Pat Johnson – Jewish Independent

On brink of radical change

Prof. Shlomo Hasson was slated to bring a pessimistic forecast for the Middle East’s future to a Vancouver lecture March 31, but his visit was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. (photo from CFHU Vancouver)

The Middle East is in a time of historical change and geopolitical shifts. The outcome is unknown and, for Israel, there may be good and bad consequences.

This is a core message from Prof. Shlomo Hasson, a professor at the department of geography, School of Public Policy, and Leon Safdie Chair at the Institute of Urban and Regional Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Hasson was to speak in Vancouver March 31 at an event organized by the Vancouver chapter of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, but the lecture was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. The Independent spoke with him by telephone about what he intended to discuss.

“We are in the midst of turmoil in the Middle East because we have this havoc with Iran and the intensifying tension between the United States and Iran,” he said. “We have the ongoing conflict within the Middle East, especially in Syria, the war now between Turkey and Syria. We have the recent events in Libya, we have a worsening situation in Yemen. I’m not optimistic about the Middle East and, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian case … the peace talks were stalled for a long time and now it seems that [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s initiative, in a way, helps to revive the issue but did it in such an awkward way that I’m not optimistic at all about the consequences of this initiative.”

The warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as with some Gulf states, is cause for limited hope, he said.

“This is indeed a good reason to celebrate because there has been a change, even a significant change, between the Gulf states and even Saudi Arabia, and Israel because [they] are facing the same adversary, which is Iran,” Hasson said. “Israel supports Saudi Arabia because it supports them in containing Iran. In that sense, I think there is something to celebrate but this is very modest, because … the public in Saudi Arabia, for example, does not support Israel. It’s sort of an alliance between the rulers of the countries, but the public is not there yet.”

An additional crisis is climate change, which is hitting the region especially hard and will continue to do so, although this also presents opportunities for Israel to build bridges.

“We face the problem of water scarcity and droughts and flooding,” Hasson said. “I think that, especially in this crisis, Israel can help a lot because we have the technology, we’ve mastered the know-how and we can help the Middle East and Africa, while coping with this issue.”

Speaking before the most recent Israeli elections, Hasson predicted that, regardless of the outcome, they wouldn’t play a significant role in the bigger Middle East picture.

“Israel is not the central actor here,” he said. The central actors are Saudi Arabia and Iran, with China, Russia and the United States intervening from outside.

“Israel is in a position of reacting to these global, regional and intra-state developments,” he said. Even if Blue and White had won, said Hasson, it is still a right-wing party and the Israeli populace is developing a rightward consensus. “I don’t think that these elections are going to present a significant change in Israel’s political behaviour.”

He compares this moment in Middle East history to the pivotal epochs of the past.

“About 100 years ago, we still had the Ottoman Empire and, after that, we had the colonial regimes, the Sykes-Picot regimes, and then we have the nation-state regimes. The Middle East is at the brink of a change, a radical change, and nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen to the Middle East,” said Hasson. “But, in a way, it’s going to affect everything, it’s going to affect the global structure, it’s going to affect the relationships between the United States, China and Russia.”

Modern matchmakers

YVR Yenta is the brainchild of Madison Slobin, left, Ben Eizenberg and Ariel Martz-Oberlander. Adapting to the realities of dating during the coronavirus crisis, they have introduced the online meetup Love in the Time of Covid: Virtual Single Mingle. This photo was taken before physical distancing was required. (photo by Madison Slobin)

Three young Jewish Vancouverites have set up a collective to help their friends – and their friends’ friends – find a romantic match “using old traditions to find modern love.”

YVR Yenta is the brainchild of Madison Slobin, Ben Eizenberg and Ariel Martz-Oberlander. The three believe that their old country methods, with the application of 21st-century technology, can procure a better match than any computer algorithm. Describing meaningful connections as “the antidote to capitalist alienation,” the matchmakers see a need to fill in a city where “finding the perfect view is easy, but finding someone to share it with can be challenging,” according to their introductory material.

The matchmaking collective was just getting up and running when the coronavirus crisis hit, but that hasn’t set them back. They resorted to technology to organize Love in the Time of Covid: Virtual Single Mingle, where anyone is welcome to join an online group chat, then tell the yentas of anyone they might like to be introduced to for virtual (and, perhaps later, in-person) meetups.

The idea of incorporating old world matchmaking practices with 21st-century singles is a growing trend.

“I would love to claim it as an original idea but, honestly, I spent the last three-and-a-half years on the East Coast, living in New York City, so I have been quite connected to young Jewish community there,” said Slobin. “It was something that I kind of knew was happening in different places on the East Coast. I heard that there was one happening in Minneapolis and it seemed to me like a new trend that was popping up, which is young, secular matchmaker collectives.”

In an age when Jdate and other online dating apps are a swipe away, why the need for the personal intervention?

For a certain segment of young people, Slobin said, Jdate isn’t cool. The other reality is that apps tend to be based on looks or instant attraction.

“I think a lot of people go on dates based on that and then don’t find success because they may not share anything other than that mutual attraction and so this is an opportunity to go a little bit deeper,” she said.

YVR Yenta invites clients – it’s all free and there’s no profit motive – to complete a comprehensive questionnaire about their religious affiliation and how important that is, whether they want a match of their own religious tradition, their political views, preferences, interests and a host of other attributes.

“We accept anyone into our dating pool who belongs to any religion, any race, any sexuality, any gender,” she said.

As clientele numbers increase, the yentas write to potential matches, “so will the quality of our matchmaking, seeing as we will have more match options to choose from! Please help us spread the word to your friends and family, either through word of mouth (as was done in the old country) or by sharing our Instagram page (as is done in the 21st century).” They are on Instagram at yvr.yenta.

“This is something that I would want for myself,” Slobin added. “I think it’s a very cool idea and I wanted to make it happen for all the people around me because I feel like I know so many amazing people who are looking for partners. So we decided to volunteer our time to make it happen. Really, it’s quite fun, so it doesn’t feel like work.”

Local team’s global impact

Ran Sommer (photo from the Walking School Bus)

Ran Sommer was working as a project manager for a health region and moonlighting as a volunteer for a very small Vancouver-based international education charity. A trip to India to see the charity’s work in action changed the direction of his career – and the course of the organization.

The Walking School Bus was the brainchild of another young innovator from the Vancouver area, Aaron Friedland, who has received numerous recognitions, including a Next Einstein award, which was presented by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and as one of the Jewish Independent’s 18 Under 36 honourees. TWSB, as it is shorthanded, emerged out of a trip to Uganda

Friedland took, where he learned that many students in that country do not attend school because it is too far for them to walk. The first step in his venture to resolve the problem was a book by the same name, which started a fundraising campaign that led to the purchase of the first vehicle, which shuttles Ugandan kids to school then does duty as a taxi in the off hours to cover expenses and generate revenue for school materials.

When Sommer returned from earning undergraduate and master’s degrees at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., Friedland was one of the first people with whom he reconnected. Both alumni of King David High School, they had been in the same social circles and Sommer had followed Friedland’s successes via social media. He came on board as a volunteer, serving as director of communications.

While Sommer was getting some good training at project management in his day job at the health authority, when he joined a self-funded trip to see TWSB’s operations in India, he was inspired to take a leap into the uncertain territory of a startup nonprofit.

“I was just so blown away to actually see what I was communicating about for the last year,” Sommer said, adding with a laugh: “To see not only that it was real [but] it was 10 times better than I thought it was and I should probably be communicating it better.”

The inspiration was mixed with sadness that he didn’t feel his full-time job was as meaningful. He and Friedland sat down, figured out how to scrape together enough to give Sommer a salary that would just cover his rent and expenses and Sommer became first-ever employee of TWSB, as director of operations. (Friedland was still unsalaried at the time.)

Despite rapid growth since Sommer’s hiring, it’s still a streamlined organization, with seven employees in Vancouver and eight overseas. But, with its tight budgets and small team, the organization has branched out in a range of directions.

The organization was never simply about getting kids from Point A to Point B. First, there is a research component. Graduate students develop symbiotic relationships with TWSB, joining self-funded excursions to the operations – now in India as well – and looking at data from the projects to enhance their delivery and outcome.

Once TWSB put in place the infrastructure to get students to school, they realized some were arriving hungry and thirsty, which impedes learning. The organization added water-catchment systems, chicken coops and community-supported agriculture to their operations. They developed supplementary curriculum, dovetailing with the objectives of the school systems where they work, including an offline database that serves as a sort of virtual library. In a country like Uganda, where a vast majority of the population does not have access to electricity, let alone wi-fi, the curriculum is aided by Raspberry Pi microcomputers – about $100 each – which can communicate with one another in a localized intranet, but not access the internet. Teachers can use the tablets to project material on screens – a benefit in places like some refugee camps TWSB works, where the teacher to student ratio can be one to about 260.

Throughout the charity’s projects are economic development initiatives that both help the communities they serve and create sustainable funding for their work. They created the BrightBox Macro classroom – a shipping container retrofitted into a solar-powered classroom. While students learn in a space that takes up about seven-eighths of the space, a solar charging room powers not only the shipping container classroom but the entire adjacent school. It also provides a charging hub, where people from the community can pay a few cents to charge their cellphones, tablets, flashlights or other electronics, similar to for-profit charging hubs common throughout the developing world. These fees will add up, according to projections, to eventually pay for the entire facility over time.

TWSB also has a small but aggressive fundraising arm that obtains grants from foundations and groups including National Geographic. The academic expeditions are funded by participants themselves, who are asked to raise an additional $1,000 to $2,000.

Based on studies that indicate students can double their reading comprehension exponentially in just months through the multisensory experience of reading the words while hearing them spoken, TWSB developed Simbi.

This “reading-while-listening application” uses different voices, accents and dialects to give the reader the most relevant voice available in their respective region. Again, outcomes are studied and the data shared to make the impacts greater. Simbi began as a part of TWSB curriculum program and then expanded independently as a startup aimed at an even broader market, with Friedland as chief executive officer, while he continues as executive director of TWSB. In addition to the thousands of students served by TWSB, Simbi is in use by another 10,000 who are not part of the project and the objective is to make Simbi available to unlimited numbers.

Through partnerships with Uganda’s minister of education and the United Nations refugee agency, TWSB has expanded its reach into refugee camps and remote public schools.

“There are currently 32,500 students who are interfacing with our technology,” Sommer said. In Uganda, there are 300,000 refugee students alone – not including others in low-income, remote or otherwise underserved communities. And, with expansion into India and a scalable model that they envision taking off globally,

Sommer predicts further exponential growth.

In addition to Sommer and Friedland both having attended Vancouver’s Jewish high school, there is another Jewish connection. The project began during Friedland’s studies in economics at McGill University, with the initial initiative launched within Uganda’s Abayudaya (Jewish) community.

While the Walking School Bus has grown, with 15 employees now around the world, its strength is still in the power of volunteerism, Sommer said.

“We’ve been able to maintain our values and the pillars of the organization because of an incredibly large army of volunteers that are so involved and motivated,” he said.

Climate hot topic at Limmud

Dr. Larry Barzelai and Maayan Kreitzman will talk about environmental activism at Limmud on March 1. (photos from the interviewees)

Environmental activism is among Canada’s top news stories in recent days and the issue will be confronted from both a Jewish and a broader perspective by two leading voices at Limmud Vancouver next month.

Dr. Larry Barzelai, a Vancouver family doctor, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of medicine and B.C. chair of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), will present alongside Maayan Kreitzman, a PhD candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. The pair acknowledges that they come at the topic using different tactics, but aim for the same objective.

Kreitzman has been among those blockading the port and traffic.

“The actions happening in the streets right now are in response to this Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline construction on Wet’suwet’an land,” she said. But this is only one element of the much larger picture, which is that oil and gas development is “occurring unabated and greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction is continuing unabated throughout the world, when we know that these activities are threatening our life-support system and are putting billions of people at risk over the next decade. People are already being impacted today.”

The issue brings together a host of concerns, she said, including “indigenous rights and sovereignty, the Canadian government’s complicity in a climate-unsafe future … as well as the business side of that from the private sector.”

Kreitzman has heard the complaints that disruptive protests may turn off potential allies and anger the general public.

“I think people’s emotions are valid and there is a valid concern about disrupting ordinary people that need to make a living and need to take care of their families,” she told the Independent. “On the other hand, I think many of the people that sometimes make these kind of complaints aren’t really the people that are struggling to feed their families. People that come from a place of privilege need to recognize that these protests inconveniencing them is a small price to pay for the types of progressive changes that will benefit all of us, including their children.”

Kreitzman said she and Barzelai will “bring a concise summary of the latest science to people so that they really understand the magnitude of the situation that we’re in.”

She said, “We’ll be speaking to a spectrum of different actions, from the personal to the more conventional campaigning type of approaches, like report-writing, research, lobbying, letter-writing, to direct-action approaches, which is what I’m most interested in, where people that have privilege start putting their bodies on the line and breaking the law on purpose, using the message of nonviolent civil resistance, which has been successful in many movements throughout history.”

Barzelai takes a more conventional approach to advocacy, but shares Kreitzman’s sense of urgency.

“Climate change, which we’re calling a climate emergency, is upon us,” he told the Independent. “It’s dramatic and we have to take big steps to do something about it. Maayan is taking a bit more radical approach to this. Myself and my group are a bit more middle-of-the-road, shall we say, but I think we both have the same endpoint in mind – that things have to change dramatically.”

CAPE, which has been around for about 25 years, focuses on the health impacts of environmental decisions and climate change.

“We see diseases that are spreading, we see cancers that are becoming more rampant, we are seeing the floods and the wildfires and the temperature changes that are dramatically affecting people’s health and we figure it’s our responsibility as doctors to look at climate change from a health perspective and to inform people of what’s going to happen unless we make dramatic changes,” he said.

Fracking is one area where he thinks British Columbia is “really going down the wrong path.”

“They’ve bought this myth that natural gas is clean energy, which it is absolutely not, and they are doing their best to increase rather than decrease global warming, and we think that’s the crucial issue that needs to be discussed in Canada and especially in B.C.,” he said.

Kreitzman and Barzelai will speak at Limmud Vancouver on March 1.

Tickets and more information can be found at limmudvancouver.com.

Many ideas at Limmud

At LimmudVan’20, Anna-Mae Wiesenthal will present on The “Othering” of Germany’s Jews and Canada’s First Nations. (photo from Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)

The latest local incarnation of the global Jewish learning festival Limmud takes place Feb. 29 and March 1. LimmudVan’20, which is being held at Congregation Beth Israel, begins with Havdalah and a few musical and intellectual appetizers on the Saturday night, followed by a day of presentations on a diverse array of topics on Sunday.

Anna-Mae Wiesenthal, a teacher at King David High School and a PhD candidate in Holocaust and genocide studies, will present on The “Othering” of Germany’s Jews and Canada’s First Nations.

Originating from Winnipeg, Wiesenthal has long had an interest in First Nations issues and has been involved in community programs there. She is aware of the sensitivities around paralleling these histories.

“There is a lot of controversy surrounding the use of the word genocide and First Nations, but I approach it from an examination of looking at different viewpoints and different research that argue both sides,” she told the Independent. “What do these two experiences of these two people have in common?” The point, she said, is not to come to any firm conclusions.

“I want to leave it open to the audience to process the information and to assess the commonalities and the differences,” Wiesenthal said. “I’m certainly there to point some of them out, but I think it’s to provide a different perspective that will engage and inspire discussion and curiosity among the participants to go further with it.”

Also not promising any proscribed conclusions is Rabbi Philip Gibbs, who will ask: Would the rabbis approve of Uber? Gibbs, who is spiritual leader of Congregation Har El, in West Vancouver, said that even issues as seemingly modern as an app that permits ride-sharing can be addressed through ancient wisdom.

Traditional arguments around fair and unfair competition have remained with him since rabbinical school and came to the fore in recent weeks as British Columbia argued over, and then slowly and somewhat clunkily implemented, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Some of the issues that could arise include whether a company keeps money in the community it serves or extracts it to some distant parent company. But don’t expect him to come down clearly on one side.

“If you’ve ever looked into a question of Jewish ethics, you know that you can make the joke of saying two Jews will have three opinions,” said Gibbs. “Maybe, through the discussion, someone else will tell me what it seems like I’m thinking, but really I think the goal is just to be more attuned to what some of the issues are so that, as we begin to make choices of who do we call up for a ride to the airport, that we’re taking into account a wider range of values than simply how little we want to pay for it.”

Other presenters will talk about crafting Jewish children’s books (see jewishindependent.ca/new-publisher-set-to-launch); how Leonard Bernstein used the music of Selichot to create West Side Story; the rich and poor among Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam’s Golden Age; building Jewish micro-communities through co-housing; healing Christian antisemitism; analyzing the Israeli smash TV show Shtisel; and many other topics.

Tickets and more information can be found at limmudvancouver.com.

Survivors reflect on liberation

Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar moderates a panel with Holocaust survivors, left to right, Janos Benisz, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Dr. Peter Suedfeld and Alex Buckman. (photo by Pat Johnson)

One survivor of the Holocaust who spoke at a panel recently believes that, in a generation or two, people will largely forget about the catastrophic events of that time.

“I think the world will forget about Auschwitz,” said Dr. Peter Suedfeld, a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “The world has already forgotten about ‘never again.’ We’ve had a fair number of genocides since 1945, in which the world did not intervene. A recent poll that I saw … apparently, the proportion of people who remember anything about how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what Auschwitz was, what the Holocaust was and so on, is not all that much above 50%.

“This is going to go on generation after generation,” he continued. “The survivors won’t be here to push the story any further. Their children will for awhile, but they have other things to do and other things to be concerned about and their children even more so. In a few more generations, it will be in the history books and people will say, yeah, I read about that or thought about that in grade whatever but, in terms of remembering it as something in your gut, something that arouses an emotion, something that has a personal connection to you, I don’t think it’s going to last all that much longer. I’m sorry to say that, but that’s what I think.”

Suedfeld, who weeks earlier was invested into the Order of Canada for his decades of work on the psychological and physical effects of extreme and challenging environments, was speaking at Hillel House, on the UBC campus, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27. He was part of a panel of four survivors sharing their reflections 75 years after liberation.

Suedfeld, who was born in Hungary, survived under false papers and a back story as an orphaned Roman Catholic child. He recalled successive bombardments of the various sanctuaries he was in near the end of the war, as Allied bombers repeatedly blew buildings apart while Suedfeld and other children hid in the cellars.

After liberation by Russian forces, Suedfeld was eventually reunited with his father; his mother had been murdered. The lesson he took from the experience, he told the packed afternoon audience, was to cherish and defend the values of freedom.

“Freedom to be who you really are, but freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of everything,” he said. After moving to the United States, Suedfeld became a powerful advocate of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion and expression. Since coming to Canada, he has been a similar champion of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he said.

Suedfeld’s admittedly pessimistic perspective on the future of Holocaust remembrance was contested by Alex Buckman, a fellow survivor on the panel.

As long as organizations exist like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which co-sponsored the event with Hillel BC, and children of survivors and others who have been touched by their experiences share the lessons they have learned, the future will be better, he said.

“Maybe our children will pick up, speaking on our behalf,” said Buckman. “Maybe they will remember because we will tell them what happened.”

Like Suedfeld, Buckman survived by being hidden by Catholics; in his case, in Belgium.

“They told us that the war was over and that we should rejoice and be happy and our parents would come and pick us up and everything would be hunky-dory,” he recalled. “At 6-and-a-half in an orphanage, nothing was that rosy. We saw parents come and pick up their children and take them home, but nobody came for us. I was there with my sister Annie and she was crying and wondering why our parents weren’t coming and I tried to tell her that I’m sure that they will come. But, like her, I didn’t know why they weren’t coming.”

The pair were moved back to Brussels and put in the care of the Red Cross, which posted the names of orphaned and unclaimed children on sheets around the city. Eventually, a paternal uncle showed up and took the two children to Annie’s parents – who, since little Alex had believed himself to be Annie’s brother, he reasonably concluded were also his parents. The truth came out in a cruel way, when another cousin, in a pique of anger, blurted out to Alex that his parents were dead and that Annie’s parents were not his.

“I took a step back and, for the first time, I realized I was alone,” Buckman recalled. His aunt and uncle did care for him, though, despite the uncle’s misgivings, because of the aunt’s insistence based on a promise she made to the heavens when she learned of her sister’s death.

Also on the panel was Amalia Boe-Fishman, who was born in the northern Netherlands in 1939 and also survived thanks to a Christian family. Like many survivors, her liberation story is not one of joyous freedom but of confusion and fear of the future.

“Liberation should have been a real happy time for me. It wasn’t,” she said. “I was told we were free, but what did that mean? What did that mean to a frightened 5-year-old girl who had been in hiding for three years? What did it mean to be free? I was told that, for the first time I could remember … I would now be able to go outdoors. I didn’t know what to expect. What was there? What was waiting for me outdoors? Indoors had become my entire life. Indoors was where I felt secure and safe. Indoors was all I knew.”

Her first venture out was harrowing. It was odd enough to be surrounded by throngs of strangers after her entire life had been confined to just a few familiar faces. After a victory parade, the girls she knew as her “sisters” decided to walk to the town centre. While crossing a bridge with scores of others – Amalia had never seen a bridge before – a rumour started that the Nazis had returned and panic swept the crowd. Pushing and shoving was accompanied by screaming and concern that the bridge was about to collapse.

“Here I was, trapped outdoors, in a crowd of panicked strangers and I was terrified,” she said. “The bridge didn’t collapse, but, as you can imagine [it was] a very long time before I would ever cross a bridge again.”

Another ostensibly joyous aspect of liberation was also clouded with confusion and fear.

“I was told that I had a real family. I had a real father, a real mother, an older brother and a baby brother,” said Boe-Fishman. “Miraculously, out of many different hiding places, all four of them had survived the war.… But who were these people? They were strangers. So, this is what liberation means to me. To leave the only family I ever had known to go outdoors to a place of terrified strangers, to strange people in a strange home.… I had to adapt to a new and also frightening world.”

For Janos Benisz, liberation was similarly conflicted. As a child, he had seen his father and his grandmother dead in the streets. His mother had been killed earlier by Nazi collaborators, during what was to have been a routine medical procedure.

Young Janos was transported from his hometown of Esztergom, Hungary, to Budapest, where Jews were divided up, many being sent directly to death camps including Auschwitz.

“I ended up in an Austrian slave labour camp,” he said, remaining there for seven or eight months before the Russians liberated them.

“I had the body of a 4-year-old,” he recalled. “At my bar mitzvah, I was under five feet.”

Making his way back to his hometown, he found squatters in the family’s house and learned that, of his immediate family of eight uncles, two aunts and 29 cousins, only Janos and one uncle had survived the Nazis.

Benisz was put in a Jewish orphanage in Budapest, then sent to Halifax, where he was put on a train to Winnipeg. He was bounced from foster home to foster home, back to an orphanage and then to a reformatory.

“I couldn’t fit in,” he said. At 18, he got a job at the Winnipeg Free Press as a copy boy.

“I spent the next 15 years in the newspaper business, then I became a salesman on my own, retired in ’71,” he said. He noted the figurative and literal centrality of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in his life today. He lives 40 yards from the centre, he said, and much of his social life is focused there.

“It’s my second home,” he said. “I work out there. I shmooze there. I’ve got a group of guys I call the ‘kosher nostra.’ I’m very happy. I absolutely adore this country of Canada. It’s been good to me ever since I turned 18.”

Prior to the panel, Holocaust survivors lit candles of remembrance. Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart read a proclamation declaring International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city. Rob Fleming, British Columbia’s minister of education, spoke on the importance of Holocaust education and credited the partnership of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). Student Adam Dobrer shared his family’s Holocaust legacy. Prof. Nancy Hermiston, director of voice and opera at the University of British Columbia, provided opening remarks. Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, introduced the program and spoke of the importance of remembrance and the power of the memory of Auschwitz on the 75th anniversary of its liberation. Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator of the VHEC, moderated the panel. Rabbi Philip Bregman, chaplain of Hillel BC, chanted El Maleh Rachamim and the Mourners’ Kaddish.

Many other commemorations and events took place throughout the province on and around Jan. 27.

Sharing legends of Mossad

Ronen Bergman signs a copy of his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations for an attendee of his talk at Congregation Beth Tikvah Feb. 2. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Ronen Bergman, perhaps the leading historian on Israeli intelligence, spoke in Richmond recently, engaging a packed sanctuary at Congregation Beth Tikvah Feb. 2 with stories that make Ocean’s Eleven pale in comparison.

Bergman, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and senior political and military analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, shared the history of the Mossad as told in his bestselling book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. One had an extremely timely conclusion.

Imad Mughniyeh was the military commander of Hezbollah, who Bergman called “the most wanted and most capable and most diabolical terrorist who ever walked the face of the earth.” Mughniyeh is believed responsible for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and truck bombings in the same city, which killed hundreds of U.S. and French military personnel, and also was involved in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre there, as well as countless other atrocities worldwide.

“He was wanted by 41 different countries and the only thing they had from him is a vague photograph from 1983,” said Bergman. Finally, the Mossad located Mughniyeh in a safe house in Damascus, but, since Israel does not have diplomatic relations with Syria and, therefore, does not have an embassy there, they were at a disadvantage. Embassies are a great boon to spies, he said.

“You can have diplomatic immunity, you have cars, you have diplomatic mail, you can smuggle, it’s wonderful,” he said. “But they couldn’t get to him, they couldn’t kill him in Damascus, because it was so hard to operate, so Mossad turned to the only organization that could: the CIA. Because the CIA had something that Mossad will never have in Damascus: an embassy.”

The CIA required permission from then-U.S. President George W. Bush, so Ehud Olmert, who was then Israel’s prime minister, flew to Washington for a secret meeting with Bush and urged the president to help Mossad take out the terrorist, noting the number of Americans Mughniyeh had killed.

“George Bush was convinced, but he said on one condition – no collateral damage,” Bergman said. No bystanders or associates were to be harmed.

Working with the CIA, the Mossad set up the scenario and then aborted the operation 53 times because the target was not within the defined kill zone or because he was not alone or because, on one occasion, his identity could not be 100% verified because he was wearing a scarf due to inclement weather.

On Feb. 12, 2008, Mughniyeh left the safe house and the Mossad was about to push the button when they realized he was not alone.

“He’s walking with a man,” Bergman recounted. “Someone looks at the monitor and says, oh that’s not just a man, that’s Good Dog. Good Dog was the codename for Qasem Soleimani,” the top Iranian general and commander of the Quds Force, responsible for clandestine operations and global terror.

“So, someone said, how wonderful, let’s take them both,” said Bergman. “They called Meir Dagan [director of Mossad], who was sitting shivah for his mother. He calls Olmert and Olmert says no, abort, I promised President Bush that only Mughniyeh is killed.”

Later that same day, Mughniyeh was found alone outside the safe house and killed by an exploding car as he passed on foot. But Soleimani would live another dozen years – until he was killed Jan. 3 of this year, on orders of U.S. President Donald Trump, sparking a conflict that nearly led to all-out war between the United States and Iran.

Bergman, a lawyer and author of six bestselling books, recently received the Sokolov Prize, Israel’s equivalent of the Pulitzer. In undertaking Rise and Kill First, Bergman discarded all previous work on the subject and interviewed 1,000 intelligence officials and others with inside information on the Mossad and its operations. The book is now being turned into an HBO series.

Bergman recounted how, in 2018, Israel stunned the world when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu invited the media to view a massive cache of documents and other materials related to the Iranian nuclear project. The moment was the culmination of two years of planning, involving 500 operatives, including 18 who located and infiltrated a secret archive outside Tehran, then swooped in, with a five-and-a-half-hour window in the middle of the night, to execute the deed and escape, relocating the ayatollah’s nuclear secrets to Israel.

Even with the Mossad’s expertise at safe-cracking, the team knew that they would not have time, once inside the archive, to fiddle with locks.

“So, Mossad establishes a front company in Europe who orders two empty safes from the same Iranian manufacturer. They ship the safes to Paris, then ship them to the Mossad lab in Tel Aviv, where they start drilling into them, trying to find what’s the fastest way to open them.”

They determined that it would require at least 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit to break into the archives’ security.

“Now imagine what sort of energy you need to shlep with you to Tehran in order to create such energy and do that in four different places because you need to open all the vaults,” said Bergman. They also had to bypass other security systems and interfere with video surveillance to make the cameras continue broadcasting as if nothing untoward was happening.

In the morning, when the heist was discovered by archives security officials, Bergman said, “no less than 12,000 troops, Revolutionary Guards, policeman, army” and others descended on the place, but could not discern how anyone could get in, grab all the contents and get out undetected. It would be two months until Netanyahu went public and the Iranians could finally confirm that the perpetrators were Mossad.

“Someone could ask, why should we write a book about the history of the Mossad? This is secret, right?” Bergman said. He acknowledges he left out a great number of secrets, some of which he will take to the grave, but added that it is impossible to tell the story of Israel without telling the story of the Mossad because any major decisions, any turning points in the dramatic story of the country, have the imprint of the intelligence services on it.

He warned, though, that this is not all derring-do and triumph. “If you want to read a book just glorifying Israeli intelligence, I suggest you don’t read Rise and Kill First,” he said. “Sometimes, the Jewish James Bond looks more like Inspector Clouseau.”

Many people ask Bergman how he got the top intelligence officials in the country – former heads of agency, high-level operatives, spies and agents – to talk, usually quite freely and almost always on the record.

“It was easy,” he said. “I smiled. When you smile to people, they feel comfortable to talk. But that’s not the whole answer. These people wanted to talk because they wanted people to know … what they have done in order to keep Israel safe.”

Some interviewees said they told Bergman things they had never told their spouses. But, when subjects were not forthcoming, he had a trick.

“If someone was not that enthusiastic to speak, I did to him or her the one thing that makes Israelis more ballistic and furious than anything else,” Bergman said. “I told him someone else took credit for his operations.”

He mooted a typical response: “What? He said that he was behind enemy lines, that he planned the operation, that he risked his life? Now I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bergman deadpanned. “Always works.”

In a remarkable number of the interviews, a single phrase frequently stood out: a quote from the Babylonian Talmud: “Whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”

“Because the way they saw it, they had no other choice,” said Bergman, noting that outsiders cannot understand the DNA, the genome, the motives of Israelis, without understanding the imprint of the Holocaust and the determination to never be powerless again.

Hamas has bragged that they have more volunteers for suicide bombings than they have suicide belts.

“It turns out the only thing that stops these people from coming is the most extensive campaign of targeted killing ever launched in history – and not against the suicide bombers,” said Bergman. “When the Shin Bet [Israel’s internal security service] and Israeli Air Force started to target the layer above them – the bomb-makers, the indoctrinators, the recruiters, the regional commanders – then it turns out that these people who have no problem with sending everybody to their death, once the price tag is attached to themselves and their families, they say, well, we’ll die, but maybe not today.”

The targeting approach, said Bergman, was adopted by the United States, whose military leaders came to realize that taking out the top leadership of the enemy was ultimately less lethal and costly than the alternatives.

“And so, the CIA started following the successful Israeli experience, started to perform targeted killings,” said Bergman. “Do you know the president who organized the largest number of targeted killings in history? Barack Obama, because he realized that this is the weapon that, at the end of the day, takes less human lives than going into an all-out war. And it’s effective.”

Leanne Hazon, Beth Tikvah’s vice-president of programming, welcomed the audience and noted the size of the crowd despite it being Super Bowl Sunday. Rabbi Adam Rubin introduced Bergman. The author signed copies of his book after his talk.

War heroism recalled

Prof. George Bluman speaks at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration, Jan. 19. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was honoured in Vancouver this month with a lecture on his wartime heroism – by a man who owes his life to the actions of Sugihara when the diplomat served as consul for the Imperial Japanese government in Lithuania, near the start of the Second World War.

George Bluman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration Jan. 19, which was held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. The annual event is presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and took place 75 years and two days after Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary whose actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, was last seen alive. The actions of Sugihara, vice-consul of the Japanese embassy in Kaunas, Lithuania, paralleled those of Wallenberg in that he issued visas and took extraordinary actions to save the lives of the threatened Jews of Europe.

Bluman’s parents, Nathan and Susan Bluman, fled to Lithuania after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. There, they received transit visas from Sugihara, which enabled them to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan. They then obtained temporary permits to enter Canada and they were aboard the last ship sailing from Japan to Vancouver prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

An estimated 15% of Sugihara survivors became Canadians, many of them remaining in Vancouver, including the Bluman family, which has come to number 23, now including great-grandchildren of Susan and Nathan. It is estimated that Sugihara’s actions facilitated the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees.

In addition to the Sugihara descendants living in Vancouver, Bluman noted an additional local connection. On his way to Europe for the series of diplomatic postings that would lead to his heroic acts, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko arrived by ship in Vancouver in 1937, then took a transcontinental train to the East Coast to board another ship, which would take them to Europe.

A 2017 poll in a Tokyo publication rated Sugihara as the most important Japanese person ever. “Why?” Bluman asked. “Against advice from his superiors in Tokyo, he issued transit visas to Japan that ended up saving about 2,100 Jewish refugees who otherwise would have been likely murdered. Those saved included my parents as well as one of my uncles and his wife.… Perhaps as many as 40,000 people owe their lives due to the extraordinary heroic deeds of Sugihara.”

Two diplomats from the Netherlands played crucial roles in Sugihara’s heroics, Bluman said. After the Nazi occupation of that country, in May 1940, an anti-Nazi Dutch government-in-exile was established in London and remained in charge of all Dutch embassies. The anti-Nazi Dutch ambassador in Latvia, L.P.J. de Decker, dismissed his pro-Nazi Lithuanian honorary consul, replacing him with Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch engineer heading Philips electronics in Kaunas.

“Two young Dutch rabbinical students approached Zwartendijk, requesting documentation to go to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, with the aim of traveling east through the Soviet Union, Japan, the Pacific Ocean and the Panama Canal to tiny Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, about one-sixth the size of Metro Vancouver. They also sought permits for their mostly Polish classmates.

“Why Curaçao?” asked Bluman. “Because no visa was required to enter Curaçao. The local governor had sole authority to permit entry. But this was rarely granted. Zwartendijk was given permission by de Decker, the Dutch ambassador in Riga [Latvia], to issue permits to Curaçao to their fellow rabbinical students that stated, in French, ‘A visa for entry is not required,’ leaving out the condition of the governor’s permission. Moreover, Zwartendijk courageously agreed to issue such permits to all Jewish refugees who applied for them.”

A delegation of Jewish refugees approached Sugihara about obtaining Japanese transit visas, a necessary step for the scheme’s success.

“Without permission from Tokyo, and after getting Soviet approval, signed by Stalin, for refugee transit through the Soviet Union, Sugihara issued transit visas valid for a stay of 10 days in Japan, based on the seemingly sufficient Zwartendijk Curaçao permits,” said Bluman. “Zwartendijk signed 2,300 such permits, until his office was forced to close on the day Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union.… The scam worked.”

With the annexation of the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, all foreign embassies were ordered closed. Though Zwartendijk left, Sugihara managed to stay on for a further four weeks to continue writing transit visas – even for Jews who had not obtained a visa from Zwartendijk.

“These Jews included my parents, who approached Sugihara’s office six days after Zwartendijk had left,” Bluman said.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Jewish refugees issued Sugihara visas survived and about three-quarters made it to Japan. Almost half carried on to Shanghai, China, to wait out the war.

Sugihara’s diplomatic career effectively ended in Romania, where he was posted at the end of the war. When the Soviets occupied Bucharest, Sugihara and his family were imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp for 18 months.

Back in Japan in 1946, Sugihara was dismissed from diplomatic service and spent the next several decades in low-key positions in Japan and Moscow. His retirement from service was ostensibly a matter of downsizing, but some have speculated that his heroic insubordination was a cause.

Only in 1968 did Sugihara learn that most of the Jews he had helped had survived. In 1985, he was recognized by the state of Israel, receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, as well as perpetual Israeli citizenship for himself and his family. Zwartendijk was posthumously honoured in 1997. Sugihara died in 1986, at the age of 86. Bluman retains close contact with the family in Japan.

“In my family,” Bluman concluded, “there is one great hero we always carry in our hearts and to whom we will be forever grateful: Chiune Sugihara.”

After Bluman’s presentation, attendees watched the film Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. Earlier, Alan La Fevre, president of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, welcomed guests, including the deputy mayor of the city of Vancouver, Christine Boyle, who read a proclamation declaring Raoul Wallenberg Day. Diplomats from Japan and Ukraine were in attendance.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was formed in 2013 by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities. The society continues the legacy of the annual Wallenberg Day events in Vancouver, recognizing and honouring individuals who, at great personal risk, have helped others by acting against unjust laws, norms or conventions.

Police incident at shul

No one was injured and police are ruling out antisemitic motivations after an intruder caused a standoff in Victoria’s Emanu-El synagogue.

Victoria police were called to the historic Blanshard Street synagogue shortly after 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 9 after a report of an unwanted man inside the building.

“Upon arrival of officers, they attempted to speak with the man, which was not successful,” according to a police statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team was activated along with crisis negotiators.”

The standoff lasted nearly four hours.

“Shortly before 12:30 p.m., the man, who was suffering a mental health crisis, was apprehended and transported to hospital with non-life threatening injuries,” according to police.

Rabbi Harry Brechner, spiritual leader of Congregation Emanu-El, which is Canada’s oldest synagogue in continuous operation, issued a statement later in the day.

“A mentally ill person brushed past a Gan Shalom (daycare) parent and managed to enter the building not due to any fault of the daycare parent,” Brechner wrote. “Another daycare parent quickly called emergency 911 and the police were dispatched. The police were remarkably responsive, communicative and efficient. Our daycare children were never in a dangerous situation and, for most of the incident, they were not aware that anything unusual was happening.

“This mentally ill man held himself up in the balcony of the sanctuary; we were not successful at talking him down and out of the building. The police provided a transit bus for the daycare to transport the children to the other Gan Shalom daycare and the children felt like they were going on a field trip. It took the police a bit of force to subdue and retain the intruder and we are left with some broken windows and a mess to clean up. I am super-thankful to Victoria’s finest for their professionalism in containing this situation and ensuring that everyone was safe,” said Brechner. “This incident had nothing to do with antisemitism and could have occurred in any downtown building. The incident is a difficult and powerful reminder of the intensity and difficulties associated with our current mental health crisis.”

The rabbi concluded: “I want to also state that the Gan Shalom staff and Gan Shalom parents who stayed by to ensure that the children were safe were remarkable and very calm. We are very safe, our protocols were tested and proved efficient.”

An advocate for two states

Eli Kowaz is communications director at the Israel Policy Forum. (photo from Eli Kowaz)

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

For Vancouver-born Israeli Eli Kowaz, there is only one path to ensuring Israel remains both a Jewish state and a democracy: a two-state solution. The road to that ideal may be long and the slogging hard, but this is the core mandate of the Israel Policy Forum, where he serves as communications director.

Though focused on Israel and its situation, IPF’s mission is to “shape the discourse and mobilize support among American Jewish leaders and U.S. policymakers for the realization of a viable two-state solution.”

Israel currently has military control over the entire land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River but, to continue being a Jewish state as well as a democracy, Kowaz said, Israel faces a decision.

“It can decide to annex the West Bank, keep the entire land and, if it wants to be a Jewish state, it will have to give up on the democracy aspect because, if it was to grant all the citizens living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean equal rights, then already today, Jews would be about 50-50, a small majority,” he said.

The answer is not cut and dry, he acknowledged. The Jordan Valley is a vital Israeli security interest and, come what may, Israel is likely to maintain military control there for the foreseeable medium-term. But both Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump have recently obfuscated their countries’ erstwhile support for a two-state solution. In Netanyahu’s case, it’s at least partly political, said Kowaz.

“He is dependent on his right-wing coalition partners, he’s willing to say things and even do things to secure his position as prime minister, even though he’s already surpassed [David] Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving one,” Kowaz said. “A lot of it is right-wing pandering to those people. Another part of it is a genuine security concern. The research done by the top security experts in Israel and others show that there is a way to keep that area secure while advancing a gradual separation of Palestinians and an eventual two states. Obviously, it’s not something that’s happening tomorrow.”

Kowaz, now 29, grew up in Vancouver’s Oakridge neighbourhood with an Israeli father, Joseph Kowaz, who moved to Vancouver in his 20s, and a mother, Andrea (Rogow) Kowaz, who moved here from New York at a young age. His late maternal grandparents were community leaders and academics Dr. Sally and Dr. Robert Rogow.

He attended Vancouver Talmud Torah and Hebrew Academy for elementary school and Magee and King David high schools, “so I kind of got a taste of Orthodox Jewish education, more of a secular traditional and also public school, so it was nice to have,” he said.

Kowaz did a gap year in Israel after high school, studying at Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University. Returning to Canada, he graduated from McGill University in Montreal and then completed a graduate degree in digital media at Ryerson University in Toronto. His final project for his degree addressed ways to remember and educate about the Holocaust in the 21st century.

“From the beginning, I wanted to do something that was Israel-related,” said Kowaz. “So, it was either move straight to Israel or look for something Israel-connected that was outside of Israel.” He moved to New York City and soon got work at IPF. He moved to Tel Aviv last year and, in July 2018, married Tal Dor, a former graphic designer for the Israel Defence Forces newspaper BaMahane. She occasionally gives Kowaz advice and support from her experience.

Part of a generation that gained political awareness during the Second Intifada, Kowaz said he has been affected by the violent imagery of those days.

“I obviously want the best for everyone, but Israel is most important to me and I want Israel to be a Jewish state,” he said. “I want Israel to be a state that’s also accepted in the world to the best that it can be. Obviously, there will still be people that hate us but I don’t want Israel’s best allies to be Hungary, Poland, these right-wing [governments] with elements of fascism. We don’t want those to be our best friends, so, at the end of the day, I don’t think we have a perfect partner and the Palestinians, they’re never going to be a perfect partner, but we should do what’s best for Israel, which is at least preserve conditions for a two-state solution, a form of separation to secure Israel as a Jewish and democratic state as a goal for the next five, 10, 15 years. Keep that a possibility. And, right now … I think it’s definitely still an option. It’s still on the table. We haven’t killed it. But it’s treading in the wrong direction.”

The Israel Policy Forum began in 1993, said Kowaz, on the very day the day of the famous handshake on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat.

“At that time, Yitzhak Rabin was looking for American Jewish support for his vision of peace,” he said. “Even back then, AIPAC were already becoming close with Binyamin Netanyahu, who [had been] Israel’s ambassador to the UN and, at that time, he was already opposition leader.”

IPF does a lot of work in Washington, D.C., with policymakers, convening roundtable discussions and panels with congresspeople, congressional staffers and opinion leaders, as well as organizing events in synagogues around the United States, all focused on preserving conditions for two states.

Their positions are credibly backed up, said Kowaz, by security experts in Israel, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, which was begun by former major-general Amnon Reshef, a hero of the Yom Kippur War, and includes a cadre of 290 former IDF generals, Mossad and Shin Bet division heads and others.

“They work in Israel, so we work closely with them to relay their policy proposals and their messaging to an American audience,” he said. “It represents about 80% of the retired security establishment. It doesn’t get more legitimate than that. These are people that, I think, between all of them have 6,000 years of experience at the highest positions, making decisions constantly with people’s lives.”

While AIPAC has an upstart challenger on the left, J Street, Kowaz sees IPF as a more fact-based alternative to the politically oriented advocacy groups.

“People are looking for a voice that is different, that’s more policy-based, less trying to rally the troops and more looking at the facts,” he said. “I think we provide that kind of home and, in a way, everything’s very fact-based.”

Kowaz looks forward to continuing to work toward the perpetuation of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.

“It really doesn’t matter to me what the role is, I think that’s where I’d like to see myself,” he said, adding: “I’ve given up on the professional soccer career.”