Beth Israel Sisterhood luncheon, 1983. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.09853)
If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected] or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
The ribbon-cutting at the launch of the Canadian Jewish Experience exhibit. From left to right: Dr. Mark Kristmanson of the National Capital Commission; Supreme Court Justice Michael J. Moldaver; Ottawa Police Chief Charles Bordeleau; Rabbi Reuven Bulka of Machzikei Hadas Synagogue; Catherine Bélanger, widow of the late member of Parliament Mauril Bélanger; Tova Lynch of CJE; Linda Kerzner of Jewish Federation of Ottawa; and Cantor Daniel Benlolo of Congregation Kehilat Beth Israel. (photo from CJE)
A new exhibit opened in Ottawa on April 2, to mark the contribution of Jews to Canada and to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation. The Canadian Jewish Experience: A Tribute to Canada 150 is on display in the lobby of 30 Metcalfe St., just two blocks from Parliament Hill, and is open to the public daily from 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
The Canadian Jewish Experience is composed of specially created, bilingual exhibit panels illustrating nine major themes, such as contributions in war and diplomacy, public service, human rights, business growth, arts, culture and sport. A traveling version of the CJE exhibit will be available for display in other cities in Canada.
A parallel website has also been created to present more detailed information about the CJE exhibit topics and about many extraordinary Canadians. The website will provide information about venues for the lecture series and locations where the traveling exhibit can be viewed.
The Canadian Jewish Experience will also present a speaker series to highlight the contributions of Jewish Canadians to the development of Canada.
CJE has produced a special exhibit panel called Remembering Louis Rasminsky, which describes the work of Rasminsky, who was the first-ever Jewish person to be governor of the Bank of Canada. This will be on display at the Bank of Canada headquarters in Ottawa.
At the exhibit opening, CJE committee head Tova Lynch thanked donors from across Canada for the financial assistance they provided. In particular, she acknowledged its major donors: the Asper Foundation and Bel-Fran Charitable Foundation (Samuel and Frances Belzberg) from Vancouver.
“The CJE is an example of the tremendous love which Canadians have for our country,” Lynch added, praising the National Capital Commission for its cooperation. “Through our partnership with the National Capital Commission, CJE has an excellent downtown facility at the centre of events celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday.”
Lynch also noted, “Excitement is building as we approach Canada Day 2017. CJE will tell Canada’s Jewish story to many thousands of visitors to Ottawa in 2017.”
She pointed out that “Jewish Canadians have played a key role in all facets of life in Canada. Their accomplishments reflect the challenges and successes experienced by Canada in its first 150 years.”
The Jewish connection to Canada dates back to the mid-1700s. “The first Jewish Canadians arrived more than 100 years before Confederation,” noted Senator Linda Frum. “We’ve been here for a quarter of a millennium, but many Canadians don’t know the role we’ve played to make our country strong and vibrant. The Canadian Jewish Experience will help to change that.”
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said that the national capital is the appropriate home for the Canadian Jewish Experience. “In 2017, Ottawa will be at the centre of celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday and Jewish people have played a key role in all facets of life in the city. In fact, their accomplishments here reflect all the themes of the Canadian Jewish Experience, including being elected mayor.”
Other Jewish leaders and organizations who have assisted the Canadian Jewish Experience project include Victor Rabinovitch, former president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History); the leaders of Jewish federations across Canada; and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. CJE is also supported by members of Parliament from all federal parties, Senator Frum, former senator Jerry Grafstein and Rabbi Dr. Reuven Bulka. Sandra Morton Weizman of Calgary is the curator of the CJE exhibit and virtual exhibit.
The CJE website is cje2017.com.
A sculpture of camels traversing the Incense Route in Avdat National Park. (photo by Kate Giryes/Shutterstock.com)
Close your eyes and travel back in time 2,000 years. You’re riding on the back of a camel laden with frankincense and myrrh from faraway Yemen, navigating 100 kilometres across the harsh, hilly Negev Desert to get your precious cargo to the Mediterranean ports.
For 700 years, from the third-century BCE until the second-century CE, this was the hazardous but hugely profitable task of the nomadic Nabatean people. Today, the small Israeli portion of the 2,000-kilometre Incense Route – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – is a fascinating trail filled with beautiful desert vistas and archeological discoveries.
The route includes the remains of the Nabatean towns of Halutza, Mamshit, Avdat, Shivta and Nitzana (another, Rehovot-Ruhaibe, is hidden by sand dunes), four fortresses (Katzra, Nekarot, Mahmal and Grafon) and two khans (Moa and Saharonim). You can see evidence of surprisingly sophisticated watering holes, agriculture and viniculture that the Nabateans innovated.
“The Roman and Greek empires controlled a lot of cities around the Mediterranean shores and, in all these cities, there were pagan shrines where they sacrificed animals. The smell was terrible, so the Nabateans brought incense for those shrines to cover the smell of the slaughter,” explained tour guide Atar Zehavi, whose Israeli Wild tours specialize in off-the-beaten-track jeeping, cycling, hiking and camel-back trips like the Incense Route.
“The route is surprisingly difficult because there were easier ways to go across the Negev. But the Nabateans wanted to stay hidden from other Arab tribes that might ambush the caravans, and they wanted to avoid being discovered by the Romans so they could keep their independence,” Zehavi said. “They knew how to harness the harsh desert conditions to their advantage, building water holes and strongholds others would not find. The Romans conquered Judea pretty easily but it took them another 150 years to conquer the Nabateans.”
Zehavi recommends a two-day “jeeping and sleeping” excursion along the Incense Route, also called the Spice Route. Start in the east, at Moa in the Arava Valley, site of an ancient khan (desert inn). From there, ascend the Katzra mountaintop, a stronghold overlooking the whole region. This will give you an appreciation for how hard it was to lead a caravan of camels up a steep slope.
“They’d travel 30 kilometres a day between khans. One camel carried 350 kilos of incense and only needed to drink once every 10 days or so,” said Zehavi, who has a master’s degree in environmental studies.
Even back then, camels wouldn’t have had much to drink at the third stop, the Nekarot River, a dry riverbed that once flowed through the Arif mountain range and northern Arava. The Nekarot is part of the Israel National Trail and boasts spectacular landscapes.
This leads you past Saharonim to the fourth stop, the town of Mitzpeh Ramon with its world-famous Ramon Crater (Makhtesh Ramon), which still has visible Nabatean milestones among its abundant flora and fauna, including the Nubian ibex. Ramon is the world’s largest erosion crater, stretching 40 kilometres and descending to a depth of 400 metres. It has unique geological structures, such as the Hamansera (Prism) of crystallized sandstones and the Ammonite rock wall embedded with fossils.
Camp out overnight in the crater, if weather and traveler preferences permit. A variety of hotels, from desert lodge to hostel to luxury, are also in the crater area. While in Mitzpeh Ramon, you may want to include the visitors centre and a nighttime stargazing tour.
The next morning, you’ll have a choice of trails for walking, jeeping or biking in the crater. A guided jeep tour is always a good option.
Getting back on the Incense Route, you go up Mahmal Ascent on the northern rim of the crater, a 250-to-300-metre climb to the Mahmal Fortress. Proceed northwest from there to Avdat National Park, site of a once-flourishing Nabatean city, where you can see shrines that were later turned into Byzantine churches.
Zehavi explained that, after the Roman Empire transitioned into Byzantine Christianity around 324 CE, incense was no longer needed, so the Nabateans started producing wine and desert agriculture, as well as raising Arabian horses.
“It’s amazing to see the way the harsh desert was colonized for agriculture through the use of highly sophisticated irrigation systems,” said Zehavi.
End your tour of the Incense Route at Avdat or go northwest to Shivta National Park and Halutza, or northeast to Mashit National Park near Dimona.
Israel21c is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton – suffragist, social activist, abolitionist. Susan B. Anthony – social reformer, women’s rights activist. Ernestine Rose – who?
Bonnie Anderson taught history and women’s studies for 30 years at Brooklyn College and at the Graduate Centre of City University of New York. She has written three books on women’s history, the latest being The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter (Oxford University Press, 2017).
When Anderson wrote Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860, she learned about Rose, who was born in 1810 in Poland to an Orthodox rabbi and his wife. Her father taught her Hebrew and Torah but, by age 14, she had rejected Jewish beliefs and identified as an atheist. Betrothed at 15, she broke her engagement but her fiancé would not agree – he wanted her inheritance and brought a suit against her. At age 17, Rose went to the district court 65 miles away and presented her case personally, arguing that “she should not lose her property because of an engagement she did not want.” She won.
Moving to Berlin, Rose lived there two years before heading to Paris and then to London, where she embraced the belief system of Robert Owen, who had a utopian socialist vision; she became a disciple. Also in London, she met William Rose, a free-thinking atheist, jeweler and silversmith. They married when she was 20 and he was 23 and emigrated to the United States.
Rose became a pioneer for women’s equality and an accomplished lecturer, speaking to the public for the free-thought and the women’s rights movements.
“A good delivery, forcible voice, the most uncommon good sense, a delightful terseness of style and a rare talent for humour are the qualifications which so well fit this lady for a public speaker,” wrote a reporter in Ohio in 1852.
She lectured extensively, including against slavery, during her years in the United States, from 1836 to 1869, and became a U.S. citizen. She went back and forth to England between 1871 and 1874.
“She embodied female equality in both her everyday life and her political activism,” writes Anderson. “She was a true pioneer, working for the ideals of racial equality, feminism, free thought and internationalism.”
The book concludes with 44 pages of notes and eight pages of bibliography. Readers should find this biography of an “international feminist pioneer” a fascinating reading experience about an amazing woman.
***
In 2005, the movie Woman in Gold portrayed the story of a painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer I that was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907 and owned by her and her husband. She died in 1925 and her husband fled Austria in 1938, ultimately dying in 1945. During the war, the Nazis seized the painting, which had ended up in a Vienna palace. The will of her husband designated Maria Altmann, niece, as heir and Altmann sued the Austrian government for the painting, and won the court battle. The painting was subsequently bought by Ronald Lauder and is now in the Neue Galerie in New York.
The novel The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2017) alternates between Vienna in the 1930s and England in the 1940s, as well as Los Angeles in 2005 and 2006 and New York in 2006.
Rose Zimmer, her older brother Gerhard and her parents, Charlotte and Wolfe, live in Vienna in 1938. Unable to escape, they send Rose and her brother on the Kindertransport to England. Rose, 12, lives with a childless Orthodox Jewish couple; her brother lives elsewhere. By the time the war is over, Rose is living with a girlfriend and working; her brother is in the service and their parents’ whereabouts are unknown. Rose goes to college, is supported by her brother and his wife, meets a young man, marries and moves to Los Angeles, where she teaches.
In the background is Rose’s quest for a Chaim Soutine painting that was important to her mother.
Alternating with this story is that of Lizzie, a 37-year-old lawyer whose sisters live in Los Angeles, where their father lived and died. She meets Rose at her father’s funeral and learns of the Soutine painting. The work had been bought by her father and had hung in their home when she was a teenager, until it was stolen during a party.
A friendship blooms between the two women and Lizzie learns Rose’s background, that her parents were sent to a concentration camp and their home, along with the painting, seized. The “fortunate ones” are the ones who survived the war, but at what cost?
Lizzie’s story is far less interesting. She grew up in Los Angeles, her mother died when she was 13. She became lawyer, lives in New York, then moves back to Los Angeles after her father dies, and starts the search for the painting.
Both women have issues with loss and forgiveness. The novel is emotional, sentimental and suspenseful, and engaging enough not to want to put it down and to keep reading.
As to whether Umansky was influenced by The Woman in Gold in writing this book, she said she had not read the story or seen the movie, “although I was certainly aware of them and interested in the true events that inspired them.”
As to why she wrote the novel, she said, “That’s a hard one to answer in a few sentences! The contemporary story of Lizzie has its roots in something that happened when I was growing up in Los Angeles: my family was friendly with an ophthalmologist who lived lavishly and had a prized art collection, the crown jewels of which were two paintings, a Picasso and a Monet. In the early 1990s, those canvases disappeared without a trace. I was fascinated by the incident and, later, when the stories of Nazi-pilfered art came into the news, I began to imagine a storyline that brought both of these threads together.”
Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language Shuk Walks in Machaneh Yehudah, she has compiled and edited nine kosher cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Journalist in Israel.
Dr. Ra’anan Boustan of Princeton University delivers the Itta and Eliezer Zeisler Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia on March 23. (photo by Gregg Gardner)
A mosaic from Late Antiquity has lessons for Jewish communities today. According to Dr. Ra’anan Boustan of Princeton University, “Jewish identity, historically, was broader, more porous, and integrated more non-Jewish elements than we might think, and, likewise today, we should not hasten to essentialize or rigidly define Jewish identity or culture.”
Boustan offered this insight when delivering the Itta and Eliezer Zeisler Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia on March 23. Called Greek Kings and Judaean Priests in the Late Antique Synagogue: The Newly Discovered “Elephant Mosaic,” Boustan’s visit was presented by the Archeological Institute of America, Vancouver Society, and co-sponsored by the UBC Diamond Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics, and the department of classical, Near Eastern and religious studies (CNERS).
A 2011 dig led by archeologist Jodi Magness excavated several sections at the site of a former village, Huqoq, near the Sea of Galilee. Among the items uncovered was a mosaic that is said to have adorned the floor of an elaborate 1,600-year-old synagogue.
“The discovery of the mosaic was a major find,” Prof. Gregg Gardner of CNERS told the Jewish Independent. “There are very few mosaics from the ancient world that depict biblical scenes.”
The mosaics’ scenes include Samson fighting the Philistines, Noah and the flood, the destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, and others. A particularly noteworthy element is that the mosaics also show images from Greek history and mythology. “This confluence of biblical and Greek imagery was quite surprising,” said Gardner.
Boustan was in Vancouver to talk about the “Elephant Panel,” which depicts a battle between unknown actors. Although some have argued that the panel represents Alexander the Great, Boustan interprets the mosaic as the depiction of a Seleucid attack on Jerusalem led by King Antiochus VII in 132 BC. “It shows they had a sense of historical connection to predecessors in a more robust way than we might have expected, and wanted to have that memorialized in synagogue art. This shows a historical consciousness, not just the timeless world of rabbis and scriptural interpretation developing in the Talmud of the same period.”
Boustan is a specialist in Judaism in Late Antiquity (circa 200-700 CE) who has focused particularly on understanding “extra-rabbinic culture,” the Judaism that existed outside of what was preserved in the narratives of the rabbis. “The rabbinic writings – the Talmud, the Midrash – preserve the world through their eyes, what they thought was important and how they wanted things to be viewed. The rabbis did not represent all Jews or all Judaism, and the wider Jewish world may have had different viewpoints and priorities.”
Boustan has focused on studying the piyyutim (hymns) written and preserved outside the rabbinic canon and containing some unusual theological ideas, as well as on apocalyptic and mystical literature, which flourished on the fertile edge between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures.
“The mosaic is important for understanding the history of Jews and Judaism and gives us something to think about in terms of Jews living in the Western world today,” he said, noting the broader and more porous nature of Jewish identity in those times, and how we shouldn’t be in a hurry to “rigidly define Jewish identity or culture.”
For example, Boustan explained, “The figural art we are finding at Huqoq and elsewhere upends some of our assumptions that, classically, Jews didn’t do that. In fact, we’ve found many small villages of one to two thousand habitants who built very expensive buildings containing a mixture of folk art and world-class art. In Huqoq, the art is imperial-quality work, which would not be surprising to find in a major landowner’s villa in Antioch. Yet, there it is, being commissioned, paid for and used by a farming village of maybe 2,000 people. That tells us we have a lot more to learn about the Jews of Late Antiquity.”
He noted, “In addition, the synagogue art contains a zodiac wheel with a figure of the sun god, Helios, in the centre. What’s going on there? Is it just a decoration? Was it actually part of religious worship in the synagogue? Was it seen allegorically as a poetic representation of God?
“Helios imagery was adopted by Christians in the third century, along with many other Greek religious symbols,” he said. “As the Greco-Roman world Christianized, however, they distanced themselves from ‘pagan’ imagery. By the late fourth to seventh [century], Jews are the only ones actively cultivating zodiacal and Helios imagery. Ironically, if you find a building with Helios imagery from that period, it’s almost definitely a synagogue.”
The mosaics can be viewed in detail at nationalgeographic.org/news/huqoq-excavation-project.
Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
Jewish Genealogical Society of British Columbia member Danny Gelmon, left, speaks with Hal Bookbinder. (photo Stephen Falk)
Why Did Our Ancestors Leave a Nice Place Like the Pale? That was the title of Hal Bookbinder’s March 14 talk at Temple Sholom.
Bookbinder was hosted in Vancouver by the Jewish Genealogical Society of British Columbia (JGenBC). He is involved with JewishGen, JewishGen Ukraine and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles. He has published numerous articles on research techniques, Jewish history, and border changes; the latter a matter of particular import to Ashkenazi Jews researching their families’ histories in Eastern Europe. A former president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, Bookbinder was honoured in 2010 with the association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
On March 14, Bookbinder gave a detailed and insightful presentation, all without using notes. “Pale comes from the Latin palus for a stake, the stakes which were used to mark off an area.” he explained. “It was also used for the English Pale, a territory within Ireland controlled by the English. The Pale of Jewish Settlement in western Russia was a territory within the borders of Czarist Russia where Jews were allowed to live.”
Bookbinder said, “Limits on the area in which Jews could live came into being when Russia attempted to integrate Jews into the expanding country, from which Jews had been excluded since the end of the 15th century.” From 1791 until 1915, he said, the majority of Jews living in Eastern Europe were confined by the czars of Russia within the “Pale of Settlement.”
Bookbinder broke up the history of the Pale into six periods, each approximately 25 years long: creation, confinement, oppression, enlightenment, pogroms and chaos. The first era, that of creation, arose from Russia’s westward march to seize new territories in Belarus, Poland and Ukraine, he explained. Russia didn’t want Jews within its borders, but, as it expanded its empire westward, it came to be responsible for millions of them, creating a “Jewish question” for itself.
Catherine the Great (who reigned 1762-1796) responded by ruling that Jews should stay in the Pale. The confinement era intensified efforts to keep the Jews in the Pale, so as not to “infect our good Eastern Orthodox brethren,” explained Bookbinder. During this era, Catherine the Great’s son, Paul I, initiated a new program aimed at assimilating Jews into Christian culture by making their lives so miserable they would rather convert than remain as they were.
This led to the period of the cantonists, during which Jewish boys were drafted into the Russian army. Some did convert, though most did not. Large numbers died from mistreatment, neglect and malnourishment. The military schools provided army training as well as a rudimentary education. Discipline was maintained by the threat of starvation and corporal punishment. At the age of 18, pupils were drafted to regular army units, where they served for 25 years. Enlistment for the cantonist institutions, which originated in the 17th century, was most rigorously enforced during the reigns of Paul I’s son Alexander I (reigned 1801–1825) and Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855), said Bookbinder. It is estimated that around 40,000 Jewish children were stolen from their families during this period. The practice was abolished in 1856 under Alexander II (reigned 1855-1881).
Czar Alexander II took a more “enlightened” approach, continuing to seek the conversion and assimilation of Jews through gentler methods. Czar Alexander III, a rabid antisemite like his grandfather, initiated the era of pogroms after he came to power in 1881.
Starting in 1905, with the ascension of Nicholas II, the chaos period began. “Russia was in ferment,” said Bookbinder, “and it was the era of assassination attempts, the Bolsheviks, fighting between the Red Army and the White Army, the Cossacks – creating a situation that was so unpleasant that it prompted many of our ancestors to leave.”
But, Bookbinder asked, “Why did they leave then? They had lived through so many horrors, and this was far from the worst they had seen. I think it is because, during the more enlightened era of Czar Alexander II, our ancestors got a taste of a more dignified, more secure existence and took courage. When things descended again into chaos, they had had enough, and many escaped Russia.”
Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
Left to right are Kaila Kask (Mary Phagan), Emily Smith, Rachel Garnet and Alina Quarin with Riley Sandbeck (Leo Frank). (photo by Allyson Fournier)
On Aug. 17, 1915, 31-year-old Leo Frank was kidnapped from the Georgia State Penitentiary in Milledgeville by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob and hanged by his neck until he was dead. His alleged crime: the rape and murder of 13-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. His real crime: being Jewish, successful and a northerner in an impoverished Deep South still reeling from the humiliation of the Civil War and looking for retribution against its perceived oppressors.
The case has been the subject of novels, plays, movies and even a mini-series. But who would have thought that you could make a musical out of such a tragedy. Author Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and Broadway producer Hal Prince (Cabaret) did. Thus Parade was born, with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. It opened on Broadway in 1998, won two Tonys and went on to be produced across America to much acclaim.
Now, Fighting Chance Productions, a local amateur theatre company, is bringing this compelling story to Vancouver audiences for its Western Canadian première at the Rothstein Theatre April 14-29. Director Ryan Mooney and lead actor Advah Soudack (Lucille) spoke with the Jewish Independent about the upcoming production. But first, more background, because it is an incredible story.
Frank was a slight man – five feet, six inches tall, 120 pounds – with a nervous temperament. Born in Texas and raised in Brooklyn, he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in mechanical engineering and was enticed to move to Atlanta in 1908 to run the factory owned by his uncle. There, he met and married Lucille, a 21-year-old woman from a prominent Jewish family. The newlyweds lived a life of privilege and wealth in a posh Atlanta neighbourhood, Frank became the president of the local B’nai B’rith chapter. However, having been brought up in the vibrant Yiddish milieu of New York, he always felt like an outsider amid the assimilated Southern Jewish community.
The journey to his tragic demise started the morning of Saturday, April 26, 1913, when little Mary put on her best clothes to attend the Confederate Memorial Day Parade in downtown Atlanta. On the way, she stopped at the National Pencil Factory, where Frank was the superintendent, to pick up her weekly pay packet from his office. That was the last time she was seen alive. Her body, half-naked and bloodied, was found in the basement of the factory later that day. Shortly after, Frank was arrested by the police and charged with the crime along with the African-American janitor, Jim Conley.
The trial was a media circus fueled by a zealous district attorney, Hugh Dorsey, who was looking for a conviction in a high-profile case to popularize his bid for the governorship of Georgia, and Tom Watson, a right-wing newspaper publisher who wrote virulent, racist editorials against Frank, casting him as a diabolical criminal and calling for a revival of the Klan “to do justice.” Frank was convicted by an all-white jury on the testimony of Conley – who had turned state’s evidence in exchange for immunity – and sentenced to death in a trial that can only be characterized as a miscarriage of justice replete with a botched police investigation, the withholding of crucial evidence, witness tampering and perjured testimony. This was America’s Dreyfus trial and Frank was the scapegoat.
The conviction appalled right-thinking people and mobilized Jewish communities across America into action. William Randolph Hearst and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs campaigned on Frank’s behalf. The conviction and sentence were appealed. Georgia governor John Slaton was lobbied to review the case. For two years, Frank sat in jail not knowing his fate until, one day, he heard that Slaton had commuted his death sentence to life in prison. In response, frenzied mobs rioted in the streets and stormed the governor’s mansion. A state of martial law was declared and the National Guard called out to protect the city. Against this backdrop, Frank was transferred into protective custody at the state penitentiary but that did not stop the lynch mob, some of whom had been jurors at the trial.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Frank was (posthumously) pardoned by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Jewish Independent: What attracted you to this play?
Ryan Mooney: Parade has been a favourite musical of mine for as long as I can remember. I was drawn to it because it is such a fascinating story, it speaks so much to its time and continues to speak to us. When people see it, they will want to know more. It has beautiful soaring music, is very emotional, but also it is real, so relatable. It will take you on a journey that will touch you in many ways.
Advah Soudack: The songs, the music. When I was going through the script and getting used to the music, I could not get through some of the songs without choking up, it was so emotional, beautiful and real.
JI: How would you classify it as a theatrical piece?
RM: It is, in essence, a love story about a young man and a woman who learn through tragic circumstances to have a deeper love for each other and to appreciate each other’s kind of love.
AS: Leo sees love as a service, being a provider, while Lucille looks for love in spending quality time together and physical intimacy. Over time, their two loves unite.
JI: This isn’t your typical musical. It has a very dark side. It covers the kind of subject matter usually covered in narrative plays. Do you think people want to see this kind of musical theatre?
RM: Our company, as our name states, takes chances and we are taking a chance on this, but I think the risk is worthwhile and that audiences will appreciate the story. It seems to do very well wherever it plays – Broadway, London. We thought the Rothstein Theatre would be the perfect venue and we hope that the Jewish community will support us.
JI: Is this strictly a Jewish story?
RM: It is not necessarily just a Jewish story, it could be about anybody, anywhere. It is a fascinating look at a historic event through a musical lens. I don’t think Prince was trying to make a political statement when he produced the show but rather to educate people about the event. At the time of its first production, 1998, shows like Ragtime and Showboat were on Broadway alongside Parade. It seemed to be a time for examining how mainstream America treated those people it considered lesser citizens.
JI: What was it like to cast?
RM: The production requires a large cast: 25. I needed people who could sing and act. Lots of people auditioned and we ended up with a great cast, with the members spanning the ages of 18 to 60. What makes this show very relevant is that we have actors playing roles for their real ages, not trying to be someone younger or older, and that makes the production more realistic. I wanted at least one of the leads to be Jewish and Avdah was perfect for the role of Lucille.
AS: When I heard about this show, I jumped at the chance to apply. I had been out of theatre for about 10 years and I really wanted to get back into it. I was lucky enough to get a callback after my first audition and felt very proud of my performance the second time around. I was thrilled when I got the role.
JI: What is it like to deal with a true event as opposed to a fictional account?
RM: Because it is a real life story, there is so much more research you can do to make sure you get it right. I read Steve Oney’s And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank and gave it to members of the cast to read to get a feel for the characters and some background information. There is some material that did not make it into the musical but the play does essentially honour the accuracy of the event.
AS: I am reading the book right now and it is so fascinating to get the story behind the character and be able to use that as an actor.
JI: How are Leo and Lucille portrayed in the script?
RM: He is not portrayed that sympathetically. At the trial, he is really cold and does not look repentant but, ultimately, we see him break. If he were just shown as a martyr and everyone else a villain, that would not be interesting for the audience. Instead, the audience sees his flawed human character and that is why it is a great story to tell – [he’s] a person with faults that anyone can relate to.
AS: She is a Southern woman and a product of the American melting pot, more assimilated than Jewish, and that is how she survives. America wants you to become American first and everything else second. People like her thought like that and assimilated. Then, she is thrust into this case, where horrific things are being said against her husband on a daily basis in the newspapers and she has to deal with that. Yet, she stands by him and is one of his biggest supporters. She even went to the governor’s mansion to personally lobby him to intervene in the case. For a young Southern Jewish woman, that was a big step. So, you see her grow into this strong, independent woman.
She comes across very strong in the play, perhaps stronger than she really was in real life, but she was so committed to Leo’s cause and to him. She came every day to jail to visit him and bring him food. The circumstances of the tragedy allowed her the opportunity to become a heroine.
JI: What will the staging be like?
RM: The set is a long wall with platforms set at different levels. The lights will move through the different levels from scene to scene to create more of a cinematic flow, more like a movie than live theatre. We did not want the story’s flow to be interrupted by the audience clapping after every song. Of course, we do hope the audience will give a standing ovation at the end of the show.
JI: What do you expect audiences to take away from the musical?
RM: I want them to walk out with questions and want to look up more information about the case, but I also want them to leave with the understanding that all good art finds the grey in life and that everything is not black and white. One of the biggest issues in America today is the mentality that you are either with us or you are against us. The world is going in that direction and it is a hard place to be. You have to be able to see issues from all angles if you want to see any positive growth. There are some ambiguities in the show but there are also strong life lessons about the dangers of prejudice and ignorance.
For tickets to Parade, visit fightingchanceproductions.ca.
Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.
Rachel Seelig, author of Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature Between East and West, 1919-1933. (photo by Lauren Kurc)
Rachel Seelig’s Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature Between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016) encompasses so many ideas – some very nuanced, others technical – that a reader will enjoy it on their own, but will learn much more if they can discuss and analyze it with others.
Strangers in Berlin uses the example of four poets – Ludwig Strauss, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Gertrud Kolmar – to examine the influence that Berlin during the Weimar Republic had on Jewish literature.
“The relationship between German Jews and East European Jews in Germany typically has been depicted in terms of … German Jews figuring as reluctant hosts, cultural insiders who viewed the so-called Ostjuden as outsiders or even infiltrators,” writes Seelig. “Strangers in Berlin is aimed at destabilizing these designations by presenting Berlin as a border traversable in both directions…. Foreigners arriving from abroad availed themselves of artistic inspiration and anonymity in order to cultivate new forms of culture, while those native to Germany ascertained their increasing estrangement from the fatherland, which they similarly channeled into artistic production. Whether they were coming or going, exiled in Germany or soon-to-be-exiled from Germany, these writers experienced Berlin as a transitional site between a moribund pre-World War I political order and an increasingly divided, nationalistic European reality.”
Seelig told the Independent that she “chose to focus on four poets who are not necessarily remembered as key figures in Weimar culture but who had considerable influence in their own day.”
She explained, “One of the reasons that these poets are relatively neglected is that they are not easily categorized according to national literary boundaries. Two of them, Strauss and Greenberg, immigrated from Europe to Palestine and wrote in more than one language (Strauss in German and Hebrew and Greenberg in Yiddish and Hebrew) and the other two, Kulbak and Kolmar, produced highly diverse, avant-garde bodies of work that do not align with what we tend to see as the dominant literary trends of their day. So, these writers weren’t just ‘strangers in Berlin’ – that is, writers who are located on the margins of the cultural milieu in which they had either permanently or provisionally settled – but also strangers to us as readers in the 21st century.
“I suppose I made it my mission to bring their extraordinary writing to light, and the best way to do so was to group them together within this context of intense transition and transformation,” she said. “For all four, the experience of living in Weimar Berlin – even if only briefly – left a profound imprint on their work and on their national identity. For all four, Berlin was a place in which they were forced to renegotiate identity. Taken together, I think their works provide a fascinating glimpse into the multiplicity of images of Jewish homeland that emerged during this very fruitful yet volatile period in history.”
Weimar Berlin brought together German, Hebrew and Yiddish literature and Strangers in Berlin examines “the impact of migration – of individuals, languages and cultural concepts – on Jewish national consciousness between the world wars,” writes Seelig. She chose to focus on poets, in part, “because establishing an autonomous and multifaceted poetic tradition was a crucial component of modern national movements.”
Whereas both the Westjuden and Ostjuden “initially viewed Germany as the wellspring of liberal, Western values, by World War I, they had begun to ‘re-orient’ their gaze toward the ‘East,’ extending temporally and geographically from the ancient Near East to contemporary Eastern Europe,” writes Seelig. “Plagued by the uncertainty of national homelessness and the terror of rising antisemitism, both groups looked eastward with a combination of nostalgia, hope and despair in a effort to come to terms with the failure of the West to fulfil the promise of coexistence predicated on the liberal principles of Enlightment. Indeed, melancholic longing for the ‘East’ betrayed profound dislocation in the ‘West,’ which in turn fueled the search for a new national homeland, whether real or imagined.”
Vancouver-born and -raised, Seelig received her undergraduate degree in comparative literature at Stanford University, then worked for a time in New York. She earned her master’s and PhD in Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, spending her last couple years of graduate school in Tel Aviv. She received the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and then, after that, returned to Israel, where she was a Mandel Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently, she is a fellow at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. She speaks English, Hebrew, German and Yiddish. From even this brief bio, it is no wonder that Seelig is interested in borders and thresholds.
“We live in a world today that is both utterly divided and, in a sense, borderless,” she told the Independent. “The phenomena of globalization and mass migration have made us keenly aware of the ways in which borders are, on the one hand, more easily traversed, and, on the other hand, rigourously enforced and policed. Borders have always been sites of contestation and conflict, but a border can also be seen as a threshold that one crosses from one reality to another and a productive site of transfer and transformation.
“I myself migrated across several borders as this book came into being. It started to develop as a doctoral dissertation in Chicago, which I finished writing in Tel Aviv. It became a book – one that changed shape continuously – in Toronto, Berlin and Jerusalem, and was ultimately published in Ann Arbor, Mich. My own nomadic experience as an academic (and I realize, of course, that mine is a kind of privileged nomadism) made me particularly attentive to the impact of changing surroundings and of transitions on one’s thinking, work and identity.”
While accessible, Strangers in Berlin’s dissertation origins are evident, and there are some sentences people will have to read more than once for understanding.
“Strangers in Berlin is first and foremost an academic book, which grew out of my doctoral dissertation, acknowledged Seelig. “But, in the process of transforming the dissertation into a book – and I should point out that the book departs fairly dramatically in terms of content and argument from the dissertation – I made a concerted effort to make the text engaging and highly readable by simplifying the language and peppering every chapter with interesting anecdotes. It will be used by researchers and teachers within the academic context, but I also very much hope that it will be read by lay readers who are interested in modern Jewish culture and the history of the Weimar Republic, which is such a vibrant and captivating time period. I also think that the themes of homeland and migration, which are at the centre of the book, are extraordinarily relevant today, and I hope that readers will find this glimpse into Weimar culture and history resonates with our own political reality today.”
Certain parts of Strangers in Berlin will make readers shiver with a sense of déjà vu. In the chapter on Kolmar, for instance, Seelig writes that, in the poet’s one novel, Die jüdische Mutter (The Jewish Mother), “Kolmar offers a pained reflection on the impossibility of salvaging a viable German-Jewish female identity in an era when both Jewishness and femininity were under siege.” Seelig notes, “Conservatives seeking to safeguard their middle-class privileges and to rebuild a healthy Germany Volkskörper (national body) regarded independent women and integrated Jews as similarly ‘decadent’ social elements…. The result of this campaign was a new form of male repression, which was often shrouded in xenophobic sentiments.”
Readers will see similarities between the Weimar period and what is currently happening in some European countries and in the United States. As it happens, Strangers in Berlin’s launch took place the day after the U.S. presidential election.
“A few hours before the event,” she said, “I was reading an article by Chemi Shalev in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he commented that many millions of Muslims, Mexicans and Jews now feel like ‘strangers in the country they call home.’ Obviously, his statement resonated very strongly with me and with my book.
“The book deals with a historical moment, nearly a century ago, when Berlin emerged as a major metropolis that attracted large swaths of immigrants, who were often seen as unwelcome infiltrators. In this respect, 1920s Berlin isn’t such a far cry from Berlin or Toronto or New York City of today. The book really does resonate with what’s going on in the U.S. and in so much of the world.… We are witnessing the rise of nativist sentiments and attendant xenophobia and bigotry that are oh so reminiscent of interwar Europe. And we’re seeing the way in which various forms of bigotry (anti-immigration, antisemitism and misogyny, all addressed in the book) have a tendency to intersect and even merge when these nativist sentiments are bolstered by political power. I realize it’s a cliché, but it really is remarkable to see how history repeats itself. It’s such a shame that the humanities, specifically history and literature, are under attack today (Trump just eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities from his proposed budget) at a time when we so desperately need them.”
Strangers in Berlin’s four poets struggle, as we all do, with the impossibility of being one thing – a German (or any other nationality), a Jew (or any other religion), for example. Not to mention the different conceptions of what comprises a “real” German (Canadian, American, etc.) or an “authentic” Jew (within the ranges of observance, belief). From all the research Seelig has done – her work, travel, ability to speak multiple languages and negotiate various cultures – has she any theories as to why humans have such trouble, in general, with multiplicity, ambiguity, a lack of borders?
“I wish I knew why we as humans have such a hard time with ambiguity,” she said. “This is something that affects our lives not only in terms of cultural, national or political identity but also in terms of relationships, career paths, place of residence, etc. On the one hand, we have more freedom than ever before to dwell ‘between’ identities, or to inhabit more than one identity, and yet that’s somehow deeply unsettling to us as creatures that crave order, certainty and security.
“I think there’s so much to be learned by the figures in my book, who didn’t have the luxury to choose where they would live or which system of beliefs to subscribe to (at least not without the risk of persecution), and who were profoundly shaped by the contingencies and vicissitudes of life. Each of the four main writers in the book represents more than one identity and, for each one, this was certainly a source of anxiety but also a source of profound inspiration and enrichment.”
Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, 1950. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.11154)
If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected] or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova found classrooms, textbooks, a synagogue, prayer books, clothing and ritual ornaments, all lovingly cared for, undisturbed, unmolested and somehow cherished since the scooping up of three-quarters of the Jews in the towns of Slovakia in 1942. (photo by Yuri Dojc)
Fascination, horror, admiration, exaltation are the words that come to mind when I search to describe the emotions I felt reading Michael Posner’s book review of Last Folio: A Photographic Memory by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova (Indiana University Press, 2011) in Queen’s Quarterly (Winter 2016). The personal saga of Krausova, a cinematographer, and Dojc, a photographer, the horror of the Holocaust in Slovakia and the discovery of remnants of the vibrant Jewish communities stripped of their Jews, their culture and their religion, provoked my curiosity and my imagination.
Dojc and Krausova found classrooms, textbooks, a synagogue, prayer books, clothing and ritual ornaments, all lovingly cared for, undisturbed, unmolested and somehow cherished since the scooping up of three-quarters of the Jews in the towns of Slovakia in 1942.
“It was as if he were entering a time capsule, classrooms frozen at almost the precise moment that Nazi transports had taken the students to the concentration camps – and almost certain death,” writes Posner. “Except for the mould and the yellowed, tattered pages, everything was exactly as they had left it: a bowl of sugar on the shelf, books inscribed with childhood signatures, notebooks filled with essays on their aborted life ambitions.”
Yet, for me, there was something more than photographs and meetings with Holocaust survivors that were being revealed. I rushed to buy the book. It is a work of art filled with dramatic testimony and the saga of an epic journey of chance meetings and breathtaking discoveries resulting in exquisite photographs, as well as a documentary film – labours of love and devotion by Dojc and Krausova.
After reading the text and examining the photographs – the most beautiful I have ever seen – I began to meditate on the fact that all these images were found in places abandoned in 1942; their Jewish owners and community members wiped out by the Nazis. Strange place names like Bratislava, Bardejov, Sastin, Michalovce and Kosice became familiar to me, as the tallit, tefillin, prayer books, mikvah and Torah fragments came alive in my eyes. One of the most haunting images is that of a book fragment with the Hebrew word הנשאר, “that which remains,” clearly legible on the delicate paper.
The essays that follow by Azar Nafisi and Steven Uhly commemorate and honour the murdered Slovak Jews and their collective memory. Yet, there was still something that I was missing. I reread the text by Krausova and stopped on the following lines:
“Mr. Bogol’ tells us that he is the warden of the Protestant church, that he and his wife have lived in the same block with the Simonovics for more than 40 years and that following the death of Mrs. Simonovic’s brother, he became the keeper of the keys of a building in the town…. Time stopped still in this building, which housed a Jewish school a long time ago, almost certainly in 1942, the day when Bardejov Jews vanished forever. Mr. Bogol’ proudly shows us how he and his wife have been painstakingly cleaning each bench, each light, each seat, finding – and preserving – every object, religious or otherwise.”
And, they find another building filled with books, also preserved and protected; waiting for Dojc and Krausova to discover them.
Here was my phantom question, here was the missing link! How is it that these empty, cold, barren places were taken care of for more than 70 years? Who would do such a thing? Why would they do it? Were the guardians of these precious objects waiting for someone? Why didn’t the municipality tear down the buildings or strip them of everything and renovate them? Who paid for the maintenance and taxes on the buildings?
The guardians and the keepers of the keys took these responsibilities upon themselves, year after year, until they bumped into Dojc and Krausova, convincing the harried and exhausted researchers to take a look.
Embossed on the inside cloth cover of the book we read: “Last Folio Charts a Personal Journey in Cultural Memory / A Reflection on Universal Loss as a Part of European Remembrance.”
These unheralded, unacknowledged guardians were the protectors and defenders of the memory of the Jews of Slovakia and their Jewish community. To them, we owe enormous gratitude.
To see an extended trailer of the 81-minute documentary about Krausova and Dojc’s research and the making of the book and photo exhibition, visit youtube.com/watch?v=0vZeL63l1ok.
Dolores Luber, a retired psychotherapist and psychology teacher, is editor of Jewish Seniors Alliance’s Senior Line magazine and website (jsalliance.org). She blogs for yossilinks.com and writes movies reviews for the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library website.
