Pat Johnson – Jewish Independent

Good Abroad: Promoting pluralism in Israel

Then-mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat and Nomi Levin Yeshua at the Jerusalem Foundation of Canada gala in Toronto in 2014. (photo from Nomi Levin Yeshua)

This article is the first in an occasional series about people with British Columbian roots having positive impacts in Israel and elsewhere.

When Nomi Levin Yeshua went to Israel in 1990, she wasn’t committed to staying there. Almost three decades later, the Vancouver-born and -raised woman can look back on a career that has impacted the face of Jerusalem and Israel.

Thanks to a chance meeting over Shabbat lunch with her grandmother’s former neighbour’s sister – “You know Israel,” she said, laughing – Yeshua had barely arrived in Israel when she got a job as assistant to the assistant to Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s mayor – but the job was more than that.

Shula Eisner, Yeshua’s new boss, had been working for Kollek since 1965, just before he began his 28-year run as mayor. Kollek was chairman of the Israel Museum and, before that, had served 11 years as director general of the prime minister’s office under David Ben-Gurion. In that role, Kollek effectively created almost all of the government agencies in the new state.

“One of the things he believed was that there had to be a national museum,” Yeshua told the Independent recently while in Vancouver for a milestone birthday of her mother, Shanie Levin. “He went around raising money to start the Israel Museum. He had an office there and [Eisner] was originally hired there to work with him with all the foreign donors. Then he was elected mayor and he kept to the Israel Museum office.”

In 1966, Kollek founded the Jerusalem Foundation, where Yeshua now works.

“That was his way of creating a forum for supporters of Jerusalem around the world, to be part of creating a new vision for Jerusalem. Then, a year after that, with the Six Day War and the reunification of the city, suddenly everything was just multiplied,” she said.

Yeshua acknowledged that Kollek’s multiple roles as mayor, head of the national museum and leader of a major foundation would probably not be sustainable today, but that was a different time.

“For him, it was all fluid,” she said.

To accommodate his different hats in the era before email or even fax machines, there was a driver who shuffled between offices, taking papers back and forth.

When Eisner moved over to another foundation, she handed her baton to Yeshua, who worked with Kollek through his last years as mayor and continued until a few months before he passed away, in 2007. She continues to run all donor relations for the Jerusalem Foundation and she personally handles Canadian fundraising for the organization.

The Jerusalem Foundation was started by Kollek because he saw that Jerusalem was a very poor city.

“A lot of religious institutions that don’t pay taxes at all are in Jerusalem, so he knew that it was always going to be a challenge for the city to have a balanced budget, to expand the city, to develop the city, to provide for the citizens of the city, so he knew that he was going to need to raise money,” she said.

Kollek pioneered a fundraising model that is now almost universal across Israeli and Jewish philanthropy.

“He connected every donor to a specific project and they knew that their money went to that project and they could come – and now their grandchildren come – and see those projects. To this day, they can still track the money. The Jerusalem Foundation was really at the forefront of that movement of changing the way people were giving to Israel. Now, it’s taken for granted, but it wasn’t back in the late ’60s and early ’70s at all. That was Teddy,” she said. “He wanted people to feel personally connected to the city, to the project, to the place.”

The foundation emphasizes “shared living” and is now focused on a vision for 2030.

“This is a city that is completely about how to exist together in this space that we share. It’s not just Arabs and Jews. It’s also secular and religious, it’s poor and rich, it’s all kinds of divisions that exist in the city,” she said. “But how do we share and how do we understand each other better?”

One major project is Hand-in-Hand School for Bilingual Education.

“Bilingual education is something that Canadians completely understand but Israelis less so. This is a school that teaches in Arabic and in Hebrew, in mixed classrooms. The rest of the Israeli education system is – we don’t like to use this word but it’s the truth – segregated,” she said. “There are Jewish schools, there are Arab schools and then, even within the Jewish schools, there are religious and nonreligious. This school brings together all of the different population groups and at all times there is an Arabic-speaking and a Hebrew-speaking teacher in the classroom.” There are now six such schools around the country.

Another area of the foundation’s work is helping the most vulnerable populations in the city, through projects such as Springboard, which develops programs primarily through the education system to push gifted kids into opportunities their financial situation might not otherwise permit.

The Jerusalem Foundation is also the city’s second-largest funder to the arts, after the municipality.

“We really believe that a modern and thriving city should have a good cultural scene. Culture is not just for one population group. All members of the community should be cultural consumers. But you have to create culture that is appropriate for those people,” she said. “For example, there is a dance troupe for ultra-Orthodox women. They only perform for women, of course, because otherwise that wouldn’t work for them. But they’re really doing amazing stuff and giving these ultra-Orthodox women who want to dance an opportunity to have a really high-level, professional dance troupe within the system that works for them.”

The foundation is also building a new Hassadna Conservatory of Music.

“They help kids ages six all the way through high school with classical music education and they also provide a special program for children of Ethiopian descent who don’t necessarily have the financial means to get musical training and they have a special program for special needs kids that’s integrated,” she said.

Yeshua credits her Vancouver upbringing as foundational to her worldview and accomplishments. She grew up in the Habonim Dror Zionist youth movement and was a camper, counselor and camp director at Camp Miriam. At home, her Jewishness was nurtured in a pluralistic way.

“In terms of how my mother brought us up, Jewish identity wasn’t limited to our religious identity,” she recalled. “National identity was something that was acceptable, cultural identity was very much encouraged. I think growing up in the very open community of Vancouver – to me it always seems that way, at least – it allowed me to be Jewish in a way that I felt good with and it wasn’t only one way to be Jewish.”

Yeshua acknowledged that “many people feel somewhat alienated from Israel today.”

“I want people to understand that there is a way to engage with Israel, to support Israel, and not contradict your own value system or what you think is acceptable,” she said. “What we do with the Jerusalem Foundation is something that people can respond to, relate to, understand – to protect Jerusalem as a city that is for everyone.”

Refugees 40 years on

Sui Khuu and her husband Dar, with their two children. (photo from Shirley Barnett)

In the last couple of years, Jewish congregations and groups in Vancouver have sponsored refugees from Syria, acts of humanitarianism that are inspired in part from ancient and recent history in which Jewish people were strangers in a new land. But this generosity is not new. Forty years ago, in 1979, a similar phenomenon occurred with Vietnamese refugees fleeing conflict in Southeast Asia.

The so-called “boat people” – about two million Vietnamese – fled their homeland in the years following the war there, which ended in 1975. Across Canada, churches, synagogues, service clubs and other groups came together to sponsor refugees. Among these were several B.C. Jewish groups.

Forty years later, one of the refugees sponsored by a group of Jewish friends reflected on the experience.

Sui Khuu was 5 years old when she arrived in Vancouver with her 4-year-old sister Ngoc Lien (informally called Ileen), her father Vinh and grandparents Namson Khuu and Kim Thi Kiu.

“My mom passed away in [a refugee camp in] Thailand,” Khuu told the Independent recently. “She was five months pregnant. She had malaria and she passed away.”

Khuu has no recollections of her life before Canada, but deeply embedded in her memory is the warm welcome she and her family received from the Jewish sponsors as soon as they arrived here.

Four couples joined together to guarantee to the government of Canada that they would ensure the sponsored family got a secure start in their new country: Peter and Shirley Barnett, Abe and Esther Nobleman, Buddy and Cherie Smith and Paul and Edwina Heller.

With the support of Canadian Jewish Congress and Jean Gerber, who worked there at the time, numerous groups banded together to sponsor Vietnamese immigrants, including Beth Israel, Temple Sholom, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and Emanu-El in Victoria, among others.

“Each group had a name and our group chose the name ‘Hope,’” Shirley Barnett recalled. She has kept in close touch with the family across the decades and remembers how Sui was just 7 or 8 years old when she served as translator for her father and grandparents at government meetings and with doctors, teachers and such.

“By the time she was 9, she was the head of the family, because the grandparents never learned to speak English,” Barnett said. The father worked for the Barnetts at their Elephant and Castle restaurant for years. He is now semi-retired. The grandparents have both passed away.

“They were incredibly resourceful, successful,” said Barnett about the family. The girls finished high school and Ileen became an accountant, while Sui is coming up on 29 years as a pharmacy assistant at London Drugs.

“How did they get the strength to turn out so great?” Barnett asked. “The answer came from their grandmother. I remember one day, as a little one, Sui forgot to take her lunch to school and Grandma packed her lunch and found her way to school without speaking English and Sui told me later she found her grandmother wandering in the hallway just trying to find out what classroom she was in to bring her lunch.”

image - An article in the Jewish Independent’s predecessor about Sui Khuu and her family’s citizenship ceremony in 1984 — An article in the Jewish Independent’s predecessor about Sui Khuu and her family’s citizenship ceremony in 1984.

While the grandparents never learned English, they found ways to communicate.

“In those years, my ex-husband, Peter, was still fluent in French and he was able to talk to Grandpa a bit in French,” said Barnett.

Khuu recalls something beyond verbal between her grandmother and Shirley Barnett.

“I can’t imagine how she and Shirley communicated at that time but they totally understood each other,” the daughter said. “That was a great memory. My grandmother was trying to tell Shirley [something] and Shirley totally understood what she wanted her to do.”

She also remembers the Barnetts and Nobelmans picking the family up to take them to dinner, delivering Christmas gifts and taking family members to doctors’ and dentists’ appointments.

“Cherie Smith was in charge of finding them clothes,” Barnett said. “I was in charge of getting them enrolled in a preschool.”

“Shirley got a house for us on East 12th Avenue in Vancouver,” Khuu said. Both girls, now in their 40s, are married and each has a son and a daughter of their own.

Seeing Syrians coming to Canada now evokes memories for Khuu.

“It’s hard when they have young families like what my grandparents and my dad went through,” she said. She is saddened when she hears comments that are unwelcoming toward new Canadians and sees the circle of life in the next generation of refugees finding a home here.

Barnett is effusive about how Sui and Ileen have turned out: “By luck or determination or resilience or whatever they had, they turned out really well. They are just lovely, responsible, charming, caring people.”

History lesson on foot

Tour organizer Carmel Tanaka at one of the tours last stops. (photo by Kayla Isomura)

The first Jewish neighbourhood in Vancouver was in Strathcona, which also served as the first home for many, if not most, cultural communities that make up the diverse fabric of the city. The neighbourhood welcomed wave after wave of immigrants of different backgrounds and continues to do so today. The rich multicultural history of this area – too often overlooked amid the social challenges of the larger Downtown Eastside – was given its due in a series of walking tours this spring.

Carmel Tanaka organized the tours, bringing together almost two dozen community organizations. Tanaka is chair of the human rights committee of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association and an active member of the Jewish community, but the tour is an ad hoc, grassroots project with no umbrella organizing agency. Partnering agencies include Heritage Vancouver, the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society, the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia and the Jewish Independent. The Cross Cultural Strathcona Walking Tour took place each Sunday in May, with two tours each day. Tanaka said she hopes to make the tour an annual event.

Tanaka came up with the idea after participating in a walk of Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s historic black neighbourhood, as part of Jane’s Walks, a global festival of citizen-led walking tours inspired by the late visionary urbanist Jane Jacobs. A week after her exploration of the neighbourhood’s black history, Tanaka took the Jewish Museum’s walking tour of Strathcona.

“We were walking similar streets and even talking about places that are right across the road from each other and I started to think, well, there must have been interaction between our communities,” she told the Independent. “Why not bring the guides, the experts, the archivists and the know-alls into one room and see if we can do something together. What started as a small group of four to five guides, who do existing tours, blossomed into 20-plus participating organizations, including community organizations, heritage organizations, the Vancouver School Board and more. We’ve been told there have been attempts to do something like this before, but not to this degree. It’s very exciting that we’re all working together.”

The tour, which took in Hogan’s Alley, Jewish Strathcona, former Japantown and Chinatown, was intended to build awareness of the contributions of immigrant communities then and now. It took place in May as part of the celebration of Vancouver Asian Heritage Month and Canada’s Jewish Heritage Month.

The theme of the walking tour this year was education and the starting point of the two-and-a-half-hour adventure was Lord Strathcona Elementary School, the city’s oldest. Referred to as the “League of Nations” for its diversity, the school remains one of the most multicultural in the country.

One former Strathcona student, Elder Larry Grant of the Musqueam Nation and Chinese-Canadian communities, recalled the experience of growing up in the area and the impact the cultural mosaic had on him and others.

Opened in March 1891 as East School, it was renamed in 1909 in honour of Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona, who drove the last spike in Canada’s first transcontinental railway. To get a sense of the extraordinary range of ethnicities, a survey in 1940 indicated that the students included 650 of Japanese descent, 300 Chinese, 150 Italian, about 150 Yugoslavian, Ukrainian and Polish students, about 100 of British descent, several from India and a scattering from other European countries. After the regular school day, many of the students would have proceeded to after-school programs in their heritage language at, for example, the Vancouver Japanese Language School and Japanese Hall, a 1906 building on Alexander Street where the tour finished.

photo - A tour participant holds up a picture from the Talmud Torah Grade 4 class, circa 1965; Gita Kron, teacher — A tour participant holds up a picture from the Talmud Torah Grade 4 class, circa 1965; Gita Kron, teacher. *(photo from Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia)*

Jewish kids would have made their way down the block from Strathcona elementary to the B’nei Yehuda synagogue, since converted to condos but, at the time, the spiritual and figurative centre of Jewish life in the city. The synagogue opened in November 1911, with an after-school program in Jewish tradition. A full-time day school, Talmud Torah, opened there in 1921 and moved to its current location on Oak Street in 1948.

In 1942, when the Canadian government instituted a wartime policy against Japanese and Japanese-Canadians, about half of Strathcona school’s population disappeared, forcibly relocated to camps in the British Columbia interior and elsewhere east.

The tour featured different community guides at each destination along the route, bringing together a patchwork of knowledge about different communities to help participants form an impression about how different communities maintained their distinctiveness while interacting with the variety of cultures and languages around them.

Not far from the industrial waterfront, Strathcona grew, in part, from the maritime trade, especially the 1858 discovery of gold in the Fraser Canyon. But, as guides noted, the area has probably been a gathering place for thousands of years, initially as a summer campsite for the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. The 1858 gold rush, and successive ones further north, brought merchants from China and Jewish provisioners from San Francisco. Indentured labourers from China, who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway, helped launch the beginnings of Chinatown in the area around Pender Street. Japanese, Portuguese and Italian immigrants followed, with many working in the Hastings Sawmill and other resource-related industries.

The tour passed the National Council of Jewish Women Neighbourhood House on Jackson Street, a locus of Jewish social activity that is seen as a precursor to the Jewish Community Centre. The Vancouver chapter of NCJW was founded in 1924 and helped new immigrants settle, learn English and find jobs. One of their landmark programs was the Well Baby Clinic, which immunized kids and helped new parents care for their families. National Council remains active today, providing services especially for families and youth, educational and advocacy programs around human trafficking and spreading awareness about Jewish genetic diseases.

Later, the tour passed Oppenheimer Park, named for the city’s first – and so far only – Jewish mayor, David Oppenheimer.

An important part of the tour was Hogan’s Alley. The creation of the Georgia Viaduct destroyed a large part of the historic black neighbourhood but Fountain Chapel, a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal church, still exists, though it is now a private residence.

photo - Vanessa Richards of the Hogan’s Alley Society leads guests down Hogan’s Alley — Vanessa Richards of the Hogan’s Alley Society leads guests down Hogan’s Alley. *(photo by Matt Hanns Schroeter)*

From Hogan’s Alley, the old Canadian National Railway station looms large to the south, and it was the profession of Pullman porter, made up almost exclusively of African-American and black Canadians, that was a launchpad to the middle class for many black families. The development of the black neighbourhood in this location owed its origins to the proximity to the train station.

From there, the tour proceeded into Chinatown and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. A sawmill at the foot of Carrall Street, constructed in 1886, provided employment for many Chinese men and set in motion the establishment of Vancouver’s Chinatown on this block.

In 1947, the Chinese Immigration Act was repealed, rescinding a racist law and opening the door to more Asian newcomers and establishing equal rights, including the right to vote, for Chinese-Canadians. The tour also recalled how, in 1907, a group calling itself the Asiatic Exclusion League incited a mob of about 9,000 rioters who rampaged through Chinatown and Powell Street, smashing windows and destroying properties. This led to the federal government reducing immigration from East Asia.

photo - Aynsley Wong Meldrum welcomes guests to the Mon Keang School in the Wongs’ Benevolent Association building — Aynsley Wong Meldrum welcomes guests to the Mon Keang School in the Wongs’ Benevolent Association building. *(photo by Matt Hanns Schroeter)*

The tour continued to the Mon Keang School in the Wongs’ Benevolent Association building, an example of a Chinatown clan society. These societies supported extended family members as they migrated, serving as housing agency, employment office, post office and bank for new arrivals. Chinese men could borrow money here to pay Canada’s discriminatory head tax and to send money home to their families in China.

Mon Keang School provided a classical Cantonese education to the first generation of local-born children and, in the 1930s, was just one of 10 such Chinese schools in the area. By the 1970s, Chinese families were living throughout the city and Chinese-Canadian kids were choosing sports and other extracurricular activities over Chinese school. Mon Keang School closed in 2011 but reopened in 2016 with a grassroots community program taking a different approach to Chinese language learning.

The history of Christian social action in the neighbourhood is demonstrated powerfully at the corner of Hastings and Gore, where the Salvation Army citadel, now boarded up, stands across from First United Church, a hub of social programs in the Downtown Eastside, and nearby Saint James Anglican, which also has a long activist history. While plenty of good work has emanated from these institutions, during the era of Indian residential schools in Canada, from 1883 to 1996, churches were complicit with the federal government in the genocide of indigenous Canadians through the deliberate and brutal attempts to exterminate indigenous cultures and languages.

The walking tour tries to highlight the main aspects of the area’s history, without romanticizing it.

“This is a grassroots initiative led by myself and a bunch of amazing, dedicated team members,” Tanaka said. “We’re really hoping that this will become an annual event and will be able to include even more communities next year. We’ll see what this turns into.”

King David set for expansion

Architects Acton Ostry, who designed the original building of King David High School, are back for the expansion. (image from KDHS)

Bucking a trend that is seeing Jewish day schools across North America struggling to maintain enrolment, Vancouver’s King David High School is about to launch an expansion that will grow the space by 40% to accommodate increasing demand from students.

The Diamond Foundation, which purchased the land on which the school sits and funded construction of the school, which opened in 2005, has committed $6.5 million for the expansion project. Building is expected to begin in spring 2020, with completion in time for the opening of school in September 2021.

The school was built for 10 classes – two cohorts in each of grades 8 to 12.

“The challenge is, unfortunately, they don’t come in even numbers,” said Russ Klein, King David’s head of school. “You have some years where you have huge groups and then you have years where you have lesser groups. The challenge of dealing with a third cohort in a grade is really, really challenging. It was really built for two classes per grade and, as soon as you add a third class in a grade, it changes the whole structure.

“For the last three years, we’ve been squeezing in,” he continued. The expansion will permit 13 or 14 classes, with the flexibility to accommodate bulges, like the large cohorts in the current Grade 8 and Grade 11 classes.

Originally envisioned for about 200 students, the school’s enrolment is now 236.

“Thankfully, when we talked to the Diamonds, they were totally on board with helping us get to where we want to be, to be the best school we can be for our community,” he said.

The project will add an additional 13,000 square feet to the school’s current 33,000 square feet. Architects Acton Ostry, who designed the original building, are back for the expansion.

The two-storey existing building is the maximum height allowed by the city, so the increased space will be accommodated by digging down. There is already an underground level featuring a parkade. That will be extended and an additional sub-basement dug beneath it. The land around the school will be excavated to allow natural light into the new sub-level spaces, with stairs and an accessible ramp leading to the outdoor activity area.

The lowest sub-basement level will include changing rooms for students, additional gender-neutral bathrooms, a computer technology room and storage, which is lacking in the existing school.

The basement level will feature a state-of-the-art music room with three rehearsal areas and a control room so that students can record music. Also on that level will be an office for the physical education staff.

Added to the existing main floor will be a drama space and film studio with a green screen, where students can work on movie-making, film-editing and drama programs. Also in the works is an “innovation lab,” still in the planning stage, which could include 3-D printers and other hands-on learning tools where students can co-create a range of projects and explore individual interests. The existing drama and music spaces will be converted into general classrooms, Klein said, “so we get the extra bang there as well.”

The top floor will accommodate more new classrooms and a teachers’ workroom. A number of small offices will also be integrated into the new design.

When completed, the school’s existing space and new areas will merge seamlessly, Klein said, as if part of the original structure.

Notably, despite the expansion to the east of the existing building, useable outdoor space will increase with the removal of a hill at the edge of the property and a reorganization of the playing courts.

The entire project will involve minimal disruption to students because most of the work will take place outside of the existing school. One area that will be affected is the loss of outdoor space for a school year. Aside from that, the most disruptive impacts should be some construction noise, said Klein.

The $6.5 million commitment from the Diamond Foundation covers all the brick-and-mortar components. As part of the commitment, the King David community is to raise an additional $765,000 for furnishings, technology and other “soft costs,” Klein said. Also part of the agreement is that the school increase its existing endowment, which stands at about $1 million, to $5 million over the next five years. The revenue from the endowment is intended to create a fund that ensures tuition affordability and accessibility regardless of family capacity.

Klein lauded the Diamonds’ visionary commitment to continuity.

“They are the greatest supporters of Jewish education in the city,” said the principal. “We are so in awe of what they’re doing and their willingness to do it and just step up and support the growth of the school, to demonstrate how proud they are of what the school has done and not just with their talk but with their actions and their leadership.”

The co-presidents of the King David board of directors, Jackie Cristall Morris and Neville Israel, noted that school enrolment has increased 70% in 10 years.

“The expansion will allow us to grow and to keep striving towards meeting our school vision of being a dynamic leader in empowering Jewish minds and engaging Jewish hearts for the modern world,” they wrote in a statement to the Independent. “We are incredibly grateful for the Diamond family’s support of King David since the school’s early days. Simply put, King David would not have existed without the support of the Diamonds both in building the school, providing us free use of the building and in supporting our Judaic studies program, which is now well regarded under the leadership of Rabbi Stephen Berger.”

The Diamond Foundation has been run by Gordon and Leslie Diamond and their daughters Jill Diamond and Lauri Glotman. Recently, Leslie Diamond said, the next generation of family – Glotman’s children Bram Glotman, Sadye Dixon and Carly Glotman – has joined the foundation.

Leslie Diamond acknowledges that she has been King David’s most avid proponent within the family foundation. “To me, it was very important there be a high school to carry on those traditions and to instil the purpose of keeping those traditions,” she said. “I think that kids going to King David will have a better chance of feeling their roots and not leaving them.”

The need for more space is a sign of the excellent health and strength of the community, she said.

“Even though we think that we’re small compared to Toronto and the east, we really are a strong community,” Diamond said. “The success of the school proves that. The fact that they’re growing by leaps and bounds means there is a need for a Jewish high school, which goes back to my thoughts in the very beginning.”

In addition to excellence in Judaic and general education and the range of additional curricular and extracurricular options, there is something that Diamond said King David offers that she sees as vitally important for young people. “There is this need of belonging, which you don’t get in a public school,” she said.

D-Day: heroism, horror

The fear, bloodshed and massive loss of life in the cause of freedom are illustrated through remarkable – and convincing – dramatic reenactments in D-Day in 14 Stories. (photo from YAP Films and the History Channel)

The horrors and heroism of D-Day took place 75 years ago June 6. A remarkable new documentary, with distinct Canadian and Jewish connections, will air on the History Channel June 1. D-Day in 14 Stories includes firsthand recollections from Allied and German soldiers and French civilians – many of them kids or teenagers at the time of the conflict.

The massive battle of the Second World War saw more than 150,000 Canadian, American, British and other Allied soldiers storm the beaches of France, marking the turning point of Nazi – and Allied – fortunes.

D-Day in 14 Stories is a social history of D-Day, a joint production of YAP Films and the History Channel. The events on that long-ago day in 1944 are illuminated by eyewitness accounts from some of the few remaining veterans of that historic battle.

On D-Day alone, 359 Canadian soldiers were killed. More than 5,000 Canadian soldiers died during the succeeding weeks of fighting in Normandy. The fear, bloodshed and massive loss of life in the cause of freedom are illustrated through remarkable – and convincing – dramatic reenactments, visual effects and historical footage, including a trove of colour film taken by a soldier using an early Bell and Howell handheld movie camera.

Many soldiers on both sides were just following orders but, as Morton Waitzman recounts in the documentary, some Jewish soldiers felt a particular motivation.

“Being of the Jewish faith myself, and so many of my comrades, we knew we had to get over there as soon as possible to do whatever we could to stop this terrible curse,” he said. As a communications specialist, he connected American and British forces with members of the French Underground to help coordinate the battle.

photo - D-Day in 14 Stories makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers — D-Day in 14 Stories makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers. *(photo from YAP Films and the History Channel)*

The Germans were anticipating an attack, but had no idea when, where or how large a force the Allies would assemble. The documentary follows a wall of soldiers parachuting through a cascade of tracers. In all, 13,000 Americans dropped inland by air to support the amphibious landing and undermine the German response.

While one Allied soldier says, “Anybody who says they weren’t afraid is not telling the truth,” a German soldier recounts, tellingly: “We had no fear. We were convinced that we would win.”

Until D-Day, the British Air Force had strafed the Normandy coast, but returned to their island redoubt. French residents of the area were familiar with the routine: take shelter when the alarms go off and come back out when they ring again.

Bernard Marie was a 5-year-old child in Normandy at the time.

“The big difference is that, on June 6th, the siren never came back,” he said.

In all, 7,000 vessels embarked from Britain to the French coast. The Allies had no illusions about the cost of the operation. Casualties were anticipated to reach 25 to 30%.

Emotionally powerful dramatizations follow 16- and 17-year-olds as they face the life-and-death moment for themselves and the free world.

“Some never got off the boat,” recalled one soldier. “They were shot, bodies laid all over, boats turned upside down, real chaos. We still kept going forward.… Soldiers.”

One survivor remembers that, despite the explosions all around him, his sole consideration when coming ashore at Normandy was that his socks were soaked through.

The average soldier was carrying 35 kilograms on his back and, for those whose vessels did not manage to make it close to shore, jumping off the ship, in many cases, led to almost instantaneous drowning.

If they survived the initial landing, the soldiers had to confront the German enemy firing down from above at Allied soldiers who were effectively sitting ducks. A German soldier recalls: “We merely had to point that machine gun and it was like cutting wheat with a scythe. For the odd miss, we had a thousand hits.”

The film admirably makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers.

Waitzman, the Jewish American soldier, went on to fight in Europe and participated in the liberation of concentration camps.

“We became eyewitnesses to the Holocaust by what we saw,” he says in the film. “We were very compelled to tell the details to young people. We had to talk, to fight this as much as possible.”

Another veteran of the battle reflects on the loss of life, but ponders the alternative: “God knows what would’ve happened if we hadn’t done it.”

Korczak course at UBC

A postcard showing Janusz Korczak in the courtyard of the orphanage on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, Poland, in the early 1930s.

An unprecedented interdisciplinary event will take place this summer at the University of British Columbia, focusing on the legacy of Janusz Korczak, a pioneer in the area of children’s rights and welfare.

Korczak is perhaps remembered most for his final act of heroism: his refusal to accept an offer of a reprieve, choosing instead to walk with the 200 or so orphaned children of his school as they were sent to their deaths at Treblinka. But it is his legacy as an educator, physician and writer that will be the focus of the 2019 Korczak Summer Institute. The two-week intensive program, called Advocacy in Action: The Legacy of Janusz Korczak, is open to graduate and undergraduate students across disciplines. It takes place July 2-11.

“To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a university-based course on the work of Janucz Korczak, not in his native Poland, not in Israel, certainly not in North America,” said Rabbi Dr. Hillel Goelman, professor emeritus in UBC’s department of educational and counseling psychology, and special education. The program was developed across disciplines, reflecting Korczak’s range of academic and philosophical work.

“He was a pediatrician by training, so we reached out to the department of pediatrics to get their help and a number of faculty members are going to do Korczak-related activities,” said Goelman. “He was an educator, so the faculty of education were happy to co-sponsor the course with the Januscz Korczak Association [of Canada]. But it would also be open to people studying social work or any sort of child-focused activity. A lot of people at UBC support the whole cause of child activism and child welfare from an interdisciplinary perspective.”

Korczak’s philosophy inspired and informed the United Nations Charter on the Rights of Children. Importantly, his work was not limited to academics or writing, but was devoted to applying his values of child empowerment directly to the real world.

“Children are not the people of tomorrow but people today,” Korczak wrote. “They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals.”

“In the orphanage that he ran in Warsaw, they had a children’s parliament, where children elected their leaders to make the rules and enforce the rules,” said Goelman. “There was a children’s court, where children could complain about their treatment either by the staff or by other students. There was a children’s newspaper that they published. He very much empowered children and he thought it was important to draw on this and give them opportunities to develop their own leadership. I think those are all very important contemporary messages for educators, social workers, pediatricians … and it’s kind of timeless. It’s really relevant to where we are today in terms of child activism, child welfare and child advocacy.”

The institute is designed to help participants transform their working environment to model democratic principles pioneered by Korczak in his writings, pedagogy and governance of the orphanages under his care. It will also encourage participants to adopt strategies to translate the respect for children’s rights into professional practices, including communication with parents and the larger community, and to learn how to help children in developing and sustaining their cultural identity, particularly among those who may struggle with multiple identities.

The course will be taught by Prof. Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady, an internationally recognized expert on the life and legacy of Korczak and adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University. She will be joined by a team of international and national invited speakers: teacher trainer and UNICEF consultant Jonathan Levy (Paris, France); founders and leaders in the field of social pediatrics Dr. Gilles Julien and Hélène Trudel (Montreal); researcher and practitioner of Korczak’s legacy Wojtek Lasota (Warsaw, Poland); several UBC professors of nursing and psychology; U.S.-Canadian writer Tilar Mazzeo (Victoria); and a Holocaust survivor and poet, Vancouverite Lillian Boraks-Nemetz.

Promoting Korczak’s pedagogical ideas, as well as their effect on children’s education, is part of the mandate of the Janucz Korczak Association of Canada, which was founded in 2002. The president, Jerry Nussbaum, lives in Vancouver, as do fellow board members Goelman and Boraks-Nemetz.

“His work is very much alive,” said Goelman of Korczak.

The deadline to register for the UBC course is May 28: pdce.educ.ubc.ca/child-advocacy.

Honouring our heroes

Elad Pelleg and his grandmother, Dvora. Pelleg shared his family’s story during the community’s Yom Hazikaron ceremony May 7. (photo from Elad Pelleg)

The sacrifices Israeli families have made for 71 years were marked in Vancouver last week during Yom Hazikaron ceremonies. The tragic losses of life in wars, intifadas and terror attacks were memorialized by hundreds of attendees at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver May 7.

The annual ceremony, led by Geoffrey Druker, specifically acknowledges family members and friends of local community members who have died defending Israel. The impacts of the losses were individualized through the stories of particular families, including numerous who lost more than one member, often across generations and in different wars.

Elad Pelleg, the Dror Israel youth movement shaliach (emissary) to Camp Miriam, shared the story of his grandmother, Dvora Pelleg, a narrative of Zionist longing, loss and rededication.

Dvora was born in Hungary, in 1921, the second daughter in an Orthodox family of seven children.

“As a teenager, she joined a Zionist youth movement, where she discovered a new world, and a new yearning was born: to live in the land of Israel,” her grandson told the audience in the Wosk Auditorium.

He recounted the story as his grandmother had told it to him: “One day, we were invited to see a movie about the chalutzim (pioneers) … I asked my mother to join me, to see for herself what Zionism was all about, and understand my dream of moving there. She came from a very Orthodox family. This was not an easy request for her to fulfil. She deliberated and, in order not to disappoint me, decided to come. She did not want to be recognized, so she disguised herself and joined me for the movie. At a time when antisemitism was rampant, seeing a movie that showed the freedom and spirit of living in the land of Israel brought her to tears.”

Dvora went on to become a Zionist youth leader and received additional training, hachshara, in preparation for aliyah to the land of Israel.

“In the hachshara, she met my grandfather, Yosef,” Pelleg said. “In 1939, the war broke out and their lives changed completely. My grandparents, Dvora and Yosef, decided to move to the capital, Budapest, in an attempt to migrate to Israel illegally. They failed to make this journey, stayed in Budapest and got married in 1942. On the 22nd of August, 1943, their son Michael was born.”

photo - Dvora Pelleg holding baby Michael — Dvora Pelleg holding baby Michael. *(photo from Elad Pelleg)*

When the Nazis invaded Hungary, Yosef was sent to a labour camp, while Dvora fought to survive with baby Michael.

“She had to keep moving between cellars and attics; she suffered from hunger, and ended up surviving only due to her tremendous effort,” said Pelleg. “My grandfather survived a number of labour camps and a death march. After the war, he returned to Budapest to reunite with my grandmother and Michael.”

Dvora lost her parents, Hanna and Yitzchak, as well as three siblings, all murdered in Auschwitz.

“The only thing left from her mother is a single photo she carried on her throughout the war,” Pelleg said. “Being refugees in their own country, they sought a way to Eretz Israel. In 1947, they boarded an unauthorized ship, Geula, with many other Holocaust survivors. The British, who at that time governed the land of Israel, stopped the ship and sent them to an internment camp in Cyprus, where they were held for almost a year.

“It was there, behind barbed wire, that they heard [about] the establishment of the state of Israel, on May 15, 1948,” Pelleg said. “Later that year, they finally made it to Israel, where two sons were born: Shimon and my father, Eli.” The couple Hebraized their named to Pelleg from Pollock when they began working for the Israeli government.

Michael grew up in Israel, graduated high school with honours and served in the army as a combat medic. Following his army service, he enrolled in university and studied accounting. In 1966, he married the love of his life, Ester.

“In 1967, the Six Day War broke out,” Pelleg recounted. “Michael did not receive an army call-up, but his heart commanded him to pack a bag and join his unit. Before leaving the house for the last time in his life, he said to his mother, ‘I can’t stay in the classroom while the army is fighting to defend our country.’

“When he reached his unit, he found that they already had a medic in place, yet he insisted on joining them anyway. On the first day of the war, June 5, 1967, in a fierce battle on the outskirts of Rafiah, his armoured vehicle was hit. Michael Pollock, the uncle I never met, was killed.

“My grandmother had to bear the heavy burden on her shoulders and in her soul, of not only being a Holocaust survivor, but also a bereaved mother. Her family was murdered on European soil and her son died in battle in Israel and, this time, she could not save him.

“When I was born, my parents gave me the middle name Michael, in his memory,” said Pelleg. “Being my grandmother’s first grandson, we have a very special connection and she is a very significant figure in my life. As a child, visiting her in her house, I would ask her many questions: about her family, about the events of the Holocaust, about Michael and why he died in the war. Slowly and with great difficulty, she opened up and shared with me her story, the story of our family.”

When Pelleg was 13, the year of his bar mitzvah, he started participating in Yom Hazikaron memorial ceremonies with his family, and described a typical commemoration.

“We start in the evening with a ceremony at Beit Yad L’Banim, the memorial home for fallen soldiers, in the city of Ramat Gan,” he said. “In the ceremony, they read the names of all the fallen soldiers of the city, sing a few songs and read passages about mourning, bereavement and love that will never be fulfilled. When Michael’s name is called, we light a candle in his memory and listen quietly to Savta crying softly at the end of the row.

“On Yom Hazikaron, the following morning, we meet at the military cemetery at Kiriyat shul. There are thousands of graves there and, around each one of them, a family like mine gathers. We all stand together and listen to the chazzan recite El Maleh Rachamim.”

Despite all this, Pelleg said his grandmother’s story is not only a story of mourning and bereavement but also of strength and resilience.

“In memory of their son, my grandparents decided to dedicate the rest of their lives in service of the state of Israel,” he said. “My grandfather worked first as a civilian in the army, and then in the Ministry of Defence. My grandmother worked in the Mossad, the national intelligence agency, until she retired. After my grandfather passed away, she chose to volunteer at a nonprofit called Yad Sarah, which provides medical equipment for those in need.”

Now 98 years old, Dvora is no longer able to attend the memorial ceremonies. On her 90th birthday, Pelleg told her: “Your life shapes my identity, my choices in life, and is expressed through my middle name, Michael, which I carry proudly.”

The JCC Choir, led by Noa Cohen, as well as Ellen Silverman on piano and Kinneret Sieradzky on violin, provided musical tributes. Rabbi Shlomo Gabay chanted El Maleh Rachamim. Rabbi Philip Gibbs said Kaddish. If’at Eilon-Heiber lit a yahrzeit candle for her friend Yaacov Koma and Samuel Heller lit a candle for his friend Adero Ahonim. Yoni Rechter, who was the featured performer at the next night’s celebration of Israel’s independence day, sang his hit song “Tears of Angels.” The event was co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

Druker marked the end of Yom Hazikaron at the Chan Centre just prior to the beginning of the community’s Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration. The festivities opened with the singing of O Canada and Hatikvah by the King David High School Choir, directed by Johnny Seguin, and included remarks by Karen James, Candace Kwinter and this year’s shinshinim (volunteer emissaries) from Israel, Or Aharoni and Ofir Gady, as well as a video of greetings from previous shinshinim and a call for hosts for next year’s volunteers. The JCC’s Orr Chadash and Orr Atid dancers, under the leadership of Noga Vieman, performed, as did the Juice Band, before Rechter and his fellow musicians took to the stage. The annual Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration is presented by Jewish Federation, with hotel sponsor Georgian Court, media sponsor Jewish Independent and 45 other community partners. For an interview with Rechter, see jewishindependent.ca/israeli-music-icon-sings-here.

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.”

Friendly below the radar

At the JNF Negev Gala April 14, left to right: comedian Elon Gold, JNF Pacific Region president Bernice Carmeli, Ambassador Ron Prosor, JNF Pacific Region executive director Ilan Pilo and JNF Canada chief executive officer Lance Davis. (photo from JNF Pacifoc Region)

The diplomatic cold shoulder Israel has received from African, Asian and Arab countries has been thawing in recent years, and a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations says the situation is even more encouraging under the radar screen.

Ambassador Ron Prosor, who was the Jewish state’s representative at the world body from 2011 to 2015, spoke at the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Negev Gala Sunday night.

The UN General Assembly is a den of hypocrisy, Prosor said, citing the presence of the most oppressive countries on committees dealing with human rights. The UN Human Rights Council has been dominated by states with the world’s worst human rights records. Moreover, the council, which is supposed to be concerned with human rights abuses all over the world, has a specific article that singles out only one country for routine, ritual denunciation.

“Surprise, surprise – Israel,” Prosor said. “The structural and institutional bias against Israel is unbelievable. There is stuff that I can’t even invent. The Saudis chairing the conference on the status of women. The Iranians … they’re deputy chairs on nonproliferation and arms control.

“What is amazing is not the bad guys,” he continued. “The bad guys are easy to explain. What is really difficult to explain is the so-called like-minded countries.”

European nations and some of the other democracies that make up a minority of the countries at the General Assembly routinely side with despotic regimes against Israel. In such a situation, small victories count heavily. Prosor took heart when countries opted to abstain from votes rather than side against Israel.

He shared an anecdote about Pablo, the ambassador of Panama, an apparent reference to Pablo Antonio Thalassinós.

“‘Pablo, are you with us on this vote? Are you going to vote for us?’” Prosor recounts asking. “‘No. How can I vote? The Arabs are threatening me. What do we do?’ I look at Pablo. He looks at me. I say, ‘Pablo, I feel you’re beginning to catch the flu.’” In the story, the Panamanian begins to cough.

Prosor shared stories of similar conversations with other ambassadors, convincing them to abstain or not show up for votes, and even making him their proxy vote in these latter instances.

While a great many votes relating to Israel are still deeply lopsided, he said, ambassadors like him have helped some others understand that abstaining is better than a no vote.

“The United States of America moves the embassy to Jerusalem. The Europeans take the Americans to the General Assembly,” Prosor said. “One hundred and thirty-nine countries vote against, 32 countries vote for and 21 countries have huge navigation problems finding the General Assembly. Huge navigation problems. Not coincidental.”

Behind the scenes, Israel is not the isolated pariah it appears, he contended.

“In essence, Israel talks with everyone,” Prosor told the audience at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. “The only ones we do not talk to, or I didn’t talk to, are the Syrian ambassador and the Iranian ambassador. We talk to countries that you guys would be amazed. First of all, most of the Arab countries, countries that we don’t have diplomatic ties with. As the Germans would say, we don’t have to kiss each other on the main road.”

For example, Prosor said, India’s relationship with Israel has grown very warm in recent years.

“The ambassador of India loves Israel,” he noted. “India votes against Israel in every committee and every subcommittee. When we hit the atomic reactor in Syria, the ambassador came to me, ‘Ron, amazing work. It’s good that you showed them.’ Then he goes over to the Security Council [and says], ‘We absolutely condemn Israel.…’ So, there is a difference between relations and voting patterns.”

Relations between Israel and the Sunni Arab world are changing dramatically, he said, due to shared concerns over the Shiite theocracy in Iran.

“I can tell you that what you see happening now in the Arab world, the Sunni world, is something that has been prepared for many years,” he said. “What you see now is not because the Sunni world – the Saudis and the others – really give a toss about the Palestinians. They fear that the rope is tightening around their necks because of Iran and they have decided they have coinciding interests with Israel. I don’t care why – this is an amazing opportunity for us to coordinate and cooperate.”

Prosor remains defiant despite the pillorying his country continues to receive at the world body.

“We have nothing to be ashamed of. They have [things] to be ashamed of,” he said of Israel’s critics. “Political structures, attitude toward women, gays … we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Of the 193 countries at the UN, he noted, only 87 are democracies. Twenty-two are members of the Arab League, 56 are part of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and 126 countries are part of the so-called nonaligned group. By contrast, Israel is the only country at the UN that is not a part of any regional grouping. This means Israel cannot sit on any committees or subcommittee of the body.

In such a context, he said, humour and sarcasm go a long way. Elon Gold, a comedian who followed Prosor on the bimah Sunday, remarked that the ambassador was funnier than he was. Prosor shared stories of what seem like diplomatic pranks.

“There are six [official] languages at the United Nations,” he said. “One of them is Arabic. I had, on my team, Arab speakers. I decided to tell them that they have to speak and respond in the different committees in Arabic. Suddenly, someone presses the microphone and, in Arabic, bashes the Arabs. Arabs don’t know what’s happening. Europeans are surprised. They don’t know where it’s coming from.”

Overall, the ambassador said, things that are not clearly visible bode well for the future.

“Under the radar screen, there is huge support for Israel,” he said. But, he warned of evolving tactics by Israel’s enemies to weaken it.

“The battle that we are in may be the toughest battle that we’ve been in since the beginning of the state of Israel,” he said. “They tried to take us out with military means and that didn’t work out. They tried economic boycotts. Today, they are trying to put a wedge between Israel and the Jewish communities abroad, going after the mutual values that we all respect, that we all live with. It’s lies, half-truths, Chinese torture – drop, drop, drop – and we have to be out there and call it and fight it and not look away. We have to confront it and work together.

“Inside the United Nations, I saw flags of 193 countries,” he concluded. “I saw 15 flags with a crescent on them, 25 flags with a cross on them but only one flag with the Magen David, and we should all work, every day, to make sure that this flag flies strong, high and proud in the family of nations where it belongs.”

photo - Funds from the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Negev Gala will support an animal-assisted therapy centre in the city of Sderot — Funds from the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Negev Gala will support an animal-assisted therapy centre in the city of Sderot. *(photo from hanof.kkl.org.il)*

In addition to comedian Gold (see story, jewishindependent.ca/jnf-gala-features-comic-gold), the evening featured a few speakers, including Sanford Cohen paying tribute to the philanthropic work of honourary event chairs Bob Markin and Ralph Markin at a gala dinner before the main program, and JNF Pacific Region president Bernice Carmeli offering remarks at the dinner and during the program. Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt spoke about humour in Jewish theology. Actor and writer Josh Epstein emceed. Shannon Gorski chaired the event and Shirley Hirsch was convenor. Ilan Pilo, Jerusalem emissary and executive director of JNF Pacific Region, recognized past president David Goldman.

Funds from the event will support an animal-assisted therapy centre in the city of Sderot, where children and adults live with post-traumatic stress disorder due to years of rocket and mortar attacks from nearby Gaza. The project was described to the audience by Lance Davis, chief executive director of Jewish National Fund of Canada.

Interacting with genocide

A project of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, the national educational tour about the Holodomor began in 2015 and has reached about 30,000 Canadian high school students so far. (photo by Pat Johnson)

What constitutes a genocide? How many Ukrainians were murdered by Josef Stalin’s human-created famine in the 1930s? Would you stand up in a situation where lives were at risk – even if it meant you might become targeted?

These were some of the questions confronted by Grade 12 students of King David High School last week. A national educational tour about the Holodomor – the mass murder of Ukrainians by the Soviet regime – pulled into Vancouver, opening the eyes of young people to this chapter of history.

Beginning in 1932, the Soviet government under Stalin began a calculated, systematic famine in Ukraine, seizing all food sources, cutting off escapes for people fleeing starvation and implementing summary execution for the crime of stealing the smallest piece of sustenance. Farming was collectivized, creating catastrophic conditions. Political and intellectual elites were murdered.

Some details, including the number of Ukrainians killed, remain cloaked in uncertainty because, from the start, the Holodomor was deliberately hidden from the outside world through a comprehensive system of censorship and misinformation, as well as the complicity of media and other countries. Estimates of the number of dead range from seven million to 14 million.

Holodomor is a portmanteau made up of holod, starvation, and mor, death, meaning “death by starvation.”

photo - Last week, King David High School Grade 12 students and others participated in the educational tour — Last week, King David High School Grade 12 students and others participated in the educational tour. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

The Holodomor National Awareness Tour consists of a bus-sized repurposed former recreational vehicle. Rather than a static exhibition through which participants walk, the vehicle has been retrofitted with a 30-foot screen down one interior wall and 30 theatre-style seats down the other, with interactive tablets that invite students to study and discuss in small groups before reconvening to share what they’ve learned with the larger group. A project of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, the tour began in 2015 and has reached about 30,000 Canadian high school students so far.

The Holodomor was not an endeavour to kill an enemy, but an effort to restructure society, a form of social engineering at its most extreme. In September 1932, Stalin wrote to one of his lieutenants that Ukraine was restive. The Soviets perceived Ukrainians as being profoundly religious, individualistic, believers in private property and attached to their plots of land, making them unsuitable for building communism. Addressing these perceived flaws would require, according to Soviet leaders, an action so extreme that a word had not yet been invented to describe the intent.

The entire agricultural sector was upended by collectivization and resisters were murdered or sent to gulags, Soviet concentration camps. At first, remaining supplies of food sustained the Ukrainian people, but those reserves were soon depleted, while the Soviets extracted ever-increasing quotas of grain and Soviet wheat exports to the West grew. As the Holodomor proceeded, NKVD secret police were sent to search for and confiscate any remaining food sources. While those caught stealing or concealing food were executed, for millions more, fate was less sudden.

“Most of the victims died slowly, at home,” according to the narrator of one of the interactive films viewed by students. “Special NKVD units raided people’s homes to collect the dead bodies. They received 200 grams of bread for every dead body they delivered.”

Students examined the forces that allowed the Soviet Union to hide the reality from the world. For the Soviets’ part, there was censorship and the threat of retaliation for those who shared the truth. But their crimes were abetted by Western figures, including New York Times correspondent Walter Durante, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the USSR, even as he misrepresented the Holodomor. In one article, titled “Hungry, not starving,” Durante wrote that there is no actual starvation or death from starvation, though he acknowledged there was widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Leading journalism figures from the time are brought to life through reenactments. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, reflected on being raised in a socialist household and how he was enthusiastic about traveling to the Soviet Union to report on the utopia being created there. When he saw the reality, he evaded Soviet censors by sending his dispatches home via the British embassy’s consular pouch.

One of the heroic figures of the story is Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who risked his life to bring the truth from Ukraine. He convened a press conference in Berlin, on March 29, 1933. But the timing was terrible. The Soviets were about to launch a show trial against six U.K. citizens, accusing them of espionage in what would become known as the Metro-Vickers Affair.

In order to remain in the USSR and report on what promised to be a trial of global importance, journalists had to stay on good terms with the authorities.

“It would have been professional suicide to make an issue of the famine then,” one reenactor remarked. “So, none of us supported Jones.”

Lauren Shore is a student in King David’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 course. The class, created by teacher Anna-Mae Wiesenthal, is delivered during lunch hour and, while students receive credit, they take the course in addition to their full complement of other classes. A province-wide genocide studies elective course is part of the new B.C. curriculum and will be offered next year at schools that opt-in.

Shore, with a partner, did a project on the Holodomor.

“Since there is a lot of debate on whether it’s a genocide or not, and how it was planned, we decided to focus on that,” she said. “We were focusing on the different steps of genocide [and] people were debating whether it was a genocide or not, since it wasn’t necessarily planned as exactly as other genocides were. As we looked into it, we found that it was planned just as much as the other genocides, just in other, more subtle ways.”

Solly Khalifa, also in Grade 12, was impressed with the interactivity of the Holodomor tour.

“I was astonished at how innovative it is,” he said. “They really get everybody participating and it’s very interesting and an easy way to participate also.”

Classmate Noah McNamara saw parallels between the Holodomor and the Holocaust.

“All genocides are kind of similar, in that it’s a governing body that takes advantage of their power to push a goal,” he said. “In the Holocaust, [it was] the Aryan race that they wanted to push. In this case, it was communism that they wanted to push. I think it’s important for us now to be aware of aggressive governments and governments that are trying to radically push things, because that’s definitely a precursor to genocide.”

Ava Katz, who worked with Shore on their Holodomor project this year, noted that studies of the Holocaust enforce the dictum “never again.”

“But I feel like sometimes that’s overlooked with other genocides,” she said. “Not a lot of people will say that. But when you really study other genocides in-depth and see how severe they are, it’s important that we never let any of them happen again.”

The cross-country tour operates with a shoestring staff. Alexi Marchel leads students though the experience. Kevin Viaene drives the bus and supports the program.