Byline: Pat Johnson

NDP proud of their record

Selina Robinson (photo from Selina Robinson)

Premier John Horgan sent Selina Robinson a message: “A mensch is a good thing, right?”

Robinson, the NDP government’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, is seeking reelection in the riding of Coquitlam-Maillardville. She sees herself as the Jewish maven around the cabinet table.

“I said yes, who called you a mensch?” Robinson recalled. “He just wanted to double-check.”

As she and other New Democrats campaign toward the Oct. 24 provincial election, Robinson and fellow cabinet member George Heyman spoke with the Jewish Independent. (In this issue, we also speak with Jewish candidates and spokespeople for other parties.)

As minister of housing, Robinson takes pride in the development of a major initiative called Homes for B.C.: A 30-Point Plan for Housing Affordability in British Columbia. Her ministry engaged with housing groups, renters, developers, economists, local government officials, planners and other thinkers. Then they convened people in a “World Café,” an engagement exercise in which people from different perspectives sit at a table and must come to agreed-upon recommendations on a topic.

“It was from that that we picked the best ideas and so it really came from all sides of the housing sector rather than pitting them against each other,” she said, acknowledging that she had to convince some to buy into the process because bureaucracy is not always amenable to novel approaches.

She cited two particular areas that she wants to “kvell about.” BC Housing, the agency that develops, manages and administers a range of subsidized housing in the province, is building housing on First Nations land.

“The feds, I don’t think, are building a lot of Indigenous housing and they’re supposed to,” she said. “No other province has stepped up to do that.… You’re a British Columbian and you need housing … if it’s land on reserve, it’s land on reserve – we’ll build housing.”

By providing housing in First Nations communities, it also helps people remain at home, rather than moving to the city, where housing is even more expensive and possibly precarious, she said.

“I’m very proud of that,” Robinson said.

The other point of pride is, Robinson admitted, “a geeky piece of legislation.” When she stepped into the role as the government’s lead on housing availability and affordability, she recognized that there is no data on what kind of housing exists and what’s needed.

“Local governments are responsible for land-use planning and deciding what kind of housing goes where – this is going to be multifamily, this is going to be single-family – but, if you were to ask them, how much do you have, how much more multifamily do you need, they couldn’t tell you, because nobody was collecting the data.”

She brought forward legislation that mandated local governments to do a housing needs assessment every five years to identify whether more housing options are needed for different age groups and types of families.

She also cited the government’s development of social housing, through the allocation of $7 billion over 10 years to build 39,000 units. So far, 25,000 units are either open, in construction or going through the municipal development process.

“My biggest worry is that the Liberals [if they are elected] will cancel all of those that are still in the development stage because they did that in 2001 when they formed government,” she said. “We’re so far behind the eight ball because they did that. I’m not saying it would have fixed everything, but, if there were another 5,000 units of housing out there, it wouldn’t be as bad as it is because there would be another 5,000 units.”

Every Friday, Robinson lights Shabbat candles and then shares a reflection on social media about her week.

“Lighting the Shabbat candles just grounds me in my identity,” she said. “I make myself take 10 minutes on a Friday at sundown to stop and to clear my head and to remind myself why I do the work. It’s not for the pay. It’s not for any of that; it’s not worth it. It’s who I am, what are my values and what’s important to me? What did I hear this week that reminds me of why this work is important?”

Robinson admitted she’s being partisan in saying that she believes NDP values are Jewish values.

“From my perspective, taking care of the world – whether it’s the environment, the people and all that’s within it – is our collective responsibility,” she said, adding with a laugh: “I think all Jews are New Democrats who just don’t know it yet.”

* * *

George Heyman, minister of environment and climate change strategy, is seeking reelection in the riding of Vancouver-Fairview. He is a son of Holocaust refugees, who escaped the Nazis with the help of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who illegally issued visas to about 6,000 Jews, many of whose descendants now live in Vancouver.

photo - George Heyman
George Heyman (photo from George Heyman)

In 2019, Heyman took a family trip to Poland, which broadened his awareness of his family’s history and where he met family members he never knew he had. The Independent will run that story in an upcoming issue.

Speaking of his record in government, Heyman expressed pride in bringing in CleanBC, which he calls “a very detailed, independently modeled set of measures to get us to our 2030 target and beyond.”

He also said the government “completely revamped the province’s Environmental Assessment Act, incorporating the principles of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Collaborating with the First Nations Leadership Council, the government adapted the legislation to bring in affected local communities at the beginning of a project, before a proponent spends millions of dollars then has to go back to the drawing board due to local concerns.

“We’ve been investing in clean technology, we’ve approved transit plans that were stalled for years that the mayors of Metro Vancouver thought were critically important,” Heyman added. “We’re going to see the Broadway [SkyTrain] line commence to relieve the tremendous congestion on the Broadway corridor, both on buses and on the roads. And we’ll be working on ultimately being able to work with UBC and the city and the federal government to extend that to UBC.”

The government, he said, updated the Residential Tenancy Act to address tenants who were being threatened with eviction for suspect renovations and that saw people getting notices of rent increases as high as 40% because of loopholes in the act.

“We closed those loopholes, we held rent increases to the cost of living unless there is a legitimate demonstrated need to do renovation and repair and it’s fair to receive some compensation rent to pay for that,” he said.

Like Robinson, Heyman cited the construction of affordable housing, as well as supportive housing, to get homeless people off the street and provide them with services they need. He said the government has created 20,000 childcare spaces in the province “with significant fee reductions for families as we work our way toward a $10-a-day program.” Increased staffing in schools, mandated by a Supreme Court decision during the previous regime, is also an accomplishment, he said, as well as adding more investments in new schools for seismic upgrades, fire safety and heating and ventilation systems.

On the opioid crisis, Heyman acknowledged a surge in deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. “While there is much more to do, we managed to flatten the level of deaths up until COVID hit,” he said.

Also parallel to the pandemic was a realization of “the terrible state of many of our long-term-care homes.”

“We saw that deteriorate under the previous government,” he said. “With COVID, we saw the results of that. We saw people dying because workers were having to go to two or three different care homes, increasing the risk of infection, simply to cobble together a living. We took measures to allow our healthcare workers to work in one institution without suffering the loss of pay and we’re also investing in more beds and more equipment for long-term-care homes.”

New Democrats have been governing in a minority situation with the support of the Green party since 2017. Horgan called the snap election on Sept. 21, facing criticism for breaking fixed election date legislation and going to the polls during a state of emergency.

Segal helms Liberal message

Rachael Segal is media spokesperson for the BC Liberals. (photo from BC Liberals)

Facing a campaign unlike any other, with shaking hands and kissing babies prohibited by social distancing protocols, all parties needed to reimagine how they would reach voters. Rachael Segal, media spokesperson for the BC Liberals, had to figure out how to get her party’s message to British Columbians.

“We can’t have a media bus, so, as the person responsible for media relations, how I connect with media now is very different than how I would do it in a normal campaign,” she said. “I’d be on the bus, I’d be with the leader.”

Instead, the leader is often driving himself to the modest-sized events that typify the 2020 campaign. Instead of facing a phalanx of TV cameras and radio mics, party leader

Andrew Wilkinson speaks to a pooled camera, with his message then shared among the media consortium. It’s an experience all parties are dealing with. But the leaders, as well as candidates in 87 ridings across the province, still have to communicate their positions.

“Obviously, Andrew still needs to get out there and get his message out there,” said Segal. “We’re making announcements daily, just like we would on a campaign normally, they’re just different.”

Wilkinson, a medical doctor as well as a lawyer, is particularly sensitive to the health risks and safety of his team, Segal said.

Segal, who grew up in Kerrisdale, is the official campaign spokesperson for the party during the election and is second-in-command at party headquarters when in non-campaign mode. As senior director of the party, her role is a loosely defined collection of responsibilities that she describes as “basically whatever hole is there, I try and fix it.”

One of her primary responsibilities is stakeholder relations, which means meeting with particular community groups and connecting them with the leader and other members of the legislature.

“Andrew and I have done Shabbat dinners, we’ve done Rosh Hashanah meals, we’ve done tons of Jewish community events,” Segal said by way of example. She also hosts the party’s podcast and started a young professional women’s group “to try to engage the 30-to-50-year-old women demographic, which is the largest swing demographic in British Columbia.”

Segal came to the role in April 2019. She already had a long resumé in education, politics and media.

She attended Vancouver Talmud Torah elementary and Magee high school and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, where she was the first president of the Jewish student organization when Hillel House opened there. She served as national president of the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students before graduating from UVic in 2005. She then went to the University of Leicester, in the United Kingdom, for a law degree, followed by a master of laws from Osgoode Hall, in Toronto.

She worked on Parliament Hill for Conservative MPs David Sweet and Scott Reid, as well as Senator Linda Frum, and was a senior policy advisor overseeing corrections and the parole board for then-minister of public safety Steven Blaney.

While studying in Toronto, Segal worked full time as an on-air legal and policy correspondent for Sun News, until that network shut down. She worked in criminal law and then civil litigation for a time but found it not her speed and returned to media, joining Toronto’s Bell Media radio station News Talk 1010. She returned to Vancouver in 2018 and covered as maternity leave replacement for the B.C. regional director of the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee. She joined the BC Liberal party staff three days after that position ended.

“This election is really about who British Columbians can trust to lead them through economic recovery,” said Segal. “When we think about the ballot question, that’s really what British Columbians are voting on. Who do they trust to lead them through the next stage of this pandemic from an economic perspective? We have an incredible team who are all very experienced. We have former ministers, we have doctors, we have lawyers, we have just a really diverse and interesting team of very smart people.”

Given significant turnover – seven cabinet ministers have opted not to seek reelection – Segal questioned who would be on the frontbenches of a reelected NDP government.

“The question is, what does an NDP cabinet look like in the next government and do they have the bench strength to be the best party to lead this province economically?” she said.

Segal takes seriously her position as one of the few Jewish individuals on the campaign team.

“It’s a real privilege to be able to represent the community within this political sphere and it’s something I take very not lightly,” she said.

Of her job on the campaign and her slightly less hectic role the rest of the time, she added: “My job is pretty different, wild, fun. Every day is a new adventure. It’s pretty great. And we have such an incredible team, so they make it all even better.”

Green Jews front and centre

Maayan Kreitzman (photo from Maayan Kreitzman)

Maayan Kreitzman said the Green party knew it was getting the “full package” when they tapped her as their candidate in the provincial election for the riding of Vancouver-False Creek. There are schisms in the environmental movement between those who see value in direct action protests and those who endorse electoral politics. Kreitzman backs both.

Kreitzman is a leading member of the Vancouver chapter of Extinction Rebellion, a global movement that practises civil disobedience to draw attention to the climate and ecological crisis, she said, based on “a theory of change that learns from many movements in the past that have basically put their bodies in the way of injustice.” She cited as models the U.S. civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement and the suffragists.

The group shut down the Burrard Street Bridge last year and is currently involved, with other groups, in a camp in Burnaby that is physically blocking the construction of the TMX pipeline.

But Kreitzman has harsh words for the environmental movement and its limited impacts.

“The environmental movement over the last 30 years has won some battles but we’re obviously losing the war because the climate and ecological catastrophe continues unabated essentially,” she said.

While she believes in blockades, she also believes in ballots.

“I definitely believe in both,” she said. “I think when the Green party chose me as a candidate they knew that they were getting the full package. They were getting somebody who believes in direct action, who believes in doing things that are illegal when they are ethical and the right thing to do. There are other people in the Green party that believe that, too. [Former federal Green leader] Elizabeth May got arrested on Burnaby Mountain in 2018. I’m certainly not alone in that.”

Beyond the shortcomings of the environmental movement, she excoriated the political system’s status quo.

“It’s utterly failing. It’s not fit for purpose. It has not delivered the systemic changes to our economy that we need to see in order to actually have a sustainable life and future on this planet,” she said.

Above a range of policy topics she champions, Kreitzman wants to create a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice – this parliament of ordinary people selected to reflect demography “would devolve power from elected government to a more representative and radically democratic form of government.”

“Citizens’ assemblies go through a very rigorous and well-facilitated deliberative process where they have access to experts and all the best information and then they are empowered to make either decisions or recommendations, depending how their terms of reference are set up,” she explained. “The citizens’ assemblies are able to make way better, faster and more radical decisions on issues that are totally intractable for elected politicians because elected politicians operate on such short cycles and they have such perverse incentives. It’s very hard and we’ve seen how totally incapable elected politicians around the world are of making the kinds of decisions that we need in order to survive on this planet.”

Kreitzman has been thrown into politics mere days after completion of her PhD in resources, environment and sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Her research specialized in sustainable agricultural systems and, more specifically, perennial agriculture.

She was born in Vancouver to a Canadian father and an Israeli-Canadian mother, attended Vancouver Talmud Torah and Eric Hamber high school and was active in Hillel at UBC, as well as in the Graduate Students Society.

She wants to win the election – but winning isn’t everything.

“This race is not just about that,” she said. “It’s also about telling the truth and just giving a platform to a sustainability scientist, a youngish person and somebody who is willing to talk very openly about the failures of our current government systems. Not just our current government and the NDP, but our current government system and their lack of democracy, and the failures of the environmental movement itself, because neither have been effective and so far nothing has really been effective.”

While she is critical of government generally, she has harsh words for the NDP government particularly.

“This government’s record on the environment has been a total loss, it’s a complete failure,” Kreitzman said. “They’ve embraced the oil and gas industry even more than the BC Liberals have and I never thought I would say those words, that the NDP government has actually been worse for climate change and the environment than the BC Liberals have been. It’s shocking, but it’s true.”

She referenced a report from Stand.Earth, which outlines subsidies to fracking and indicates that the oil and gas industry receives four times as much in provincial government subsidies than it produces in royalties to the province.

As the candidate in Vancouver-False Creek, she is sounding the alarm that sea-level rise will make parts of the most densely populated neighbourhoods of Vancouver uninhabitable.

* * *

Kreitzman’s colleague Scott Bernstein is running for the Greens in Vancouver-Kingsway. He sees it as an ideal opportunity to contrast NDP policy with his ideas because he is facing off against Adrian Dix, the minister of health.

photo - Scott Bernstein
Scott Bernstein (photo from Scott Bernstein)

Bernstein is director of policy at the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, which is based in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University. While he has a graduate degree in environmental studies, his career has shifted to drug policy. He was a junior co-counsel on the landmark 2011 Insite case at the Supreme Court of Canada, which found that the federal government’s failure to grant an exemption allowing users to consume illicit drugs at the Vancouver safe consumption site breached the Charter of Rights because it undermined the “maintenance and promotion of public health and safety.”

He also worked at Pivot Legal Society in the Downtown Eastside and operated a private practice for a time as well, before coming to the drug coalition about three-and-a-half years ago. He has worked for George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, in New York, focusing on drug policy at the UN level and in Africa, and he spent two years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Uzbekistan.

The record-breaking recent months of opioid deaths contrasts, Bernstein said, with the response to COVID.

“There are a lot of structural problems with how the government is dealing with the overdose crisis and it really was highlighted when we had another public health crisis and, all of a sudden, we saw how the government could sort of snap to attention, dedicate funding, have information flow, have protocols and guidelines and resources available to address COVID where, in reality, the overdose crisis is now in the fifth year since it was declared a public health emergency in B.C. and we’ve never seen the response that we saw with COVID, that materialized in a few weeks,” he said. He credited retiring Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Judy Darcy as “a wonderful and caring person,” but added: “they also didn’t give her sufficient resources to deal with the problem and she doesn’t have a lot of power in the cabinet.”

* * *

Ian Goldman, the Green candidate in Vancouver-Fairview, grew up in Toronto and moved west in 1988 to attend law school at UBC. He later did a master’s in international relations, also at UBC, and has practised immigration law in private practice since 1998.

photo - Ian Goldman
Ian Goldman (photo from Ian Goldman)

The first-time candidate is up against George Heyman, the NDP minister of environment and climate change strategy.

“It’s unfortunate that, in my area, the NDP have really strong support in the sense that he’s not really feeling pressure, I don’t think,” Goldman said. “Hopefully, I can make him feel some pressure. That’s the most important thing for me.”

The New Democrats have taken climate change more seriously than previous Liberal governments, he said, “But I think they’re more of a status quo party. They say they’re taking it seriously but then their actions show them out to be more status quo, no serious climate action, really.”

COVID is a serious issue, he said, but it has allowed governments at all levels to push environmental issues and climate change to the back burner, he argued.

“As soon as the pandemic’s over, people will wake up and say, oh my God, we’ve got a really serious issue here again,” said Goldman. “That’s why I joined the Green party. I’ve always been interested in environmental issues. My kids and I and my wife go for a lot of outdoor trips, we go hiking, a lot of outdoor activities we do together. That’s where my interest in the environment comes from.”

He added: “If people are really serious about tackling this issue, they should at least consider the Green party.”

* * *

photo - Michael Barkusky
Michael Barkusky (photo from Michael Barkusky)

Michael Barkusky, an economist and certified public accountant, is in a rematch with Andrew Wilkinson, now the leader of the Liberal party, in the riding of Vancouver-Quilchena. He acknowledged it’s an uphill battle in the Liberal stronghold.

“What I’m trying to do is strengthen the Green party in general,” he said. But it is also an opportunity to press the party leader on environmental issues.

“I think the BC Liberals need to improve their green credentials substantially to be relevant in the long term,” said Barkusky, who came to Canada from South Africa in 1980. (More about his background and career is in our story from the last election, at jewishindependent.ca/apartheid-impacted-views.) He said former premier Gordon Campbell was innovative on a range of policies, including the carbon tax. He said Campbell’s successor, Christy Clark, backtracked on Campbell’s environmental policies.

The Liberal party is, Barkusky said, a “broad church with some very conservative elements and [Wilkinson] probably can’t do a lot of things that he would do if he had a completely free hand. I think the pressure needs to be kept up on them as much as it has to be kept up on the NDP.”

As he campaigns, Barkusky said, voters tell him they think the NDP ran a good government in part because of the Green party’s influence.

“And now they [the NDP] are trying to say they’ll do a better job without us,” he said. “I can’t buy that.… Quite a lot of voters in the riding agree with me. They feel that we had good government in the last three years and they credit the Green party with being an element of it being good.”

While he disagrees with the Liberals’ promise to eliminate the provincial sales tax for a year, he said changing it could be justifiable. Reducing it from seven percent on most items, or changing the number of items it covers, is a discussion worth considering, he said. But he sees the promise as akin to the NDP’s promise in the last election to eliminate tolls on bridges.

“It’s just kind of instant popularity,” he said. “A relatively bad policy that will resonate well with a certain constituency.”

Barkusky finds it interesting that there are four Green candidates in Vancouver who are Jewish, and noted that the federal Green party just elected a Jewish woman to lead it.

“That’s a lot of tikkun olam consciousness,” he said.

***

Note: This article has been amended to reflect that Maayan Kreitzman is a leading member of the Vancouver chapter of Extinction Rebellion, not of the British Columbia chapter, as originally stated.

The road to recovery

Risa Levine, chair of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Community Recovery Task Force. (photo from Jewish Federation)

The Jewish community and its agencies have been dramatically affected by the COVID pandemic and its economic implications. But not a single agency has folded – and not a single employee has lost their job – in part because of the coordinated efforts of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

That is the assessment of Risa Levine, who is chairing Federation’s Community Recovery Task Force. Levine, a retired justice who served on the Supreme Court of British Columbia and the B.C. Court of Appeal, was chosen to lead the major initiative, which will address the impacts of the pandemic on community agencies and help guide a possible rethinking of how programs and services might be delivered more efficiently or effectively in future.

The resilience of Jewish agencies stands in stark contrast to a much bleaker climate for nonprofit agencies in the general community. Among the many individuals and agencies the task force has heard from is Alison Brewin, executive director of Vantage Point, a resource agency for nonprofits in the province. “Alison told us that they expect about 25% of the nonprofits in British Columbia not to make it, to shut down,” said Levine. “Some already have and they expect that many of them won’t continue to operate.”

One of the things that Federation did almost immediately at the beginning of the emergency was intervene with a disbursement of emergency funds – $505,000, plus additional tranches released by individuals and families through their respective funds at the community foundation. In addition to this season’s annual campaign, canvassers are asking donors, if they are able, to make an additional contribution to the COVID emergency fund.

Levine was asked by Alex Cristall, chair of the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, to head the task force.

“I was on the allocations committee for Federation for 10 years, so that’s really directly related to what I’m doing now,” she said. “I had time and I think it’s crucial work to be done for our community, so I was honoured to be asked.”

Other task force members are Andrew Altow, Jill Diamond, Michelle Gerber, Hodie Kahn, Candace Kwinter, Shawn Lewis, David Porte, Justin L. Segal and Isaac Thau.

As well as confronting immediate needs of agencies, the task force presents an opportunity to consider the future more comprehensively, said Levine.

“The task force is taking a longer-term, holistic, strategic approach to look at how the community might look or how we think it should look coming out of this,” she said. The team is uniquely qualified to confront the challenges because of the diverse identities and experiences of the people on the task force, she said.

Task force members, collaborating with staff members Marcie Flom, executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver, and Shelley Rivkin, Federation’s vice-president, planning, allocations and community affairs, are reaching out to all community partner agencies.

The crucial initial step is to determine how each agency has been impacted by COVID, what their immediate needs are, and what their requirements are likely to be for them to survive and continue their work.

“It’s just amazing and very impressive how resilient and responsive the agencies have been,” Levine said. “They are affected in different ways, depending on what their function is in the community and what they are doing.”

Jewish Family Services is on the very frontline, she said, addressing food security and housing for the most vulnerable in the community. They have expanded beyond their food bank to provision of meals, and providing delivery, which they did not do before.

“They are providing financial support for people, mental health support and so on,” said Levine. “Their client load has doubled, at least, since March and they’ve had to add to their staff and they are all working remotely. It’s been huge. And they’ve been amazing in terms of what they have been able to do.”

Synagogues have also stepped up in preparing and delivering meals to congregants, especially seniors and others who are particularly vulnerable and lack mobility because of transportation challenges and the reduced accessibility to routine services, she said.

She cited the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s nearly instant transition to online delivery of services. Smaller agencies, however, face greater challenges because they may not have the hardware, software and institutional capacity to make that kind of technological shift. Helping those agencies adapt to the technological and parallel needs was one of the priorities addressed at the outset, Levine said.

As the emergency campaign unfolds, the task force will continue assessing the situation.

“Ultimately,” said Levine, “the task force will be making recommendations for distribution of those monies, the Community Recovery Fund, and that will be based on the information we are gathering now about what the needs are and our assessment of how those funds can be strategically distributed to meet the needs of the community as they have changed and evolved through this crisis.”

“Right of return” a poison pill?

Among Middle East observers, there has long been a view that the demand for a Palestinian “right of return” is a bargaining chip that would be negotiated away in a final status agreement, perhaps in exchange for a symbolic but small number of Palestinian refugees admitted to Israel and a substantial amount of money as compensation.

In a new book, two prominent Israeli progressives argue that this assumption is wrong, that the right of return is an unwavering demand from the Palestinian side and, as a result, represents a poison pill that guarantees no resolution to the conflict or to Palestinian statelessness.

“The Palestinian conception of themselves as ‘refugees from Palestine,’ and their demand to exercise a so-called right of return, reflect the Palestinians’ most profound beliefs about their relationship with the land and their willingness or lack thereof to share any part of it with Jews,” write Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf in the book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace (All Points Books, 2020).

Wilf, a former Labour member of the Knesset, and Schwartz, an academic and journalist for Ha’aretz, have undeniable left-wing credentials. But, while the Israeli left has long been associated with the idea of compromise and idealism, the authors contend that there is little room for any sort of resolution as long as Palestinians cling to the idea that five million or more of them have the right to citizenship in Israel. Part of the failure of successive peace plans, they write, stems from the inability of negotiators to recognize the Palestinians’ tenacity in holding fast on this core issue – and argue that Israelis need to recognize that truth.

“[D]ecades of shuttling, strong-arming the sides, and endless hours of negotiations came to naught because none of the diplomats or negotiators truly understood and dealt with the root causes of the conflict, choosing instead to turn away and focus on that which appeared easier,” they write.

The status of Palestinian refugees is unique in the world. They have their own international agency devoted to the issue: UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, while all other refugees fall under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In this sole instance, the definition of “refugee” has been amended to become an inheritable status, meaning that the several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs dislocated by wars in 1948-1949 and 1967 have ballooned to more than five million – even though many or most of the original refugees have died and the vast majority of those seeking “return” have in fact never lived or set foot in the state they claim for their own.

While exponentially more people were made refugees in the same era – in Europe, in the Indian subcontinent and at least 800,000 Jews forced from Arab- and Muslim-majority lands across the Middle East and North Africa – Schwartz and Wilf argue that Palestinians view themselves as having experienced a unique injustice.

They quote Aref al-Aref, a Palestinian writer who was mayor of East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule in the 1950s: “We have been afflicted by a catastrophe, we the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, during this period of time in a way in which we have not been subjected to catastrophe in centuries and in other periods of time.…” Another Palestinian scholar, in 1950, wrote: “It is the most terrible disaster befalling the Arabs and the Muslims in modern history.… It is a deep-rooted disaster, far-reaching and full of dangers. It is an evil growing by the day and by the hour.” Another writer compared it with the Muslims losing Spain in the Middle Ages.

This almost apocalyptic language precludes compromise on what Palestinians have been promised through the generations by their leaders, according to the book. And, while plenty of voices, including academics, activists and politicians, have argued that the right of return would not be such a terrible thing for Israel’s well-being, the authors provide plenty of evidence that the proposed migration of millions of Palestinian Arabs into Israel is perhaps less about justice for refugees than it is about doing to the country through demographics what the Arab world has been unable to do militarily.

“It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the homeland and not as its slaves. With greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the state of Israel,” said a senior Egyptian politician in 1949, at the beginning of the refugees’ long history.

As an article in a Lebanese newspaper put it, the Palestinians’ return would “create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character to Palestine while forming a powerful fifth column for the day of revenge and reckoning.” Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha viewed the refugees’ return as making it possible for “an irregular army that would be in a position to cause a great deal of inconvenience to the Jews by acts of sabotage.”

To ensure that the plan was not foiled, no matter how long it took to reach fruition, a now-seven-decade-old scheme was hatched to prevent Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere from putting down roots, argue the authors.

“The rehabilitation of the refugees in Arab countries would have meant the end of the war, but that was not what the Arabs wanted,” they write. While the Palestinians were made pawns of the Arab League’s campaign of “denormalization” against Israel, the book portrays most refugees as at least semi-willing players. Attempts to find resolutions to their statelessness have been met with outrage. When Canada’s foreign minister suggested some Palestinian refugees might find a permanent home in Canada, he was burned in effigy in Nablus.

UNRWA, which was presumably begun with the best of intentions, has been consumed by politics and corruption and usurped into what the authors contend is effectively a globally funded branch of the Palestinian liberation movement. Agency-funded textbooks used in Palestinian schools have been shown for decades to inculcate Jew-hatred, venerate terrorists and incite violence. Nevertheless, Palestinians receive through UNRWA among the most per capita humanitarian aid in the world and live a life of which most refugees – and the poor in most Arab countries – can only dream.

From the start, UNRWA’s first annual report, in 1951, noted that many or most refugees were enjoying a better way of life than they had before 1948, receiving universal free education and quality healthcare. The UNRWA schools, now with more than three generations of alumni, have created a uniquely well-educated population of refugees, but, along with reading, writing and arithmetic, the curriculum has created “an embittered, angry and frustrated generation, raised on myths about ethnic cleansing by the Jews, the perfidy of Arab leaders, a sense of victimhood and a refusal to take responsibility for the results of the Palestinians actions in the years and months before Israel’s birth and thereafter,” Wilf and Schwartz write.

The book does not paint an optimistic picture. Western diplomats, peacemakers and politicians refuse to recognize the Palestinian demand of return seriously and continue to believe it can be negotiated away.

“If return were truly just a bargaining chip,” write the authors, “it could have and would have been bargained long ago for a Palestinian state. Rather, it is a Palestinian state that is repeatedly bargained away in order to keep fighting for return.”

There are plenty of issues to discuss – if there were negotiations occurring – but, they argue, the entire Palestinian case rests on the thing Israel must reject.

“The one article that Israel could absolutely not agree to, as it entailed its very suicide, was the one without which the conflict would never end,” write Schwartz and Wilf.

 

Beth Tikvah welcomes rabbi

Rabbi Susan Tendler, her husband Ross Sadoff and their daughters Sofia and Daniella moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Richmond, where Tendler is the new spiritual leader of Beth Tikvah Congregation. (photo from Rabbi Susan Tendler)

Moving to a new city and starting a demanding and highly visible new job would be a challenge in the best of times. For Rabbi Susan Tendler, the recently arrived spiritual leader at Richmond’s Beth Tikvah Congregation, and her family of four, it was a little more complicated.

Not only has the COVID pandemic added complexity to every detail, the family was moving from the United States. This meant that, once they made it to British Columbia after a long, though enjoyable, drive across the continent, during which they took in some national parks and historical sites, they had to go into two weeks of quarantine in their new home.

The lemons of COVID were turned to lemonade by the reaction of the Beth Tikvah community. Tendler calls their reception “extraordinarily unbelievable.”

They arrived at the house, which had been equipped with bedding, toiletries, kitchenware and small appliances, a stocked pantry and refrigerator, and almost everything the new arrivals could want.

“People would from a distance greet us and somebody brought us dinner every single night that week. And people checked on us and would just drop off some milk or whatever we needed for the next week,” she said. While her husband, Ross Sadoff, returned to the States to collect their other vehicle, the rabbi and her daughters, 10-year-old Hannah Sofia and Daniella, who is 8, settled into quarantine.

“My girls and I sat in kind of a tent in our driveway,” she said, while congregants brought socially distanced greetings. “They drove by, honked at us and welcomed us. They had signs and balloons to make us feel welcome. The community, honestly, has gone above and beyond and really demonstrates what a caring community could be and just really made us feel welcome.”

The family moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., where Tendler had been rabbi for eight years at the Conservative B’nai Zion Congregation. She also served on the faculty of Camp Ramah Darom, in the foothills of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

She grew up in Virginia and previously held positions in congregations there and in North Carolina. Her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia is in religious studies with concentrations on Islam and Judaism. At the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, she received her rabbinical ordination and her master’s of education in informal Jewish education. She also completed a two-year rabbinic track at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She describes herself as “an ardent Zionist.”

Coming to Canada generally and Beth Tikvah specifically seems bashert. Tendler and Sadoff met at a wedding at the Richmond shul. In fact, that was one of three coincidental meetings that happened before Tendler decided maybe she should consider them an omen.

“I started thinking, wow, maybe I should pay attention to this,” she said. “Why do I keep running into him?”

She had first met Sadoff in New York, when she was en route to Israel and he was rooming with a friend of hers. On a different trip to Israel, for a cousin’s bar mitzvah, the pair met again. The Beth Tikvah meetup was third time lucky.

Relocating to Canada was not in the cards until recently, but it was something like a long-held dream.

“My husband used to say to me years ago, hey, do you think we can move to Canada?” Tendler recalled. “I’d say, Ross, I’m a female rabbi. The chance of that, at this point in time, is very slight. A decade ago, there were many fewer female rabbis in Canada.”

In fact, Tendler is the first female pulpit rabbi in a Conservative shul in British Columbia.

A few factors account for the family’s attraction to Metro Vancouver. For one thing, they wanted a Jewish day school, which Chattanooga has not had for a number of years.

“We are very excited about RJDS [Richmond Jewish Day School] because we think it will offer the flexibility that our kids will greatly benefit from,” she said.

The family loved Chattanooga, but even at one of the most diverse public schools in town, not being Christian was sometimes an issue.

“In some ways, we felt like we were undermining our family values,” said Tendler in the context of raising their kids. “We just wanted them to fully embrace and love who we were raising them to be and the values we were raising them to honour and realizing that, in some ways, we were undermining them constantly.”

A lockdown that took place after false alarms of a threat at the kids’ school made Tendler and her husband ponder school security and the prevalence of gun violence in their country.

“We say things are going to be different but nothing changes,” she said. “I went to Washington, D.C., after the shooting in [Parkland] Florida and we say things are going to change but nothing changes. At some point, you have to do something different. The lobbies are too strong and we can’t even talk in the States about gun safety. It’s all like, you’re taking away my rights. Well, what about public safety?”

Possibly above all, the family just thought that British Columbia would feel like home.

“I think that, in many ways, my family moved here for holistic health reasons,” she said. “We just wanted a place that felt healthier and was more aligned with our values.”

Even comparatively small things like an efficient recycling program make Tendler feel kinship with her new hometown. “It’s a small thing but, in general, I just feel that our values and what we want to teach our children are more in line with Canada, at least with British Columbia and Vancouver, with open-mindedness and, I would say, respect for other people.”

While the transition to their new hometown was complicated, they made the best of it. During the transcontinental road trip, they stopped at sites like the St. Louis Arch, the Badlands, Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore.

“We took some little hikes and saw bison and prairie dogs,” said Tendler. “It was fun.”

Cemeteries get an upgrade

The new black granite memorial wall at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery in New Westminster allows people to memorialize loved ones buried in other cities. (photo from Schara Tzedeck)

What’s new at the cemetery? Not a question one tends to ask, but the Schara Tzedeck cemeteries in New Westminster and Surrey have seen some significant upgrades and additions in recent months.

At the New Westminster cemetery, which saw its first burial in 1929, 50 graves that did not have headstones have received permanent markers. More than 100 others will ideally also see stone markers added in the coming years as the cemetery board’s Chesed Shel Emet Fund is replenished.

There are plenty of reasons why a grave might not have a permanent headstone, according to Howard Jampolsky, executive director of the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery Board.

“Sometimes, somebody had no family, maybe they were destitute, alone in the world,” he said. “Sometimes, the families just don’t have money; sometimes, one spouse dies and they get a headstone and the other spouse dies and there is no one to put the headstone.”

Whatever the reasons, the graves, some dating back to the 1950s, had temporary markers.

The Chesed Shel Emet Fund was set up primarily with donations from cemetery board members, Jampolsky said, and the first batch of 50 headstones was purchased for these unmarked graves and placed in the last few months.

photo - One of 50 headstones placed on graves that, until now, had only temporary markers
One of 50 headstones placed on graves that, until now, had only temporary markers. (photo from Schara Tzedeck)

“We were hoping to do a big unveiling ceremony, where all the graves would be unveiled and we would invite the community,” he said. But COVID intervened. He hopes such a ceremony will occur in the future.

The headstones cost about $525 each and the board is welcoming donations from the community to the fund so they can proceed with placing more stones.

Also at New Westminster, a new black granite memorial wall has been created to commemorate people who are buried in other places.

“Sometimes, someone lives in Vancouver their entire life and they die and get buried in another place, maybe they’re sent to Toronto or Israel or somewhere else,” Jampolsky said. “This is an opportunity to memorialize somebody who lived in the city and contributed to the city’s life and they don’t have a headstone here. The other possibility is people who have parents or family buried in other places where they live and don’t have the ability to go and visit. If you want to come on the yahrzeit, you can come and put a rock on top of that.”

The New Westminster cemetery also has seen a green irrigation initiative recently completed.

“We spend a lot of money irrigating our green grass here, a lot of water,” he said. “We used potable city water.”

They have now drilled a well and are also capturing rainwater, which is pumped through the irrigation system. Not only is this better for the environment, Jampolsky said, but the $150,000 cost will be recouped in about eight years at current water rates. He sees the greening initiative as in keeping with Jewish burial tradition, which is respectful of the land, rejects concrete casings and does not include embalming.

In other significant news, the Surrey cemetery, which had its first burial about a dozen years ago, now has a chapel. Until now, funerals at the Surrey site were graveside only. A sad irony is that the pandemic has meant that, after the first couple of funerals in the new chapel, services had to be again curtailed to graveside only, and with limited attendance.

The $500,000 structure was completed in late 2019 and reflects the philosophy of the board, Jampolsky said, that all members of the community be treated equally. Those being buried in New Westminster had funerals in a chapel, while those in Surrey did not. The new Surrey chapel was funded within the existing budget, but, if a community member wanted to contribute to the chapel, Jampolsky said, naming opportunities could be considered.

“The other thing we’re doing in Surrey is spending more time and effort and money to make Surrey look a lot nicer,” he said. “We are doing more landscaping work, we’re planting flowers and doing things that make it look very, very nice. We’re putting a lot of effort into that property.”

The Surrey cemetery contains about 2,000 plots while the much older New Westminster site has about 10,000. While approximately 5,000 of the New Westminster plots are filled, Jampolsky acknowledges that he can’t accurately predict how long the cemetery has before it is full.

“It really depends,” he said. There are about 80 burials annually in New Westminster. That would suggest about 60 years before it is full. But the community is growing quickly, so perhaps it would be only 50 years. At the same time, a plot may be purchased and not used for decades, he said. If a young family purchased plots today, it is reasonable to assume some burials might not occur until the 22nd century.

 

 

A testament to free speech

A new book on an incendiary topic turns out to be not quite as expected. The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, by Kenneth S. Stern, may be the most comprehensive assessment of the (at least) 20-year battle on North American campuses between pro-Israel and anti-Israel forces.

Jewish and pro-Israel readers picking up the work might anticipate a litany of horrors, anti-Zionist if not antisemitic incidents, brawls, screaming matches, vandalism, boycotts and the like. There is that. But Stern argues that the perception that campuses are aflame in anti-Zionist rage is simply not true. More, he offers proof that the pro-Israel side is far from innocent of engaging in disgraceful tactics, too. There is ill will and there are bad actors on both sides. Most unexpectedly, as much as the book is about the conflict, it is more than anything an exercise in applied ethics on the topic of free expression.

Stern is the director of the Bard Centre for the Study of Hate, an attorney and an author. For 25 years, he was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism and he was a lead drafter of the Working Definition of Antisemitism. He is also, it appears, something close to a free speech purist. As such, he rails against efforts by Israel advocates who have organized campaigns to censure (and censor) anti-Israel voices. He doesn’t let the other side off easily, either, calling out acts of harassment like drowning out pro-Israel speakers with the “heckler’s veto.”

The book, from New Jewish Press, an imprint of University of Toronto Press, begins with an empirical assessment. In institutions of higher learning in the United States, Israel is an issue in very few, he writes.

When speaking with Jewish audiences, Stern asks for a show of hands to gauge perceptions on anti-Israel attitudes. He asks for guesses on how many American colleges have divested from Israel.

“Many seem surprised when I say ‘zero,’” he writes. “There are relatively few campuses where Israel is a burning issue, and every year the number of pro-Israel programs … is usually at least double the anti-Israel ones. There are over 4,000 campuses in the U.S. – in the 2017-18 academic year, 149 had anti-Israel activity.… So the campuses aren’t burning.”

He does not dismiss the extreme tensions on a few campuses, however.

“[O]n some campuses where anti-Israel activity is prominent, pro-Israel Jewish students may feel marginalized, dismissed or vilified, sometimes with antisemitic tropes.” Identity politics and the conflation of Jewish people with “whiteness” creates racial conflict. “[T]he labeling of Jews as white becomes a problem when shared victimhood becomes a sacred symbol, a badge of honour, a precondition to enter a club of the oppressed. Antisemitic discrimination is rendered invisible.”

Though bigotry may play a role in the discussion, Stern does not see constructive resolutions in neologisms like trigger warnings, safe spaces and microaggressions.

“Faculty should have the right to give trigger warnings if they want, but I never do, and I think the idea is a horrid one,” he writes. “I teach Mein Kampf. It’s disturbing – get over it. College should prepare one to be an adult, and there are no trigger warnings after graduation day. Why are we encouraging students to be ostriches? Shouldn’t they, rather, be learning how to navigate things that will likely unsettle them over the rest of their lives?”

He quotes CNN commentator Van Jones, a strong civil rights proponent, who opposes “safe spaces” on campus: “I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take the weights out of the gym. That’s the whole point of the gym.”

Stern contends a fundamental error has been made in defining terms.

“We want campuses that are open to expression – including, perhaps even especially, difficult and disturbing ideas – but which protect students from real harassment and intimidation. Hate speech codes were efforts to say that ideas themselves can harass and intimidate. Ideas can and should make one uncomfortable (a comfortable college education is a wasted college education). But harassment is something different.”

Strategically, he argues, trying to censor hateful ideas is self-defeating and advances hate agents by martyring them.

“By trying to censor, rather than expose and combat, speech the students perceived as hateful, they were actually helping the alt-right and white supremacists,” writes Stern. “It’s no coincidence that the white nationalists in recent years have wrapped their racist and antisemitic messages around the concept of free speech. Why would progressives allow these haters to steal the bedrock democratic principle of free speech, disingenuously saying that this is what their fight is about? By trying to deny alleged racists platforms, progressives are helping white supremacists recast their vile message as noble protection of a right.”

Another strategic failure, he argues, is buying into the Palestinian narrative’s good/evil dichotomy.

“Israel’s case is best understood as inherently complex and difficult; playing into the ‘all bad’ and ‘all good’ binary of the other side renders those complexities invisible,” he writes.

The conflict on campus spills over, of course. Israel has created a list of 20 organizations, those that urge boycotts of the country, for instance, and bars their members from entering the country. Stern sees this as counterproductive: “You don’t make the case that blacklists (especially of academics) are proper if your goal is to oppose blacklists. You are conceding the argument.”

He gives an example of an anti-Israel campus activist who defends his group’s refusal to meet with Zionists “over cookies and cake” because “you Jews, in all due respect, you wouldn’t sit down with Nazis for tea and cake.”

He also reflects on the “Standards of Partnership” adopted by Hillel International, the Jewish campus organization, which proscribe engaging with groups or individuals that deny Israel’s right to exist, or who delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard Israel, who support BDS or who exhibit “a pattern of disruptive behaviour towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.”

Writes Stern: “For those who are not yet ideological soldiers, but want to learn more, and want to do it around their campus Hillel, what sense does it make that adults are telling them they can only bring in certain types of speakers? Yes, the adults defined BDS as hateful. But does it make sense to tell students they have to go elsewhere than the Jewish address on campus to hear about it firsthand from those who support it?”

The litany of bad behaviours on all sides of the ideological divide is likely to make readers of Stern’s book uneasy, whether the reader is Zionist or anti-Zionist. But it is a rare and uncompromising testament to free expression that should give genuine free speech advocates an uplift, particularly in an era when ideologically driven regulation of expression and ideas, especially on campuses, has left many advocates of core liberal, academic values feeling beleaguered.

Holidays unlike any before

Services in the Schara Tzedeck auditorium, with social-distancing measures in place. (photo by Camille Wener)

In early March, Canadians were just beginning to take COVID-19 seriously. Then, in what seemed like an instant, the province shut down all places where people gather. Religious organizations were forced to close their doors – in some cases for the first time in more than a century – and rethink everything about how they engage with their congregants.

In a survey of rabbis and synagogue leaders across British Columbia after a summer of COVID, what emerges is not so much a story of hardship and difficulty but of resilience, creativity and a paring away of the superfluous to rediscover the most elemental things that we seek from spirituality and community.

The loss of life, the horrible illness and difficult recovery have directly affected thousands of British Columbia families, but we have fared better than many other jurisdictions. Even those not directly affected by the virus itself have had heartbreaking occasions, such as losing loved ones to other causes without family beside them, funerals and shivahs conducted online and, of course, the various burdens and isolation experienced by older people, those who live alone or others who are especially vulnerable.

As we approach High Holidays that are assured to be unlike any we have experienced before, there is an air of anxiety, but more evident is a flexibility and commitment to make the holidays as meaningful as possible. Although close coordination has taken place through RAV, the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver, every congregation is finding its own way and the holidays in most cases will occur along a spectrum of hybrid in-person and online services, most with multiple smaller, shorter programs. Services that routinely occur outdoors, such as Tashlich, will be joined in some cases with shofar-blowing and other services held out of doors. Despite all, reaction among rabbis is that community engagement and flexibility have made these months far better than could have been predicted in March.

“From day one, our motto was, we are not ramping down, we are ramping up,” said Rabbi Jonathan Infeld. His Conservative shul, Beth Israel, had not previously done programs or services online but, within 24 hours of the shutdown, all activities had moved online.

Zoom, an online meeting platform that almost no one had heard of before the pandemic, has proved a lifeline for individuals and communities, including almost all synagogues in the province. The platform’s interactivity allows individuals to participate in services, make virtual aliyot, engage in back-and-forth with teachers and guest speakers, and participate from home in numbers that rabbis say are routinely higher than in-person programs in “normal” times. “The social community of the synagogue’s remained intact,” said Infeld.

Most of Beth Israel’s congregants will experience the High Holidays from home, online. “It’s only the people who are leading the services and/or their families who will be in the building,” he said.

Provincial regulations permit a maximum of 50 people in any gathering, with social distancing enforced. For synagogues, that number varies based on the size of a sanctuary and the reality is that, to ensure two-metre separation, smaller synagogues will be able to accommodate far fewer than 50.

For the Orthodox Congregation Schara Tzedeck, however, online Shabbat and holiday services are not an option.

“We’ve had to think very creatively,” said Camille Wenner, executive director of the synagogue. “This was the first time in 110 years that our doors closed for davening,” she said.

People who had made minyan every week of their life suddenly couldn’t.

“That was really difficult,” said Wenner. “That’s why it was so important for us to mobilize a chesed committee to connect with everyone and make sure that everyone was OK. That’s how the idea of Shabbat in a Box developed and the idea of feeding people and making them feel that that ritual of Shabbat is still very much alive, you don’t have to be here to do it, we can still do it together.” That concept will be extended to Rosh Hashanah in a Box, which will go to more than 300 households.

photo - Office administrator Anna Herman is among those who sanitize the prayer books for congregants to use at services
Office administrator Anna Herman is among those who sanitize the prayer books for congregants to use at services. (photo by Camille Wener)

Schara Tzedeck was the first Orthodox synagogue in Canada to reopen to limited in-person services, on June 1. “It was nerve-racking,” Wenner admitted. The usual single Shabbat service has been increased to two. Hand sanitizers and masks are required. Those who do not bring their own siddur are handed a newly cleaned one. Additional custodial staff are on hand to wipe down the entire sanctuary between services. An online registration program allows congregants to see how many of the 50 seats remain available.

For the holidays, services will be expanded to meet demand, she said. Rabbis and cantors who work in day schools and elsewhere in the community have volunteered to lead smaller services, which will occur in various places throughout the building and may even take place under a tent in the parking lot, if need be.

“The services will be condensed to about two hours instead of the regular five,” she said. “Right now, we’re looking at six or seven services back to back starting at 6:30 in the morning.”

The Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture normally doesn’t run programming through the summer. But, this year, the Sholem Aleichem Speakers Series has continued every Friday on Zoom and Exploring Jewish Writers, on Saturday mornings, also has continued through the summer, said Donna Becker, the centre’s executive director. “Both of them are better attended on Zoom than they were in person,” she said.

Peretz Centre holiday services will feature Stephen Aberle singing Kol Nidre, but the usual musical program, which sees the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir interspersed with the audience, is obviously out of the question.

This year’s High Holidays will be the first since the inception of the progressive congregation Ahavat Olam in 2004 that will not be held at the Peretz Centre. Said board member Alan Bayless: “We would prefer not to use computers for Shabbat or High Holiday services, but we believe that virtual services are necessary for our community this year given the danger of the coronavirus.”

Rabbi Yitzchak Wineberg of Chabad Lubavitch BC, said the 10 Chabad centres in the province are all adopting protocols appropriate for their congregants’ needs. He worries that, with daily infection reports often heading in the wrong direction, the province may re-impose stricter regulations by the time the holidays roll around. Either way, he suspects many or most people will be marking the holidays at home. “It’s the reality,” he said. “It’s a question of what works and what is acceptable and what isn’t.”

On the positive side, online learning has skyrocketed.

“The amount of study that’s going on by Zoom is absolutely unprecedented,” Wineberg said. “That’s the silver lining. I have a feeling that it will continue once this pandemic is over, God willing as soon as possible, I think people are going to continue learning that way. You have the convenience of sitting in your home and participating almost as if you are there – that’s the new reality.”

The Reform synagogue Temple Sholom had a running leap at livestreaming services, so some of the infrastructure was well in place before the pandemic. The difference now is the effort they are going to not just to allow people at home to observe, but to participate in the services. Classes, webinars and other programs have been expanded online. The Men’s Club and the Sisterhood have moved their programs onto Zoom. The accessibility means Temple Sholom programs are reaching new audiences, often far outside Vancouver.

The summer weather has allowed the synagogue to hold some events in parks and in the courtyard behind the shul. Still, Rabbi Carey Brown has no illusions that these High Holidays will be like any other. For one thing, only clergy will be in the sanctuary.

“It will be really different,” said Brown, who is the synagogue’s associate rabbi. “We are working really hard to put together High Holiday services and experiences that will help people feel the sense of the season, both the newness of the new year and the reflectiveness of the season.”

The Okanagan Jewish Community, which does not have a permanent rabbi, has depended on volunteers to deliver programs and services. The Kelowna-area centre has seen significant growth, and is running an 11-person conversion class and various adult education programs on Zoom. As great as all that is, Steven Finkelman, the centre’s president, thinks this might be a tough year financially for the group, a concern expressed by several interviewees. Revenue generated at the High Holidays and through in-person galas or other fundraising events in normal years is likely to suffer this year.

While online programming has proven hugely popular, there can be no denying that this experience has resulted in some missed opportunities. Rabbi Philip Gibbs of West Vancouver’s Conservative shul Har-El, has pangs of regret when he thinks back to the grand plans the synagogue had in January for a year of innovation and new initiatives.

“I was very excited about both the scale and the types and the variety of programming – more cooking events or culturally focused programs that really were going to give our community the chance to gather and engage in a really fun, exciting and meaningful way,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve lost that opportunity.”

The challenges and opportunities of the High Holidays will be met with one or more services on different days, he said. While he and his congregation are making the best of the situation, Gibbs laments the loss of in-person collective connection.

Similarly, Rabbi Hannah Dresner of Or Shalom, which is affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, grieves the loss of some in-person connections. However, she feels that Zoom can provide an intimacy that a large group gathering might not. As well, not only are out-of-towners joining Or Shalom’s offerings, but the rabbi and others are surfing programs throughout the Jewish world and beyond.

“I just think it’s a time when the world is our oyster,” said Dresner. “Spiritually you can look for whatever kinds of workshops you want, so people are experimenting a lot more.”

Or Shalom will hold successive Tashlich services at False Creek, each accommodating congregants in limited numbers. For the well-being of ducks and other birds, Or Shalom members drop leaves rather than bread in the water.

“I love the creative challenge, but I can’t say it doesn’t keep me up at night,” Dresner said, laughing. “I hear a lot of rabbis say, I didn’t sign up for this. There’s nothing that we’re doing that I signed up for.”

This extraordinary time has forced and invited rabbis and others to reconsider everything. The changes have made her reflect on “what’s at the heart of the service, what do we really need, what’s extraneous, what makes it tedious? Because it cannot be tedious. It’s got to be tight, shorter and beautiful.”

Rabbi Levi Varnai of the Bayit in Richmond concurs that the crisis forced a reckoning. “If a synagogue is not doing services – and we don’t do services online – what do we do? It got us thinking to the real core of what a synagogue is really supposed to be about,” he said.

As an Orthodox shul, the Bayit cannot stream services on Shabbat or the holidays, but they have expanded classes throughout the week and held socially distanced events at Garry Point Park. Pre-Shabbat events help people prepare for the Sabbath and regular phone calls and visits by the rabbi and volunteers to speak with people from a distance and drop off packages keep a sense of community alive.

Now that limited in-person gatherings are permitted, the shul’s size permits 25 congregants. But even that is not quite as it was. “It’s coming in, praying and going, which is great because it’s more than we had before that,” he said, but there’s no food and no kibbitzing.

The holidays will see multiple services and people can arrange to be there specifically for Yizkor but perhaps not come for the entire day.

The chaos of shifting suddenly from the way things have always been done has not left Varnai a lot of time to reflect. But, when pressed, he acknowledged how surreal it is.

“It’s a huge change to the regular Jewish life that I’m accustomed to since I was a young boy, since my bar mitzvah, praying three times a day with a quorum of others,” he said. It’s a stunning transformation, but entirely within Jewish tradition. “We always put safety and well-being and health first.”

He puts the whole thing in perspective. “Our people came out of the centuries and had to go through a lot worse,” he said. “Not going to synagogue is not fun but, thank God, other generations were challenged with much greater hardships and we’re relatively blessed.”

Beth Hamidrash, the only Sephardi synagogue in Canada west of Toronto, counts among its congregants Dr. Jocelyn Srigley, a microbiologist who is a director with the infection prevention and control branch of the Provincial Health Services Authority. Rabbi Shlomo Gabay and shul president Eyal Daniel credit Srigley with helping guide them through this difficult time and say it was on her advice that their synagogue was the first in the city to close.

photo - Services at Beth Hamidrash with COVID-19 precautions in place
Services at Beth Hamidrash with COVID-19 precautions in place. (photo from Beth Hamidrash)

Despite the challenges, however, engagement is better than ever, said the rabbi. Daniel added that synagogue membership has actually jumped 20% since the pandemic began, something he credits to an increased desire for meaning, and also a direct outreach he began when he became president in June to encourage occasional attendees to commit to membership.

The strange situation has also helped strengthen relations between Beth Hamidrash and the two Sephardi congregations in Seattle. They virtually co-hosted an Israeli historian speaking on Medieval Spain, for example.

Probably no rabbi has had an experience quite like Rabbi Susan Tendler. The new spiritual leader at Richmond’s Conservative shul Beth Tikvah arrived in the midst of the lockdown with her family from her previous posting in Chattanooga, Tenn. The family then had to quarantine for 14 days, with community members dropping off prepared meals and greeting the family from a distance. Despite that unusual arrival, or perhaps because of it, she has reflected on big things.

“While I would never wish the pandemic on this world or on any person, really, this is an opportunity for renewal,” she said. “We do all have to reconsider what we’re doing and what our goals are and find new paths for reaching them.”

While hoping that services might return to normal in the not-too-distant future, she acknowledged that the very term sanctuary implies that every congregant must feel secure. “At a minimum,” she said, “it has to feel safe.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been amended to reflect that Or Shalom is affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, not the Reconstructionist movement, as stated in the original online and print versions.

Best years ahead: Shanken

Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver chief executive officer Ezra Shanken holding a T-shirt featuring Dr. Patricia Daly, vice-president of public health and chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health. The Facebook post thanks Daly for always being there, throughout COVID-19, “behind the scenes providing valuable support.” (photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)

The largest capital project in the history of British Columbia’s Jewish community – the redevelopment of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver site – is going ahead as planned, despite the pandemic. This and many other projects are continuing as planned, says Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver chief executive officer Ezra Shanken, in part because the agency has been preparing for a crisis for more than a decade.

As the Jewish Federation is set to launch the 2020-21 annual campaign, the Independent spoke with Shanken about the achievements and challenges of a year that started out relatively normally and veered suddenly into the utterly extraordinary.

While the COVID-19 crisis wreaked havoc on communities worldwide, and upended 2020 in unpredictable ways, Shanken said that Federation has been prepared for a crisis and that means the community remains in a position of economic and social health. After the 2008 economic recession, the organization launched a multi-year planning and allocations process intended to smooth economic ripples and equip partner agencies with reliable income expectations.

Federation raised $10.3 million this year – $8.9 million through the 2019 annual campaign and $1.4 million in special targeted funds from donors toward specific high-priority community needs such as supplemental education, to expand Jewish Family Services’ food hubs and to increase outreach to suburban and remote Jewish communities. Dr. Jonathon Leipsic was campaign chair. Alex Cristall, Federation board chair, and Shanken, provided a comprehensive overview of the year’s achievements in the 2019-20 annual report, available online at jewishvancouver.com.

When the pandemic struck, Federation launched an emergency campaign to help agencies meet the challenge of providing services to their constituencies while confronting the health crisis and its associated economic implications. The amount raised so far is not being announced, but $505,000 in funding has been released, for services like food and housing supports through JFS; to the JCCGV to help with service delivery; to supplemental and day schools to assist with tuition subsidies and transitions to online learning; for emotional support for seniors through the Jewish Seniors Alliance; and more.

A crisis like COVID, said Shanken, can have unintended consequences in helping communities overcome divisions and work together to reduce duplications of effort.

“Crisis often opens the door for opportunities for collaboration that never would have existed before for myriad political reasons,” he said. “People have far greater clarity around what the big picture looks like when they are in crisis. They are willing to forgo those smaller, often political complications that don’t allow for the advancement of big-ticket projects.”

Programs and projects that were underway before COVID include a Jewish Day School Council, chaired by Hodie Kahn, which began a year ago to undertake a benchmark study on the costs of education for each of the five schools in Metro Vancouver’s Jewish community. The findings of the report are expected to point the direction toward new funding models for Jewish education.

Community security also remains top of mind. This year saw the largest number of community organizations receive federal funding for security upgrades to facilities – Federation’s community security advisory committee, chaired by Bernard Pinsky, helped secure more than $225,000 from the federal Security Infrastructure Program. Security training sessions were provided to 160 community members.

A significant portion of campaign funds support programs abroad, including in Israel, especially in Vancouver’s partnership region, the Upper Galilee Panhandle. A connection with Jews in far-eastern Russia is also enjoying support from Vancouver’s campaign.

The challenges presented by the pandemic brought out the best in the community, Shanken said.

“It’s unprecedented in its negativity and it’s unprecedented in its positivity,” he said. “It’s unprecedented in the way that we are seeing need but it’s also unprecedented in the way that we are seeing cooperation to address that need. It’s really been a beautiful thing to see the community come together, agencies across the spectrum working together to ensure that we really have a great community as we come out of this.”

He recalls a phone call he received at the height of the lockdown.

“Somebody called me up one time when we were knee-deep in this thing and said to me, you know, Ezra, if you want to go through a crisis, go through it with the Jewish community, because we do it better than anybody,” he said. “I actually think that there is some truth to that. We really are very, very good at coming together at these critical moments. You see that materializing in the way that our agencies are working together, the way our donors are working together, the way our volunteers are coming now to serve, people are delivering food packages, over 1,300 people are being fed a week, that’s being done on the backs of volunteers and amazing professionals, multiple agencies working in conjunction with each other to make that happen. And that’s only possible because people’s best selves are emerging during this moment.… What strikes me is we really, really do, as a Jewish community, show our best selves in times of crisis.”

Shanken credits Eldad Goldfarb, executive director of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, for forging ahead with plans for the redevelopment of the site.

“I think people are still very passionate about seeing this project move forward,” said Shanken. “We are committed to continue to walk down the road. I can’t tell you when we will get a shovel in the ground, but I will tell you we have not put this on hold.”

Though this has been a most unusual year, so far, Shanken is bullish on the Metro Vancouver Jewish community.

“I believe it in my soul that the best years for our community have yet to happen,” he said. “We have had an amazing run over the past decade or more. Our community is incredibly strong, well positioned to emerge from COVID better than it’s ever been. But, for us to emerge in that way, it requires a commitment from our community to seize on the moment and bring us to that place that I know we can get to. The call that I would have for people is to join up, because we have an unprecedented opportunity to do truly great things for this community and to make us even stronger than we’ve ever been.”