Pat Johnson – Page 12 – Jewish Independent

Spreading the lights of Chanukah

The Jewish Renewal synagogue in East Vancouver, Or Shalom, is marking the eight nights of Chanukah by honoring eight “lights” of life on the city’s east side.

“I had this idea that it would be really special to open ourselves out to our community and to really focus on the notion of Chanukah being a celebration of light emitting from darkness, or the notion of Chanukah as being about light that seems unlikely to continue to shine but miraculously does persevere,” explained Rabbi Hannah Dresner, spiritual leader of the shul. “I would really like our community to focus on what it means to be a human being that is a light in the community.”

The synagogue will have a celebration this Saturday night that recognizes the contributions of eight individuals and organizations that add light to the east side community.

Among the honorees are John Jardine of Vancouver’s Native Education College; firefighters from the hall nearest Or Shalom; a group within the Or Shalom congregation devoted to aiding refugees; Kim Leary, executive director of the Homework Club associated with Britannia Secondary School; members of the Habonim-Dror youth movement; Angela Marie MacDougal, the director of Battered Women’s Support Services; Mount Pleasant Neighborhood House; and Rev. Sally McShane of First United Church, which runs programs in the Downtown Eastside.

“Our miracle story is that, when the Temple in Jerusalem was desecrated, they came in afterwards and wanted to relight the candelabra that was kept lit all the time but there wasn’t enough oil, so they lit it anyway and the miracle that’s celebrated is that that oil was sufficient to keep the lamp lit until olives could be harvested and oil could be pressed and brought forward to the Temple,” Dresner said. “So the notion is that if you light the light and tend it, that there is an element of trust and faith that, if we do our work, then the divine energy will join us in uplifting our world.”

Eight Leading Lights takes place Saturday, Dec. 12, at Or Shalom, 710 East 10th Ave., with a potato bar supper at 5:30 p.m. and communal singing and candlelighting at 7 p.m.

Noir-ish Toronto tale

Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig is having a second life as a 35th anniversary reissue. The novel won the 1981 Toronto Book Award and gained critical acclaim when it was first issued. Yet, it had been largely forgotten by most Canadians until recently, its revival heralded by reviewers in Canada.

The Polish-born Weinzweig began writing comparatively late in life and certainly never became a household name like some of her contemporary Canadian writers. However, she cut ground with experimental writing that, in this novel, employs dreamlike progression as her character assimilates the dramatic stories of ordinary people she encounters as she moves from place to place and mood to mood.

The narrator, Shirley Kaszenbowski, travels the world under the alias Lola Montez. If the reader is not quite sure who Shirley/Lola really is at the start of the book, it is amply clear by the end that she doesn’t know precisely either.

Her dull, although far from normal, home life is bearable thanks to a secret world she inhabits, in which she travels the world meeting her lover, Coenraad. Because of Coenraad’s top-secret role in a spooky intelligence service, rendezvous locations are secretly conveyed through numerical codes hidden in the latest issue of National Geographic, leading her to dramatic forays into remote parts of the world.

The theatrical, noir-ish story (the title marquees basic black, after all) unfolds through furtive, whispered conversations, overheard snippets, recollected traumas and sexual fantasies … or are they real encounters? It is often dark, sometimes dismal and lonely, yet the writing is brisk. Emotions and events transpire and are left behind in quick succession as the story – and Lola’s adventures – speed along. Much is packed into the novel of little more than 100 pages.

And while the book is fiction, it captures a real sense of a Toronto gone by: the original Shopsy’s backing onto the Yiddish theatre, and passing mentions of landmarks, familiar and less familiar, as she trudges the city’s streets like a lost soul.

Some reviewers have viewed this novel as a feminist tome. If so, it is in the sense of illustrating how some women’s lives are dictated and proscribed by the men in their lives. Or, figuratively or literally, not in their lives.

Despite critical acclaim, Weinzweig never joined the famous names of Canadian literature, or even the smaller shelf that is Jewish Canadian literature, and she was well aware of this before she died in 2010.

She wrote to the Globe and Mail once: “Canadians hate success … Basic Black with Pearls has had rave reviews and has been bought by William Morrow Company in New York. Success and 60 cents will get me a ride on the subway. No one can find a copy of my novel in the bookstores.”

The iconic Canadian literary publisher House of Anansi recognized something in this work that deserved to be shared with another generation. Weinzweig would be pleased. If only bookstores were still a thing. Basic Black with Pearls is also available as a digital book.

Hotel’s history full of stories

Harpo Marx and the Bodnes in the Rose Room. The hotel’s list of illustrious guests is almost literally endless. (photo from Algonquin Kid)

Michael Elihu Colby had the unique privilege to be brought up in New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. Well, not exactly brought up in it, but his grandparents owned it from 1946 to 1987 and he was there a lot.

Colby’s book, The Algonquin Kid (BearManor Media) is chock-a-block with stories from his experience as a youngster hanging around and also tales handed down through the years.

photo - Grandma Mary and Grandpa Ben Bodne — Grandma Mary and Grandpa Ben Bodne. *(photo from Algonquin Kid)*

Grandma Mary and Grandpa Ben Bodne loom large in the book, as they did in the hotel and, by extension, cultural life in New York City in the 20th century. The grandparents were from the southern United States and Ben became wealthy through oil during the Second World War and afterward sought to parlay his money into something else. Despite having no hotel experience, the couple threw themselves into the adventure.

The hotel was a dilapidated shadow of its former glory. On top of the million dollars the hotel cost, the family had to sink another $300,000 into making it decent. This renovation was not welcomed by all the guests. The hotel had residents who had lived there for 20 years and who were highly averse to change.

The book is fabulously gossipy and it would have been shorter, maybe, if Colby had listed the celebrities he didn’t run into. Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, William Saroyan and John Cheever were among the literary lights.

Although this was well past the hey-day of the famed Algonquin Round Table, some of those names were still hanging on, too.

Show biz figures included Ingrid Bergman, Kitty Carlyle, Tallulah Bankhead and Angela Lansbury, the latter two of whom lived at the hotel. Rosemary Clooney, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Ella Fitzgerald … the list is almost literally endless.

The Algonquin was welcoming to actors and artists blacklisted during the McCarthy era and also to African-Americans at a time when this was unusual. Among the bold-faced names in this category: Maya Angelou, Coretta King, Thurgood Marshall and Oscar Peterson.

The hotel staff included its own characters, like a telephone operator who had the skills of the CIA at tracking down anyone anywhere, and a quick-thinking maître D’: “When a guest found a fly in her salad, he popped it in his mouth, swallowed down the evidence, and exclaimed ‘Delicious! A raisin.’”

This is a book of family stories and such stories, especially when the family is filled with characters, can improve with the telling. The author may or may not believe some of his own tales.

“Grandpa Ben claimed he first met a celebrity selling her a paper: he believed that woman, who tipped him generously, was Helen Keller,” writes Colby. Think for a moment about how likely that story is to be true.

How about this story of Grandma Mary welcoming Marilyn Monroe: “After greeting each other, Grandma remarked, ‘Marilyn, that’s the most beautiful mink you have on!’ Marilyn replied, ‘You think that’s something, you should see what’s underneath.’ She pulled open the mink, and wasn’t wearing anything. Not every kid can claim his grandmother was flashed by Marilyn Monroe.” Well, every kid can claim it.

Legendary Broadway librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe were working in a ninth-floor hotel room, below the family’s 10th-floor apartment.

“One evening, Grandpa could no longer stand the ivories tinkling in Room 908 – one light below – disturbing his sleep. He phoned the hotel operator to ask Lerner and Loewe to quiet down, complaining, ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were writing something good, but this is just noise.’ It turned out Lerner and Loewe were creating the song ‘I Could Have Danced All Night.’”

Unlike others who visited or lived at the Algonquin, Colby is not among America’s greatest writers, but his stories are well worth the read.

Survivor helps others

On Nov. 18, Robbie Waisman spoke at the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia. (photo by Pat Johnson)

The head of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is crediting Robbie Waisman, a Vancouver man and a child survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, with making a significant impact on the work of the landmark national initiative.

Justice Murray Sinclair, the first Aboriginal judge appointed to the Provincial Court of Manitoba, headed the commission that handed down its report earlier this year. It is a compendious study of the legacy of Indian residential schools in Canada, with recommendations for redress. Over the course of a century, an estimated 30% of Aboriginal children in Canada were taken from their family homes and placed in residential schools. Funded by the federal government and run by Christian churches, the schools forbade children from speaking their native languages. Countless numbers were physically and sexually abused, even murdered, starved to death or died from lack of medical attention. Of the estimated 150,000 children who went through the system, 4,000 are believed to have died. Survivors have struggled for decades with the legacies of the experience. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first comprehensive nationwide effort to address the history.

Sinclair told the Independent that Waisman made a crucial suggestion that informed the work of the commission. It can be extremely difficult for survivors to tell their stories directly to their children, Waisman told Sinclair. He himself did not tell his own children about his experiences in the Holocaust; they learned some of the details by witnessing their father tell his history to others. The commission took this advice to heart, said Sinclair.

“Based on that, when we go to a community, we bring all the [residential school] survivors in and we always make a point to bring their children in so that when the survivors are talking to us, the children are hearing them,” Sinclair said. “That proved to be an exceptionally strong piece of advice for us to open the lines of communication within families. From the perspective of residential school survivors, often the most important process of reconciliation that they wanted to engage in, that they needed to engage in, was to apologize to their own families for how they behaved after residential schools and to be given an act of forgiveness by their children, their spouses, their family members.”

Waisman participated in the entire TRC process, traveling to every part of Canada to speak with residential school survivors about his own story of survival and about creating a life after experiencing the most unimaginable horrors.

“I told them that I am one of the 426 teenagers that was liberated at Buchenwald,” Waisman explained. “We couldn’t go home, we went to France and, in France, the experts that analyzed us told the French government that these kids, first of all, won’t amount to anything because they’ve seen too much and they’ll never rehabilitate. Get a Jewish organization to look after them, they told the French government. Number two, they won’t live beyond 40. So here we are. Six years ago, I phoned [Nobel laureate and fellow Buchenwald survivor] Elie Wiesel, who wasn’t going to amount to anything, and I wished him a happy 80th. And little Lulek [Yisrael Meir Lau], who became chief rabbi of Israel. This is what I related to them. You see what we have achieved? So, then I quote [Barack] Obama: ‘We did it … yes you can.’”

On Nov. 18, Waisman spoke at the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia about his experience in the Holocaust and about participating in the TRC.

Waisman has been involved with First Nations communities for years. He was first contacted by Canadian Jewish Congress when David Ahenakew, a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, uttered antisemitic comments in 2002. CJC engaged with First Nations leaders and brought Waisman to meet with them. Waisman’s relationship with CJC goes back further – as an orphaned child survivor, he was sponsored to come to Canada by CJC.

Because of his effectiveness as a speaker, Waisman was invited to speak to residential school survivors in the Northwest Territories. As he spoke, he noticed maybe a dozen people in booths, speaking into headphones. It turned out his words were being translated into local dialects and broadcast across the territories. A trip that was supposed be a daylong in-and-out turned into a four-day sojourn as residential school survivors came from surrounding villages to meet him.

“They figured that nobody cared,” said Waisman. “Many of them have begun to talk about their horrors after they listen to me.”

Sinclair is full of warm words for Waisman. “He’s a stalwart supporter and a warm and kind and loving man who always understood what the survivors were talking about and let them know that,” said the judge.

Consuls save thousands of lives

Consul General of Japan Seiji Okada, centre, Yasuko Okada and Dr. George Bluman. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

There are Vancouverites who owe their lives to the wartime actions of the then-obscure Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. The mid-level official, vice-consul in Lithuania for the imperial government of Japan, disobeying explicit and repeated orders, in 1940 issued Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing the advancing Nazi onslaught.

Two of the people who received the visas were Nathan and Susan Bluman. Their son, Dr. George Bluman, delivered the keynote address Sunday at the 33rd annual Kristallnacht commemoration event, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel.

Bluman recounted the story of Sugihara’s life and the motivations for his actions, then addressed the magnitude of those events on his own family.

“There are thousands of stories like my parents’,” said Bluman, noting that this one family’s story is barely a footnote in the Sugihara narrative, but it means “the entire world for me and my family.”

Bluman, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, said his parents were two of about 2,100 people who received life-giving visas from the Japanese consular official. Approximately another 600 individuals were aided by being included in the visas of others, mostly their parents, and perhaps 25% more were helped in their survival by forged versions of Sugihara visas.

Bluman explained that, after Germany invaded Poland and divvied the country up with the Soviet Union, many Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied portion. Unable to flee to the west, and having been denied entry by most Western countries, Jews were effectively trapped.

Nathan Bluman and his fiancée Susan lived in Warsaw, which was occupied by the Nazis. Nathan fled to the Soviet-occupied east and prevailed upon Susan to join him, which she did, though her father forbade them from marrying without his permission.

“She would never again see any of her parents or siblings,” Bluman said.

While Germany had occupied the Netherlands, Dutch embassies and consulates worldwide remained loyal to the Dutch government-in-exile, located in London. Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Lithuania, began issuing visas to Curaçao, the Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Jewish refugees, including many Polish Jews like Nathan and Susan Bluman, made their way to Lithuania in hopes of obtaining a ticket to safety.

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, all foreign embassies and consulates were ordered closed. In the short window available, the Dutch consul, with the support of his superiors in the government-in-exile, issued visas for Jewish refugees to enter Curaçao.

However, while Polish and Lithuanian Jewish refugees were free to travel in the Soviet Union, they could not go further without a visa to another country. That made a Japanese transit visa priceless.

While there is no evidence that Zwartendijk and Sugihara ever met, it was their combined actions that are credited with saving thousands of lives. While Zwartendijk acted with the authority of his superiors, Sugihara ignored explicit orders not to issue transit visas, an act of extraordinary disobedience for a mid-level Japanese bureaucrat and an action that not only put his job on the line, but threatened the lives of himself and his family.

Sugihara handwrote the visas day and night, issuing the equivalent of an average month’s worth of visas every day in the weeks before the consulate was forcibly closed by the Soviets.

The combination of a Dutch visa to Curaçao and a transit visa for Japan allowed refugees to make the arduous journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, board a ship to a Japanese port, take a train to Kobe and, in various ways, survive the war. In many cases, the refugees became stateless people, interned first in Japan and then in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Bluman’s parents managed to get on one of the last two ships heading to North America before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched Japan and the United States into a state of war and made passage impossible.

The Bluman family’s fate was influenced by one of those fortunate flukes that occurs in history. While in Japan, Nathan Bluman ran into an old professor from school in Warsaw, who told him that a ship, the Hei Maru, was to leave for Vancouver the next day. Bluman raced to the Canadian consulate to request one of the 25 visas being offered to skilled workers and it was granted. There were no provisions for spouses but Susan Bluman, using some sort of extraordinary persuasive power, managed to get the Canadian official to include her on her husband’s visa and they boarded the ship the same day, arriving in Vancouver on July 9, 1941.

That single transit visa was responsible for 17 lives, including Nathan and Susan Bluman, their children and grandchildren and three great-grandchildren born this year.

George Bluman estimates that, in all, 30,000 people worldwide owe their lives to Sugihara. Yet, it was not until 1968, when a survivor contacted him, that Sugihara began to understand the magnitude of what he had done during the war. In 1985, he was named by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Sugihara died in 1986, as did Nathan Bluman. But the Bluman and Sugihara families have had a long association and friendship that remains strong today to the third generation.

The event Sunday night at Beth Israel began with a solemn candlelight procession of local survivors of the Holocaust.

The annual event commemorates Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” a government-initiated pogrom across Germany and Austria on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, nearly 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a member of the commemoration’s organizing committee, noted that the Holocaust ended 70 years ago with the Allied defeat of the Nazi regime. But when did it begin? Kristallnacht is often cited as the moment when the increasingly repressive policies of the Hitler dictatorship turned into the violence that would culminate in the “Final Solution.”

But Friedrichs said that the Holocaust was not so much a direct result of events of that fateful night.

“It is what did not happen in the days that followed,” he said. After a day or two of headlines worldwide, said Friedrichs, there was nothing more. The world’s reaction, or lack of it, was the signal the Nazis needed to be assured that their policies of eliminating those “deemed unworthy of life” would meet with no resistance from the world community.

Referring to the procession of candle-bearing survivors that had just preceded him, Friedrichs said, “a candle may not seem very heavy to you.” But each of the survivors who mounted the bimah, said Friedrichs, belonged to a family, many of whom were almost completely destroyed, and the candles represent not just their families or hundreds or thousands of people, but millions.

Vancouver City Councillor

Andrea Reimer, deputy mayor of the city, broke down in tears while reading the mayor’s proclamation after telling the audience how the history of the Holocaust tests for faith in humanity.

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Bluman and expressed gratitude that Bluman is a member of his congregation.

“You are a key component of maintaining the history of the Holocaust in our community,” Infeld said.

Arthur Guttman, cantor emeritus of Temple Sholom, chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer for the martyrs. Ed Lewin, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the survivors. Gary Miller, president of Beth Israel, introduced Reimer. Bluman was introduced by Prof. Richard Menkis, a member of the Kristallnacht commemoration organizing committee.

Survivors’ immense impact

Holocaust survivors who came to Canada after the Second World War remade this country’s Jewish community.

Before survivors arrived in numbers, beginning in 1947, Canada’s Jewish community had a few poorly resourced social service agencies. The demands created by thousands of new arrivals – many with significant emotional and physical challenges – spurred the growth of Jewish communal organizations across the country. In turn, those survivors have had an impact on the community in the successive seven decades that is incalculable. The impact of the Holocaust – and the arrival of its survivors – is perhaps the defining factor in the development of Canada’s Jewish community.

photo - Adara Goldberg — Adara Goldberg *(photo from Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival)*

“The Holocaust is a watershed moment and the scale of this watershed resettlement was unprecedented,” said Adara Goldberg, a Vancouverite and author of Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947–1955. “Many of the agencies across Canada only came to be as a result of the Holocaust. Jewish Immigrant Aid Services [JIAS] did exist, but this was a small organization that only dealt with small numbers up to this point. Having some 35,000 people come in, in less than a 10-year span, really trampled the organizations.”

Survivors who moved to the United States joined a vibrant Jewish community already in progress, while those who came to Canada found a Jewish community with little infrastructure. What exists of the Jewish community and its social service agencies today was built, in large part, for the survivors and, subsequently, by them.

To an extent, there was an unwillingness among Canada’s existing Jewish community to address the Holocaust experiences of the newcomers – those who did not experience the Holocaust may have been afraid of opening wounds or been unwilling to hear the horrors others experienced. There was also a history in Canada of immigrants getting off the boats and throwing themselves instantly into building a new life, leaving the past behind.

Still, Goldberg said, there was a recognition by people like the head of JIAS that these immigrants had some very particular needs.

“The problem was availability,” she said. “This is uncharted territory. Social workers themselves and the Canadian Jewish community were only learning with the survivors about how to treat victims of trauma … the idea of post-traumatic stress didn’t really exist.”

Getting the newcomers integrated was not only a matter of meeting social needs, she added.

“There is also a legal element to that,” Goldberg said. “The fact is, refugees who came to Canada under the auspices of either the Canadian Jewish Congress, or who received support from JIAS or who had relatives sponsor them, were liabilities. If they didn’t find work, if they didn’t have a home, if they became dependent, they risked deportation. They risked becoming a drain on the existing Jewish community, which was already really reaching its max in terms of what they could do.”

A symbol of success is that very few fell through the cracks, although many of the case studies in the book indicate that some survivors were miserable in their assigned living conditions or workplaces.

There was a realization after the war, as the magnitude of what would come to be called the Holocaust dawned, that Canada had failed the imperiled Jews of Europe in the 1930s, when there was still time.

“After the war, relationships changed and there was significant international pressure on Canada to help do its part in relieving the postwar refugee crisis of Jewish and also non-Jewish displaced persons,” Goldberg said. “On the one hand, we can say this was a humanitarian gesture.… There’s also a practical element that we can’t overlook in that Canada stood to gain something from allowing in the Holocaust survivor refugees. There was a need for skilled laborers and this is how most survivors did come in, they came in for skilled labor posts, so Canada benefited.”

The equation of immigration and Canada’s need for labor is underscored by the fact that there was no ministry of immigration at the time – until 1950, Canada’s immigration policy was administered by the ministry of mines and resources. The influx of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees postwar familiarized the Canadian government and public to the concept of receiving refugees on humanitarian grounds. The first major instance of this reconsideration came in 1956 after the Soviet Union crushed the democratic uprising in Hungary. Canada admitted 37,000 refugees in the course of a year.

Goldberg’s book begins with a refresher on Canada’s abominable record in the prewar period. Chapters then take on topics such as the unique requirements of young orphaned refugees; the double-edged sword of interned “enemy aliens” – Jews from enemy states, mostly Germany and Austria, whose nationality, in the eyes of Britain and its Canadian dominion, trumped their status as endangered victims of Nazism; the various programs under which refugees were admitted to Canada and how established Jewish communities, especially their women’s organizations, cared for refugees’ personal needs; the creation of social clubs and synagogues by and for survivors; the development of an ultra-Orthodox and Chassidic community here; and “transmigrants,” those who came to Canada after a sojourn elsewhere, often in Israel. She has included the stories of survivors who didn’t want to be found; those whose experiences in Europe led them to hide their Jewishness and their past as they began a new life in Canada. It is a monumental work.

A Toronto native, Goldberg wrote the book in fulfilment of her PhD at Clark University in Massachusetts and, while there are differences between the dissertation and the book, which was published in September by University of Manitoba Press, the book avoids the academic jargon that can exclude ordinary readers.

“As a social history that was created with the research that I did both in archives as well as through interviews and other sources, it was written with a wide readership in mind,” she said.

Goldberg eschews statistics in favor of personal case studies both from in-person interviews and records of social service agencies from decades past. The result is an introduction to hundreds of individuals and their stories, as well as a testament to the resilience of the survivors and the history of a small Jewish community rising – not always flawlessly – to the challenge of welcoming tens of thousands of co-religionists who had suffered unspeakable horrors.

The dissertation took about three years to complete and, after Goldberg moved to Vancouver, where she worked for three years as education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, she took the opportunity to do additional research that incorporates more local content. The book is enriched by her background as a trained social worker, which underpins a deep analysis of the successes and failures of social service agencies in those early years.

Refugees are the top global news story today and Goldberg sees lessons for the present in her book.

“It’s a very different crisis,” she said. “I think what we can do is, without trying to compare individual experiences, to remember the risk of nativist attitudes and what happened when Canada had very discriminatory, restrictive immigration policies 75 years ago. Canada accepted the fewest number of Jewish refugees of any country in the Western world … Canada had an opportunity at that time to distinguish itself, to take a very restrictive policy and widen the gates. They could have done this and they elected not to. What we can do now is reflect on the result of this inaction. History does not need to repeat itself. Canada can distinguish itself as a world humanitarian leader.

“Similarly,” she continued, “Holocaust survivors have contributed to all aspects of Canadian society. I imagine that so, too, do other refugees to Canada and so will other waves that come in the future. There is so much that we can gain.”

The Vancouver launch of Adara Goldberg’s book takes place on Nov. 25, 5:30 p.m., at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. Admission is free.

Filmmaker as subject

Henrik Gawkowski, as seen in Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann. (photo from Les Films Aleph/Why Not Productions)

The French intellectual who created what many view as the definitive documentary of the Holocaust is himself the subject of a documentary, called Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah.

Commentators in the film are unanimous that Shoah, Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour study of the Holocaust, is a masterpiece. They also agree that Lanzmann is himself a piece of work.

A former friend calls him a megalomaniac. Another commentator says he is “a very challenging individual.” Through interviews with Lanzmann, the viewer gets a sense of what they are talking about.

Over a 12-year odyssey of interviewing and filmmaking, what Lanzmann set out to create was a film, in his words, “not about the Shoah, but a film that would be the Shoah.”

His first challenge was how he would approach a topic so enormous and distressing.

“What is my theme?” he asks during interviews for the documentary. “The heart of the Shoah, what is it?”

On this he concludes: “Shoah is not a film about survival. And, as it is not a movie about survivors … the survivors are not in Shoah, Shoah is a film about death.”

He recounts an incident that left him hospitalized for a month after a former SS officer’s wife discovered a hidden camera in his bag and Lanzmann and his female assistant were chased, beaten and bloodied by thugs associated with the war criminal. In another instance, Lanzmann relates how he almost drowned while swimming off the coast of Israel. He recalls that he had no gratitude to the individual who saved him and speculates that perhaps he had intended suicide because he knew he could not finish the film in the two years he had been given, with the instruction to keep it under two hours.

As Lanzmann goes on at length about his artistic struggles and the terrible toll the project took on his spirit, a viewer’s empathy may fade. Considering the subject matter of Shoah, lamentations on the difficulties of making a film – however monumental – come across as startlingly self-absorbed. Given the advance billing of Lanzmann’s character with which the documentary begins, the film comes full circle, providing a character sketch of a difficult individual who has done a remarkable thing.

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah double bills with What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival (vjff.org) on Nov. 11, 3:30 p.m.

Liberals sweep into power

Justin Trudeau schmoozes after a speech to the Richmond Chamber of Commerce in July. (photo from Justin Trudeau’s Office)

As Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party swept to a majority victory Monday night, it was British Columbia that finally made a difference. Without the 17 seats the Liberals took here, Trudeau would have won, but with a minority mandate – albeit a big one.

The Liberals swamped Vancouver and its suburbs, winning some seats that few, if any, observers anticipated they were even competitive in, particularly in the eastern suburbs. The North Shore was a Liberal sweep. In Vancouver South, the Conservatives lost their only foothold in the city as incumbent Wai Young lost to Liberal Harjit Sajjan.

Liberals Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra) and Hedy Fry (Vancouver Centre), the only two Liberals elected from British Columbia in 2011, trounced their respective opponents. Murray more than doubled the votes of her nearest competitor, a Conservative, and Fry almost tripled the vote of the second-place New Democrat.

The new riding of Vancouver Granville, slicing through the centre of the city north to south, is a microcosm of what appears to have happened locally and nationally. Several organizations had formed to encourage Canadians who opposed Harper’s Conservatives to vote strategically for the candidate most likely in their riding to defeat the Conservative. In Granville, Leadnow, probably the most prominent of the anti-Harper organizations, urged voters in the riding to back New Democrat Mira Oreck. This drew a backlash from Liberals, who said their candidate was either tied or ahead of the New Democrat in the available public opinion polls and the Vancouver Sun noted the friendship between Oreck and the head of Leadnow. In the end, so-called “change voters” seem to have looked at the national polling trends – which, by the end of the campaign, showed the Liberals slightly ahead of the Conservatives and NDP support dissipating – and turned red. In the end, Liberal Jody Wilson-Raybould took nearly 44% of the vote, with Oreck and Tory candidate Erinn Broshko effectively tied at 26%, Oreck edging out the Tory by 38 votes for second place; Green candidate Michael Barkusky took about three percent. Oreck and Barkusky are members of the Jewish community.

There were no clearly evident trends in ridings across the country with concentrations of Jewish voters. In the Montreal riding of Mount Royal, held until the election by retiring Liberal Irwin Cotler, Anthony Housefather, the Liberal candidate and mayor of the suburb of Cote-Saint-Luc, beat Conservative Robert Libman by a comfortable margin. Both Housefather and Libman are Jewish.

In Thornhill, the Toronto-area riding with the country’s largest concentration of Jewish voters, Conservative incumbent Peter Kent trounced Liberal Nancy Coldham. In Eglinton-Lawrence, incumbent Conservative finance minister Joe Oliver, the most senior Jewish official in Ottawa, lost by a significant margin to Liberal Marco Mendicino. In York Centre, another Toronto riding with large numbers of Jewish voters, Tory Mark Adler was narrowly defeated by Liberal Michael Levitt. Adler is known nationally mostly for his foibles, such as calling out to advisers of Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to be included in a photo opportunity and, several weeks ago, for seeming to exploit his family’s history in the Holocaust for political gain.

In 2011, post-election surveys indicated that Jewish voters supported the Conservative party by large margins. Though such indicators are not yet available for this week’s election, it appears that Jewish voters are far from being a monolithic bloc.

Survivors living in squalor

Survivor Mitzvah Project’s Zane Buzby, centre, in 2012 with Abramas and Malka Dikhtyar, the last two Jews in Bazaliya, Ukraine, the birthplace of Buzby’s grandfather. (photo from Survivor Mitzvah Project)

It is officially autumn and British Columbians are nesting, settling in for the cozier, slower season to come. For impoverished Holocaust survivors living in shocking squalor in eastern Europe, the impending winter is a time of danger and scarcity.

Like most people, Zane Buzby initially had no idea that there were thousands of destitute, aged survivors of the Holocaust living in subhuman conditions across the former Soviet Union. After she first encountered some of the poorest of the poor, she returned to her California home and searched for organizations that help them.

“I thought a lot of them must be doing this, even the big organizations that have Holocaust survivor programs,” she recalled recently. “I called every single one of them, [asking] specifically what are you doing? It’s nothing. They’re not helping people financially. No one was doing with this.”

The Claims Conference, which was created by the German government to aid survivors of the Holocaust, has proven useless to most of these individuals.

photo - Survivors Isak and Galina in hospital — Survivors Isak and Galina in hospital. *(photo from Survivor Mitzvah Project)*

“If you were in a concentration camp – and the Germans kept really good records – if you survived Auschwitz, they have your name … [even so], most people have to hire an attorney,” Buzby said. The survivors she helps don’t have records, partly because the Holocaust in the east was typified by on-the-spot mass murder by Einsatzgruppen killing squads rather than concentration camps. And the few survivors in eastern Europe today do not have the resources to apply.

“They don’t have computers, they don’t have people advocating for them, there’s no lawyers out there,” said Buzby.

photo - Survivors Isak and Galina in their younger days — Survivors Isak and Galina in their younger days. *(photo from Survivor Mitzvah Project)*

In many cases, they also don’t have the money to pay for heating fuel, let alone medications or doctors. Some may have a pension of $10 a month, others have no income whatsoever. Food can be very scarce and many of the survivors are the last, or among the last, Jews in their villages, making their final years bleak and lonely.

Buzby took it upon herself to help. She formed the Survivor Mitzvah Project in 2001 and has helped thousands of the most desperate, destitute survivors. (See also jewishindependent.ca/oldsite/archives/may08/archives08may02-01.html.)

“This is the last generation of Holocaust survivors and we are the last generation who can say that we helped,” she said. “Everyone turned their back in 1939 but today we can do something to help them and we should.”

The Survivor Mitzvah Project (SMP) doesn’t try to create the infrastructure of social services or initiate major projects. The goal is simple. Get some money into the hands of the most destitute Holocaust survivors as quickly as possible.

“We try to give them between $100 and $150 a month to get food, heat and medication, so it comes out between $1,800 and $2,000 a year per survivor,” she said. “Of course, we don’t have the money, we don’t bring in enough money, we don’t have enough donors to help everyone every month and that’s the sad part. That’s why this is really a call to action. There is no tomorrow for these people. They need money now.”

Buzby, an actor and TV director before she became obsessed with helping destitute survivors, finds recipients through word of mouth, traveling to villages and asking around for Jews or looking for signs of Jewish life. Often, she said, survivors lead her to others. She recalled a particular example.

photo - Some survivors are living in huts – “no running water, no heat, broken windows.” — Some survivors are living in huts – “no running water, no heat, broken windows.” *(photo from Survivor Mitzvah Project)*

“When I went there, to this little village, it was in such poverty, it was unimaginable, unbelievable poverty. No bathroom, no running water, no heat, broken windows,” she said. “A lot of these people made the huts they live in themselves out of mud and straw bricks after the war. It needs to be refurbished every year but now in their old age they can’t do it, so ceilings fall in. I gave [a woman] $800 and, on the way out, she pulls on my jacket and says to me through a translator, ‘Can I split this was someone?’ And I said, ‘Who are you going to split it with?’ ‘There is a woman down the road who is much worse off than I am.’ And I thought, how could anybody be worse off than you are, so I said come with us and take us to this woman. So we went to see the second woman and she was very bad off, so she was put on the list, and that’s how it goes.”

The Jews in these villages are often surrounded by non-Jews who are also destitute, said Buzby.

“There’s always poor people to help, God knows,” she said. “But for the Jewish people who survived the Holocaust, not only were their families decimated and murdered, their communities were obliterated, especially if they were in the east, they were burned to the ground. There’s no community, there is no rabbi, there’s no Jewish community, there is no shul, there’s no sister, brother and uncle, there is no support system. So, these [non-Jewish] villagers, even though they are also poor, they have large families, they have maybe a church, they have community. These [survivors] have no community. There is absolutely nothing supporting them.”

photo - Basya Kreyn with her prewar photo, Belarus — Basya Kreyn with her prewar photo, Belarus. *(photo from Survivor Mitzvah Project)*

Holocaust survivors in eastern Europe have one thing in abundance, Buzby clarified. Antisemitism.

“Rampant. Terrible,” she said. “There’s more antisemitism now than there’s ever been.”

In places, neo-Nazis march openly on the streets. Fascistic parties are gaining strength across eastern Europe. In Vilnius, Lithuania, kids dress up as “Jews” in masks with exaggerated features that are perceived as Jewish and trick-or-treat, demanding money. War-era Nazi collaborators are being rehabilitated as national heroes, she said.

The relationships between the few surviving Jews and their neighbors is additionally fraught because of the high levels of collaboration between the Nazi invaders and the native populations in the east. The almost complete destruction of the Jewish communities of Lithuania – an estimated 95% of the Jews there were killed – is credited to the assistance of Lithuanians. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has said that Ukraine, for example, has never initiated any investigation into collaboration or prosecuted a perpetrator.

The Survivor Mitzvah Project gets almost no institutional help. Buzby said she routinely contacts major foundations but they demur, saying they support various organizations that assist survivors. But the survivors Buzby has tracked down have fallen through the cracks of whatever institutionalized assistance might be available.

What they do get is support from some of Buzby’s show biz colleagues. Buzby’s acting career includes turns in some of the classic comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, including Up in Smoke, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and This is Spinal Tap. As a director, she worked on sitcoms including The Dick Van Dyke Show, Golden Girls, Newhart and Blossom. She has brought entertainment figures together for emotional events in which luminaries including Valerie Harper, Ed Asner, Frances Fisher, Elliott Gould, Lainie Kazan and Chris Noth read letters from survivors SMP has helped, who speak about their hardships and the difference the assistance has made in their lives. A powerful video of one of the events is online at survivormitzvah.org.

SMP has hit the $1 million a year mark, but Buzby estimates she needs $2.5 million to meet demand.

“This is an opportunity for people to change the course of history for the survivors,” she said. “Everybody has monuments and raises money for and builds museums for remembrance of those that perished, which is absolutely as it should be. But what about those that survived?”

The coming of the cold winter adds urgency to Buzby’s work. So does the obvious march of time, she said, as the remaining survivors near the end of their lives.

“It’s a time that’s never going to come again,” she said.

For more information or to donate, visit survivormitzvah.org or canadahelps.org.

Kenney discusses priorities

Jason Kenney, Canada’s minister of national defence and minister for multiculturalism. (photo from forces.gc.ca)

Jason Kenney, Canada’s minister of national defence and minister for multiculturalism, says this country should prioritize Christian refugees and other minorities who constitute the most imperiled of the millions fleeing Syria and Iraq.

“Some people are in an understandable wave of emotion … telling me that we should just send C-17 aircraft over there to refugee camps and load them up and bring them to Canada,” Kenney told the Independent. But the refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) that Kenney sees as most vulnerable are not even in the United Nations refugee camps, he said.

“I know these issues extremely well and I can tell you that there are certain vulnerable Syrian and Iraqi minorities who cannot and do not even go to the UN camps,” said Kenney. “Why? Because they are the persecuted minorities. Ismaili Muslims, Druze, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syrians, Armenians – e.g. the Christians – do not go to the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey because they’re afraid of their minority [status], the implications of that. These are the people who are living in urban slums in Amman, Jordan, in Beirut, Lebanon, and some in Ankara, Turkey, who we have said we will focus our refugee resettlement programs on.”

These minorities are less likely, Kenney said, to harbor individuals who could pose a threat to Canada.

“These are the victims of the doctrine of armed jihad,” he said. “I can tell you that these people, when they come to Canada, they want to keep us safe from what drove them out of their homes. This is why I think we need to be intelligent about refugee resettlement.”

Kenney emphasized that he wishes peace and protection to all of the refugees and IDPs regardless of their faith or political views. But, he added, “I’ve been to the camps, alright? When I go into people’s tents and I see there’s very few young men, I’ve asked in Turkey and Lebanon and in Jordan: where is your father, where is your husband, where’s your son? I see the pictures in the tents.”

The response he has received often, he said, is that the men are off fighting with the al-Nusra Front or other Islamist militias.

“This is a vicious stew of violence and we must ensure that that cult of violence doesn’t inadvertently come to Canada,” said the minister, who is running for reelection in Calgary. “So that’s why we need to be careful and prudent about security screening and, I think, ensure that to the greatest extent possible the refugees who we welcome to Canada are those who are amongst the most vulnerable.… I don’t apologize for saying we should focus on the most vulnerable and on Canada’s security at the same time.”

Kenney, who has been the Conservative government’s point person for ethnic communities, spoke with the paper as the image of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian-Kurdish refugee child whose body washed ashore on the Turkish coast, was animating the world to act on the refugee crisis.

“The image of that boy represents thousands of others who die in human smuggling operations and the tens of thousands who have – excuse me, the hundreds of thousands – who have died in the Syrian civil war and as victims of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” said Kenney. “It galvanizes collective attention on the total humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq and Syria.”

Canada is the largest per capita resettler of refugees worldwide, Kenney said, welcoming one in every 10 resettled refugees in the world. (CBC and Global News have both analyzed this claim and note that it refers to refugees resettled from an asylum country like Lebanon or Jordan to a country that has agreed to take them as refugees. Because most refugees flee to an adjacent country – or, as seen in recent months, trek to European countries – the news outlets assert that Canada is not first, but 41st, in the world. Canada accepts one in 10 resettled refugees, but most refugees remain unsettled, they claim, making Canada’s acceptance rate of total refugees about one percent, not 10%, of the world’s refugees.)

In any event, the enormity of the problem, Kenney said, means “resettlement is not a solution.”

This is where Kenney differentiates the Conservative government’s position from those of the opposition parties. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees cites 15 million Iraqi and Syrian refugees and IDPs, he said.

“It’s a cruel myth if we think we can solve a humanitarian crisis with 15 million IDPs and refugees and here’s the key thing – new refugees are being created every single day,” he said. The world needs to address the root cause of the massive refugee problem, he said, which is the genocidal terror of ISIS (also called ISIL or the Islamic State).

“We have a moral obligation to play a role in degrading and ultimately defeating ISIL in its campaign of terror,” he said. “And, we also need to provide humanitarian support to the IDPs and refugees, which we are doing…. We’ve contributed between the two countries over $810 million in emergency humanitarian assistance. We will do more.”

The defence minister took a shot at New Democratic party leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, both of whom oppose Canadian ground troops in the fight against ISIS.

“What we’re doing is important,” Kenney said. “The military contributions that we are making through our airstrikes and the training of the Kurdish Peshmerga in northern Iraq are making a meaningful difference but, in the grand scheme of things, are relatively modest contributions. So, for the Liberals and NDP to suggest that we should completely withdraw even from the air campaign or, in the case of the NDP, from training, is, I think, morally irresponsible and reprehensible. If the world is moved by the images of the Kurdi family on the Turkish beach, we must recall that these were people who fled the violence of ISIL and there will be more Kurdi families unless and until the world stops this genocidal terrorist organization. That’s why we believe there is a moral obligation and a security imperative for us to participate in the international coalition degrading and, hopefully, ultimately defeating ISIL.”

On the issue of domestic security, Kenney also lashed back at critics of Bill C-51.

“If you look at the additional security powers included in Bill C-51, they are modest compared to most of our liberal democratic peer countries,” he said. “Most of the new powers included in Bill C-51 are actually invested in the courts, the judiciary, not in the police or intelligence agencies and certainly not in the hands of politicians. And many of those additional powers themselves are very modest.”

Kenney said RCMP were keeping an eye on Martin Couture-Rouleau, the “lone wolf” terrorist who killed Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in Quebec last year.

“The RCMP went to the prosecutors and said we want to apply for a preventative detention order or peace bond to restrict this guy’s movements because we think he’s going to do something crazy and violent,” said Kenney. “The prosecutor said, sorry, but we just do not have the legislative, the statutory, tools to do this. We would have to prove to a court that he will commit a terrorist offence and there’s no way to do that.”

Under the new law, said Kenney, police can go to the prosecutor, who in turn can go to the court, and the court determines whether an order for preventive detention can be issued.

“And, by the way, the maximum order for that can be seven days,” he said. “In Britain, it’s 28 days. It’s why I say the powers here are relatively modest.”

Another example of what Bill C-51 does, he said, is to allow the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to interrupt a possible terrorist event.

“What does this mean practically? If CSIS is observing that a 15-year-old kid’s spending hours every day on terrorist websites, instead of just waiting for him to blow up metaphorically, they can go to his parents now and say, ‘Are you aware that your son appears to be in the process of radicalization?’” Kenney said. “Is this a violation of civil liberties? No. As the prime minister says, the most important civil liberty is the right to live safely and securely.”

Kenney described the idea that C-51 could be used to infiltrate or disrupt civil society protests against things such as oil pipelines as “rubbish.”

“I think the criticisms of Bill C-51 have been massively overblown,” he said. “If they advocate going and blowing up pipelines, yes, possibly. But protesting the construction of pipelines? Absolutely rubbish. No police officer would be interested in that, no prosecutor would bring a charge on that, no court would accept it. It is ridiculous.”

The Conservative government has often been alone on the international stage in defending Israel’s right to defend itself, a position that has been criticized on several fronts, including accusations that the Tories have turned Israel into a partisan political issue. The Independent asked if the government’s vocal position is driven by theology, politics or ideology.

“What drives that is principle,” Kenney said. “Israel is not a normal state. Israel is a moral cause. Israel is the refuge of the survivors of the Shoah and, therefore, the world has a moral obligation to ensure the protection of that refuge, that one and only Jewish homeland in the world.”

He dismissed political expediency as a factor, noting that fewer than one percent of Canadians are Jewish – and that not all of them are committed Zionists – and Canada has little of the Christian Zionist movement that exists in the United States.

“So, it’s not political,” he said, adding that it is also not based on “some kooky Christian reconstructionist millennial theology.”

“I have never heard a Conservative political actor in Canada make reference to Christian Zionist theology in articulating our support for Israel,” he said. “That’s a phantom for some paranoid minds on the left. The truth is this … we see Israel as an emblem, a symbol, a surrogate for Western civilization in the Middle East, by which we mean that Israel is predicated on the belief in human dignity, which is manifest in a liberal democratic political system, protection for human rights, religious freedom and pluralism.”

He said Israel’s enemies are motivated by what they view as “an unacceptable presence of those Western civilizational values in the Middle East, but secondly because the enemies of Israel are motivated by a deep and irredeemable antisemitism.”

“Most of Israel’s enemies do not seek a conventional peace – negotiations toward a two-state solution or a conventional political solution to the conflict there. They seek one thing, which is the elimination of the so-called ‘Zionist entity’ and the driving of the Jews into the sea. A second Holocaust.”

In addition to foreign affairs, Kenney said he wanted to remind Jewish Canadians of programs the government has undertaken domestically.

“We’ve taken a zero-tolerance attitude to antisemitism here domestically and that’s not just rhetorical,” he said. “We’ve paid a price for it. I’ve defunded organizations that were receiving grants – perversely – to provide integration services to newcomers, like the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House, whose leadership were openly antisemitic. I’ve been sued for it, our government’s been sued for these decisions, but we did the right thing.”

The government, he said, has also funded security infrastructure projects to upgrade security at synagogues, Hebrew schools and Jewish community centres.

On the issue of whether Canada is in a recession, Kenney said there was a sectoral contraction in oil that’s affected Alberta.

“No doubt about it, Alberta is in a recession due to the crash in oil prices,” he said. “But the rest of the country and the other industry sectors are growing. Employment remains strong. This is hardly a recession by any broadly understood definition and, according to the June StatsCan report, we’re back into a growth phase of two percent annualized growth. The dumbest thing we could do would be to act as though there is a serious, deep recession by going out and borrowing tens of billions of dollars as the other parties [would] do, which constitute deferred taxes. We think fiscal discipline, low taxes [and] expanded trade markets continue to be the right recipe for growth.”

The Independent has interviewed Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and has invitations out to NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Green party leader Elizabeth May. The federal election is on Oct. 19.