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Coming Feb. 17th …

image - MISCELLANEOUS Productions’ Jack Zipes Lecture screenshot

A FREE Facebook Watch Event: Resurrecting Dead Fairy Tales - Lecture and Q&A with Folklorist Jack Zipes

Worth watching …

image - A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project

A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project. Made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

screenshot - The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is scheduled to open soon.

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is scheduled to open soon.

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Tag: Yom Hashoah

A virtual Yom Hashoah

A virtual Yom Hashoah

Toronto actor Jake Epstein hosted Canada’s online Yom Hashoah commemoration on April 20. (PR photo)

Days after many Canadian families celebrated Passover remotely using online platforms for virtual seders, Yom Hashoah was commemorated with a virtual ceremony that linked survivors and others across the country in an unprecedented, but deeply moving, program of remembrance and education.

The 27th of Nissan was set aside in 1951 by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, as Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. This year marked the 75th anniversary since the end of the Second World War and the end of the Holocaust.

Hosted live by Toronto actor Jake Epstein, the event, on April 20, featured prerecorded content from organizations across Canada and new footage broadcast live, including candlelighting from six locations across the country, among them the Vancouver home of Shoshana and Shawn Lewis and their children Charlie, Julian and Mattea.

In a recorded message, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada stands firm against antisemitism and with Israel and the Jewish people.

“The Shoah was undoubtedly one of the darkest periods in human history and these moments where we pause to remember matter, both to honour those who lived through these horrors but also to make sure these atrocities are never repeated,” Trudeau said. “Sadly, acts of antisemitic violence are more and more frequent today and Canada is not immune to this trend. For many Jewish Canadians, the rise in attacks is not only troubling, it’s downright scary. But, let me be clear, attacks against the Jewish community are attacks against us all. Let me be equally clear, Canada and Israel are partners, allies and close friends and we will continue to stand proudly with Israel. Attacks against Israel, including calls for BDS and attempts to single her out at the UN, will not be tolerated.… We will always condemn any movement that attacks Israel, Jewish Canadians and the values we share.”

The Yom Hashoah program also included recorded messages from Israeli diplomats in Canada and prerecorded musical components.

“During the war, music played an important role in lifting the spirits of ghetto inhabitants, camp inmates, as well as being used as a bargaining chip in negotiating small freedoms in the camps,” said Epstein.

Pieces were performed by the Toronto Jewish Chorus, participants in previous March of the Living programs and by shinshinim, young Israelis performing overseas duties after completing high school. Memorial prayers, El Maleh Rachamim and Kaddish, were offered by Cantor Pinchas Levinson of Ottawa.

Epstein, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, spoke of his family’s history, the good fortune of his grandparents’ survival and the resilience they showed in beginning a new life in a new land.

“Upon being liberated from the camps, survivors faced the inconceivable realization of the enormity of their loss,” Epstein said. “Recovery was a long road ahead. Survivors, like my grandparents, immediately searched for any other surviving family members, only to discover that they had lost everyone. And yet, somehow, they rebuilt their lives.

“My grandparents came to Canada through Pier 21 in Halifax before ultimately moving to Toronto. Even though they were free, the culture shock, the language, the difficulty in finding work, made life extremely hard. My grandfather, an architectural engineer in what was then Czechoslovakia, was lucky enough to find work as a bookkeeper for a lumberyard. My grandmother became a seamstress, working day and night, not only making clothing for customers, but making dresses for my mom as well. Somehow, they managed to connect with other survivors who became like family.…My grandparents’ story of resilience and adversity is a common one. They, like so many other survivors in Canada, raised families, found employment, learned new languages and contributed to Canadian society and Jewish communal life. Some even dedicated their lives, decades later, to speaking out against hate and injustice by sharing their Holocaust stories with students and the public.”

Survivors from across Canada, in video recordings, spoke of their liberation experiences and offered advice to successive generations.

Faigie Libman of Toronto recounted her moment of liberation.

“We saw a man on a horse, a Russian soldier, coming towards us,” she recounted. “He said he was a captain, that we are free. You cannot imagine the joy, you cannot imagine the exhilaration. I still see the picture in front of my eyes, women who could hardly walk, some were even crawling, pulled him down, they were kissing him, they were hugging him, and that day will always be in my mind – Jan. 21, 1945 – we were finally free.”

Sydney Zoltan of Montreal expressed concern about Holocaust awareness after the eyewitnesses pass.

“We, the youngest survivors, now stand in the frontline,” he said. “We often ask ourselves what memory of the Shoah will look like when we are gone. We depart with the hope that our fears are only imaginary.”

Another survivor asked younger generations to be vigilant.

“I want young people to remember, I want them to be politically aware, that their government should never preach hate,” said Elly Gotz of Toronto. “I want them to understand how damaging hate is to people.”

The commemoration, coordinated by the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, was presented in partnership with organizations across the country, including the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Earlier the same day, a global Yom Hashoah memorial event took place from an eerily empty Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, again with video-recorded survivor testimony and messages from political, religious and civic figures.

Format ImagePosted on May 15, 2020May 14, 2020Author Pat JohnsonCategories NationalTags Holocaust, Jake Epstein, memorial, survivors, VHEC, Yom Hashoah

Yom Hashoah online

Like everything else in this time of pandemic, Yom Hashoah, which took place this week, was not normal.

On Monday, at 10 a.m. Pacific time, viewers worldwide, including here in British Columbia, tuned in online to watch the state ceremony marking the start of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, taking place in Israel at Yad Vashem. Later that day, a cross-Canada commemoration took place, presented by a number of national bodies and with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre as a contributing organization.

The eerily vacant hall at Yad Vashem was interspersed with video recordings of remarks from Israel’s president, prime minister and chief rabbis, as well as six survivors, who shared their stories of loss and survival. The Canadian commemoration a few hours later was similarly moving, with video interspersed with thoughtful reflections from a member of the third generation who served as host and a message from the prime minister, stories of survivors, and candlelighting by families across the country. (See coverage next issue.)

No doubt the organizers of these events would have preferred to hold them in person. The proximity of family, friends and community strengthens survivors and the successive generations. Being in proximity provides crucial emotional, psychological and intellectual means of conveying the historical importance of that time and its lessons for social justice and human rights today.

The use of digital technology to mark Yom Hashoah was perhaps a little less startlingly odd, given that Jewish people worldwide recently experienced an unprecedented Passover, engaging in “zeders” – virtual seders on Zoom or other videoconferencing platforms – to get together with family over the holidays. The contortions some of our family members went through to make these celebrations happen was cause for some laughs, as well as some tsuris, and Passover 5780 will not be soon forgotten.

This was hardly an ideal way of celebrating – and many in the Orthodox community couldn’t even do this much – but it was necessary given the social isolation required of us during this pandemic.

Yet, while it is important to come together for happy occasions, this time is particularly difficult for those experiencing grief and loss. Having to up-end the ancient Jewish rituals that serve to sustain and strengthen mourners, those who have lost loved ones are left with minimal funeral attendees and shivahs conducted by telephone and computer; hugs only from those who share a household, none of the important reinforcement – and comfort – that comes from the physical proximity of a broader community. Even this sad situation fulfils a mitzvah, though. As painful as it is to be remote from our loved ones in times of grief, it is pikuach nefesh, an act of saving a life, the highest Jewish value and one that overrides almost every other law. During a pandemic, we remain apart from our loved ones because we love them.

Yom Hashoah commemorations often take a sombre tone and include some of the rituals we perform at a funeral, which made viewing the events in seclusion especially isolating. Yet, conversely, there was something uniquely appropriate about this alternative form of marking Yom Hashoah.

While we were fortunate to have survivors participate via video in these and other online commemorations of the day, the undeniable reality is that this was among the last such commemorative days where successive generations will be able to hear firsthand from the mouths of survivors their stories of loss, resistance and survival. Finding ways beyond first-person witness testimonies is the unavoidable way forward for Holocaust education and remembrance. Organizations dedicated to this mission have recognized this reality and have been developing impactful ways to augment and, eventually, replace in-person survivor testimony.

Remembering and, using that memory as motivation, ensuring that the promise of “Never again” is taken up by the next generations is also a Jewish value. It took an admirable mobilization of our local, national and international communal organizations to ensure that the pandemic did not cause us to ignore Yom Hashoah this year. It was precisely the sort of flexible, responsive action that will be required to meet the demands of Holocaust remembrance and education in the decades to come.

Necessity is the mother of invention and the unusual yet deeply moving commemorations this week should encourage us that, whatever challenges and changes the future holds, we remain determined to memorialize and educate about the Holocaust in ways appropriate to the times in which we live.

 

 

Posted on April 24, 2020April 24, 2020Author The Editorial BoardCategories From the JITags commemoration, Holocaust, memorial, Yom Hashoah
Jessies, Order of Canada, Korczak, Rockowers, Federation & VHEC

Jessies, Order of Canada, Korczak, Rockowers, Federation & VHEC

Warren Kimmel won a Jessie Award for his portrayal of the title character in the Snapshots Collective’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (photo from Snapshots Collective)

The 37th annual Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards were held on July 15 at Bard on the Beach’s BMO Mainstage in Vanier Park. Fifty theatrical productions were nominated from last year’s theatre season.

In the small theatre category, the Snapshots Collective’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which included several Jewish community members in its creative team, garnered eight nominations: director Chris Adams and costume designer Emily Fraser were acknowledged, along with the outstanding performances by Jewish community member Warren Kimmel, Colleen Winton, Oliver Castillo and Jonathan Winsby, and the production as a whole for its quality and innovation. In the end, the show won four Jessies, for the performances of Kimmel, Winton and Castillo, as well as nabbing the award for outstanding musical production.

Jewish community member Itai Erdal won the award for outstanding lighting design category for his work in Arts Club Theatre Company’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Erdal was also nominated for his lighting in Théâtre la Seizième’s Le Soulier.

At the July 15 ceremony, community member David Diamond received the Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance Career Achievement Award.

For more information, visit jessieawards.com.

* * *

On June 27, 2019, Governor General of Canada Julie Payette announced this year’s appointments to the Order of Canada, including, as officers, two local Jewish community members: Gordon Diamond, for “his steadfast leadership in business and for his philanthropic support for causes related to health care, education and social services,” and Dr. Peter Suedfeld, for “his groundbreaking research on the psychological impacts of extreme environments and stressors on human behaviour.”

* * *

On June 18, 2019, at Government House in Victoria, B.C., the Janusz Korczak Medal was awarded to Ted Hughes, OC, and Helen Hughes, OC, while the Janusz Korczak Statuette was awarded to Irwin Elman, the past advocate for children and youth of Ontario. The awards were bestowed in recognition of caring for children in the spirit of Dr. Janusz Korczak.

The ceremony started with welcoming remarks by the event’s host, Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin, and Holocaust survivor and writer Lillian Boraks-Nemetz spoke about Korczak, with a personal touch. The awards were presented jointly by Jennifer Charlesworth, B.C. representative for children and youth, and Jerry Nussbaum, president of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada. And the event was emceed by Jerymy Brownridge, private secretary to the lieutenant governor and executive director of Government House.

* * *

The Jewish Independent won two American Jewish Press Association Simon Rockower Awards for excellence in Jewish journalism this year (for work published in 2018). The awards were presented at the 38th annual AJPA banquet, held in conjunction with the association’s annual conference in St. Louis, Mo., June 23-26.

Bruce Brown’s “The draft: a dad reflects” – in which he shares his experience of sending his son off to serve in the Israeli Air Force – placed first in the personal essay category for its circulation class.

The JI’s editorial board – Pat Johnson, Basya Laye and Cynthia Ramsay – took second place in the editorial writing category for its circulation group. The submission, which included the editorials “Holocaust education needed,” “Impacts of nation-state” and “What is anti-Zionism?” elicited the following comment from the Rockower judges: “Riveting and well-explained editorials on anti-Zionism, the identity of Israel as a nation-state, and a local controversy involving Holocaust education.”

* * *

photo - Ambassador Nimrod Barkan at Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s annual general meeting on June 18
Ambassador Nimrod Barkan at Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s annual general meeting on June 18. (photo from facebook.com/pg/jewishvancouver)

At Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s annual general meeting on June 18 at King David High School, Federation elected two new directors – Karen Levitt and Melanie Samuels – and the board appointed a new executive. While Karen James has completed her term as board chair, she remains on the board as immediate past chair. Alex Cristall takes over as chair, Penny Gurstein is vice-chair, Bruce Cohen is secretary and Jim Crooks is treasurer.

At the AGM, several honours were bestowed: Stephen Gaerber was the recipient of the Arthur Fouks Award, Megan Laskin the Elaine Charkow Award and Sam Heller the Young Leadership Award. Tribute was also paid to James; as well as Jason Murray, outgoing chair of CIJA’s local partnership council; Richard Fruchter, chief executive officer of Jewish Family Services; Rabbi Noam Abramchik and Rabbi Aaron Kamin, rosh yeshivah of Pacific Torah Institute; and Cathy Lowenstein, head of school at Vancouver Talmud Torah. Ambassador Nimrod Barkan attended the AGM as part of his last visit to Vancouver before he completes his term as Israel’s ambassador to Canada.

Federation thanks the directors who came off the board – Eric Bulmash, Bryan Hack, Rozanne Kipnes and Laskin – for their dedication to community and that they chose to share their time and talents with Federation. In Bulmash’s case, he will continue to contribute, but in a different capacity, as he is Federation’s new vice-president, operations.

* * *

At its annual general meeting on June 19, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre announced the two winners of the Kron Sigal Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education. The VHEC also inducted two new recipients of the Life Fellows designation.

The designation of Life Fellow recognizes outstanding dedication and engagement with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre Society through long-term involvement and significant contributions to the organization’s programs and mandate. This year, VHEC is delighted to have two recipients, Wendy and Ron Stuart, in recognition of their longstanding contributions as artistic directors of the VHEC’s community-wide Yom Hashoah commemoration.

Each year, the VHEC presents the Meyer and Gita Kron and Ruth Kron Sigal Award to a B.C. elementary or secondary teacher who has shown a remarkable commitment to teaching students about the Holocaust and its important lessons. This year’s recipients are Nicola Colhoun and Dr. Christine Paget from West Vancouver Secondary School.

In their remarks, Colhoun and Paget shared, “As social studies teachers … we are tasked with the lofty goal of having students care about what has come before them to shape the world they live in now…. Through the testimonies of survivors, the past becomes tangible, it becomes human, and it becomes relevant to students…. So many of our students come away from the Holocaust Symposium saying things like, ‘I get it now.’ ‘I didn’t realize, but now I understand.’ They understand why the history of the Holocaust matters. And they also understand why they need to speak up for inclusion, and stand against racism and persecution of any kind, from the school hallways to the hallways of power.”

The VHEC’s executive is Philip Levinson, president; Corinne Zimmerman, vice-president; Marcus Brandt, second vice-president; Joshua Sorin, treasurer; Al Szajman, secretary; and Ed Lewin, past president.

Format ImagePosted on July 19, 2019July 18, 2019Author Community members/organizationsCategories LocalTags AJPA, Christine Paget, Gordon Diamond, Itai Erdal, Janusz Korczak Association, Jessie Awards, Jewish Federation, journalism, Kron Sigal Award, Megan Laskin, Nicola Colhoun, Peter Suedfeld, Rockower, Ron Stuart, Sam Heller, Snapshots Collective, Stephen Gaerber, theatre, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, VHEC, Warren Kimmel, Wendy Bross-Stuart, Yom Hashoah
Recalling heroism, Holocaust

Recalling heroism, Holocaust

Holocaust survivor Rita Akselrod and Premier John Horgan at the Yom Hashoah commemoration that took place at the British Columbia legislature May 2. (photo by Pat Johnson)

The history of Jewish tragedy in the Holocaust – but also the heroism of Jews and non-Jews – was commemorated last week in moving ceremonies in Vancouver and Victoria.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, occurred May 2 this year, coinciding with 27 Nissan in the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A community commemoration convened by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) took place on the evening of May 1 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The following day, Holocaust survivors and others gathered in Victoria at the British Columbia legislature with the premier of the province and many elected officials in what has become an official annual commemoration.

Premier John Horgan assisted survivors and representatives of other targeted groups – people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, Roma – to light candles of remembrance.

“We need to remember that, if we do not stand together – Christians, Jews, Muslims, those who have no faith at all – if we do not stand together when hate raises its head, we will have failed not only those that have lost their lives so many decades ago in the millions, but folks who will come after us,” said Horgan. “We acknowledge the murders in San Diego and the tragic loss of life in Pittsburgh … in a synagogue there. We acknowledge the loss of Christian lives in Sri Lanka and the loss of Muslim lives in New Zealand. But, on this Yom Hashoah, we must always remember, in the presence of those who survived those horrors, that today we stand with you, tomorrow we will stand with you and forever we will remember the impacts of your lives and the consequences that you have lived for so many decades.”

Marie Doduck, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Vancouver, shared some of her life story with the audience at the legislature.

“Living in Brussels, Belgium, I was only three-and-a-half years old when my life was suddenly ripped apart and irrevocably changed by hate, by Nazism,” she said. “In 1939, our family, which was made up of 10 children – three were already married at the time with children of their own – were all separated by the scourge of war. We were all put into peril by the fact of our Jewishness – a crime under the rule of Nazis in Europe. We were marked for death by the accident of being born Jewish.”

She was hidden in a succession of non-Jewish homes and even in a Catholic convent.

“We had to run and to vanish in order to survive,” she said. “We became the children of silence. No talking, no crying, no disturbance – a blank mind with no feelings and no future. We lived only in the moment, felt nothing except hunger. Feelings like loneliness were a luxury. It was better not to feel. People and the world did not care. We were nothing – just Jews.

“This frightened little girl, Mariette, saw her beloved family disappear. My mother, Channah Malka, whom my firstborn is named after, and my brother, Albert, were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. I saw my mother and brother being loaded into trucks…. That was the last time I saw either of them alive. Another brother, Jean, who was in the French Resistance, was hung by the Gestapo in the city square. Another brother, Simon, like hundreds of thousands, died three weeks after the war from the mistaken kindness of American and Canadian soldiers who liberated the camps and fed the fragile, thin and starving prisoners food that they could no longer digest.”

Like many survivors, Doduck’s experience is filled with close calls and fortunate near-misses.

“In order to survive, I jumped off moving trains and high buildings, was thrown into a sewer and was even hidden in a barn, where I took shelter in a bale of hay. I still bear the scar of being impaled by the pitch fork of a Nazi soldier searching there for Jews,” she said. “I lived mostly in darkness – literally – in dank cellars and other dark hiding places where the Nazis could not find me. When I returned to Brussels years later, I could not recognize the city in daylight, for my Brussels was a place of darkness.

After the war, Doduck immigrated to Canada as part of the War Orphans Project, the youngest of 1,123 Jewish children admitted to Canada in 1947 through an agreement between Canadian Jewish Congress and the federal immigration department.

“I arrived in Vancouver on Jan. 3, 1948, at age 12 and was taken in by a foster family,” said Doduck. “While I was warmly welcomed by the Jewish community and Canadian society – and grew up to be a proud Canadian – not everyone received a warm welcome when attempting to flee Nazi Germany. It was indeed the policy of many countries not to accept those seeking refuge.

“This is the important message that I share with students when I speak – that no society is immune to the dangers of discrimination and racism; and that we must work together to stand up when we see injustice in the world around us.”

B.C. Education Minister Rob Fleming, who emceed the event, noted the startling increase in antisemitic incidents in recent years and called for vigilance.

“Today also requires us to acknowledge the role that apathy and indifference played in enabling these atrocities to happen, the thousands of Jewish refugees turned away at our Canadian borders and the borders of other countries, the people who stood by and said nothing while their neighbours were hunted down in their homes because of their faith and identity,” said Fleming. “We come together to say never again.”

While mourning the atrocities, Fleming said, it is necessary to also remember the heroism of survivors and others who took the most dangerous risks to resist the dystopia of Nazism.

“They teach us that standing up for others, standing up for the values of tolerance and inclusiveness is how we can stop hate crimes, it’s how we can maintain and protect the peace that we are privileged to enjoy in our country.”

MLA Nicholas Simons played Kol Nidre on the cello to open the ceremony.

The evening before, the heroism of survivors was the topic of remarks from a member of the second generation. Carla van Messel, a board member of the VHEC, reflected on the lessons imparted by her father, Ies van Messel, who was a 5-year-old in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, at the start of the war.

“Throughout my life, my father has demonstrated to me how to transform tragic memories into the strength to do good,” she said. “He taught my family that our Jewishness doesn’t make us evil or other and, therefore, by the same reasoning, neither should someone’s Germanness or Polishness or Arabness. He taught me that, if we don’t want something like the Holocaust to happen again, we have to continue to be better than the Nazis, and better than the nations who stood idly by. We have to actively protect all people … despite the history, despite the wounds, despite the deaths.

“As a second-generation survivor, I am energized by the examples of the survivors among us. They have inoculated us with their strength and resilience, with their will to turn bad into good. I want our survivors to know that they are leaving their memories, their essence, in good hands. Among the second generation are upstanding citizens of today’s very complicated world. They have taken the pain of their family’s personal history and transmuted it into the positive energy of tikkun olam. They continue to translate the hate of antisemitism into a hate of injustices: of racism, of bigotry, of sexism, of the demonization of otherness, of discrimination in all its many, many forms.”

The keynote address at Vancouver’s JCC was delivered by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz.

“Not a day passes when I don’t ask myself: Why did I survive when six million perished?” she said. “When 1.5 million [of the murdered] were children and, among them, my 5-year-old sister. And I survived. Why? When every European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death by Hitler. I wonder: Was my survival a miracle? A twist of fate? The will of God? Why me?”

She detailed the series of close calls and fortunate happenstances that allowed her to survive, in part due to the persistence of her parents to do anything within their powers to save their two daughters.

The family was relocated into what would become the Warsaw Ghetto, sharing shelter with 20 other people in a three-room flat.

“Eventually, the ghetto grew more and more crowded – up to about 480,000 bodies in the small space of 1.3 square miles … with the lack of hygiene and medication, we were quarantined for typhus. Most of the boys and girls I played with died of the disease. Young children were dying on the streets; if not from illness, from starvation. Shabby and haunted people would simply pass by, powerless to help them,” she said.

“As 1942 approached, things got worse and worse. People out of desperation stole food from each other. I saw a woman carrying a bowl of soup when a man grabbed it. It spilled onto the pavement and the man fell to the floor licking the broth off the stones. All morality ceased to exist in an immoral, murderous universe of Nazi domination.”

As things in the ghetto deteriorated, Boraks-Nemetz’s parents bribed ghetto guards to allow young Lillian to escape. Her grandmother, who never entered the ghetto, had bought a little house in a nearby village, which she promised to give to a Catholic man who, in exchange, would let her live under his Polish name, ostensibly as siblings.

Boraks-Nemetz joined her grandmother and the man at the home.

“One night in the spring of 1943 we were outside in the yard, looking with horror at a blood-red sky above Warsaw,” she said. “We knew from a friend that it was the Warsaw Ghetto leveled to the ground by fire ordered by Hitler, after the courageous stand of the ghetto fighters against Nazi soldiers.”

Only after the war did she discover the fate of her sister.

“I found out that she was informed on by a Polish neighbour as a Jewish child and murdered by an unwilling Polish policeman who was commanded to do so, or else, by the Gestapo. The policeman found a ball lying on the street and threw it, telling my sister to run after it, then shot her in the back.”

While the Russians liberated her and her parents, Boraks-Nemetz said, the reality was not liberating.

“While adults worked to reestablish their lives, we children were left to grow up alone carrying the burden of experiences that nobody wanted to know about.… I was always told to forget and to let go by people who didn’t have a clue what was on my mind and in my soul. This was not a physical wound that results in a bruise or scab, which then falls off and mostly disappears. This was a branding on the Jewish soul with fire caused by man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child.

“It took me a long time after the war to realize myself as a human being who deserves to live and to be a Jew,” she said.

Philip Levinson, president of the VHEC board, introduced the procession of Holocaust survivors who lit candles in memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim and survivor Chaim Kornfeld led Kaddish. Under music director Wendy Bross Stuart, violinist Nancy di Novo and the Yom Hashoah singers performed songs in Ladino, Yiddish and Hebrew. Sarah Kirby-Yung, a Vancouver city councilor, brought greetings from the city and read a proclamation. The evening ended as it does every year with the singing of “Zog Nit Keynmol,” “The Partisan Song.”

Format ImagePosted on May 10, 2019May 9, 2019Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags British Columbia, Carla van Messel, history, Holocaust, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Marie Doduck, Rob Fleming, VHEC, Yom Hashoah
Marking Yom Hashoah

Marking Yom Hashoah

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu places a wreath at Yad Vashem on Yom Hashoah. (photo from IGPO via Ashernet)

photo - On Yom Hashoah, Israel comes to a virtual standstill at 11 a.m., for two minutes, as sirens wail across the country – everyone stops what they are doing and stands at attention, in respect to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust
(photo from IGPO via Ashernet)

On Yom Hashoah, Israel comes to a virtual standstill at 11 a.m., for two minutes, as sirens wail across the country – everyone stops what they are doing and stands at attention, in respect to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Format ImagePosted on May 10, 2019May 9, 2019Author Edgar AsherCategories IsraelTags Holocaust, Israel, Yom Hashoah

Basic facts not known

During the week of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released the results of a comprehensive national survey of Holocaust awareness and knowledge among adults in the United States. The survey found that there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust, and that there is a broad-based consensus that schools must be responsible for providing comprehensive Holocaust education. In addition, a significant majority of American adults believe that fewer people care about the Holocaust today than they used to, and more than half of Americans believe that the Holocaust could happen again.

Major findings of the survey include that 70% of Americans say fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to, and a majority of Americans (58%) believe something like the Holocaust could happen again. The study also found a significant lack of basic knowledge about the Holocaust:

  • Nearly one-third of all Americans (31%), and 41% of millennials, believe that fewer than two million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, as opposed to the six million Jews who were killed.
  • While there were more than 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45%) cannot name a single one, and this percentage is even higher among millennials (49%).

At the same time, there are encouraging notes in the survey. In particular, there are key findings underscoring the desire for Holocaust education. More than nine out of 10 respondents (93%) believe all students should learn about the Holocaust in school and 80% of respondents say it is important to keep teaching about the Holocaust so it does not happen again.

The findings show a substantial lack of personal experience with the Holocaust, however, as most Americans (80%) have not visited a Holocaust museum.

“This study underscores the importance of Holocaust education in our schools,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice-president of the Claims Conference. “There remain troubling gaps in Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories. We must be committed to ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust and the memory of those who suffered so greatly are remembered, told and taught by future generations.”

The Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish

Material Claims Against Germany. Data were collected and analyzed by Schoen Consulting with a representative sample of 1,350 American adults via landline, cellphone and online interviews. Respondents were selected at random and constituted a demographically representative sample of the adult population in the United States.

The task force led by Claims Conference board was comprised of Holocaust survivors as well as representatives from museums, educational institutions and leading nonprofits in the field of Holocaust education, such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Agency and George Washington University. Claims Conference president Julius Berman noted, “On the occasion of Yom Hashoah, it is vital to open a dialogue on the state of Holocaust awareness so that the lessons learned inform the next generation. We are alarmed that today’s generation lacks some of the basic knowledge about these atrocities.”

For more information, visit claimscon.org/study.

Posted on May 4, 2018May 2, 2018Author Claims ConferenceCategories WorldTags education, Holocaust, United States, Yom Hashoah
Yom Hashoah at KDHS

Yom Hashoah at KDHS

The Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School Grade 11 history class for which King David High School teacher Anna-Mae Wiesenthal (middle row, second from the right), did a presentation on the Holocaust. Their teacher, Bonnie Burnell, is to Wiesenthal’s left. (photo from Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)

“They were in awe of the Holocaust survivor,” said Bonnie Burnell, a teacher at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary, describing the reaction of her students to survivor Robbie Waisman’s talk at a Yom Hashoah assembly at King David High School (KDHS) on April 24. “Looking at him as he spoke at the podium, they could scarcely imagine him on the inside of a Nazi concentration camp.”

Students from Prince of Wales Secondary School and, of course, from KDHS also joined the assembly, which was organized by KDHS teachers Anna-Mae Wiesenthal and Aron Rosenberg, and included Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanting El Malei Rachamim.

The multi-school initiative was led by Wiesenthal, who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Holocaust and genocide studies. Last year, she went to Austria and Poland with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre of Toronto. In addition to teaching about the Holocaust at KDHS, she has been giving presentations at various public schools. She told the Jewish Independent that students have been very engaged and have asked many questions. This outreach led to the recent assembly at KDHS, where other schools’ students were invited to attend.

photo - Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman addresses the assembly for Yom Hashoah at King David High School on April 24
Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman addresses the assembly for Yom Hashoah at King David High School on April 24. (photo from Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)

“My students, in general, were impressed with the ceremony and glad that they had made the decision to come,” Burnell said. “We have had a real focus on racism in our curriculum this year, and this visit definitely adds something of central importance to that subject.”

Wiesenthal, who has taught at KDHS since 2006, became interested in focusing more on Holocaust education after attending an educators seminar at Yad Vashem in 2012.

“I feel Holocaust education is about giving voice to the millions of victims who were murdered simply because of who they were, and honouring their legacy and our history,” explained Wiesenthal. “It is about remembering the vibrancy of Jewish life both before and after the war. It is about preserving memory for future generations and across cultures. It is about taking the knowledge of unprecedented horrors, and keeping them in front of us so that we remain vigilant about our humanity in the face of genocides today.”

Wiesenthal also admitted to being inspired by a possible kinship with renowned Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Her great-grandfather, Mattityahu Wiesenthal, was a Russian boy saved from forced conscription in the Russian army by being “thrown across the river” from Russia into the town of Skala in Austria-Hungary, as many boys were at that time. As an orphan in Skala, he was taken in by Moshe Efroyim Wiesenthal, who supported many such refugee orphans, and the young boy took the family name Wiesenthal to honour his patron. Wiesenthal does not know if Moshe Efroyim was directly related to Simon Wiesenthal, but the latter remains one of her heroes, and she has been in touch with his granddaughter, Racheli Kreisberg.

Wiesenthal also recently initiated a pilot project at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), in which KDHS students trained as docents (museum guides) lead other students through the exhibit.

Another project was an art exhibit at KDHS, where her Jewish History 11 class viewed a video of a Holocaust survivor’s testimony, chose an aspect of the testimony that stood out for them and then created a work of art based on that aspect. Each work was accompanied by an artist’s statement, a picture of the survivor and why the student chose the testimony they did. Contributions included painting, sculpture, writing and music. “The quality of expression was very moving,” said Wiesenthal.

Rabbi Stephen Berger, head of Judaic studies at KDHS, said he is thrilled with the work Wiesenthal has been doing.

“She shares her passion with her students and fulfils the talmudic dictum, ‘Words that leave from the heart, penetrate the heart,’” he said. “Our school and students benefit immeasurably by having her as a teacher of history and Holocaust studies.”

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Format ImagePosted on May 19, 2017May 17, 2017Author Matthew GindinCategories Celebrating the Holidays, LocalTags Anna-Mae Wiesenthal, Bonnie Burnell, education, Holocaust, KDHS, Robbie Waisman, Yom Hashoah
Yom Hashoah in Israel

Yom Hashoah in Israel

Vehicles at a standstill alongside the ancient walls of Jerusalem’s Old City on April 24, as drivers honor the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. At 10 a.m., sirens sounded throughout Israel, and pedestrian and car traffic stopped to remember. (photo from Ashernet)

Format ImagePosted on April 28, 2017April 26, 2017Author Edgar AsherCategories IsraelTags Israel, Yom Hashoah
Marking Yom Hashoah

Marking Yom Hashoah

Claude Romney will give the keynote address on April 23. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

Jacques Lewin, a Jewish physician in Paris, was arrested at the end of 1941 and was sent to Auschwitz on the very first convoy from Western Europe to that notorious death camp. His profession almost certainly saved his life, as he performed a role that the Nazis deemed useful: that of a prisoner-doctor.

Lewin’s daughter, Claude Romney, has studied the Holocaust experiences of prisoner-doctors like her father and has a forthcoming book on the subject. She will share her family’s story, and illustrate aspects of the experience of prisoner-doctors, as the keynote speaker at this year’s Yom Hashoah Holocaust Commemorative Evening, which takes place April 23, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

Lewin’s arrest took place two weeks after Romney’s third birthday. She and her mother, Saya, survived the war in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a small town near the Spanish border that was occupied by the Germans less than three months after they arrived.

Romney’s presentation will begin with some context about the state of French Jewry in the early part of the war, something she said is not as well known as it could be. She will share a bit about her and her mother’s experiences during the war, then turn attention to her father’s story.

That story is something that Romney has pieced together mostly after her father’s death in 1968. “I remember when he died, thinking that so much had remained untold,” Romney said. “He never talked about it.”

Years after her father passed away, Romney’s mother gave her a file containing documents from her father’s past, including a few articles he had written immediately after he returned to France after the war. These had been published in a newsletter distributed by the French resistance and never reached a wide audience.

Romney has obtained the transcript of the testimony her father gave at the 1947 trial of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, but it is not comprehensive.

“The transcript of his testimony looks as though he was so frustrated that he wasn’t given more time to talk about it,” said Romney. “I don’t know if it was 10 minutes or what, but it looks as if he was really frustrated because at one point he enumerates a number of atrocities that he saw and he said, ‘it could take me days and days to tell you about them.’ I think that’s why he never wrote any more. I don’t know whether he was approached to testify anywhere else, but he never did.”

However, other prisoner-doctors did write and testify. Romney’s forthcoming book, Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Written Testimonies of Prisoner-Doctors, is based on the experiences of 60 individuals who survived and told what they witnessed.

When Lewin first arrived at Auschwitz, he and the others in his transport were put to work constructing a new section of the camp – to be known as Birkenau.

Lewin was one of only a few from this group that survived the war, Romney said, because he was a medical doctor. The Nazis decided around the end of 1942 that they could use prisoner-doctors to treat ill and wounded inmates who were doing forced labour. Prisoner-doctors tried their best to help other inmates, but routinely confronted horrific ethical dilemmas. They were faced, Romney said, with what the Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer called “choiceless choices.”

“If they had refused to obey orders outright, they would have sent them to the gas chambers too,” she said.

After the war, Romney studied at the Sorbonne and became a professor of French linguistics and literature, first in Toronto, then Sudbury and finally Calgary, before retiring to Vancouver. She and her husband, also an academic, thought Canada seemed an ideal place since he was English and she was French.

The annual Yom Hashoah evening is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). It is supported by the Gail Feldman Heller Endowment and the Sarah Rozenberg-Warm Memorial Endowment Funds of the VHEC, and funded through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.

In addition to Romney’s keynote address, the evening will feature cellist Eric Wilson, Yiddish singer Myrna Rabinowitz, Cantor Yaacov Orzech and the Kol Simcha Singers. Artistic producers are Wendy Bross Stuart and Ron Stuart of WRS Productions. Holocaust survivors are invited to participate in candlelighting.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Format ImagePosted on April 7, 2017April 4, 2017Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags Claude Romney, Holocaust, VHEC, Yom Hashoah
The resilience of survivors

The resilience of survivors

Peter Suedfeld and his mother. Taken at Vajdahunyad Castle, Budapest, Hungary, circa 1939/40. (photo from Peter Suedfeld)

Dr. Peter Suedfeld has devoted his life to the study of how human beings adapt to and cope with challenge, stress and danger. Yet it was many years into his work that he acknowledged his choice of academic pursuit may be related to his personal life history as a survivor of the Holocaust.

Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, will deliver the keynote address at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s community-wide Yom Hashoah commemoration at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on May 4.

Through the years, he has often been asked if his research was influenced by his family’s experience in the Holocaust.

His mother was murdered at Auschwitz; his father survived Mauthausen. Suedfeld was a hidden child in Budapest, living as a Christian in an orphanage run by the International Red Cross.

“My answer always used to be no,” he said, “because my research for a long, long time was fairly straightforward experimental psychology, cognition, perception, memory, things like that.”

But, when he was interviewed for the VHEC’s survivor testimony project, he “put it all together,” he said. “I started to think that maybe there really is a connection, because almost all of my research – not quite all, but most of it – has to do with how people adapt under unusual, extreme, challenging, sometimes traumatic environments and situations.”

His early work focused on sensory deprivation, looking at how removal of external stimuli affects things like cognition, studying astronauts, cosmonauts and people who work in polar research stations.

“I also started looking at people who were under stress because they had to make really important decisions in stressful circumstances, such as political and military leaders,” he said. “I realized that might have had something to do with my own experiences. How do people face unusual, extreme and sometimes dangerous environments – which people who have survived the Holocaust have had to do, including me? But, I want to emphasize that, at the time I was doing this research, I never thought this way. People asked me why I do all these things, and I said something interests me and I do research on it, that’s all, and I have a wide range of interests. But then, I thought maybe this does have something to do with my personal history.”

At the Yom Hashoah event, Suedfeld will reflect on his personal experience, discuss the Holocaust more broadly and then address the issue of the long-term adaptation of survivors of the Holocaust, a topic on which he has conducted a series of studies.

Suedfeld has reviewed the psychological reports written soon after the war about the long-term potential of survivors to survive and thrive.

“In general, what I found is that the early reports of psychologists and psychiatrists about how permanently damaged survivors are were, to put it bluntly, wrong,” he said. “Yes, of course, some people were permanently damaged and some people could never put their life back together again. But there are a lot of people who did put their lives together or build new ones, who were quite resilient and still are, did well in their occupation or in education if they were young when they came here, have family lives that are certainly no less happy than anybody else’s, are proud of their kids and grandkids if they have any, don’t think about the Holocaust all the time, don’t let it ruin their life.”

Many survivors, he said, have some post-traumatic stress, but not post-traumatic stress disorder. “Disorder means it really interferes with normal life,” he said. “And very few have that.”

Reviewing the early literature and knowing what he knows from personal experience and acquaintance with many survivors, Suedfeld is more surprised by the early negative prognoses than by the remarkable resilience of survivors.

“What did surprise me was the negativity of the scientific reports, which overlooked or ignored or never got to see any of the people who were so resilient,” he said. “There is now a substantial and rapidly growing literature showing not only resilience but post-traumatic growth and people’s strength instead of just emphasizing the weakness. And, again, that’s not to deny by any means that there are some people who were so terribly affected that they haven’t recovered, but that is not the norm.”

Suedfeld also cautioned that every experience of survivors is unique.

“We talk about the Shoah as though everybody had pretty much the same experience,” he said. “I want to bring home to people that that is also a mistaken idea, that people experienced very different things, all of which are lumped under the label of Holocaust or Shoah, but that’s an incredibly wide diversity of experiences to which an incredibly wide diversity of people responded in an incredibly wide, diverse way, so you cannot talk about survivors or victims as an undifferentiated lump. They’re not.”

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, as well as a member of the Independent’s editorial board. This article first appeared in the VHEC publication Zachor.

Format ImagePosted on April 22, 2016April 20, 2016Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags Holocaust, Suedfeld, survivors, VHEC, Yom Hashoah

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