Attendees at the Nov. 16 event at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital check out the Gallery of Donors Wall. (photo from Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation)
On Nov. 16, the Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation honored donors on its Gallery of Donors Wall, located in the walkway linking the Louis Brier Home and Hospital and the Weinberg Residence. The afternoon celebration, which was attended by more than 100 people, was led by event chair Lisa Sirlin, who introduced foundation president Harry Lipetz.
Jazz duo Dave Ivaz and Julie Boton were among the entertainers on Nov. 16. (Photo from Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation)
Lipetz spoke of the importance of donors to the vitality of both the Louis Brier and the Weinberg. He also thanked Dvori Balshine, who retired last month from the foundation after 12 years as its director of development.
Louis Brier board chair Arny Abramson thanked all of the donors as well for their continued support and chief executive officer Bob Breen detailed how the funding from the foundation is being used. Breen emphasized that the Louis Brier is the only home in the Lower Mainland that staffs several full-time occupational therapists and physiotherapists, as well as a full-time music therapist.
The Sunday afternoon event hosted donors, friends, family and residents, who enjoyed performances by the JCC Or Chadash dancers, musical interludes from Annette Wertman on piano, and the jazz duo Dave Ivaz and Julie Boton. The audience was in full spirits as they moved from the social hall to the boardroom, where the Zalkow family were honored for their donation towards its renovation and a plaque was unveiled, honoring the Edith Lando Charitable Foundation for its donation of audiovisual equipment.
Attendees then moved on to the Gallery of Donors Wall, where Rabbi Yitzchak Wineberg was on hand to say Shehecheyanu, as guests enjoyed a l’chaim. The wall was marked with green, yellow and purple bows, delineating donors who participated in the Maintain, Sustain and Enhance 2014-2016 campaign, plaques moving to a higher category and new donors on the wall. Final words were given by Balshine, who conveyed her appreciation to all the donors, emphasizing that their support is vital to the Brier and the Weinberg Residence.
A reception at the Weinberg, hosted by Chabad Catering with music by Wertman, Ivaz and Boton, concluded with another performance by the Or Chadash dancers. Guests went home with a chocolate confection donated by Chabad Catering.
Paul Harnett felt “compelled to understand the nature of the shofar, and what it embodied.” (photo from Paul Harnett)
In 2000, Paul Harnett was living in Vancouver. On the day before a flight to the East Coast for a family reunion, his mother asked him to purchase her a shofar. He found one at Temple Sholom. He didn’t know it at the time, but that purchase would lead him on a journey of personal transformation, turning him – 14 years later – into one of the Lower Mainland’s main shofar producers.
Harnett, 53, who lives in Abbotsford with his wife Iris, is inspired by Judaism but not halachically Jewish himself. When asked what brought him to shofar making, he said, “The shofar picked me, I felt drawn by it.” Moreover, he felt “compelled to understand the nature of the shofar, and what it embodied…. Shofar making requires lots of practise and perseverance and getting the horn blown properly takes many months to perfect the art.”
Paul Harnett is one of the Lower Mainland’s main shofar producers. (photo from Paul Harnett)
In 2009, an Orthodox Jewish friend from Montreal claimed Harnett’s shofars were not kosher due to the type of horn used. Concerned, Harnett wrote to Rabbi Eliezer Danzinger of chabad.org, who responded, citing Orach Chaim (586:1), that they are indeed kosher because his horns come from kosher animals. With renewed confidence, Harnett committed to producing the highest quality shofars that he could for his customers around the country.
Harnett sources raw horns from Israel, England, Africa and the United States. Each horn has a unique sound and, if properly tuned, can be used as musical accompaniment. Composer Herman Berlinski, for example, and others have explored the dynamics of this ancient instrument.
On two occasions, Harnett has blown the shofar for visiting dignitaries from the Knesset, once in order for them to honor and recognize the Tsawwassen First Nation. Among other events, he also accompanied a blowing of the shofar at a Holocaust memorial hosted by Beth El Synagogue in St. John’s, Nfld.
In addition to the command to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, there are other reasons to own your own. “The shofar is not only a prayer without words,” said Harnett, “it is a visible testament of our identity when displayed as a beautiful ornament in your home.”
As accessories, he makes custom stands out of granite for the shofar, while his wife makes shofar bags from chintz.
Prices for Harnett’s shofars range from $50 to $500, depending on the quality of the horn itself and the time spent making the shofar; shofars can be shipped, upon request. For more information, Harnett will soon have a new website, beharshofars.com.
Gil Lavieis a freelance correspondent, with articles published in the Jerusalem Post, Shalom Toronto and Tazpit News Agency. He has a master’s of global affairs from the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Where the Jewish section is planned at Seaview Cemetery. (photo from Sunshine Coast Jewish Burial Society)
About 18 months ago, a small group of Jewish seniors living on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast approached the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) asking that a section of Seaview Cemetery in Gibsons/Roberts Creek be set aside to accommodate Jewish burials. Since then, the Sunshine Coast Jewish Burial Society has been incorporated and, after many discussions and meetings, an area of the cemetery has been designated for such use.
The SCRD has allocated 30 burial plots for burials according to Jewish rites and practices and, this Sunday afternoon, Dec. 7, Rabbi Lindsey Bat Joseph will officiate at the dedication of the site.
The Sunshine Coast Jewish Burial Society was incorporated as a society under the B.C. Society Act on Jan. 7, 2014, and as a nonprofit society on Oct. 1, 2014, with Irene King, Rita Sadlik and Michael Weiner as members of the board. Renee Switzer has also recently joined the board.
During this project, the committee discovered through speaking with many of the Jewish people living in (and moving to) this part of the province that it may help form a more cohesive community, as more people choose to live in the region. The small towns and villages are quite spread out along Highway 101, though residents do get together from time to time to celebrate and mark Jewish occasions or festivals, with the occasional visit from a rabbi.
If there should be a death, it is important to feel a sense of community and for people to come together to sit shivah and support the mourners. The society will form a local Chevra Kadisha and would appreciate help and guidance from other such groups in the Lower Mainland.
In the meantime, for anyone in the Sunshine Coast area on Sunday, the dedication at the cemetery will take place at 2 p.m. For more information (and offers of support), call Sadlik at 604-886-4906.
Forty-three years after it was dismantled, the Jewish section of Mountain View Cemetery has an arch once more. (photo from MVRP)
A replication of the historic archway for the Jewish section at Mountain View Cemetery went up on Nov. 20, 43 years after the original had been dismantled.
The cemetery, consecrated in 1892, is the only Jewish cemetery in Vancouver. Under the leadership of Shirley Barnett, chair of the Mountain View Restoration Project, it is being restored to reflect its historic significance. Other amenities include a kohanim bench outside the cemetery, two benches inside the cemetery, washing and pebble basins, new pedestrian gates and garden walls. More than 350 headstones are being cleaned and stabilized, and small headstones will be laid for 80 babies buried there.
For more information about the cemetery or the restoration project, contact, Myra Adirim, project administrator, at [email protected].
The Jordan River is “the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide.” (photo from Beivushtang via Wikimedia Commons)
Settlements or Jewish communities? West Bank or Judea and Samaria? East Jerusalem or eastern Jerusalem? Those are some of the language choices that journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are faced with each day – and those choices should not be taken lightly, experts say.
“It’s the terminology that actually defines the conflict and defines what you think about the conflict,” said Ari Briggs, director of Regavim, an Israeli nongovernmental organization that works on legal land-use issues. “Whereas journalists’ job, I believe, is to present the news, as soon as you use certain terminology, you’re presenting an opinion and not the news anymore.”
“Accuracy requires precision; ideology employs euphemism,” said Eric Rozenman, Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
At the conclusion of his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argues that writers have the power to “send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs.” Many Jewish leaders, organizations and analysts wish to do just that with the following terms, which are commonly used by the mainstream media in coverage of Israel.
West Bank: Dani Dayan believes the “funniest” term of all that is used in mainstream coverage of Israel is West Bank. Dayan is the chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing the municipal councils of Jewish communities in an area that the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria, in line with the region’s biblical roots. Yet, media most often use West Bank to describe the area in reference to the bank of the river situated on its eastern border.
“[The Jordan River] is the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide [spanning across Judea and Samaria],” Dayan told this reporter. “There is no other example of such a thing in the geography of planet earth. That proves that West Bank is the politicized terminology, and not Judea and Samaria, as people claim.”
Member of Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) has said it’s “ridiculous” that West Bank – a geographic term that once described half of the Mandate of Palestine – has “taken on a political meaning that attempts to supersede thousands of years of Jewish tradition.”
“The correct name of the heartland of the Land of Israel is obviously Judea and Samaria,” he said.
Rozenman, the former editor of the Washington Jewish Week and B’nai B’rith Magazine, draws a distinction between the context of Palestinian and Jewish communities in the area. “If I’m referring to Palestinian Arab usage or demands, I use West Bank,” he said. “If I’m referring to Israeli usage or Jewish history and religion, etc., I use Judea and Samaria. Israeli prime ministers from 1967 on, if not before, used and [now] use Yehuda and Shomron, the Hebrew from which the Romans latinized Judea and Samaria.”
West Bank is fair to use, “so long as it’s noted that Jordan adopted that usage in the early 1950s to try to legitimate its illegal occupation, as the result of aggression, of what was commonly known as Judea and Samaria by British Mandatory authorities,” added Rozenman.
Dayan, meanwhile, prefers to call Palestinian communities in Judea and Samaria exactly that. “The area is Judea and Samaria and, in Judea and Samaria, there are indeed Palestinian population centres, and that’s perfectly OK,” he said. “We cannot neglect that fact, that yes, we [Jews] are living together with Palestinians. And, in Judea and Samaria, there is ample room for many Jews, for many Palestinians, and for peaceful coexistence between them if the will exists.”
Settlements: Judea and Samaria’s Jewish communities are often called settlements, a term that can depict modern-day residents of the area as primitive.
Settlements “once referred in a positive manner to all communities in the Land of Israel, but at some point was misappropriated as a negative term specifically against those Jews who settled in Judea and Samaria,” Danon said. “I prefer to use ‘Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria’ when discussing the brave modern-day Zionistic pioneers.”
Dayan said that “settlements” is not pejorative, but still inaccurate. “It’s a politically driven labeling in order to target those [Israeli] communities,” he said. “Most communities in Judea and Samaria are not different from any suburban or even urban community in Europe, in the United States, in Israel itself, or elsewhere.”
Marcus Mendes in Yemin Moshe, Jerusalem, last year. (photo from Marcus Mendes)
Marcus Mendes has joined Alan Tapper in hosting The Anthology of Jewish Music, which airs Sundays, 10 a.m., on 100.5 FM and coopradio.org. Mendes will be playing a variety of genres of Jewish music: traditional, pop, religious and especially Israeli artists.
Recently, Mendes was a volunteer at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. For a couple of years, as a child, he lived on Kibbutz Gesher Haziv and Kibbutz Dorot. He spent another year in Israel when he was 17, he recently visited there and will be traveling to the country again next year.
“I’m completely in awe of Alan’s dedication to bringing us this great show of Jewish music every week for the last 34 years,” said Mendes. “The man deserves a star on a walk of fame. If I could play a theme song, it might be the Knack’s ‘My Sharona!’ except I’d replace those words with, ‘Alan Tapper!’ and sing them with feeling!”
To the women reading this post, brace yourself for the following comment: It’s not easy being a man!
Take a minute. OK. Breathe. Sit back down. And we can continue.
The North American male lives under a lot of pressure with high expectations when it comes to their role in relationships, an assumed level of strength, decisive behavior and success.
Yes, it’s true! Stop laughing!
The truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of time or space for sensitivity, vulnerability or exploration of feelings when it comes to thriving as a man in our society. That’s where ManTalks, a new Vancouver-based, community-themed speaker series, steps in.
Connor Beaton founded ManTalks.
Developed by Connor Beaton, a sales/operations manager for Apple, ManTalks came to be after Beaton’s own personal “rock-bottom” had him bounce back, looking for more truth and support in his life.
Once a world-traveling opera singer, Beaton walked away from the stage to pursue other interests and his life was set adrift, leading to some tough decision making.
“I had made some really poor choices in my relationship and had lied and cheated on the woman I was with at the time,” he explained. “Instead of coming clean I tried to keep lying.
“The problem was,” he continued, “I had been lying to my friends, family and myself about what was happening in my life. I wasn’t living the life I wanted, but I had convinced myself and everyone around me that my life was amazing. I had convinced everyone that I had an amazing career, an amazing partner, had money in the bank and was on the path to huge success. But it was all a lie.”
Beaton went on to explain how he realized he’d lost track of who he was, digging a hole deeper than he could pull himself out of. He eventually made a conscious decision to promise himself two things: “First, I would speak my truth and live it,” he said. “Second, I would make sure that other men didn’t have to face their challenges and darkest moments alone.”
The goal of ManTalks is to create the largest resource “for men looking to live a powerful, authentic and honest life, contributing to the success of others.”
A few ManTalks sessions have already taken place, with participation from more than 100 men and women (pretty sure the women were there on a recon mission). The last one, earlier this month, was focused on fitness, body image and work/life balance. It featured three speakers with different perspectives or stories about how they conquered some extremely vulnerable moments in their own lives, while audience members shared with each other as well.
Starting in January, ManTalks will take place once a month, each with different themes. January will be themed Wealth Mindset, February will be What Women Want (featuring all female speakers), March will be Spirituality, April will be Fatherhood and May will be Masculinity. More info on Mantalks can be found at www.mantalks.ca
Beaton will also be speaking at the upcoming Recharge Conference taking place at the JCC, January 11. www.sparkenergizeempower.com
An aerial photograph of the Vancouver International Airport. (photo by Alejandro Erickson via en.wikipedia.org)
On Oct. 21, Governor General of Canada David Johnson awarded Haim Peri, a member of the local Jewish community and a former Israeli, with the Canadian Medal of Bravery. Five other heroes from the Greater Vancouver area received the award along with Peri – all for saving passengers from a burning airplane that crashed at the Vancouver International Airport three years ago, in October 2011.
In an interview with the Jewish Independent, Peri talked about that afternoon, when he and the others witnessed a plane crash and participated in the rescue of its seven passengers.
Haim Peri received the Canadian Medal of Bravery for his heroic actions in October 2011 to rescue passengers from a burning plane at Vancouver International Airport. (photo by Olga Livshin)
“It happened about 200 metres from where I work. I’m a driver for Amre Supply. I just finished my workday and took a smoke outside when I saw the entire thing happen right before my eyes. As I later learned, the plane took off for Kelowna and immediately encountered a mechanical problem. It had to turn back. The pilots tried to land the plane on the runway but couldn’t. I remember hearing the engines struggle. They roared. The plane was too low and coming down at great speed. One of the wings clipped a lamp post, and then the whole thing made a sharp left turn and hit the ground. The cockpit was instantly engulfed in flames. There was choking black smoke, and spilled jet fuel could ignite at any moment…. It was as cinematic as it was horrific, and then there was silence.”
According to the reports later available to the media, several people saw the crash and tried to get away as fast as they could. The fire was spreading, the heat was intense and an explosion could have occurred at any moment. Despite the imminent danger, Peri and the other rescuers rushed towards the burning plane.
“I didn’t know how many people were on board, or who had survived the crash, but letting people die was not an option,” he recalled. “There were no fire fighters or medics there. They all arrived a few minutes later, but a few minutes is a long time in such situations.”
He remembered running towards the plane the moment it crashed. “By the time I arrived, the door had just been opened, and someone was already trying to drag out a passenger. He was struggling, and I told him we could lift her together.” He stepped into the plane to pick up the passenger’s legs, while his partner lifted her shoulders. They carried the injured woman some distance from the wreckage.
“I had had first-aid training so I checked her for bleeding first,” he said. “There was none, but she was in terrible pain, and I feared she may have suffered internal injuries and broken bones. By that time, other rescuers had stepped in to get the remaining passengers off the plane, so I focused my attention on the woman, talked to her, tried to make her as comfortable as possible.”
Six weeks before the plane crash, Peri had received sad news: his 30-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. “As I sat with the woman I saved, I prayed to G-d,” he said. “I told him: ‘I’ll take care of this woman. Please, you take care of my baby, help her.’ He did. She is better now, free of cancer. She recently had a new baby, my eighth grandchild.”
Eventually, emergency crews arrived and took control of the crash scene, and the injured were taken to the hospital. “And I walked back to work across the street,” Peri recalled.
That daring rescue wasn’t the first in his life. When he served in the Israeli army in his youth, he was a landmine specialist, trained to spot and disarm mines, as well as plant them. He and a group of others were assigned to rebuild a barbed-wire fence in the Golan.
“The Syrian military had planted thousands of mines on the Golan Heights,” he said. “We were told that the area was already clear of the mines, but I decided to look around anyway. That’s when I saw the spherical shape of the top of an anti-tank mine. ‘Don’t move!’ I shouted to the others. They all held still. I slowly retraced my footsteps back to the main road. One by one, I had the other soldiers follow my tracks, until all 15 of my men were out of harm’s way. I later discovered four additional landmines were buried along the same path.”
The events of that day and the plane crash of 2011 were separated by more than 30 years, but the man was still the same, keeping others safe. While both pilots unfortunately died in hospital, all of the passengers survived because of the rescuers’ swift actions.
“The City of Richmond presented all of the rescuers with the awards for bravery,” Peri said, displaying his medals. “The recognition continued with the Lions Club’s Medal of Merit and the RCMP award. And now, Canada’s Medal of Bravery. It has my name on it.”
The other five B.C. recipients of the Canadian Medal of Bravery were Peri’s fellow rescuers, who ventured into the burning aircraft with him on that autumn day in 2011 to save its seven passengers: Jeremy Kerr, Lonney Lee, Shawn Nagurny, Francis Nand and John Redmond.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
