of school Rabbi Noam Abramchik and Rabbi Aaron Kamin left the meeting determined to save the yeshivah by attracting more students from beyond the Pacific Northwest, as well as from closer to home.
“There was never a desire to pick up and move,” Abramchik told the Independent. “There were enrolment questions, which coincided with the opening of a similar school in Seattle. Students from Seattle have been a consistent part of our student body, and we were worried – with them staying there and competition from another nearby school, we might not have enough students to be viable.”
Although PTI is affiliated with the Rabbinical Seminary of America, part of the community commonly known as the Chofetz Chaim network, it is an independent yeshivah that relies entirely on direct support from donations and fees. In recent years, enrolment has decreased because of families moving out of Vancouver, creating what Abramchik called “an existential issue” in the yeshivah’s high school program.
Kamin said affordability in Vancouver is a major factor. As well, the community is small, so, when members leave, it has a destabilizing effect. “When some families move,” he said, “you lose critical mass and it gets harder for an Orthodox Jewish community to function and have what everyone needs.”
Both rabbis talked about the opportunities and challenges that come with operating a yeshivah here.
“Vancouver’s strength is its openness,” said Abramchik. “Students here get the benefit of living a Torah lifestyle while interacting with all kinds of people and ideas, being a part of the wider world.”
Yet, the nature of the community also means “we don’t have the strength in numbers, we don’t have as many institutions and services,” said Abramchik.
One common challenge for smaller Orthodox communities is the need for young people to go elsewhere for advanced Torah study or to make a shidduch (marriage match). PTI offers higher level Torah learning until the age of 21 or 22, but those who want to continue their studies will have to move to another city, as will many of those seeking a life mate. Both Abramchik and Kamin have children who have gone to New York to find a shidduch, though some of them would like to eventually return to Vancouver with their families and make a home here.
Both rabbis are deeply embedded in the local Jewish community.
“Fifteen years of being here is fantastic,” said Abramchik. “My children couldn’t have been raised in a healthier, more wholesome environment, with such breadth of experience. As a rabbi who values religion above all else, I couldn’t be prouder of who they are as Jews and people, and directly attribute that to the incredible education they received in Vancouver through Vancouver Hebrew Academy (the Orthodox day school), PTI and Shalhevet (the Orthodox girls high school), as well as the wide range of people they’ve come into contact with, as we have hosted many diverse people at our Shabbat table over the years.”
Asked why they want to stay here, the rabbis were in agreement. “If we were looking to best serve our institution per se, the move to Seattle makes sense,” said Abramchik. “There are 300 Shomer Shabbos [Orthodox observant] families versus probably 60 here. We had a number of supporters saying we should go, but, after giving 10 years to this community, we feel it’s our home … we weren’t ready to leave it if there was any possible way to stay here.”
After the community town hall, the rabbis’ commitment to stay was strengthened, Abramchik said. “Is Vancouver a better city for having this institution or not? We heard a resounding yes, we heard this from people who do not send their children here, never will. We heard this needs to get done, we need to find a way to make this happen.”
“Our first priority is to do what we feel is God’s will,” said Kamin. “We believe this is the best thing for ourselves and our spiritual advancement, we want to do the right thing. The right thing transcends the institution, it transcends our own personalities. It was very much a feeling of this is the right thing to be doing, to make this decision to stay – the right thing for the community and the right thing for the boys now and the future boys.”
For Toviah Salfinger, a student at PTI, the news they are staying is welcome. The yeshivah plays “a huge part in my life,” he said. “It enables me to be able to really grow in terms of religious life. It would be pretty hard to have a solid foundation as a religious Jew without a yeshivah.”
Salfinger sees the challenges of Vancouver as holding a hidden blessing. “The fact that you’re in a community where there isn’t a strong Jewish religious presence, it helps you in a way,” he said, “because it puts the responsibility on you to live up to that, to be an example as religious person.”
Salfinger said he’d like to go on to study at the Rabbinical Seminary of America yeshivah in New York, and maybe become a rabbi who teaches kids. Maybe, he said, if there is an opportunity, he will one day be able to return to Vancouver.
Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He is Pacific correspondent for the CJN, writes regularly for the Forward, Tricycle and the Wisdom Daily, and has been published in Sojourners, Religion Dispatches and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
King David High School head of school Russ Klein. (photo by Pat Johnson)
King David High School has chosen to refund families who made a $1,000 deposit for next year but opted to send their kids to a different school. The decision ends a controversy that some parents said was a money grab.
Faced for the first time with more applicants than available positions, the school requested a non-refundable deposit of $1,000. Timing was a factor, as families were awaiting admission decisions from other private schools or space-limited specialty programs in the public system.
The idea, said KDHS head of school Russ Klein, was that families for whom King David was the first choice would pay and those for whom the school was not first choice might opt not to pay, thereby ensuring that those who most wanted in were admitted.
“It didn’t work out that way,” he said. “What we thought would happen, didn’t happen. They all just made the deposit.”
In the end, the school got what it wanted – full enrolment – and families ended up with their children in the schools of their choice.
After reflection on the process, Klein said, King David decided to refund the deposits to families who chose other schools.
“It wasn’t a cash grab,” he said. “We did it with good intentions.”
As it turned out, of the nine families offered the refund, four declined, choosing to make it a donation to the school, another donated half, two received the full refund and two others didn’t respond to the offer at all.
This year’s graduating class had 45 students, the second-largest ever. Next year’s class will be the biggest – between 55 and 60.
Klein said dealing with more applications than they have spots available was a learning opportunity.
“Now that we think we know how to handle this situation a little better, we’re hoping we get this, as we say, ‘good problem,’ where there are too many applicants again in the future,” he said. “The school next year will probably be at its biggest number ever.… We’ve just got nothing but good things to look forward to.”
Common sense prevailed at a meeting of the Pittsburgh school board in the end, although two of nine board members voted against participation in a Holocaust education trip to Poland.
The educational program is funded by the nonprofit organization Classrooms Without Borders at no cost to the school district. Nevertheless, one board member insisted that Pittsburgh schools are doing enough Holocaust education and that the trip could be seen as taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She contended, despite the fact that the funds were granted specifically for the Holocaust education trip, that they should be reallocated to programs that focus on African-American topics, including slavery.
It’s sort of a tempest in a teapot – especially given all the other things going on in the United States and around the world right now – but it is illustrative. Pennsylvania has an excellent record on Holocaust and genocide education, especially since 2014, when the state passed a law to “strongly encourage school entities in this Commonwealth to offer instruction in the Holocaust, genocide and other human rights violations.” That’s a far more specific directive than the British Columbia curriculum requires.
A representative of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh responded to the board member’s criticism of the Poland trip.
“The notion that a trip to Poland to enhance the quality of Holocaust education in Pittsburgh public schools somehow discriminates against the Palestinian people is incomprehensible at best,” John Sayles told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. “What’s more, the insinuation that in order to most effectively teach about slavery we must allocate resources away from Holocaust education, or vice versa, is disturbing, as teaching about these two very important histories are not and should never be mutually exclusive.”
Coincidentally, but not unrelated, educators in Florida made a dubious decision to provide parents with an opportunity to opt their children out of a presentation by a Holocaust survivor. Parents of students at St. James Middle School in Murrells Inlet, Fla., received a letter saying, “We understand that a firsthand account of the atrocities of the Holocaust may be sad or difficult for students to hear. Students may opt out of this assembly and complete an alternative activity. Students who opt out will watch [a] video about the Holocaust in the media centre as an alternative activity.”
The letter assumes that the survivor speaker would not present at a level appropriate to middle schoolers. Second, and more significantly, it implies that difficult aspects of history should be sugarcoated – that was the word used by the survivor.
No matter the topic – the Holocaust, slavery, current events, writing, reading or arithmetic – effective education is delivered at an age-appropriate level. Survivor speakers understand this as well as any teacher.
The opportunity for today’s young people to hear firsthand accounts from witnesses to the Holocaust is a benefit no future generations will receive. To do anything but try to maximize the number who experience this opportunity firsthand is a tremendous loss.
This is especially true when a recent poll commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany indicates that many Americans are unaware of the most basic facts of the Holocaust. (See jewishindependent.ca/basic-facts-not-known.)
This is fraught territory and headlines can be deceiving, such as the one in Newsweek, which declared: “One-third of Americans don’t believe six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.” Contrary to the headline, the poll suggested not that these Americans have heard the truth and rejected it, but rather that they have not been educated enough in the topic to have the facts. The issue is not Holocaust denial, in this case, but plain ignorance.
Denial of the facts is one thing, ignorance of them is different and far less malignant. In both cases, the answer is more education, not less.
This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and the Azrieli Foundation. Last fall, students learned about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students began interviewing local Holocaust survivors and are now in the process of writing the survivors’ memoirs, based on the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. They used their most recent journal entry to reflect on the topic of The Importance of Memoirs. Here are two excerpts.
Memories are our experiences: our interactions with people we love or hate, our communication with the ever-changing world. Our memories remind us of our moral values, our knowledge, our appreciation of our own lives, and perhaps our own inadequacy in being the person that we wanted to be. Our memories are a true reflection of who we are, and that is exactly why they are our most valuable asset.
Writing down our memories is a great way to retain them and, hence, it is meaningful to write a memoir on behalf of David, a man who has experienced one of the most controversial and complex events in history – the Holocaust – so that his memories will be retained in concrete form and can be passed on to many generations. I believe David’s descendants, and anyone who cares about other human beings, will be inspired by what David fought for in the past and will be grateful for what they have. Sometimes, we take food and safety, peace and dignity, the privilege to love and to be loved, for granted, and we forget about the unfortunate ones.
Most importantly, memoirs of Holocaust survivors are a stern reminder of the fact that we humans can turn into perpetrators for not so obvious reasons. It would be wrong for us to think that, since we are civilized, rational, educated people, we cannot become perpetrators. We have come to realize that it is not the case that only psychotic or inherently evil people can harm others in callous and appalling ways. The Holocaust has demonstrated that hatred, racism, conflicts between religions and a sense of insecurity can easily be used to justify our wrongdoings. With the real-life experiences of survivors recorded in memoirs, hopefully people will never forget this painful lesson in human history.
– Bonnie Pun
Storytelling is a phenomenon that all manners of societies and cultures have practised since the hominid species first learned to communicate. We use stories to convey social values and wisdom. In Western society, thanks to pioneers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, storytelling forms the bedrock of modern counseling practice. The intimacy of sharing a story with a compassionate and safe person can literally transform a life. Stories transmit meaning, both individually and socially. It’s as simple and complex as that.
Memoirs are a place where individuals can encounter and transform their experience into one that has larger meaning. On a societal level, projects like Writing Lives present the human experience and personal costs of the atrocities that have occurred. The personal narrative transforms historical facts into real and impactful events that can be felt, if not fully understood.
The Holocaust is so often constructed and taught as an historical anomaly, a mysterious evil; however, the fact of the matter is that it is a story of social relationships. Sadly, “stories” such as this have occurred far too frequently over the last 70 years. Globally, we have seen genocidal processes of hate in countries such as former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Russia, Sudan … the list goes on. As our neighbour to the south, the United States, struggles with an ideological divide that has become so significant it is now one of the countries monitored by the NGO Genocide Watch, memoirs from the Holocaust become particularly important here in the Western world. I think it is sometimes easy to look at racially motivated brutality in the second and third worlds and feel a certain sense of safety. These memoirs confront us with a different reality, one which is too important to ignore.
During the week of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released the results of a comprehensive national survey of Holocaust awareness and knowledge among adults in the United States. The survey found that there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust, and that there is a broad-based consensus that schools must be responsible for providing comprehensive Holocaust education. In addition, a significant majority of American adults believe that fewer people care about the Holocaust today than they used to, and more than half of Americans believe that the Holocaust could happen again.
Major findings of the survey include that 70% of Americans say fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to, and a majority of Americans (58%) believe something like the Holocaust could happen again. The study also found a significant lack of basic knowledge about the Holocaust:
Nearly one-third of all Americans (31%), and 41% of millennials, believe that fewer than two million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, as opposed to the six million Jews who were killed.
While there were more than 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45%) cannot name a single one, and this percentage is even higher among millennials (49%).
At the same time, there are encouraging notes in the survey. In particular, there are key findings underscoring the desire for Holocaust education. More than nine out of 10 respondents (93%) believe all students should learn about the Holocaust in school and 80% of respondents say it is important to keep teaching about the Holocaust so it does not happen again.
The findings show a substantial lack of personal experience with the Holocaust, however, as most Americans (80%) have not visited a Holocaust museum.
“This study underscores the importance of Holocaust education in our schools,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice-president of the Claims Conference. “There remain troubling gaps in Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories. We must be committed to ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust and the memory of those who suffered so greatly are remembered, told and taught by future generations.”
The Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany. Data were collected and analyzed by Schoen Consulting with a representative sample of 1,350 American adults via landline, cellphone and online interviews. Respondents were selected at random and constituted a demographically representative sample of the adult population in the United States.
The task force led by Claims Conference board was comprised of Holocaust survivors as well as representatives from museums, educational institutions and leading nonprofits in the field of Holocaust education, such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Agency and George Washington University. Claims Conference president Julius Berman noted, “On the occasion of Yom Hashoah, it is vital to open a dialogue on the state of Holocaust awareness so that the lessons learned inform the next generation. We are alarmed that today’s generation lacks some of the basic knowledge about these atrocities.”
