Adam is one of the potential converts interviewed in the documentary Converts: The Journey of Becoming Jewish, directed by Rebecca Shore and Oren Rosenfeld, which is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. (photo from convertsmovie.com)
A religion that encourages questions, one in which people can speak directly with God. A religion that’s thousands of years old, which so many have attempted to wipe out, yet still flourishes. A religion that’s intellectual and communal, which involves both the head and the heart.
Danya (photo from convertsmovie.com)
These are just some of the aspects of Judaism highlighted in Converts: The Journey of Becoming Jewish, directed by Rebecca Shore and Oren Rosenfeld. The 70-minute documentary is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs April 4-14 in theatres and April 15-19 online.
Converts follows Adam, Danya and Bianka as they go through the conversion process. Each have their own reasons for wanting to become Jewish.
Adam, a student at York University when we meet him, grew up in a violence-filled neighbourhood in Toronto. His father used the family’s savings – that could have gone into moving the family elsewhere –to establish a church, which failed. Adam was attracted to Judaism because, unlike the Christianity he grew up with, Judaism gave him the space to ask questions and to speak with God directly, though giving up belief in Jesus was hard, he admits.
Danya, a businesswoman from Costa Rica, found out in high school that she has Spanish-Portuguese Jewish roots, that her ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism from Judaism centuries ago. She feels that ancestral pull and uproots her life, traveling to Israel with her daughter in the hope of converting and living there.
Bianka (photo from convertsmovie.com)
Bianka, a PhD student in chemistry at the University of Warsaw, lives in Radom, Poland. She immerses herself in a few other religions before finding comfort in what she considers Judaism’s scientific approach, but also in the warmth of the Jewish community, which she discovers by attending synagogue and holiday events.
Well-constructed and well-paced, Converts is a fascinating look at identity, family, community, religion, the search for meaning and the possibilities of change and self-actualization.
A still from the documentary Resistance: They Fought Back. (theyfoughtback.com)
Resistance: They Fought Back screens March 3, 2pm, at Rothstein Theatre. Presented by the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre, special guest at the screening will be director Paula S. Apsell.
The film’s synopsis reads: “We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed ‘Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.’ Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel and the U.S., Resistance: They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis.”
For tickets ($10) to the screening, visit vjff.org.
Jeff L. Lieberman – director, writer and producer of Bella! – with his mother, Carole Lieberman, at the documentary’s July screening in San Francisco. (photo by Pat Mazzera)
“I could feel defeated now / I could be broken-hearted / I could be finished long before I’d even started / But that would be too easy and I never take the easy way.”
In his production notes, Jeff L. Lieberman – director, writer and producer of the award-winning documentary Bella! – rightfully highlights these lyrics from the original song Mark W. Hornburg and Doug Jervey composed specifically for this film about Bella Abzug (1920-1998). Abzug never shied away from a fight and would always come back after a loss.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim issued an official proclamation of Oct. 15, 2023, as the opening night of the film Bella! in Canada. (photo from Re-emerging Films)
Lieberman, who has lived in New York City since 2007, returned to his hometown of Vancouver for the Canadian première of Bella! Oct. 15 at the Park Theatre. The film was presented by the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre and sponsored by Dexter Realty. Ahead of the event, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim issued an official proclamation of the opening night of the film in Canada. The proclamation recognizes that the documentary “explores the remarkable life and accomplishments of the late Bella Abzug, the trailblazing activist, feminist, congress member, and global advocate for equality.” The proclamation acknowledges that Lieberman grew up in Vancouver and that the idea for the film originated here. It was a suggestion from Carole Lieberman, who had gotten the idea from a neighbour, but more on that later.
For those unfamiliar with Abzug, she was one of only 12 women (of 435 members) to enter Congress in 1971. There, she was instrumental in getting women the right to have credit cards in their own name; she introduced curb cuts that allowed people with disabilities or other mobility issues more freedom of movement; and she brought in the Equality Act, the first federal LGBTQ+ rights legislation in the United States. Other issues about which she was vocal included ending the Vietnam War and supporting the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
Abzug was the first woman to run for the Senate from New York and the first woman to run for mayor of New York City. After she lost both races – in heartbreaking fashion – she took on other challenges, including being one of the leaders of the feminist movement and a co-founder of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization.
“Raised in a community filled with strong Jewish women, Bella Abzug was not a totally unfamiliar name,” writes Lieberman in his director’s notes. “Her orbit filled my 1980s home: the books of Letty Cottin Pogrebin (featured in Bella!) and Anita Diamant lined our bookshelves; we sang the songs of Debbie Friedman; and were proud to see Gloria Steinem (also featured in Bella!) appear on the evening news. However, Bella’s name did not quite push through like it had in other homes throughout the 1970s, when she appeared on magazine covers and became one of the most recognizable faces in Congress – due in part to her trademark branding – her iconic hats.”
Lieberman includes many audio clips of Abzug talking about various things, including her first jobs as a lawyer – she enrolled in law school at Columbia University in 1944, where she was one of six women in a class of 120, and graduated in 1947. She said she would go out to clients on behalf of a firm and be told to sit and wait until “the lawyer” arrived.
“So, I had an identity crisis and, in those days, professional women wore hats,” she says. “So, I put on a pair of gloves and a hat and whenever I appeared anywhere, they then knew I was there for business. I’ve since taken off the gloves, but I grew to like wearing hats and that was merely my way of being me.”
Congresswoman Bella Abzug, in 1979. (photo from Bernard Gotfryd, Library of Congress)
Bella! captures Abzug’s big personality and her passion for politics and social change. She made an impact on abortion rights, gay rights, equality for women and minorities, climate issues and more. Not understanding how a person who accomplished so much had basically disappeared from public knowledge was one of the reasons Lieberman made the film.
“In 2016, after completing my previous film, The Amazing Nina Simone, I began brainstorming ideas for my next project,” he writes. “My mom came up with a list of documentary ideas that like any well-meaning parent included suggestions that ignored many boundaries of reality. After politely rejecting most of the ideas, I paused when she mentioned Bella Abzug. I liked the idea but was pretty confident that her story had been told many times before. My mom said the idea had come from a neighbour who had met Bella when she visited Vancouver for a climate conference. I didn’t know George Febiger, but spoke to him on the phone and he told me about his very memorable day spent touring the city with Bella, and the many stories and insights that she had shared. He thought Bella’s story was long overdue. After doing some research, I quickly realized a comprehensive documentary film about Bella Abzug had never been done before, and George was not alone in his belief – it was Bella’s time.”
And Lieberman gives Abzug her due. He had access to never-before-shared audio and video footage, of which he and the production team of Re-emerging Films – Jamila C. Fairley, Tamar Kaissar and Amy Wilensky – made brilliant use. The film includes interviews with Abzug’s children and we meet her supportive husband, Martin, who died in 1986, through archival recordings, as well as other Abzug supporters and rivals. The film features interviews with a host of political activist celebrities who worked with and were inspired by Abzug, including Hillary Clinton, David Dinkins, Phil Donahue, Marlo Thomas, Barbra Streisand, Maxine Waters and many others.
Returning to the original song that ends the film, Lieberman writes, “It is easy for any one of us to retreat and be discouraged by the onslaught of overwhelming, bad news. It takes more work to stand up and fight – but less work if we all do it collectively. With the perils of climate change, dismantling of civil rights, and our democracy being challenged by both inside and outside threats, we hope that Bella! inspires a future generation of leaders who will pick up the bullhorn and lead us toward sustainable solutions. And we hope this film inspires everyone to find those small things they can do improve the world and never take the easy way.”
Bella! had its world première this summer in the United States. While there currently are no other screenings planned for Vancouver, the film will be aired on PBS, and will also stream more widely in the coming months. It can be rented to stream at vimeo.com/ondemand/445444. For more information, visit bella1970.com.
The costs of completing the documentary A 20th Century Passion include editing time, colour correction and sound mix. (screenshot)
A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to bring to the big screen a documentary about the late Peter Gary, a Hungarian-born composer, Holocaust survivor and resident of Victoria.
The online fundraising effort to complete A 20th Century Passion was started by filmmaker David Malysheff and Gary’s widow, Judith Estrin. Their goal is $35,000.
Gary passed away in 2016, the same year his oratorio A 20th Century Passion premièred in Jerusalem. The work spans the period from the First World War to the Nuremberg trials, including his experiences living in and surviving three years in three different concentration camps.
Gary had a message, the campaign organizers say, which was to stamp out hate. Over the years, he delivered this message to tens of thousands of students throughout Canada.
“The message of the oratorio is to remember history, that hate is ugly and brutal and should be stopped. It is a love piece in honour of Peter’s mother, who was brutally murdered by the Nazis while Peter spent three years in death camps,” Estrin said.
“Like all classical oratorios, it is tragic – this one deals not with the life of Jesus but with the six million murdered Jews. Because Peter had to deal with the murdered bodies of children, he dedicated the piece to the murdered 1.5 million Jewish children,” she said.
While Gary wrote the oratorio over a period of many years, revising it right up to time of his death, it was mostly written during 1970s and 1980s. Barak Tal, the conductor who led the work in Jerusalem, spent time with Gary at his home, going over every note.
The documentary explains how the oratorio came to fruition, using the Jerusalem performance as the score beneath the narrative. The film also shows Gary speaking to high school students about his experiences.
Malysheff, who has been a cinematographer for The Nature of Things, Us and Them and The Fifth Estate, described the film as a passion project – one for which he has not received any payment in the seven years since he began working on it. The costs of completing the film, including editing time, colour correction, sound mix and more, have led Estrin and him to appeal to the public for support.
The importance of A 20th Century Passion at this time cannot be overstated, Estrin said. “With antisemitic hate crimes and acts up just since Oct. 7, the message to stamp out hate, to go in peace, is more critical than ever,” she said. “The world has lost its moral compass, and this piece is about the hope that [people] will remember what horror the 20th century held for the world. We are facing an enemy who wants to annihilate all Jews. Once they are done with us, they will come for everyone else.”
The documentary shows Peter Gary, a Holocaust survivor, speaking to high school students about his experiences. (screenshot)
The filmmakers also point out that a significant number of North Americans born after 1981 cannot name a single concentration camp or ghetto and think that fewer than six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. An alarming percentage of young people, they added, hold the opinion that the Jews caused the Holocaust.
Gary was born in 1924 into an artistic family that included famed Hungarian musicians, such as conductor Eugene Ormandy and pianist Lili Kraus. Through his mother’s encouragement, he began his musical training on the piano before the age of 5.
Deemed a musical “wunderkind,” Gary was admitted at the age of 9 to Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he studied advanced choral and orchestral composition, as well as conducting, under the tutelage of Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Leo Weiner.
In 1940, Gary’s education stopped when both he and his mother were arrested by the Nazis. His father was away on a business trip, which allowed him to escape into hiding. Gary spent the next years in concentration camps before he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British on his 21st birthday.
Following the war, Gary moved to Paris to resume his musical studies at Sorbonne University. He received a doctorate in musicology there in 1949.
Gary then immigrated to the United States and, for a brief time, worked in the music department at MGM. In 1963, he took a year off to compose a ballet suite that was performed in France. During his life, he composed more than 20 orchestral pieces, which have been performed in the United States, Canada, Germany, Holland, France and Scotland.
The film runs approximately 90 minutes. Malysheff and Estrin would like it shown at Jewish film festivals and in schools. They have a curriculum for secondary schools that uses the libretto as text. To date, the oratorio has been translated into Hebrew, French and German.
To donate to the documentary’s fundraising campaign, visit gofund.me/d335a5f8. All who send in a contribution will receive a screen credit for being part of the message of the film.
Sam Margolishas written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.
Grant Gochin in J’Accuse!, which can be screened online as part of the South African Film Festival Nov. 2-12. (screenshot)
The award-winning film J’Accuse! is about the alliance between Grant Gochin, a Jewish activist for Lithuanian Holocaust truth, and Silvia Foti, the author of Storm in the Land of Rain, which reveals that her grandfather – Jonas Noreika – operated as a Nazi collaborator who ordered the massacre of thousands of Lithuania’s Jews. However, Lithuania continues to view Noreika as a freedom fighter because he fought against the Communists.
J’Accuse!, by filmmaker Michael Kretzmer, screens as part of the South African Film Festival, which runs Nov. 2-12, presenting more than 20 movies.
SAFF Canada brings together the combined histories and volunteer efforts of two in-person festivals – the Toronto South African Film Festival and the Vancouver South African Film Festival. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the organizations transitioned to one virtual South African Film Festival that could reach audiences across Canada. While most films are online, there are some in-person screenings and events in both Vancouver and Toronto.
Silvia Foti in J’Accuse!, a documentary by filmmaker Michael Kretzmer. (screenshot)
The festival is part of, and raises funds for, Education without Borders, created in 2002 by local Jewish community members Cecil and Ruth Hershler.
“It is estimated that over 90% of South African Jews are Litvaks, [are] of Lithuanian descent,” said Cecil Hershler. “On a personal note, my maternal grandparents were born in Plunge. My grandmother, Ethel Sher, arrived on a ship in Cape Town in 1905 – she was 10 years old, she never saw her parents in Plunge again. On Ruth’s side, her paternal ancestors come from Riteva.”
More than 220,000 Jews – more than 95% of the prewar Jewish population – were murdered in the Holocaust. Kretzmer’s documentary exposes the scale and scandal of Lithuanian Holocaust denial by focusing on Noreika, who murdered as many as 14,500 Jews in the Plunge region in 1941. Gochin, whose family was murdered by Noreika, brought almost 30 legal actions against the Lithuanian government over more than three decades. In focusing on Noreika, the film also examines the role of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre.
For tickets to watch J’Accuse! – the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre is a community partner on the film – or any of the South African Film Festival offerings, go to saffcanada.ca.
Filmmaker Sam Green will narrate live his documentary 32 Sounds, which is part of the Vancouver International Film Festival. (photo by Catalina Kulczar)
“There’s a thing in documentary filmmaking where, after you’ve done an interview with someone, you need to get what’s called room tone,” shares director, writer and editor Sam Green in his film 32 Sounds. “Room tone,” he explains, “is basically just sitting still for about 30 seconds or so and recording the sound of the room; this can help out a lot with editing later. I’ve been making films, which is kind of just marveling at people in the world, for 25 years now, and there’s always something odd and wonderful about this moment. An interview takes a person to other times and places and, now, they’re just here in the present, sitting with the sound of the room.”
Watching some of his interviewees, as they struggle or embrace sitting in silence for a few seconds, is one of the many highlights of Green’s latest documentary, 32 Sounds, which screens Oct. 5, 7 p.m., at the Vancouver Playhouse, as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s specialty program VIFF Live. New York-based Green will be in town to narrate the screening in-person, and audience members will be given headphones to wear, to help make the experience as immersive as possible.
The film premièred in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival. It exists in three forms: one as described above, but sometimes also with live music by composer JD Samson, who wrote original music for the film; another designed for an immersive at-home experience; and a theatre version without the in-person performance aspect. Watching the film at home without headphones was not ideal, but it was still enjoyable and mind-opening. There are parts where it would have added understanding and had greater impact to have heard something in only the left ear or only the right one.
32 Sounds is not just auditorily stunning but a visual pleasure, and intellectually stimulating, as well. Though there are explanations of how humans hear and how sound affects our bodies, the documentary is more philosophical than scientific. It presents concepts like the idea that all the sounds that have been made in the world should still be out there somewhere, “tiny ripples vibrating,” as contemplated by mathematician Charles Babbage, who is credited with having invented the computer, in the 1800s. If we had the right device, mused Babbage, we should be able to listen again to every joke, declaration of love or angry word ever uttered, narrates Green. “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” wrote Babbage in 1837.
In 2022, Green wrote: “I’ve made many documentary films over the years, and each one has changed me in some way, but none as much as the film I just recently finished called 32 Sounds. The film weaves together 32 different recordings as well as images, music by JD Samson, and voice-over to create a meditation on sound. Or, put a different way, the film uses sound to consider some of the basic features of our experience of being alive: time and time passing, loss, memory, connection with others, and the ephemeral beauty of the present moment.”
From the sound of a womb, to a cat purring, to fog horns, to a man who captures the sound of bombs landing nearby as he’s recording his music, Green masterfully takes viewers (listeners) on an emotional journey. We get to see how movie sound magic is made by foley artists like Joanna Fang. We meet sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim, who talks about the deaf community, as well as hearing people’s perceptions of her work. Edgar Choueriri, professor of physics at Princeton, plays part of a tape he made for his future self when he was 11 years old. And we get to know a bit about composer and academic Annea Lockwood, 81 at the time of filming, who had been recording things like the sound of rivers for more than 50 years. Lockwood fundamentally changed how Green thinks about sound, especially a point she makes in the film: “There’s something I started writing about a year ago: listening with, as opposed to listening to,” she shares. “And it’s my sense that, if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment … we’re within it and we’re all listening together, as it were.”
32 Sounds has much to recommend it, including the chance to get up and dance, if you choose, when Green pumps up the volume on Sampson’s music, so you can “feel the sounds in your whole body.”
Accepting oneself
William Bartolo as Daniel, left, and Daniel Gabriel as his secret lover, Isaac, in a still from Cut, which is part of VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy program. (image from VIFF)
Sound that you can feel in your whole body plays an important part in the short film Cut by Samuel Lucas Allen. In what may – or may not – be semi-autobiographical, Cut tells the story of Daniel, a high school student who tries to hide his Jewishness and his queerness. At key moments, the original score created by Sam Weiss thrums with tension, underscoring Daniel’s inner conflict.
Despite being somewhat heavy-handed – there is nothing subtle in this film, perhaps because it is only 19 minutes long – Cut is interesting, well-acted and put together. It opens with a Chassidic man holding a rooster, then shows Daniel cutting his hair, which falls onto a copy of Merchant of Venice, from which the teen will eventually have to perform, by memory, Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Daniel’s room has drawn images of men on his walls, in various poses, apparently his own work.
The film defines its three main elements: kapparot, as a “Jewish ritual where a chicken is blessed and slaughtered in the place of a person, to atone for their sins”; tefillin as a “pair of leather boxes containing portions of the Torah, worn by Jewish men in their morning prayers”; and cut, “a slang term for circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin, usually performed for religious reasons.”
It is mainly the Jewish aspect that Allen deals with in this work. Daniel is able to walk away from a gay slur, but not an antisemitic one, and, in the end, he is reconciled to himself and his Orthodox father by the mystical Chassidic man’s performing kapparot over him. We witness Daniel’s acceptance of being Jewish, but are left to wonder if he comes to accept his queerness, an aspect of his being that conflicts with Orthodox Judaism, though his soul would still be considered divine in religious circles, even if he engages in homosexual acts, which are prohibited by the Torah.
Cut is featured in VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy, a program for viewers aged 18+, in which the films’ “protagonists discover that sorting out their lives can be much more difficult to achieve than they realized.” It screens Oct. 5, 6:45 p.m., and Oct. 7, 12:15 p.m., at International Village 8.
The Vancouver International Film Festival runs Sept. 28-Oct. 8. For the full schedule and tickets, visit viff.org.
A still from the film Kidnapped, which is set in 19th-century Italy. In it, a 6-year-old Jewish child is abducted by papal soldiers who inform his parents that the boy was secretly baptized by a maid. If they want him back, they must convert to Catholicism. In the meantime, the boy will be educated in the Vatican at the feet of Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon). There’s an international outcry, but even as the Church loses political ground with the emergence of an Italian state, the Pope remains adamant: the child has been saved.
Marco Bellocchio (The Traitor, Dormant Beauty and Exterior Night) seizes on this true story to mount a fierce denunciation of antisemitism and the excesses of the Catholic Church, as well as to chronicle a pivotal chapter in Italian history.
Email [email protected] by Sept. 27 for a chance to win two vouchersto see the Jewish Independent-sponsored film Kidnapped at the Vancouver International Film Festival Sept. 28, Oct. 3 or Oct. 6.
Zanna Linskaia and Rudy Rozanski were key in making the video Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, which is available on YouTube. (screenshots)
Burquest Jewish Community, which serves people in the eastern suburbs of Vancouver, turns 50 next year. Whether that milestone is marked by a major celebration or not, a recently released video provides a permanent commemoration of the impact the group has had on individuals and Jewish life in the area. The film premièred at an event June 25.
Zanna Linskaia, a former Burquest board member and longtime force of nature in the community, had the idea of making a permanent, easily viewable history of the community and she got the support of the organization’s board. She recruited Rudy Rozanski, Burquest’s then-president, to work with her to get the project done.
They collected archival materials, old photos, newspaper clippings and historical artifacts, and identified people to interview on camera to help tell the story. A valuable find was video footage of Burquest members taken two decades ago by Jelena Fuks and longtime member and past president Dov Lank. They also hired filmmaker Lior Noyman.
Linskaia and Rozanski have several lifetimes of creative achievement between them.
“I was always a huge fan of Zanna,” Rozanski told the Independent. “I had the great honour to arrange a few of her songs and do some performances with her and so I knew she’s a composer, a writer, a poet … probably the most amazing woman I’ve ever known.”
In addition to all that, Linskaia, a journalist by background (she once wrote the Russian-language page in the Jewish Independent’s predecessor, the Jewish Western Bulletin) and a Coquitlam resident for two decades, retired in 2020 as a seniors outreach counselor for Jewish Family Services. Rozanski is a classical pianist and teacher, with a PhD in musicology. He has lived in Coquitlam for 30 years.
Through interviews with a host of longtime members – including two founding originals, Bill Gruenthal and Max Jacobson (who, sadly, died Aug. 18) – the video sets the stage by indicating how remote many suburban Jews felt from the geographic heart of the community half a century ago.
Gruenthal recalled reading the Jerusalem Post on the bus headed for Kootenay Loop those many decades ago and a fellow passenger leaned over to ask if he was “a member of the tribe.” It was Jacobson.
“Max and I have been friends ever since,” Gruenthal says in the film.
A few intrepid people plodded through the old Jewish phone book and called anyone who lived in Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam and surrounding areas. A living room meeting was held in 1974, with a few more than a dozen attendees. A lawyer volunteered to shepherd the nascent group into legal existence and Jacobson became founding president.
A year later, they formed a supplementary school for kids in the community, and Burquest became a gathering place for holidays and simchas. But they were meeting mostly in private homes. They raised some money, with the support of the late Morris J. Wosk, the Diamond Foundation and other philanthropists, and hired an architect to design a purpose-built shul and community centre. But the plan wasn’t feasible and it was decided to buy an existing building instead. Gruenthal’s son-in-law was in the mortgage sector and helped the society purchase a Jehovah’s Witnesses building in Coquitlam that has served ever since as Burquest’s locus for Shabbat and holiday celebrations, classes, kids programs, seniors lunches and a raft of other activities. Visiting rabbis, including Rabbi Yosef Wosk, have led holiday services over the years. Cantor Steve Levin has been Burquest’s spiritual leader for more than two decades.
Current and past members speak in the video about the impact Burquest has had on them and their families.
“Some of the most emotional and connected experiences we had with Judaism were when we were at Burquest,” recalls Shelley Rivkin. Stewart Levitt talks about the number of intermarried families or families with converted members and how they were welcomed.
The film, Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, is available on YouTube. The musical score is an original creation by Rozanski.
“I ended up improvising some of [the music] on the spot as we were editing and we went through the entire film and edited it scene by scene,” he said.
At the wine-and-cheese reception before the première screening, Rozanski performed the entire score, accompanied by Arnold Kobiliansky on violin.
“The music [in the film] gets cut up and only specific parts are used,” said Rozanski, “so we wanted to present the film music almost as a score, so they could hear the entire music as it unfolds … and then they would be able to recognize it in the film.”
The film project, a labour of love, was a major undertaking.
“We are not going to do a second film,” Linskaia said with a laugh.
“We both felt this was really important,” said Rozanski. “I realized immediately what an important gift this was to Burquest and to future generations. It really is our gift and we put our heart into this. We understand nothing is perfect, of course, but we really did our best with it.”
For Linskaia, the film is a tribute to the centrality of the community in her life.
Screenshot from Jordan Amit’s video on the former Jewish settlement of Edenbridge, Sask. The synagogue and the Jewish cemetery are cared for by the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.
Almost 120 years ago, 56 Jews fled Lithuania and ended up in a remote Saskatchewan prairie that would become the community of Edenbridge. The town and its people have scattered to the winds – but the spirit of the place comes to life again in a short video by North Vancouver filmmaker Jordan Amit.
In addition to filmmaking – which he hopes to turn into his main gig – Amit has a window-washing business and, for years, traveled to Alberta and Saskatchewan for seasonal work. Through the Chabad rabbi in Saskatoon, he learned about the abandoned Jewish settlement, which lies about two-and-a-half hours northeast of Saskatoon – the last leg on a dirt road.
The shul is beautifully maintained – or it was when Amit took his camera there – and the small synagogue is open to the public. Said to be the oldest shul in the province, the site, which includes the Jewish cemetery, is cared for by the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, which was granted a 40-acre plot in 1987, when the rest of the Jewish settlement’s land was sold.
The Jewish cemetery at the former Jewish settlement of Edenbridge, Sask. (photo by Jordan Amit)
The Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews, who came here did not set out for one of the coldest, most unforgiving places on earth. They traveled first to South Africa, where one of their party, Sam Vickar, saw an ad for cheap land in the Canadian West. They uprooted again, arriving in 1906 at what they would call Edenbridge.
Originally, they wanted to call it Jewtown, but the government balked. They chose Edenbridge as a sort of Anglicization of “yidden bridge,” reflecting the bridge that traversed the small Carrot River nearby.
On their initial 160 acres, bought for $10, they built Beth Israel Synagogue. Expanding out into other fields, three schools, a Jewish community hall and numerous houses would eventually form the structures of a community that, at its peak in the 1920s, was home to 170 people.
Indigenous neighbours helped teach them how to survive the first winter with sod-roofed dugouts.
While other Jewish settlements in Saskatchewan were funded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Edenbridge does not appear to have received such support, Amit said, though he doesn’t know that for sure.
The Depression and the general trend toward urbanization started a decline in the town and, by 1964, the synagogue ceased operation. The exact date of Edenbridge’s transition into ghost town status is vague, in part because local farmers moved to Saskatoon and returned seasonally to farm.
At the cemetery, the last gravestone is dated 2000, a departed resident who chose to be interred in the cemetery of the abandoned village. The last bar mitzvah at the shul was more recent – the child of one of the community’s descendants, in 2021. Amit had his own bar there, too. Born in Israel, he came with his family to Vancouver as a child and never became bar mitzvah. So, his friend and rabbi in Saskatoon suggested he have a belated ceremony at the historical site, and it was the first since 1976.
As more people have seen the video online, descendants of the settlers have reached out to him. He is piecing more history of Edenbridge together, and also is on the lookout for additional off-the-beaten-path Jewish (and non-Jewish) sites to explore for his growing online video explorations.
Jordan Amit (photo from Jordan Amit)
“I always have this feeling when I see Jewish sites that are kind of in the middle of nowhere, there’s something so fascinating about it,” he said, recalling a trip to the Indian province of Kerala, where he explored three abandoned synagogues. “When you go into the synagogue, it’s a special experience. You go in and you just feel this presence of the building and the silence.”
Amit invites anyone with knowledge of Edenbridge, or ideas for future videos, to contact him at [email protected]. He also recommends road-trippers make the diversion to the remote location to see the place themselves.
“It’s fully open to the public,” he said. “You just open the latch and walk inside. You only see that in Saskatchewan, that kind of trust. They just trust that it’s going to get taken care of and respected.”
In the story of Edenbridge, Amit contemplates the settlers’ tenacity and the opportunities, sometimes hard won, of newcomers to a land.
“[It is] something we could learn from, that despite difficulties of life and all the odds against us in realizing our dreams, really, if we put our mind to it, we can do whatever we want,” he said. “We can self-realize and create the life that we want, just like they did.”
Pets & Pickers producer Tyson Hepburn confers with Regional Animal Protection Society chief executive officer Eyal Lichtmann during the film shoot.
The Regional Animal Protection Society (RAPS) in Richmond operates a cat sanctuary, a fostering network, thrift stores and a full-service animal hospital, along with an adoption and education centre. RAPS has grown into one of Canada’s largest and most innovative nonprofit animal-serving organizations – and it will be featured in the TV show Pets & Pickers, the second season of which airs Saturdays at 5 p.m. Pacific on Animal Planet.
RAPS began in the 1980s as the Richmond Homeless Cats Society. Driven by a small team of volunteers, it housed countless feral, abandoned and surrendered cats. In 2005, the organization pivoted to become the Richmond Animal Protection Society, extending its standard of care and no-kill animal policy to all of Richmond’s animals. In 2017, it became the Regional Animal Protection Society to better reflect the geographic diversity of its patient base.
For Jewish community member Eyal Lichtmann, executive director and chief executive officer of RAPS, “pets are part of the family.”
Lichtmann joined RAPS in 2016. His resumé before RAPS included a stint as executive director of the Vancouver Hillel Foundation, where he helped raise $10 million to build the University of British Columbia’s current Hillel House. With proven capabilities in fundraising, he was asked to lead a fundraiser with RAPS, and eventually became their CEO.
Lichtmann is passionate about “taking nonprofit organizations to the next level.” At RAPS, he created a new mission and vision for the organization, centred around helping both animals and their owners. He contends that saving more animal lives can be accomplished by helping individuals overcome any financial obstacles they may encounter in caring for their pets.
Recognizing that many pet owners cannot afford quality animal care, Lichtmann has made affordability a core focus of RAPS: “we are the only clinic we know of that offers interest-free payment plans based on the person’s ability to pay,” he said. In addition to giving annual community subsidies amounting to $1 million, he said, RAPS still generates profits, directing them towards the cat sanctuary, which houses more than 500 cats at the moment.
“Everyone is entitled to have a pet as part of the family,” said Dr. Joseph Martinez, one of RAPS’s veterinary staff. Martinez has been with RAPS since Lichtmann joined in 2016. His passion lies in treating exotic animals, such as reptiles and small mammals, an area not many veterinarians are knowledgeable about.
Having grown up on a farm in the Negev Desert in Israel and being the son of a farmer from Sicily, Martinez developed a deep love for animals. He even became a vegetarian at the age of 10, despite his family’s meat-loving Italian culture. Animal care is second nature to him, he said, noting that “animal welfare started in the Bible,” and has only been enhanced by modern-day science and technology. When he moved to Vancouver 30 years ago, Martinez was drawn to RAPS by a drive to help the less fortunate – “the idea is to not leave anybody behind in terms of funding,” he said.
“Jewish values are definitely ingrained in all of us,” said Lichtmann about his staff, many of whom followed his transition from Hillel to RAPS. Lichtmann said he is “programmed” by tikkun olam and views himself as part of a “Jewish family” at RAPS – even though not all the staff are Jewish, they are growing familiar with Jewish values and culture, he said. Last year, for example, 60 staff members attended a Passover seder with the organization. Lichtmann added, “my mother is cooking for the staff all the time,” treating the team to home-made matzah ball soup, hamantashen, challah and more.
Ayala Dafni is assistant manager at RAPS. (photo from RAPS)
In addition to its subsidy programs, RAPS partners with organizations such as Jewish Family Services Vancouver, Tikva Housing Society, women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and senior care facilities. Martinez said veterinarians “should be open to different cultures,” to build positive relationships with pet-owning families.
Ayala Dafni, an Israeli animal technician and assistant manager at RAPS, has been “working with animals since forever,” aspiring to be a vet since the age of 4 – “everything that was legal to keep as a pet, I had growing up.” After getting her bachelor in animal science at Hebrew University, she went on to study animal assistant therapy, and manage a chain of pet stores in Israel.
Dafni is driven by “mitzvot,” she said, especially helping the community and donating to certain causes. At RAPS, she said, this translates to being compassionate and committed to understanding different perspectives. Dafni emphasized that “empathy is most important in this job” and, despite years of experience in the veterinary field, she still finds herself emotionally invested in difficult cases.
Lichtmann attributed RAPS’s corporate culture as part of the reason that Pets & Pickers was attracted to feature them. The unscripted series follows animals, their owners and the veterinarians who care for them.
To learn more about RAPS, visit rapsbc.com and tune into Season 2 of Pets & Pickers, which is also on Animal Planet in the United States. Season 1 can be streamed on Crave.
Alisa Bressler is a fourth-year student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. She is an avid reader and writer, and the online director of the arts and culture publication MUSE Magazine. Bressler is a member of the Vancouver Jewish community, and the inaugural Baila Lazarus Jewish Journalism Intern.
