Carmel Tanaka

Vernon’s Jewish community

The exhibit Shedding Some Light on the Jewish Community in Vernon is at the Museum and Archives of Vernon until the beginning of April. (photo from Alexandra Fox)

If you are passing through the Okanagan between now and the beginning of April, check out the exhibit on Vernon’s Jewish community, which recently went up at the Museum and Archives of Vernon. Last month, I sat down with collections and exhibits intern Alexandra Fox to chat about it.

Between sips of hot chocolate at a local café, we bonded over the fact that we are two queer Jews from the Lower Mainland, who grew up spending winters up on SilverStar Mountain Resort with family, and both find ourselves currently in Vernon. We also share a love of local Jewish community history.

Carmel Tanaka: What inspired you to curate an exhibit about Vernon’s Jewish community?

Alexandra Fox: When I came here, I found that there weren’t a lot of openly Jewish people and most of the non-Jewish community was not aware of the Jewish community. I wanted to shed some light on a community that has often gone under the radar and that’s why I titled the exhibit Shedding Some Light on the Jewish Community in Vernon. It was partly a pun on certain traditions of lighting candles, too.

Basically, I wanted the exhibit topic to be something that meant a lot to me. I come from a multifaith family, with my dad being Jewish and my mom being Protestant. Growing up, Jewish identity had been a confusing thing for me as, technically, I am not Jewish, due to it being matrilineal but it was always the religion I connected with the most. Maybe this is in part due to always being told that I look Jewish. However, you cannot always tell if someone is Jewish, as there is so much diversity in the community. I wanted to curate this exhibit so that I could honour my identity a bit more.

CT: What have been some of the reactions to the exhibit?

AF: The reactions to the exhibit have all been positive so far and I believe it will stay that way. I’ve had a few questions about certain Jewish traditions that are represented by the items in the exhibit but they have all been very respectful. Some of my co-workers have also congratulated me on making an excellent exhibit.

CT: During the research and curation of the exhibit, did anything surprise you? Did you face any challenges?

AF: I was surprised by how small the Jewish community was when it started in the 1970s – it numbered only 20 people – and how small it really still is. The 2021 Census … in the case of Vernon, it shows that most Jewish people identify as Jewish but are not practising. This trend doesn’t surprise me because I think a lot of Jewish people in other communities are the same, but the numbers of Jews (both ethnically and religiously) are so small.

Some of the challenges that I faced while creating the exhibit were during the call-out phase and during the editing phase. Since our museum didn’t have any Jewish objects in the collection, I had to do a call-out to the community…. I felt limited to reaching out to practising Jews rather than those who identify as ethnically Jewish because I didn’t have a lens into the community and was only able to reach out to the Okanagan Jewish Community Centre and Chabad House. Only the Okanagan Jewish Community Centre agreed to loan some objects to the museum for the exhibit.

CT: What resources did you use in compiling the exhibit?

photo - Alexandra Fox, curator of the exhibit Shedding Some Light on the Jewish Community in Vernon — Alexandra Fox, curator of the exhibit Shedding Some Light on the Jewish Community in Vernon. *(photo from Alexandra Fox)*

AF: The resources I used to compile the exhibit were from Census data analyses, the Okanagan Jewish Community Centre website, the Chabad website, some existing pictures in Vernon’s museum archives, as well as Ronnie Tessler’s research from the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C., which focused more on Kelowna than on Vernon.

CT: Community archival projects are limited to the availability of resources. If you were able to continue researching Vernon’s Jewish community, what stories would you like to dive further into?

AF: Only after finishing the exhibit did I find out that one of the people who developed SilverStar was Jewish, so if I were to continue researching Vernon’s Jewish community, I would totally dive further into finding out about that family. I would like to know if the SilverStar community even knew about Dr. [Michael] Lattey being Jewish.

Also, if I were able to continue researching Vernon’s Jewish community and developing the exhibit, I would extend the call-out to more community members so that I could expand the range of people represented by the exhibit, such as Vernon’s very own, the Saucy Soprano Melina Schein, who won Food Network’s Wall of Bakers and who I only found out about after the exhibit.

As an intern at the museum, I seemed to be quite limited in who I could extend the call-out to and I wish I had met with you, Carmel, before the coffee meetup because then I could reach more community members, especially those not affiliated with community organizations or synagogues.

I would also like to dive deeper into the 2021 potential sale of Nazi memorabilia by Dodd’s Auction, a local and much beloved auction house. The memory of the Holocaust is very present in Vernon’s Jewish community so when these items were included in the auction, the community – Jewish and non-Jewish – successfully demanded that it be halted, and the items were returned to the consigner. It’s important to me to ensure that these stories and this part of local history are heard.

CT: Your exhibit, the first of its kind in Vernon to my knowledge, is a wonderful “Jewifying” of museum space. Why is it important for the Jewish community to share our stories in rural towns like Vernon?

AF: “Jewifying” the museum space, as with creating space for any other groups that have been historically left out of museum space, is a very important thing. I think it is especially important in museums located in rural towns because these are the places that are most likely to have fewer interactions with any minority groups…. In many rural towns, the Jewish people (or any other minority group) feel like they have to hide that part of themselves and I think it is very important to show them, and the rest of the community, that you don’t have to hide your identity.

CT: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

AF: I’d like to add that this is the first exhibit I have curated and, although limited by time and other factors, I poured my heart into this exhibit, which had a personal connection to me. When embarking on this exhibit, as mentioned earlier, I wanted to do something that was personal to me. It was either something about Jewishness or queerness and I decided to choose the former. My sister is in Israel right now, volunteering on a kibbutz, and I felt that curating this exhibit would be my way of honouring my identity.

***

For more information on the exhibit, visit vernonmuseum.ca/vernon-museum/vernons-jewish-community.

Carmel Tanaka is the founder and executive director of JQT Vancouver, and curator of the B.C. Jewish Queer and Trans Oral History Project (jqtvancouver.ca/jqt-oral-history-bc) and the Jewpanese Oral History Project (@JewpaneseProject on Instagram). She has family ties to Vernon, and it was a Japanese-Canadian friend who tipped her about Fox’s exhibit.

Retracing family history

(photo from Victoria Shoah Project)

The following remarks have been edited from a talk given at the April 15 Yom Hashoah commemoration at Victoria’s Jewish Cemetery, which was organized by the Victoria Shoah Project.

I recently saw a beautifully poignant play called We Keep Coming Back. It’s about a Jewish mother and her son who – in real life – travel to Poland, retracing the steps of her parents, who survived the Shoah. They documented their journey and now share their experience with audiences in theatres around the world. Their play triggered me on many levels.

I have yet to do my roots trip. I’ve been thinking about it, but haven’t done it yet. At the age of 30, I have done extensive traveling around the globe, yet somehow have always managed to avoid four places: Poland, Belarus, Japan and New Denver (the Slocan Valley camp where my Japanese-Canadian family was interned). After being exposed to this mother and son’s story and seeing proof that traveling to an historically hostile land can be done and that it can be a profound and life-changing experience for the better, I am finally at a point in my own life journey where I feel ready to start tracing the steps of my grandparents on both sides of my Second World War-torn family.

* * *

It was a sweltering hot summer day in Israel and I was 12 years old. I was helping my mom clean my grandparents’ gravesites in a Haifa cemetery, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, located on Mount Carmel (after which I’m named). In this cemetery, in addition to the person’s name who is laid to rest, there are also the names of grave-less victims etched into the headstone of their one surviving family member. My maternal grandparents’ headstones are no different.

Shifra Atlasovich (my savta) was born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1917. She was the daughter of a wealthy businessman who owned a cooking oil factory. Before the war, she attended the Hebrew Gymnasium High School, enjoyed traveling and skiing, and was admired for her beauty, especially her blond hair and blue eyes. She married her high school sweetheart and seemed to have a picture-perfect life.

A year before the war broke out, her mother died of cancer, which, some say, was a blessing, considering what was to follow. When the war began, her father was deported by the Russians, who occupied eastern Poland and deported all capitalists and influential people to Siberia. He suffered an unknown fate.

Shifra, her husband and her brother were also deported by the Russians, but sent to Kazakhstan, where they spent the rest of the war. When the war ended, non-Russians were given an opportunity to return to their home countries. Taking advantage of this, Shifra left with her infant son and brother, leaving behind her husband (her sweetheart), who, after being tortured and brainwashed by the KGB, chose to stay behind and become a communist – she never saw him again.

Once back in Poland, Shifra handed her son to Catholic nuns while she and her brother searched for survivors. She went to their family home, which had been taken over by their gentile nanny, who said that, if Shifra did not leave the premises immediately and cease to claim the house, she would call the neighbours, who may kill her.

When Shifra went to pick up her son, he was warm, well-fed, settled and no longer on the run – but the nuns refused to return him. Only with the help of American officers was she able to get him back.

From Bialystok, they migrated to West Berlin, where they stayed in a refugee camp and she taught Hebrew to orphaned children. While there, her brother fell ill and, tragically, died at the age of 33 in a hospital in East Berlin from an infection of the lining of his heart, which today could have been cured by penicillin, a rare commodity back then.

Berel “Dov” Gottlieb (my saba) was born in 1914 in Drahichyn near Pinsk, Poland (today, Belarus), into a working-class family. He was a skilled carpenter by trade and married when the war broke out – he had to leave his pregnant wife when he was drafted into the Polish army, which quickly lost within several weeks to the Nazis. He later escaped to Russia, joining to fight with the Jewish Partisans.

Dov’s second-oldest brother, Mordechai, fled to Israel in 1938. After the war, Dov found out that most of his family, including his parents, five other siblings, as well as his wife and newborn daughter, were all sent to Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed to death.

Dov secured a visa to the United States – he had relatives in Chicago, who had emigrated in 1905 after pogroms in Eastern Europe – and made his way to a refugee camp in West Berlin to wait for his pending departure. It was there he met my grandmother, Shifra, and, instead of going to America, they headed to Israel on the first boat to enter the newly independent country in 1948. There, he was reunited with his brother, Mordechai.

Both Dov and Shifra became active members of the Irgun, an underground resistance movement headed by Menachem Begin.

* * *

In 1950, my mother, Dalia Gottlieb, was born in Haifa, Israel. During her days at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, she fell in love with a Japanese-Canadian foreign exchange student, my father, Mineo Tanaka, and would follow him to Canada, eventually marrying him in 1976. My sister Talia was born in 1979 and I came along in 1987.

I remember spending many a summer in Israel visiting my grandparents. I didn’t know Hebrew well at the time or Yiddish or Polish, so, in the absence of a common language, I would play gin rummy – Shifra’s favourite card game – repeatedly with her. Boy, was she good at that game, and taught me to be just as ruthless. I’d give endless bear hugs to Dov and lick my plate clean at every meal to show them just how much I loved them and their matzo ball chicken soup.

Dov passed away in 1995, followed by Shifra in 2004, taking with them the chance for me to ask the questions to which I so crave answers: What was your life like before the war? What did you enjoy doing? Do I remind you of any of my relatives? What were my great-grandparents like? How did you survive? How did you find the will to live life? To start again? It’s questions like these that the child I was would not have thought to ask, but nor would I have understood the answers.

On that hot summer day visiting my grandparents’ final resting place, I noticed that the names of my grandfather’s first wife and first daughter (my half-aunt) were not written on his headstone. At this point, my grandmother was still alive and had been active in getting both his and her headstones engraved. In retrospect, I feel bad assuming my grandmother had something to do with the missing names on his headstone. When I spoke with my mother, she told me that she once asked her father about them and the sad truth was that he couldn’t remember his first wife’s name or what she looked like, and he never had the opportunity to meet his firstborn and learn her name. It was in this moment when I first learned about the impact of trauma and that there could be such a thing as repression in people who have gone through horrific loss.

* * *

Between the Holocaust survivors on my mother’s side and my interned Japanese-Canadian grandparents on my father’s side (a story for another time), I joke that there is enough post-traumatic stress disorder to go around in my family. But, pushing dark humour aside, I would like to draw attention to what has and continues to be a rather taboo topic at many Holocaust commemorations and symposiums – the topic of trauma, specifically intergenerational trauma.

When people tell me, “The Holocaust happened long ago … get over it … it’s time to move on,” I find it very hard to do so. Among other things, I have been raised and prepared my entire life for when the Nazis, or their equivalent, will return.

There are no longer survivors in my family to tell the world about what happened to them, and I am their voice now. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, as I know from my mom the survival stories of my Jewish grandparents – not everyone does. My personal post-Holocaust syndrome has thankfully, to my knowledge, not presented itself in the form of serious or debilitating mental illness or addiction; however, some of my family members have not been so fortunate. I speak candidly to break down these chains and to spread awareness within our own community and beyond – on the need for proper support for victims of trauma to ensure a brighter future.

I plan to drive to New Denver this summer and fly to Poland next year. My story is just beginning.

Carmel Tanaka is partnerships manager at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Pacific Region, and former director of the University of Victoria branch of Hillel BC.

Holocaust awareness

The Post-Survivor Exhibit in Mystic Market, one of the busiest spots on campus. (photo by Chorong Kim)

The following remarks have been modified from the original address given during Hillel Victoria’s Second Annual Holocaust Awareness Presentation during Holocaust Awareness Week, which took place at the University of Victoria Jan. 25-29.

When my co-organizer, Dr. Kristin Semmens in the history department at the University of Victoria, and I embarked on planning Holocaust Awareness Week, we decided to put a call out for poster submissions to include in the Post-Survivor Exhibit to be publicly displayed in Mystic Market, one of the busiest spots on campus. The aim was to feature personal stories of post-survivors – UVic students who are descendants of Holocaust survivors – and we welcomed submissions from survivors of other genocides and atrocities. We thought that, between all the Jewish students and the diverse student body, we would be overflowing with submissions and would struggle to select 20 stories to include in the exhibit. As it turned out, our struggle was to get any submissions at all. Why am I sharing with you our experience of failed expectations? Well, it’s quite simple. This has been a learning experience for us, just as much as it has been for the students we approached to participate in the exhibit.

Many of the Jewish students said they knew very little about their grandparents or their survival story, and felt they didn’t have enough to write personal reflections about it. I was coming from the point of the view that you can write about “not having enough to write about” and attribute that to the implications of being a descendant of a survivor and the negative effects of post-Holocaust syndrome (a form of transferable post-traumatic stress disorder). Others didn’t want to share their story in public and recommended that we ask people to submit anonymously; some were too scared to be identified as Jews on campus. Both Kristin and I were not surprised by the reasons we received but, as advocates of Holocaust awareness and education, we thought the students could overcome their fear and disassociation from their family’s past.

photo - Dr. Orly Salama-Alber, left, and Hannah Faber sing “Mi Ha’Ish,” while Cheryl Noon, left, and Kaitlin Findlay light the second candle — Dr. Orly Salama-Alber, left, and Hannah Faber sing “Mi Ha’Ish,” while Cheryl Noon, left, and Kaitlin Findlay light the second candle. *(photo by Chorong Kim)*

As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland (and today Belarus) on my mother’s side and a granddaughter of interned Japanese-Canadians on my father’s side, I can tell you that there are two types of survivors. Those who talk and those who don’t. My maternal safta (grandmother) spoke about the Holocaust and would tell everyone that the only reason she survived was because of her blond hair and blue eyes, whereas, my other three grandparents chose to never talk about what happened to them. So much so, that my Japanese bachan and gichan (grandmother and grandfather) completely abandoned their Japanese heritage and opted to raise their children with English names and, tragically, my maternal saba (grandfather) couldn’t even recall the names or faces of his murdered first wife and baby girl. That’s how he dealt with his past.

I only know about my histories because I wanted to know about them and I asked questions. That got me thinking, how can I ask students to write about their stories if they haven’t gone through this process of asking yet? And who am I to pressure them to do so? I know now that I may have asked too much of the students. Perhaps we are not as ready as I thought to share our stories, let alone share them collectively as an international community.

I thank the handful of students who did send in poster submissions for their bravery in sharing their stories. Each one was on a different page in their personal journey to coping and understanding their family or nation’s past. Some already knew all the details while others had to ask their families for help in obtaining old photographs and putting all the bits and pieces of their grandparents’ stories together into one cohesive personal reflection. One of my students wrote to me on Facebook, “I just found out a ton of information that I didn’t know before, and I’m still kind of processing it”; another texted me saying that, although they have decided not to submit a story, this has started a personal desire to find out more about their family’s history. Coming to terms with the past is not easy, we all need healing and we all have the right to look to a brighter future.

photo - Carmel Tanaka with, left to right, Dawn Smith, Thomas Laboucan-Avirom and Rachelle Trenholm of the Indigenous Law Students Association — Carmel Tanaka with, left to right, Dawn Smith, Thomas Laboucan-Avirom and Rachelle Trenholm of the Indigenous Law Students Association. *(photo by Chorong Kim)*

This weeklong exhibit and the presentation today have already served their purpose – Holocaust awareness. It was not smooth sailing organizing this event. The Holocaust is a very sensitive subject and everyone has their views on how to approach Holocaust education. I am very moved by the outpouring of support from participating organizations in our very diverse community. May this be an example of collaboration, tolerance, compassion and love towards our ultimate goal: peace on this campus, in our community and around the world.

Traditionally, during Holocaust commemorations, six memorial candles are lit to represent the six million Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. Today, we have chosen to light seven memorial candles, to be lit by UVic students representing various communities and causes, with our seventh candle symbolizing our hope. Performing “Mi Ha’Ish” is post-doctoral fellow Dr. Orly Salama-Alber, accompanied by Hannah Faber, the volunteer coordinator of UVic’s Jewish Students Association, and the same song that has been incorporated into our gift to Dawn Smith, who performed the First Nations acknowledgement earlier. In English, the lyrics read: “Who desires life, loving each day to see good? Then guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it.” (Psalm 34:12-4)

Our first candle will be lit by undergraduate students Shelly Selivanov, Paige Gelfer and Anat Kelerstein and master’s student Keenan Anthony, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and they will be lighting on behalf of the six million Jews who perished in the Shoah.

Our second candle will be lit by I-witness Field School student Cheryl Noon and history graduate student Kaitlin Findlay on behalf of all other persecuted victims of the Holocaust.

photo - Holocaust educators at UVic, left to right, Dr. Helga Thorson, chair, Germanic and Slavic studies department; history professor Dr. Kristin Semmens; and Dr. Charlotte Schallié, co-chair of the European Studies Program — Holocaust educators at UVic, left to right, Dr. Helga Thorson, chair, Germanic and Slavic studies department; history professor Dr. Kristin Semmens; and Dr. Charlotte Schallié, co-chair of the European Studies Program. (photo by Chorong Kim)

Our third candle will be lit by international students Moe Ezzine and Abbie Urquia, who are members of the African Awareness Club, on behalf of all the victims of genocide, including, but not limited to, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Ukrainian genocide and, more recently, the Syrian genocide.

Our fourth candle will be lit by student advocates Lane Foster and Maks Zouboules from the Sexualized Violence Task Force on behalf of all victims of sexualized violence on and off campus.

Our fifth candle will be lit by undergraduate student Nicola Craig Hora and graduate student Lauren Thompson, who are co-designing a teaching unit on the Holocaust for high school students, on behalf of all the children whose lives were cut short and were robbed of their bright futures.

Our sixth candle will be lit by members of the Indigenous Law Students Association, Thomas Laboucan-Avirom and Rachelle Trenholm, on behalf of all victims of residential schools and Japanese internment camps here in Canada.

Our seventh and final candle, our candle of hope, will be lit by Multifaith Services work-study students Olivia Bos and Gabriela Turla, on behalf of all humanity, regardless of their race, religion, creed and sexual orientation.

photo - Team leader Mike Brosselard from Campus Security — Team leader Mike Brosselard from Campus Security. (photo by Chorong Kim)

On stage, between the candles is our broken window. This window is shattered and represents Kristallnacht, the night of Nov. 9, 1938, on which a massive coordinated attack on Jews occurred and swept across Europe, marking the beginning of the Holocaust. This night is otherwise known as the Night of Broken Glass. Throughout this presentation, we will be reclaiming the broken pieces of glass and rebuilding this very window in a communal act of resilience.

The eight window pieces were placed by members or representatives of the following groups: 1) First Nations community; 2) UVic Multifaith Services; 3) Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island; 4) UVic Holocaust educators; 5) Campus Security; 6) student leaders (Jewish Students Association, Indigenous Law Students Association, History Undergraduate Society, Multifaith Services work-study students, Germanic and Slavic studies students, I-witness Field School students, and student advocates from African Awareness Club and Sexualized Violence Task Force); 7) UVic administration (Equity and Human Rights Office); and 8) children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Kristallnacht planning committee.

It takes a community to overcome trauma and rebuild a peaceful future. It also takes a community to prevent trauma from happening in the first place.

Carmel Tanaka is the Hillel BC director at the University of Victoria, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and an advocate for Holocaust awareness.