Canadians and Americans are similar, but different. To see this obvious statement in practical terms, two books – by two authors who will speak in Vancouver next month – provide an entertaining and educational contrast.
Andrew Kirsch and Douglas London are retired spies. Well, the term “spy” is, they both readily admit, a bit laden for a job that Kirsch characterizes as a lot of “hurry up and wait” and that London describes as “hours and hours of routine, and a few moments of adrenaline.”
Kirsch is a Canadian and author of I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Story of Coffees, Codenames and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism. London is American and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence. They will present as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, in an event dubbed “Jews in Trench Coats,” on Feb. 13.
Kirsch, who grew up in Toronto, left a job in the financial sector in London, England, after the 2005 terror attacks in that city and joined the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, CSIS. He describes himself as “part of a post-9/11 wave of civically minded Canadians who had left our day jobs to do our part in the age of terrorism.”
London’s career in the field was longer, symmetrically spanning 17 years on either side of 9/11, which is, obviously, the Western world’s iconic intelligence failure of the current era.
In the United States, the FBI is the domestic security service, much like our RCMP, while the CIA works almost exclusively outside the country. Similarly, in Israel, the Mossad deals with foreign intelligence and covert activities, while Shin Bet manages internal security. “In Canada, we have one organization [CSIS], and it’s responsible for covering the globe while operating largely domestically,” writes Kirsch.
The lack of awareness around CSIS is one of the reasons Kirsch wrote his book. If the CIA knocks on your door, many people around the world would know to be instantly on alert. If CSIS knocks on a Canadian’s door, Kirsch admits, it usually requires a quick spiel about what CSIS is and what it does. He also wrote the book because, when he and most of the other agents he knows first got interested, there was little to read on the subject of what they might expect.
If most Canadians don’t know what CSIS is, new Canadians can be expected to know even less. The author shares a cute anecdote about how he shorthands his role for Arabic speakers.
“The Arabic term for intelligence service is Mukhābarāt,” he writes. Obviously, somebody from an Arabic speaking country might understandably be anxious when someone knocks on the door and declares themselves representatives of the security service.
“I’d simply say, ‘Canadian Mukhābarāt. Nice Mukhābarāt.’ That might get a laugh and a foot in the door,” he said.
In typical Canadian fashion, Kirsch downplays the drama. He’s no James Bond.
“These aren’t high-stakes negotiations over baccarat and cocktails at a casino. It’s much less glamorous. I was in the coffee and conversations business,” he writes. Nevertheless, he charms with amusing anecdotes, foibles and practical jokes (he and his former colleagues are serious and professional, he insists, but they need to blow off steam). One gets to know the man and the organization.
While Kirsch is modest in speaking of his work and that of CSIS, he makes their significance clear.
“Canada is one of the safest countries in the world. This is not because we don’t face threats, but because we do an admirable job of protecting our citizens against them,” he writes. “That is how law enforcement and intelligence agencies tend to work. If we do our job, you won’t know we were ever needed in the first place.”
One of the most notable incidents in recent history when the work of CSIS did hit the front pages was the foiled Toronto 18 plot in 2006, when a cadre of radicalized Canadians plotted to explode truck bombs in southern Ontario. That was a disaster that didn’t happen because of intelligence, but Kirsch acknowledges tragedies where intelligence failed.
In 2014, for example, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a soldier who was standing guard at the National War Memorial, and then stormed Parliament Hill but was killed before he could reach the heart of our democracy.
And just because Canadians have been blessedly fortunate not to suffer more terrorism doesn’t mean Canadians aren’t involved in some of the horrors we see abroad. A Vancouverite was convicted in absentia for involvement in a suicide bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 2012. Five Israelis and the bus driver were killed and more than 35 other Israelis injured.
Kirsch admits he was worn down by the bureaucracy of the job, but his decision to leave the agency was based on family obligations, when his wife became pregnant. He clearly holds CSIS and his former colleagues in great esteem.
London’s reflections are not so kind. He calls the CIA in the last couple of decades “a cult of personality.”
“The senior ranks became an ever more homogenous collection cut from the same mold, focused more on ambition than the mission, the organization, or the workforce,” writes London. “While there were thankfully brilliant exceptions, the cadre had drunk their own Kool-Aid as to their own brilliance and worth.”
London also paints a more dramatic picture than his Canadian counterpart – not surprising, given the lopsided size and prominence of their respective organizations in the world.
There is cajoling involved in recruiting people to the CIA. One of the crucial tasks of a successful operations officer is determining a person’s motivations. To one potential recruit, London said, “It was Allah’s will that we meet … so we can together accomplish something bigger than ourselves.” In this case, it was an appeal to religious and national pride, not material reward. In other cases, material reward was enveloped in a person’s (usually a man’s) sense of providing for family, in which case London would emphasize that the “ability to contribute modestly to your family’s well-being” was something that would be undertaken by a good family man, not a traitor to his country.
London writes about antisemitism he encountered from among colleagues – especially fellow recruits early in his career, many of whom had never met a New Yorker, let alone a Jew. Both authors write of keeping their Jewishness under the radar. Occasionally, a throwaway comment could still stun.
Kirsch was meeting with a Sunni Muslim who was ranting about his hatred of Shia Muslims.
“And he rolled back into his seat and he stroked his big bushy beard and said, ‘You know, Andrew, they are worse than the Jews.’
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Jewish than in that moment,” writes London.
In an amusing observation near the end of his book, London claims people in his business are notorious yentas.
“It’s a pity really that confidentiality considerations prevent the creation of a People magazine, Us Weekly or TMZ program for the agency. Perhaps ironic, but the very same people hired to protect our nation’s most guarded national secrets are absolutely the biggest gossips.”
London proves this in a book that is as juicy as CIA censors would allow.
Jews in Trench Coats, featuring London and Kirsch, takes place at 6 p.m., Monday, Feb. 16. Tickets are $18. The JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 11-16, with free and ticketed events for all ages. Details at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.
Dr. Larry Barzelai chaired the recent Canadian Physicians for the Environment climate conference. (photo from Larry Barzelai)
We can recycle everything possible, drive electric vehicles and take other steps to ameliorate our carbon footprints. At some point, though, says Dr. Larry Barzelai, we need to address our culture of consumption because we are simply using more resources than the planet can sustain.
Barzelai, chair of the B.C. branch of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), spoke to the Independent following a conference he chaired on climate issues. The third annual event, held entirely virtually, brought together doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to discuss climate and the environment from a specifically health-related perspective.
“It’s a physicians organization,” said Barzelai. “So people who tend to be most interested are doctors. But we’re always trying to expand it into other healthcare professionals.”
Interested people outside the profession are welcome to join, he said.
“It’s a general information conference to appeal to people that don’t know very much about environment or climate issues and people that are well-versed,” he explained. “We’re hoping there will be something in the conference for both those groups.”
Topics included “radical overconsumption, environmental genocide, economics and de-growth,” mobilizing climate action within the medical community, the impacts of food systems on the climate, and strategic approaches to successful advocacy campaigns. Canadian filmmaker, broadcaster and activist Avi Lewis gave a closing presentation.
Barzelai retired from his practice as a family physician in June of last year but still does work in seniors facilities including the Louis Brier Home and Hospital. He was pleased that, with the exception of Nunavut, the conference had representation from all provinces and territories.
The conference took place under the auspices of the continuing professional development department of the University of British Columbia and, while it is a national conference, most of the members of the steering committee are from the West Coast.
The October event was the third annual conference and Barzelai laughed about the fact that they had thought they were breaking new technological ground when they began planning for the first gathering. Believing that too many people spend too much time and resources flying, with deleterious impacts on the climate, they envisioned a virtual conference, or possibly a hybrid version with hubs in Vancouver and Toronto where locals could attend in person. By the time the inaugural event was nearing, the entire world had adopted virtual meetings (as well as religious services, seders and just about every other kind of interaction).
While Barzelai has thrown himself into the climate issue in recent years, he calls himself a “Johnny-come-lately” to the topic.
“I’m a late joiner,” he admitted. “A lot of the people in the organization have been doing this all their lives [and] are really dedicated people.”
Barzelai began reading and thinking more deeply about climate issues after encountering the American environmental author and activist Bill McKibben at a conference several years ago. He was particularly impacted by McKibben’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Barzelai explained why McKibben spelled the book (and the planet) “Eaarth.”
“It’s changing and it’s changing rapidly and he says the expectations that seasons would be similar and that you would be able to predict rainfalls and temperatures on a fairly regular basis, with some exclusions, year after year – now that’s all gone out the window,” said Barzelai. “It’s a different world. That’s why he is calling it by a different name. He says, with a lot of work and a lot of luck, maybe we can create a new world that is somewhat akin to our old world, but it’s never going to be the same. We are going down a new direction here in a future that’s undefined and we’ve got to be careful and not let climate change get too far ahead of us.”
At the recent conference, Barzelai was struck by the message that, even as humans are taking these issues more seriously, we are still not getting to the core problem.
“Two of our speakers talked about consumption, that we can recycle as much as we want and drive as many battery-operated cars as we want but, at some point, we have to reduce consumption,” he said. “Even if we were as green as can be, we are still utilizing more resources than the earth can put out, so reducing consumption has to be a big part of this. It’s a tough topic because our whole society is based on consumption. But a lot of people think that we’re not going to get anywhere with climate change issues unless there is a general reduction of consumption in First World societies.”
Another issue to which Barzelai urged people to pay attention is corporate “greenwashing,” a topic addressed at the conference by Prof. Calvin Sanborn of the University of Victoria.
“That’s a big, big issue,” said Barzelai. “The fossil fuel companies are saying that they are greening and changing but, in reality, they’re just trying to find ways to keep doing what they’re doing and they don’t really want to change.”
Due to university copyright issues, recordings of the conference are not publicly available, but more information about CAPE is online at cape.ca.
Toby Rubin was invested as the new president of CHW Vancouver on Oct. 16. (photo by Sid Akselrod)
A vast amount of progress has been made in gender equality in recent decades, but organizations where women come together for philanthropic work and social connections remain desirable and necessary, says Toby Rubin, the new president of CHW Vancouver.
Founded by Jewish women in 1917, after a visit from Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, CHW started out as Hadassah Organization of Canada. In 1921, Canadian Hadassah affiliated with World WIZO and became known Hadassah-WIZO Organization of Canada (later condensed to Canadian Hadassah-WIZO). CHW defines itself as a non-political, non-partisan, national network of dedicated volunteers who believe that excellence and advancement of education, healthcare and social services transcend politics, religion and national boundaries.
Rubin has been a volunteer with the local chapter of the organization for years and was invested as the president at an event Oct. 16 at the Richmond Country Club. In an interview with the Independent, she attempted to dispel some misconceptions.
First and foremost, she said, is the concept that CHW “is a bubbe organization.”
“We have really changed,” she said. A new chapter of 25-to-40-year-old women – including Rubin’s daughter and a cadre of new leaders who were centre-stage at the installation luncheon – has launched and already held their first fundraising event. They raised $5,000 for JOLT, a leadership development curriculum being developed by Young Judaea Canada.
Another misconception, Rubin said, is that all funds from CHW’s philanthropy go to Israel. Rubin and a group of Canadian activists have just returned from a tour of Hadassah projects in Israel, but she stressed that local and Canadian projects are also supported by the chapter’s work. Among the initiatives the group supports is SOS, Starting Over Safely, for victims of domestic violence; scholarships for an LGBTQ+ kids’ camp; and Franny’s Fund.
The latter program was launched by Rebecca Snukal, a Calgary defence lawyer with two decades of experience navigating the legal system and social safety net through some emotionally and administratively perilous cases. But when she and her own family were rocked by crisis, she came to understand how unwieldy the system is – even people with expertise in the field have challenges accessing the legal and psychological supports they require. Snukal was the guest speaker at the October event.
Something that Rubin especially wants to dispel is the idea that CHW’s work is accessible only to Jews. The foremost example, she said, comes from Hadassah Medical Centre in Israel, where triage is based on medical need, to the extent that injured terrorists have been treated based on the severity of their condition alongside victims of their attack.
Also at the meeting, Daniella Givon, a past president, was honoured for her many years of commitment to the organization and the broader community. The meeting also expressed gratitude to outgoing presidents Stephanie Rusen and Sasha Gerson.
In addition to her role with CHW, Rubin is co-executive director of Kehila Society of Richmond, which connects Jewish people in Richmond with one another and with businesses, health and social service agencies and community resources. She is also a board member of Jewish Seniors Alliance and Better at Home committee of the City of Richmond.
Rubin comes to CHW naturally – her mother, Linda Hilford, is a member and both her grandmothers, Vera Himelfarb and Rae Moss, were involved on the Prairies back in the day.
The enthusiasm Rubin and other members of the local chapter exhibit is a reflection, she said, of exciting changes at the national level where, under the fresh leadership of national chief executive officer Lisa Colt-Kotler, the organization has seen dramatic progress in the past couple of years.
“She’s just really pumped energy into it and she’s updated it, and is working at making us more mainstream,” Rubin said of Colt-Kotler. Technology has been a boon, she added, allowing members from across the country to conveniently meet regularly without getting on a plane.
Times have changed from when a large proportion of Canadian women did not work outside the home. But those social and economic changes have not altered one fundamental need, said Rubin.
“We are really about bringing women together, to empower them in their philanthropic needs and introduce them and network them with other women,” she said. “We just want them to meet each other, be there, support each other, share their resources. Ultimately, what brought me to this organization 30 years ago – aside from the fact that I have grandparents and a mom who were involved and I love Israel – was women. The ceiling has broken in those 30 years but it’s still there and we need to be there for each other.”
For decades, CHW was most closely associated in the public mind with Hadassah Bazaar, a massive undertaking that ended about 15 years ago. The explosive growth of thrift stores, combined with the immense resources required to execute the annual event, led to the decision to end the tradition. But Rubin said a new initiative is soon to launch nationally that nods to that history – possibly an online version of the bazaar or something similar. Plans are in development.
Things have come a long way, but Rubin said expectations have grown in some ways and getting together with women experiencing similar things is no less valuable than it was in her mother’s or her grandmothers’ time.
“I think women still have a long way to go and we need to support each other and be there for each other, lift each other up,” she said. “I’m trying to be a mom and I’m trying to do a job and I can’t be Superwoman and [it’s good] to know that’s OK – nobody is. I think that’s truly, truly important.”
Flame Towers, in the capital city Baku, reflect the forward-looking economy and the ancient Zoroastrian roots of the Azerbaijani people. (photo by Pat Johnson)
It is a Muslim-majority country where Jews proudly draw visitors’ attention to the fact that their synagogues and day schools receive government funding and require no security. It is a majority-Shiite country with a primarily Turkic population, where Turkish flags wave alongside Azerbaijani standards. Yet, among its closest allies is Israel, which a survey indicates is the second most admired country among its citizens. It provides 40% of Israel’s oil and receives vital security and defence cooperation from the Jewish state. One of the country’s greatest modern heroes is a Jewish soldier who died defending the country in 1992.
Azerbaijan is an enigma that defies assumptions, especially when it comes to its Jewish citizens, who have experienced almost nothing but neighbourliness from their Azerbaijani compatriots for two millennia.
Along with a small number of other Canadian journalists and community activists, I was a guest last month of the Network of Azerbaijani Canadians during an intensive weeklong immersion in the country, including its Jewish present and past.
I won’t pretend I didn’t have to Google Azerbaijan to place it alongside its Caucasus neighbours Armenia and Georgia, between the Black and Caspian seas, inauspiciously bordered by two rogue nations, Iran and Russia. Like many people, my knowledge of Azerbaijan was limited to its 30-plus-year conflict with Armenia over the disputed Karabakh region, a conflict that has led to allegations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and atrocities on both sides.
We traveled to Karabakh, a place of ghostly, abandoned, war-destroyed cities and countrysides plagued by an estimated million landmines. Helmeted workers pace slowly through what were once farms in the almost unimaginably Sisyphean task of demining a half-billion square metres of land. (Israeli drones and artificial intelligence are helping the process.) We visited cemeteries and monuments, drove highways lined for kilometres with portraits of war dead.
In a distinct counterpoint to this carnage, we visited the country’s Jewish residents and learned of the history of Jews and non-Jews in this place, a story of almost unprecedented fraternity unusual for any country, not least a majority Muslim society in a place where ethnic and territorial conflicts, and the ebb and flow of empires, has conspired against peace.
A history of diversity
Azerbaijan was a deviation on the standard Silk Road route, and so people were long familiar with those from the west and the east. But its economy exploded in the latter half of the 19th century, when oil was discovered. By 1901, the region, part of the Russian Empire, was producing fully half of the world’s oil.
This ancient and modern history brought waves of Jews, beginning in biblical times. The oldest communities of Jews in Azerbaijan are known as Mountain Jews, or Kavkazi Jews, whose Persian-Jewish language is called Juhuri. Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, the Mountain Jews maintain some Mizrahi traditions and their practices are heavily influenced by kabbalah. They trace their presence back to the Babylonian exile following the destruction of the First Temple, in 586 BCE, but these ancient communities have been joined in more recent times by other migrants.
Jews from neighbouring Georgia, where communities have also lived since the Babylonian exile, migrated to Azerbaijan during the first oil boom, in the late 19th century. After the 1903 and 1905 Kishinev pogroms sent terrified Jews from across the Russian Empire fleeing to the New World and elsewhere, a group of Ashkenazim moved from throughout the empire to Azerbaijan, drawn by its reputation for intercultural harmony.
Today, Mountain Jews make up about two-thirds of the country’s Jewish population. (Ballpark estimates are that there are 30,000 Jews in Azerbaijan.) Most Mountain Jews – 100,000 to 140,000 – now live in Israel and there is a significant population in the United States. Those who remain, however, deflect questions about why they have not made aliyah or migrated to Western countries.
“This is my homeland. Why should I leave?” asked Arif Babayev, the leader of the Jewish community in the city of Ganja, adding: “I don’t know what antisemitism is. I’ve never experienced it.”
The community of Qırmızı Qəsəbə, or Red Town, has been known as “Jerusalem of the Caucasus” and also as “the last shtetl in Europe.” It is said to be the only all-Jewish (or almost-all-Jewish community) outside Israel. The streets of the mountain village, in the northeast region called Quba, were quiet on a November Sunday. Many of the people who call the village home actually spend most of the year working in the capital city Baku, returning in summer to what amount to summer homes. The older community members and a few families stay year-round.
Three synagogues in the town survived the Soviet years – two still operating as congregations and one transformed into an excellent museum with original artifacts and in-depth exploration available on interactive screens where congregants once davened. The two synagogues, active on Shabbat and holidays, are intimate, magnificent structures. The Six Dome Synagogue, dating to 1888, was used as a warehouse and as a shmatte factory during the Soviet period and was restored and reopened for use in 2005.
Throughout history, the Jews of the area worked in viticulture (their Muslim neighbours were ostensibly forbidden from alcohol-related tasks, though this is not a country with a large strictly observant religious population), tobacco growing, hide tanning, shoemaking, carpet weaving, fishing and the cultivation of the dry root of the madder plant, which is used in dyeing textiles and leather.
In the 1930s, there was a Stalinist crackdown on Judaism, but circumcision, kosher slaughter and underground Torah study survived. Since the end of the Soviet era and the dawn of independence, in 1991, Jewish life has both thrived and shrunk – many emigrated, but those who remained have revivified their cultural and religious roots.
In wealthy and modern Baku, signs of a flourishing Jewish community are found at two government-funded Jewish schools, each with about 100 students. They follow a government-created Jewish studies curriculum that includes Hebrew, Jewish history and tradition, as well as the official curriculum of the Azerbaijani education ministry. Like so many other places throughout the country, the school is festooned with photographs of the current president and his late father and predecessor.
The school’s leadership note that there is no security outside the institution, unlike in France or even Israel. The school is in a complex that includes a non-Jewish school and the students compete together in intermurals. Jewish and non-Jewish students celebrate the Jewish holidays together.
Nearby, the Sephardi Georgian congregation and the Ashkenazi synagogue share a building that was funded by the national government. The two sanctuaries are on different floors, each with their distinctive internal architecture and warm, inviting sanctuaries.
Ambassador optimistic
George Deek was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history when appointed to head the embassy in Baku, in 2018. An Arab-Christian from a prominent Eastern Orthodox family in Jaffa, Deek was a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University and held previous posts at Israeli missions in Nigeria and Norway. He is also, he noted, the Israeli diplomat geographically closest to Tehran.
The ambassador sees parallels between Azerbaijan and Israel, which are both young countries made up of people who are used to being bullied by their neighbours. Both peoples understand what it is to be small and to struggle to preserve one’s own culture, he said.
In addition to the large swath of Israel’s oil supply that comes from Azerbaijan, there is growing trade and cooperation between the countries across a range of sectors. In addition to strategic partnerships, they are sharing agriculture and water technologies in conjunction with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, in southern Israel. An Israeli company is building a Caspian desalinization plant and Israeli drip irrigation technology is being applied to Azerbaijani farms.
Tourism is a growing sector and Israel is a significant market: by next year, there will be eight flights weekly between Baku and Tel Aviv on the Azerbaijani state carrier, as well as regularly scheduled tourist flights on Israir.
Deek shared the results of a survey that seemed to provide proof of the historical and anecdotal things we had been hearing about the Azerbaijani connection not only to their Jewish neighbours but to the Jewish state. In a poll measuring Azerbaijanis’ positive opinions about other countries, Turkey came first and Israel second.
Despite all this upbeat news, and despite the fact that Israel has had an embassy in Baku almost since Azerbaijan gained independence, the diplomatic mission was not reciprocated, even as trade and person-to-person connections expanded. There is a range of geopolitical explanations for the lack of an Azerbaijani embassy in Israel and Deek told our group he hoped that Azerbaijan would soon be able to open one there. And, just a few minutes after we left our meeting with the ambassador, our guide received a phone call – Azerbaijan’s parliament had just approved a resolution to open an embassy in Israel.
The decision, after all this time, is due to a confluence of events. There had been fear of an Iranian backlash to more overt relations between Azerbaijan and Israel, but global disgust over the Iranian regime’s crackdown on anti-government protesters may have diminished Azerbaijani concerns. The close relationship between Azerbaijan and Turkey was probably another factor. With Turkish-Israeli relations back on a somewhat even keel after a chilly period, the time may have seemed right. With the long-simmering Karabakh conflict now concluded, as far as Azerbaijan is concerned, by the 2020 war that returned the region to Azerbaijani control, the country may be less wary of making waves among Muslim allies. That fear would likely be additionally assuaged by the Abraham Accords, which make warm Azerbaijani-Israeli relations less remarkable than they might have been just a few years ago. (Azerbaijan’s anti-Israel voting record at the United Nations is still a disappointment that some observers hope changes as ties grow.)
The tight relationship between Azerbaijan and Israel is, of course, viewed by Iran as a Zionist plot. Iran has both internal demographic and external security concerns about Azerbaijan. There are almost twice as many ethnic Azerbaijanis within the borders of Iran – about 15 million – than there are in the country of Azerbaijan, and the Islamic revolutionary regime doesn’t want any nationalist rumblings. Beyond this, the very existence of a secular, pluralist Azerbaijan stands as an affront to Iran. Azerbaijan is a majority Shi’ite country, like Iran. It is geographically and demographically small and, in the imagination of Iranian fundamentalists, it should be the next domino in the ayatollahs’ plan for regional domination. Instead, despite the familial ties across the Azerbaijani-Iranian border, intergovernmental relations are frigid.
What is it about Azerbaijan?
A new embassy. Burgeoning trade and tourism with Israel. Centuries of good relations between Jews and non-Jews. A level of comfort and security unknown to Jews in almost any other country, certainly any Muslim-majority place. What is it about Azerbaijan?
I asked a few people – religious leaders, a member of parliament, Jews and non-Jews – what the secret sauce is for the Azerbaijanis’ exceptional relations with their Jewish neighbours. No one had a pat answer.
It was people-to-people contact, one person told me. There was never a ghetto; Jews were integrated and part of a larger multicultural society. One theory is that, more recently, there have been lots of Jewish teachers in the school system, so Azerbaijanis get to know and respect Jewish people growing up. Another explanation is that Azerbaijanis view their national identity above their religious or other particular identities, so religious differences are not as divisive as in many places – a factor probably accentuated by decades of Soviet official atheism.
Rabbi Zamir Isayev, who leads the Georgian Jewish congregation in Baku, doesn’t have a simple explanation for why Azerbaijan, among the countries of the world, seems to be so good for the Jews. It’s simply in the nature of the Azerbaijani people, he says.
Azerbaijani history celebrates a number of notable Jews. The Caspian Black Sea Oil Company, which was central to the creation of the region’s dominant resource sector, was founded by Alphonse Rothschild, a French Jew, and other Jews have been involved in a range of resource and other sectors over the years.
In the short-lived government of the first independent republic of Azerbaijan, 1918 to 1920, the minister of health was a Jewish pediatrician, Dr. Yevsey Gindes. That government was also the first democracy in the Muslim world and among the first in the world to grant women the franchise. Like many countries that emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire, Azerbaijan was quickly subsumed into the new Soviet Union.
Lev Landau, Azerbaijan’s 1962 Nobel Prize winner in physics, is widely fêted. Garry Kasparov, considered by some the greatest chess player of all time, is a (patrilineal) Jew from Azerbaijan. A long list of academics, athletes, musicians and business innovators have risen to the top of their fields in the country and abroad and are celebrated both as Azerbaijanis and as Jews. A hero from recent times seems to elicit an especially emotional connection.
The conflict with Armenia, which began in the late 1980s and culminated most recently in a 2020 war, remains understandably fresh in the national consciousness. Highways and villages display thousands of portraits of war dead and the Alley of Martyrs in the heart of Baku is the final resting place of 15,000 Azerbaijanis, many from the final throes of Soviet domination and the two wars with Armenia. Among the most visited graves at the sprawling memorial park is that of Albert Agarunov.
Agarunov was a young Jewish Azerbaijani who volunteered with his country’s defence forces and was a tank commander during the Armenian capture of the strategic Karabakh town of Shusha on May 8, 1992. The 23-year-old, already apparently such a legendary figure that the Armenians had put a bounty on his head, stepped out of his tank to retrieve bodies of slain Azerbaijani soldiers from the road when he was killed by sniper fire. Agarunov was posthumously named National Hero of Azerbaijan and was buried at the solemn national monument, in a service attended by both imams and rabbis. Today, Jews place stones on his grave and others place flowers.
In terms of Azerbaijani-Israeli relations, the large number of Azerbaijani-descended Jews who live in Israel create natural familial ties between the two places. Jewish remittances from Azerbaijani oil wealth helped purchase land in Palestine, an early portent of a connection between the two places. According to one museum piece, Jewish horse wranglers from the Caucasus made aliyah and became protectors of early kibbutzim and moshavim and helped put down the 1929 Hebron massacre, although I cannot find reference to this role online.
Whether that last detail is factual or not, what seems undeniable is that the story of Jews in Azerbaijan stands out as a model of coexistence and good neighbourliness in a world that has not always been so kind. This is a story that deserves to be told more widely.
Danny Danon, former Israeli envoy to the United Nations. (photo from IGPO / Chaim Tzach)
“Jerusalem is an inseparable part of Israel and her eternal capital,” said an Israeli prime minister. “No United Nations vote can alter that historic fact.” This quote, which could have come from any of the country’s leaders, was in fact spoken by the first, David Ben-Gurion, in 1949, just days after the UN voted for the internationalization of the city. Israel’s issues with the agency, in other words, have existed for some time.
One wouldn’t expect a right-wing Likud party stalwart, well-known hothead and self-acknowledged non-diplomat to be one of Israel’s foremost voices to present an unambiguous defence of the UN. But, in his new book, Danny Danon does exactly that.
Danon’s book, In the Lion’s Den: Israel and the World, focuses on his term as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, from 2015 to 2020. Before that, he was a Likud member of the Knesset and a minister in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.
He acknowledges that, when he was appointed to the diplomatic post, commentators in Israel and elsewhere suggested that Netanyahu was deliberately poking a stick in the belly of the beast.
“There was an expectation that, because of my background and strong ideological beliefs, I would not fit into the world of diplomacy, that I was too much of a hawk and a ‘hardliner,’ which would make it difficult for me to build relationships and achieve anything of substance,” he writes.
Well, yes and no. He does not fit into the world of diplomacy. But he does claim a litany of successes. Danon devotes nearly 200 pages to justifying Israel’s engagement with the international body. Despite the routine censures of Israel and seeming obsession the General Assembly and several of the UN’s agencies have with Israel, Danon argues convincingly that taking on the haters in that forum is a worthy enterprise.
“What many people don’t understand is that there is a public UN and a private UN,” he writes. “The public face of the UN – at least when it comes to Israel – is aggressive and bullying. But, privately, you can build bridges, forge friendships and create a space for understanding, particularly if you are transparent.”
His own approach – far more bull in a china shop than circumspect diplomat – has its merits, he contends. His calling out of critics by name, apparently nearly unheard of in the hallowed halls of the UN’s Manhattan headquarters, may have drawn gasps, but it also seems to have made some think twice before talking.
“After a few times calling out the French ambassador in the media, not only did he reiterate that he did not appreciate it, which had no effect on me, but, more importantly, it made him much more careful in the words he used and actions he took going forward.” Danon said.
In one segment, the former ambassador goes into extensive detail about the efforts he made to derail two particularly troublesome resolutions. “Both resolutions were pointless,” he acknowledged, which might describe most of the General Assembly resolutions against Israel, but this comment, in turn, raises the legitimate question about why such energy and resources are devoted to fighting them. Danon’s argument is that it is in Israel’s interest not to ignore them and to take up the fight whenever and wherever possible.
If his own account of his time there is to be believed, Danon achieved many victories.
He caused the UN to officially recognize Jewish holidays so that, for example, no major meetings occur on Yom Kippur. He managed to get a small amount of kosher food onto the menu at the UN staff cafeteria – and it was promptly snapped up by non-Jews who view a hechsher as proof of healthy, quality food.
More substantively, he hosted more than 100 ambassadors on delegations or missions to Israel.
Partly as a result of a conference that Danon organized for fellow ambassadors on the subject of antisemitism, the UN issued its first-ever thorough report dedicated entirely to anti-Jewish racism.
After successfully pressuring for a UN bureaucrat who is Israeli to be promoted (apparently a challenge), he took on a more entrenched problem. The UN unofficially boycotts Israel, he writes, passing over Israeli options in the agency’s not-insubstantial procurement process. He set out what he called the three T’s.
“We would sell our relevant technology, offer training and provide troops,” he said. The first two he succeeded in.
“I believe the last T, providing troops to UN peacekeeping missions, will come in time,” he writes. “Sending troops is still an ongoing effort on our part. We have one of the best trained militaries in the world, and it knows how to deal with many difficult conflicts. We have so many security challenges that require us to engage in prevention, deflection and defence that it puts us in a unique position of having both the know-how and the experience on the ground. This gives us an advantage in comparison to others. We have the expertise to train UN forces, such as search and rescue, medical treatment in the field, and addressing acute emergency situations…. It has not happened yet, but I am hopeful. It remains a goal for the future.”
For all its flaws, Danon argues, the UN is a unique environment where an Israeli ambassador can shmooze with people he would never get to meet otherwise.
“Think of this: anytime a special envoy from Israel travels to an Arab country, it has to be done with the utmost discretion. If such visits were to be discussed publicly, they could become an issue that could result in political backlash or even violence from extremists and terrorists. At the UN in New York, you can meet anyone, anytime, in a legitimate and open forum, free from the anxiety of those who are determined to see you fail. Indeed, such exchanges between adversaries and friends are expected, which is why the UN is a useful tool despite criticisms about its effectiveness in the 21st century.”
UN ambassadors aren’t nobodies, either, and the connections an Israeli envoy can make there can bear fruit later.
“Once a term at the UN is over, you can be assured that many ambassadors turn their attention to political positions in their home countries, some going on to become heads of state or ministers of foreign affairs,” he said. “It is useful to have existing relationships with such people.”
The Israeli delegation at the United Nations has managed to peel away a few European countries from the European Union’s consensus position against Israel.
“As the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria grow more confident and economically strong, one of the ways they have and will continue to show their independence and sovereignty is the approach they have taken toward Israel. We have a great opportunity to continue to strengthen our bond with the people and governments; as young countries striving to grow, they understand and relate to Israel’s challenges. I believe they will continue to reject Western Europe’s automatic pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli sentiment.”
More remarkably, Danon also managed to peel away members from the Arab bloc. In a secret ballot, Danon became the first Israeli ever elected chair of one of the UN’s six standing committees. There were far fewer votes against his candidacy than there are Arab countries at the General Assembly, he notes.
“I had the courage and vision – and the will,” he writes of the chutzpah he showed in his role. “I was often told, great idea, let’s do it next year. I always said, let’s do it now, we can get it done in two months.” (Memoirs are rarely testaments to humility.)
Though Danon argues that he made headway in his term at the UN, predictably, he didn’t make many friends. But he certainly made one. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador appointed by Donald Trump, became fast pals with Danon, apparently joyfully collaborating to stick it to the enemies. (Haley wrote the foreword to the book.)
This alliance and the many other overt and covert bridges he built during his term were overwhelmingly with representatives of governments that are on the right of the political spectrum – sometimes on the far-right, like Brazil’s and Hungary’s.
Though he doesn’t address this fact, he would no doubt make the case that Israel must take its friends where it can find them. In the bigger picture of Danon’s time in the belly of the beast, perhaps the words of the late Yitzhak Rabin prove true: “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.”
Holocaust survivors participate in the candlelighting ceremony at the community’s Kristallnacht commemoration Nov. 9. (photo by Al Szajman)
Commemorating the Holocaust and the sad succession of genocides that have been perpetrated since is a sacred responsibility – but it is not enough, says Liliane Pari Umuhoza. That memory must be the motivation that drives people to make a better world, she said.
Umuhoza was 2 years old when her father and a million others were murdered during the Genocide Against the Tutsis of Rwanda, in 1994. After experiencing trauma in her adolescence due to that familial and communal history, Umuhoza has devoted her life to commemorating and educating about the genocide and encouraging people to dedicate themselves to healing their societies.
“When we remember, we help ensure that the memories and legacies of the victims and survivors continue to resonate for future generations,” she said at Vancouver’s community Kristallnacht commemoration Nov. 9. “When we remember, we learn about the history and create awareness. But that’s not enough. What matters the most is how we use that history to create a better world.”
The annual event took place at Beth Israel synagogue on the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” on Nov. 9-10, 1938, which is the moment when anti-Jewish regulations and systemic discrimination turned into overt violence and murder. It is seen by many historians as the effective beginning of the Holocaust.
The event was presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel and with support from the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment Fund of the VHEC and from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.
Umuhoza arrived in Vancouver several months ago to attend the University of British Columbia, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in public policy and global affairs. She is founder of the Women Genocide Survivors Retreat and is project officer for Foundation Rwanda, which provides funding for education to those who were born from rape during the genocide.
She began by outlining her own family’s history.
“I was 2 years old in the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda,” she said. “During this tragedy, my father was killed. Some of my uncles, aunties, cousins and many other members of my extended family are among the million Tutsi who were killed by the Hutu extremists in 100 days.
“One million people were killed in 100 days,” she stressed. “I was lucky to survive with my mother, who managed to escape to a neighbouring country, Congo, holding me, a 2-year-old baby, where we lived as refugees until it was safe enough for us to go back to Rwanda.”
She considers herself fortunate in comparison with many of her peers.
“I now have a stepfather and stepsiblings and I cannot tell you how blessed I feel because most of my friends from home grew up without a father or a mother figure in their lives,” she said.
Umuhoza was too young to understand what was happening at the time, she said. “But I grew up facing the consequences of that tragedy in every corner of my life. As many of you may know, psychologically, young children between the age of 0 and 5 are the most vulnerable to the effects of trauma since their brains are in the early development stage. For most people who have been exposed to genocide or war as children, the trauma can become severe at the adolescent stage and adulthood, if it is not properly treated.”
At the age of 12, Umuhoza began to exhibit symptoms of trauma, including depression, post-traumatic stress, nightmares, frustration, anger and confusion. She used the strength of others as an example to recover, including a friend who had to take on the parent role from childhood after she and her younger siblings were orphaned. Umuhoza is now deeply immersed in often deeply difficult aspects of education, such as translating the narratives of other survivors through Foundation Rwanda.
“My role with this organization was to listen to the stories of these women in their Rwandan mother language and translate the stories in English so we could use those stories to create awareness and educate the world about the genocide and its ongoing consequences,” she said. “I found myself in a series of stories I’d never heard before … stories of mass murder, stories of pain, stories of rape.”
One of the lessons she learned from the genocide is to never tolerate injustice, no matter how big or small, Umuhoza said.
“Speak up and raise your voice when you see or hear people denying that the Holocaust happened,” she said. “Speak up when you hear people saying that the genocide did not happen. Speak up when you see minorities being unfairly treated. Speak up when you see women in Tehran being oppressed. Let’s dare to step out of our common comfort zone and cultivate empathy to people around us.”
She concluded: “Individually, we can change our communities. But together we can change the world.”
Earlier in the evening, Prof. Chris Friedrichs contextualized the history of the Holocaust, emphasizing the importance of synagogues as a place of refuge for Jewish communities. The Kristallnacht commemoration has been taking place in the sanctuary of Beth Israel for more than 40 years, he said.
There were more than 1,000 synagogues in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht, he noted, some many centuries old, while others were newer, having been dedicated in the presence of senior German officials, clergy and others, a testament to the apparent solidity of the Jewish community’s place in the country.
“But then, beginning in 1933, everything started to change,” said Friedrichs, professor emeritus of history at UBC. “Once the Nazis came to power, Germans were taught to shun their Jewish neighbours. Jews were banned from public places. They could no longer go to the theatre or walk in the park or send their children to public schools. But one place was still open to them – their own synagogues, where they could gather to worship or study or simply spend time with their fellow Jews. And so it was until Nov. 9, 1938, when, in one carefully orchestrated nationwide night of terror, hundreds of synagogues all over Germany were set aflame, thousands of Jews were arrested, over 100 were killed. The next morning, Jews found their synagogues turned into empty shells and the windows of their shops shattered into broken shards of glass and the contents plundered. No Jew in Germany ever forgot that night of broken glass, Kristallnacht.”
Irwin Cotler, Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism, spoke via video link to the audience.
Of the Holocaust, he said, “It was a continuation and manifestation of history’s oldest, longest, most enduring and most toxic of hatreds, antisemitism, a hatred that mutates and metastasizes over time, which is grounded in one generic, historical, foundational, conspiratorial trope of the Jews – the Jewish people, the Jewish state – as the enemy of all that is good and the embodiment of all that is evil, which led, therefore, to the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for Kristallnacht and the Holocaust.”
A parallel between the Holocaust and the genocide against the Tutsis, he said, is that they were preventable.
“Nobody could say we did not know,” said Cotler. “We knew, but we did not act.”
Corinne Zimmerman, president of the VHEC, opened the event. Nina Kreiger, executive director, introduced the speakers and acknowledged dignitaries in attendance.
Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld, a child of Holocaust survivors, thanked Umuhoza and reflected on her words and those of other speakers. He understands the idea of trauma being passed down through generations, he said. Reflecting on Friedrichs’ discussion of the centrality of the synagogue in Jewish life, Infeld said his spiritual leadership of the congregation during the construction of the new synagogue building was a form of response to the history of his family and the Jewish people.
Elected officials also spoke at the ceremony. Taleeb Noormohamad, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, spoke of his first trip to Berlin, where he walked around the streets of the old Jewish district.
“As somebody who had never really seen firsthand until that trip the horrors of what had happened to the Jewish community and to so many others,” said Noormohamad, “in that moment you come to realize the absolute inexplicable horror that was cast upon people and what it does to people, to communities, to families and to the histories of people.”
He committed to standing with the Jewish community against discrimination and noted the diversity of the audience, which included himself, a Muslim Canadian; Michael Lee, a Chinese-Canadian member of the legislature; and Ken Sim, a Chinese-Canadian mayor.
Parm Bains, member of Parliament for Steveston-Richmond East, was also present, as was Marc Eichhorn, consul general of Germany in Vancouver.
“Antisemitism is not a problem, a fight, that is for the Jewish community alone,” Noormohamad said. “When you look in this room today, we are all in this together. This is our community. You are our family and the remembrance of what happened is our responsibility as much as it is yours.”
The Kristallnacht commemoration was the first official community event for Sim, who was sworn in as mayor of Vancouver three days before. He, too, spoke of visiting Germany, along with his wife and their four sons, where they witnessed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and pondered the Stolpersteine, the “stumbling stones” that have been installed to mark the places where victims of Nazi extermination or persecution lived. The family, he said, has also visited Auschwitz, in Poland, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C.
During the recent election campaign, Sim promised that, as mayor, he would promote the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which the previous council failed to do. He repeated his commitment at the ceremony, and council passed the motion on Nov. 16. (Click here and here for stories.)
Sim was joined at the event by Vancouver Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung, who Sim credited as a stalwart ally of the Jewish community. Together, they read the official proclamation from the City of Vancouver.
“Out of the shards of destruction, in this case the glass on the night of Kristallnacht, often are born the glimmers of hope,” said Kirby-Yung, “and I think that is what keeps all of us going. It is the resilience and faith and the hope of the Jewish community that I think embodies the spirit of what we aspire to deliver here in the city of Vancouver.”
Reuben (Rube) Sinclair, centre, with Rabbi Levi Varnai and head of school Emily Greenberg. (photo by Tybie Lipetz)
In front of hundreds of students, staff and guests at Vancouver Talmud Torah elementary Nov. 11, Canada’s oldest veteran of the Second World took an honoured place and laid a wreath at the school’s annual Remembrance Day ceremony Nov. 10.
At the age of 111, Reuben (Rube) Sinclair is not only the oldest war veteran but certainly one of the oldest people in Canada. Soft-spoken and hard of hearing, Sinclair nevertheless quipped with family and reporters before the ceremony and beamed with pride at times throughout the midday event.
Sinclair was born in 1911, on the family farm near Lipton, Sask., a Jewish farm colony underwritten by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association. Sinclair’s parents, Yitzok and Fraida, received property from the association but the farmland was poor so they saved up money Yitzok earned working for the Canadian National Railway to purchase better land nearby.
It was a vast undertaking – more than 2,500 acres, with milking cows and 42 horses. Among young Rube’s tasks was collecting the eggs from the chickens. He was driving vehicles at the age of 12.
Yitzok Sinclair (né Sandler) had migrated from Ukraine and was a leader in the small Saskatchewan Jewish community. He donated land and helped construct a school, which doubled as a synagogue.
Rube Sinclair was no longer a kid when he signed up for the war effort. At the age of 31, in 1941, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he became a corporal pilot and taught other pilots to take off and land in the dark using a “standard beam approach” that, in the days when radar was rare, involved a navigation receiver that lined the aircraft up with the runway.
The forces redeployed him to the West Coast and, after the war, with his youngest brother Joe, the siblings opened Sinclair Bros. Garage and Auto Wrecking in Richmond, just across the two long-disappeared Fraser Street bridges from Vancouver. Rube trolled in a tow truck, collecting old cars to salvage and the brothers refurbished and sold surplus military vehicles.
For three decades, from 1964, Sinclair and his wife, Ida, lived in southern California, where Rube worked in a family furniture business. Their philanthropy included raising more than a million dollars for a cancer hospital and research facility.
They returned to Vancouver, and Ida passed away in 1996. Rube is a great-great-grandfather and, among other recognitions, is a lifetime member of Congregation Schara Tzedeck.
At the VTT commemoration, Sinclair waved and grinned at students as his daughter, Nadine Lipetz, pushed him in a wheelchair, escorted by a bagpiper, to the place of honour at the ceremony in the school gymnasium.
Also present were representatives of the lieutenant governor of British Columbia, the Canadian Armed Forces, the Vancouver Police, the United States Secret Service and the Royal Canadian Legion Shalom Branch #178. All these guests laid wreaths, as did representatives of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the VTT board of directors and VTT staff.
“Today, our community gathers to remember, pay our respects and appreciate the freedoms we have been granted by the sacrifices of others,” said Emily Greenberg, VTT head of school. She urged students to recommit themselves to being students of history and humanity “so that you can steward and inspire peace and compassion.”
In a d’var Torah, Rabbi Levi Varnai, the VTT school rabbi, held up the veterans as a model.
“What we can learn from their courage and their bravery is that we too should and could be brave and courageous, to always stand up for what’s right,” said Varnai. “Whenever we see something happening in the world, remember you have a voice and you can stand up and you can say always what’s right. That would be a legacy to their memories.”
Students sang and a video was screened of VTT students holding photographs of ancestors who had served in the military.
When George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, it reawakened awareness about police violence and institutional racism in the United States and beyond. Nearly three years later, many of the anti-racist pledges made during that time remain unfulfilled.
“Do you know that most of those commitments have not been met and there is no accountability for not doing this?” said June Francis, special advisor to the president of Simon Fraser University on anti-racism, director of the Institute for Diaspora Research and Engagement, co-founder of the Black Caucus at SFU and an associate professor in the Beedie School of Business. “Companies said they were going to do X,Y and Z, research shows they’re not doing it. Accountability is everything. If we don’t see change and there are no repercussions … then we get tired, society goes back.”
Francis was speaking Nov. 3 at an event titled From Talk to Action: Challenging Racism in Canada Today. The panel discussion, at Robson Square, was presented by the Simces & Rabkin Family Dialogue on Human Rights in partnership with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Equitas, an international human rights education organization.
Francis aimed a particularly sharp critique at academic institutions.
“When students arrive at a university, they are being groomed to become racist people,” she said. “I say this honestly because what they are taught is any ideas worth knowing emanate out of white supremacists. White ideas are the enlightened [ones], the primitive becomes us, our art is considered primitive, our work is always denigrated. It’s only recently that Indigenous knowledge has become a thing, only because we’ve totally destroyed the planet and now we’ve suddenly awakened and, even then, we have a certain category of it as being nonscientific. Universities are founded on these ideas that are meant to create this idea that some people are superior to others and we perpetuate this every day. Then we go on to only fund research that does that. We go on to promote people who do that research. We go on to insist that our students who dare to challenge the system don’t graduate unless they do what we tell them to do.”
Annecia Thomas, who joined Francis on the panel, was mobilized to action in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, as well as when students at her Kamloops high school made light of the murder in an online post. She was afraid to speak up, she said.
“But, I think, through this fear I gained another fear – that was not speaking up,” she said. “Without speaking up, it would just continue.”
Also on the panel was Daniel Panneton, director of allyship and community engagement at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. He addressed online hate and how it can transmute into real-world violence, citing the case of Dylan Roof, the South Carolina man who was radicalized online and, in 2015, murdered nine people in an African-American church.
Concerns about free speech rights, which are sometimes invoked to defend racist, misogynistic or otherwise bullying behaviours online are specious, he argued. These actions effectively deter members of historically marginalized communities from running for public office and participating in the public sphere, he said.
“The tolerance of hate and threatening speech in our society threatens the free-speech rights of vulnerable communities,” said Panneton.
The panel was moderated by Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe man who is head of the department of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba and is a frequent commentator in national media.
“I grew up as a refugee, but I didn’t know it,” he said, referring to Canadian governments who forced his ancestors off their lands. “In every other country of the world, that would be called ethnic cleansing, but in Canada they call it progress.”
He said the ultimate goal of racism is to erase its own history.
“The outcome of violence is always silence, not to talk about it, to make sure that it happens in perpetuity and that it’s somehow legal and justified,” said Sinclair.
Zena Simces and Dr. Simon Rabkin, who launched the annual series four years ago, spoke of their motivations.
“We established the dialogue on human rights because we saw a void in Vancouver with respect to a dedicated program on human rights for everyone in the community, for all groups,” said Simces, a consultant in health, social policy and education and a former leader in the now-defunct Canadian Jewish Congress.
“To combat racism, we first need to understand it, think about the background and understand the history,” said Rabkin, a professor at the University of British Columbia medical school who has provided health care to underserviced areas in northern Canada and in Kenya. “Talk and reflection is not enough, it won’t move us forward. We need a vision of the future in order to provide a guidepost and a goal to aim towards.”
Jonathan Lerner, left, Christine Boyle and Dan Ruimy were among the winners in the recent municipal elections. (PR photos)
Municipal elections across British Columbia brought numerous surprises and a number of defeats for incumbent mayors, notably in both of the province’s largest cities.
Ken Sim defeated Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver’s incumbent mayor while, in a far closer race, Surrey’s mayor Doug McCallum was defeated by Brenda Locke.
Most of the community members featured by the Independent Oct. 7 were not successful in their races, with two exceptions.
Jonathan Lerner, a Jewish community member who has worked with organizations including the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Hillel BC and Jewish Family Services, topped the polls on his first foray into elected office. He was elected to district council in Lantzville, which is north of Nanaimo.
Christine Boyle, who asked to be included in our coverage as part of a mixed family, was reelected to Vancouver city council as the sole successful candidate for the OneCity group, withstanding the onslaught of the overwhelming sweep by Sim’s ABC slate.
Former Liberal member of Parliament Dan Ruimy, a son of Jewish Moroccan immigrants to Canada, was elected mayor of Maple Ridge. He was inadvertently not included in our pre-election coverage.
Adrienne Montani and Landon Pearson were honoured this month by the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada as the 2022 laureates of the Janusz Korczak Awards in Child Advocacy.
Jerry Nussbaum, president of the association, described the legacy of Korczak, a Polish Jewish pedagogue (born Henryk Goldszmit) whose final act was to accompany almost 200 orphans to the Treblinka death camp.
“He was devoted to children’s welfare and was a fierce advocate of loving the whole child,” said Nussbaum. “Dr. Korczak was a pediatrician, an educator, pedagogue, author, orphanage director for over 30 years, and a children’s rights advocate. His holistic approach to children’s well-being was at the time groundbreaking…. Korczak’s vision of child well-being embraced such principles as justice, dignity and equality. Korczak placed respect for the child at the heart of his vision to empower children and give them a voice in their own fate.
Korczak treated children with respect and love. This is what is often missing in the lives of children in government care.… Dr. Korczak’s legacy has never been more relevant than it is today.”
Pearson, a former senator and lifelong advocate for children, was awarded the Janusz Korczak Statuette in the virtual presentation ceremony Oct. 18. Prior to her 1994 appointment to the senate, she volunteered with local, national and international organizations concerned with children, including serving as vice-chairperson of the Canadian Commission for the International Year of the Child, in 1979. From 1984 to 1990, she served as president and then chair of the Canadian Council on Children and Youth. She was a founding member and chair of the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children.
In May 1996, Pearson was named advisor on children’s rights to the minister of foreign affairs and, in 1998, she became the personal representative of the prime minister to the 2002 United Nations Special Session on Children. In 2005, she retired from the upper chamber, where she was known as the “Children’s Senator.” The statuette is presented under the patronage of the lieutenant governor of British Columbia, Janet Austin.
Pearson called Korczak a hero of hers and lauded the memory of the man who rebuffed the Nazis’ offer to spare his life at the time when the German occupiers came to liquidate the orphanage he ran in the Warsaw Ghetto. Instead, Korczak walked with the 192 children to the deportation site from which they were transferred to Treblinka, where they were murdered together.
“I’m not sure I would’ve had the courage to do that,” Pearson said.
The former senator, who is to turn 92 on Nov. 16, thanked the Korczak Association of Canada for the honour. “The opportunity to be awarded something like this at the end of my long life is deeply moving for me,” she said.
Montani was awarded the Janusz Korczak Medal, which was presented in partnership with the B.C. Representative for Children and Youth.
Montani is the executive director of First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society. Previously, she served as the child and youth advocate for the City of Vancouver, and was an elected trustee of the Vancouver School Board for six years, including three as its chair. She has worked extensively on issues of cross-cultural awareness and racism, women’s and children’s rights and the impacts of social exclusion on children and youth in low-income families.
“Elevating children’s rights to the civil and cultural priority they deserve has never been easy,” Montani told the event after she was presented the medal. “Children in B.C. are a declining portion of the population and don’t get to vote. They rely on us to speak up for them, to remember that they do have special entitlements…. The stakes are very high for them if we fail to give them the care and support they need during their childhoods. Of course, if we teach children that they have rights and [teach] society as a whole about child rights, children will be better equipped to exercise their participation rights. Parents and families will be better equipped to play their role as champions for their children and to claim their own rights, which are also in the UN Convention [on the Rights of the Child], to the supports that they need in child-rearing, whether it is adequate income, quality child care, affordable housing [or other] basic needs.”
Montani said Canada and adults elsewhere have too often come up short. “With the best of intentions, we have created a complex and very fragmented system that is full of barriers, such as waitlists and fee structures and referral systems and narrow eligibility requirements,” she said. “It’s hard for a seasoned service navigator to understand it, let alone a parent in need or in crisis. We have done this not because we want to frustrate parents or deny children services, but because we operate in a social and political environment where values other than giving children first call on our collective resources have gained ascendance. As a community, we have not lived up to our commitments in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to make the best interests of children a primary consideration.”
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a child survivor of the Holocaust and a board member of the Korczak association, emceed the event. She read a poem by Korczak, which she had translated into English, called “A Teacher’s Prayer.”
Boraks-Nemetz recounted her connection with the legendary doctor. They were incarcerated together in the Warsaw Ghetto and her father was friends with Korczak and assisted the doctor to obtain food for the orphans. Boraks-Nemetz visited the orphanage with her father one day and, while Korczak was not present on that occasion, she got to know him later in life through his writings, she said.
Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth, British Columbia’s Representative for Children and Youth, spoke at the event and participated in the awarding of the medal and statuette. She was joined in the presentations by Dr. Christine Loock, Dr. Anton Grunfeld, Ron Friesen and Nussbaum.
Melanie Mark, B.C. Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, who was the inaugural recipient of the Korczak Medal, in 2016, congratulated the honourees. Mark was the first First Nations woman elected to the B.C. Legislature and remains the only First Nations woman to have served in cabinet. She described how both Pearson and Montani had profound impacts on her life through their shared commitment to fighting sexual exploitation, particularly of young Indigenous women.