The harrowing history of Ukraine’s past was recounted recently in the annual lecture honouring Rudolf Vrba, the late Vancouver scientist whose 1944 escape from Auschwitz brought the most concrete proof of the Nazi “Final Solution” to the world.
Dr. Nataliia Ivchyk delivered the 2023 Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture, titled The Holocaust in Ukraine: Violence, Gender and Memory. Ivchyk is at the University of British Columbia on a visiting fellowship that was created by Dr. Richard Menkis and Dr. Heidi Tworek to bring to Vancouver a Ukrainian scholar at risk. Ivchyk is associate professor in the department of political sciences at Rivne State University for the Humanities in her hometown of Rivne, Ukraine, and her work is focused on public history and memory politics.
Ivchyk’s presentation was based on survivor testimonies held at the USC Shoah Foundation, and narrowed in on the experiences of Jews in the western Ukrainian region of Volhynia and Podilia. Of the approximately 27,000 Jews who lived in Rivne (then known as Rovno) in 1937, it is estimated that just around 1,200 survived to the 1944 liberation by the Red Army. In a single day, on Nov. 6, 1941, about 21,000 Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppe C and Ukrainian collaborators. The surviving Jews were imprisoned in the Rovno Ghetto, which was created the following month. In July 1942, remaining Jews, about 5,000, were transported to a stone quarry and murdered.
About 1.5 million Jews died in Ukrainian territory during the war years, most of them shot in what has been called the “Holocaust by bullets.”
“The Holocaust has long remained on the margins of collective memory in Ukraine,” said Ivchyk. Babyn Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered over two days in 1941, has become a national symbol of Holocaust remembrance, she said. “However, the local level of remembrance remained low.”
There are many other sites of atrocities that were committed in Ukraine. “Some are marked by monuments, others are still forgotten and lost,” she said.
Of the several thousand Jews who survived the initial mass executions, anyone over the age of 13 was forced into slave labour.
“Nobody wanted to work for the Germans,” Ivchyk quoted one survivor, “but we had to. We hoped it would somehow balance our relationship with the Germans and would help us survive.”
Violence against women was mainly carried out by Ukrainian collaborators, she said, though Nazis also took part.
“I remember many times Germans came at night, knocked on the windows, took away beautiful girls,” Ivchyk quoted a survivor. “Sometimes, they raped and killed them right away. Sometimes, they said we will come again.”
Rabbis became a particular target of violence against men, given their social and symbolic status, and their role as spiritual leaders.
In the Soviet era, historical memorialization was subordinated to the priorities of the regime.
“The Holodomor [the deliberate Soviet famine that killed millions of Ukrainians], the deportation of Crimean Tatars, the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma – all of these events were suppressed in collective memory by the Soviet regime,” she said.
Today, support in Ukraine for Holocaust memorialization is ambivalent.
“The activities of the state today do not prohibit academic, educational or public activities in the field of Holocaust remembrance, but neither does it act as a financial or ideological initiator,” she said.
The Vrba event was funded by the Holocaust education committee of UBC’s department of history, which is responsible for the annual lecture, as well as a number of other organizations, including the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Diamond Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics.
Menkis, associate professor of modern Jewish history at UBC and chair of the Holocaust education committee, noted that the event recognizes Vrba’s contributions to two primary areas to which Vrba’s life was devoted: Holocaust education and science, particularly pharmacology. The annual lectures alternate between these topics.
Menkis told the audience how Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler made the momentous decision to escape from Auschwitz after overhearing conversations around the planned deportation of Hungarian Jewry. After a difficult and dangerous trek, the pair reached northern Slovakia, where they compiled a report documenting the layout of Auschwitz and the extermination process there.
“Although the report is credited with saving many lives,” said Menkis, “Vrba and Wetzler were keenly aware that more decisive action could have saved more. After the war, Dr. Vrba continued to speak about Auschwitz and his experiences. His book, I Cannot Forgive, written with Alan Bestic, was first published in 1963 and has been issued in a number of translations and re-editions since. He is also well known for his unforgettable testimony in Claude Lanzmann’s [documentary film] Shoah and perhaps less well-known but also important was his effective testimony in the Canadian trials against Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.”
Vrba’s widow, Robin, attended the event virtually. Vrba died in 2006.
Hüttenbach in Medan in 1880s. (photo from KITLV Album Or. 27.377)
Jewish communities in Indonesia have always been tiny, though their history is long. Jewish merchants are recorded in Sumatra as early as the 10th century, and diasporic and Israeli newspapers regularly report on the very small groups of Jews now living in Indonesia. (A 2022 article estimated that there were only 50 Indonesian Jews, and perhaps 500 Jewish expatriates.) However, the largest communities with the most substantial record are those in the late colonial cities of Batavia (now Jakarta), Surabaya and Manado.
The digitization of Dutch archives, both from European publications and the colonial newspapers, has facilitated research about the history of Jewish groups in the Indonesian archipelago. In this article, we offer some notes towards a history of some Jewish merchants in Medan between the 1870s and 1940s, as tobacco plantations on Sumatra’s east coast developed.
The Deli region on the east coast of Sumatra was not developed until the mid-1860s, when a few Dutchmen accepted an invitation from the sultan of Deli to establish tobacco plantations in the area. By the late 1890s, it had become one of the most profitable parts of the Dutch empire.
Deli tobacco leaves were “thinner than cigarette paper, and softer than silk,” and quickly the plantation zone’s tobacco became highly valued. The result was a brown “gold rush” of Deli tobacco in the late 1870s, attracting German, Swiss, English and Polish planters, as well as Dutch, to the new “dollar land.” Planters, tolerated and sometimes abetted by colonial authorities, instituted a brutal and often murderous system of exploitation of imported Chinese and Javanese labour.
Before long, merchants established themselves to serve the European population’s taste for European goods and technology. Among these new arrivals were several Jews, including Ashkenazi Jews from the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, as well as others who relocated from existing Baghdadi Jewish communities in Penang and Singapore. There are also scattered accounts of Jews in the Dutch army serving in Sumatra.
Mercantile opportunities
We know very little about how many Jews tried their luck in the eastern coast of Sumatra, but we have not yet found any evidence of a synagogue (as in Surabaya) or a dedicated cemetery (as in Aceh). The most consistent record of the community available today is not from the colony but rather from Amsterdam’s Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (New Jewish Weekly). The first mention we have found in that newspaper was a report of an August 1879 anonymous donation of 60 guilders originating in the Sumatra’s east coast and destined for the Dutch branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an international Jewish educational charity.
Between 1899 and 1901 the NIW published letters from N. Hirsch, a non-commissioned officer initially writing from the fortress of Fort de Kock (now Bukit Tinggi). In his letters, when not speculating that some Indonesians might be descendants of the lost tribes, Hirsch is troubled by the challenges of Jewish life in the Indies, without religious or community institutions. Months after his first letter, Hirsch joyfully reported the arrival of a kosher butcher and, in 1901, having since moved to Padang, on holding the first religious services at his home.
However, the bulk of sources concern a few European Jewish merchants who became prominent in Medan. Among the first Europeans to come to Deli were members of the Hüttenbach family, an established and assimilated merchant family from the German Rhineland city of Worms. The eldest son, August Hüttenbach, began working for the German-Jewish company Katz Brothers in Penang in 1872 at the age of 22. Katz Brothers, which had arrived in Penang in 1864 at the height of the tin rush, invested in all kinds of business, including supplying ships for freight. When the Dutch-Aceh war broke out in 1873, the company provided logistics and supplies to the Dutch military, and the Hüttenbach family’s shipping business ran a regular service to the Aceh ports.
While August became a prominent merchant in the British Straits settlement colony port of Penang (now in Malaysia), his younger brothers Jacob and Ludwig Hüttenbach settled across the Strait of Malacca, in Deli. In 1875, they opened the first European store in the harbour settlement of Labuhan Deli to cater to all the needs and requirements of the Dutch government, plantations and industrial groups.
Gradually, the family firm developed into a general merchandise company supplying all sorts of goods from Europe, and even establishing its headquarters in Amsterdam and another office in London. With their own shipping lines at their disposal, they were for a time the only importer in Deli. When the Hüttenbach enterprise moved its Sumatran operations inland to the developing city of Medan in the 1880s, the street on which they established their business was named Hüttenbach Street (today Jalan Ahmad Yani VII).
Hüttenbach enterprises supplied all manner of goods and services, ranging from live water buffalos and Brazil nuts to Bordeaux wines. It furnished machinery, tools, motors, electrical goods, harnesses, saddles, guns, ammunition, watches and clothing, and served as an agent for brands including Ford, Cadbury, Heineken and Guinness Stout, as well as other European trading, insurance and manufacturing companies. In the 1910s, its annual imports totalled 1,200,000 guilders and it supplied across the whole of Sumatra.
At the turn of the 20th century, Jacob and Ludwig retired to Europe and left Heinrich Hüttenbach (1859-1922), the youngest of the brothers, in charge of the company. Heinrich, who had been a well-known planter in Malaya, moved to Medan to run the company. A small glimpse of the brutality of plantation life is visible in the German primer Heinrich wrote to provide instruction for Europeans learning plantation Malay (Anleitung zur Erlernung der Malayischen Sprache), including instructions such as: Lu orang bôhong. Lu bukan sakit. Lu malas sadja. Saja mau kassi pukul sama lu. (You are a liar. You are not sick. You are just lazy. I will hit you.)
Selling to the sultans
Medan’s growth attracted other Jewish merchants, who also opened stores selling European consumer items such as clothes and luxury goods. Two German Jews, Louis Kellermann of Leipzig and Max Goldenberg of Hamburg, opened the S. Katz & Co. shop in the Kesawan shopping street. The Katz Brothers, a prominent firm of Singapore and London, did not appreciate what appeared to be an appropriation of their name, and put a notice in the local newspaper, the Deli Courant, making clear that no connection existed. We cannot know whether Katz’s implication – that Kellermann and Goldenberg were seeking to capitalize on a familiar trading name for their profit – was correct.
Advertisements from S. Katz, Goldenberg & Zeitlin, and Hüttenbach in the Deli Courant, 1899. Katz Brothers was a well-known company in Singapore and S. Katz was a company in Medan not related to Katz Brothers in Singapore.
Among S. Katz’s employees was Russian-born Alfred Aron Arnold Zeitlin (1863–1938). Partnering with Goldenberg, Zeitlin opened a new store called Goldenberg & Zeitlin in November 1898, on the same main shopping strip, Kesawan Street. Majestic by all accounts, they specialized in the importation on luxury items such as jewelry, music boxes, typewriters, hunting rifles, glassware, curtains, suitcases, cigars and so on.
Other competitors were not far behind. An English-language travel guide to Sumatra in 1912 highlighted one of them: “A visit should also be paid to the establishment of Messrs. Cornfield. The firm are the official suppliers to the various sultans, and make a specialty of superior diamond jewelry of every description, although their stock includes well-selected continental fancy goods, pictures and also the latest modes.”
The Goldenberg & Zeitlin building at Kesawan around 1890. The company later became M. Goldenberg & Co. and was acquired by a German company. It was seized by the Dutch when Germany invaded Holland in 1940. The building has been demolished and turned into shophouses. (photo from Stafhell & Kleingrothe, KITLV 154472)
Wilhelm Cornfield (1862–1908), an Austrian Jew, had come to Deli in the 1880s, first working as a cutter at the S. Katz shop. In 1893, Cornfield started his own business as a tailor, offering European clothing with imported fabrics. Before long, he carried a complete range of clothes and luxury goods from London and Paris.
The first generations of merchants eventually left or passed away and were replaced by their children. When Wilhelm Cornfield passed away in 1908, his children expanded their father’s business. In particular, his son Isidore (1885-1923) became an investor in many luxury stores in North Sumatra, and also owned tea and coconut plantations on the east coast of Sumatra.
Heated competition
Jewish merchants competed to import European consumer goods, their firms merging, dividing and often clashing with one another. In 1915, the Hüttenbachs’ company split into a wholesaler business and the retail business. The retail business was managed by Isidore Cornfield while Heinrich Hüttenbach maintained the import interests. This split, however, caused a legal dispute between Hüttenbach and Cornfield about the management of the new department store. In the end, Cornfield won the case and opened Medan’s Warenhuis(Warehouse) in 1920, the first department store in Sumatra, the remains of which still stand. The Hüttenbach firm, on the other hand, was declared bankrupt in December 1921, after 46 years of business, due to the global financial crisis and mismanagement.
The bankruptcy resulted in Heinrich Hüttenbach’s return to Amsterdam. A few months later, he went missing on a passage from Amsterdam to London, and was declared dead five years later. The Cornfields, too, suffered great misfortune. Isidore and his wife, opera singer Henriette Zerkowitz, returned to Vienna, where he died of heart disease in October 1923 at the age of 38. By 1939, now run by his brother Adolf, the Cornfield fashion store, in financial trouble, was liquidated, closing its doors in July 1939 after more than 50 years of trading. Most likely, as the Depression caused a decline in demand for Sumatra tobacco, consumer luxury goods were no longer a viable business.
Cornfield advertisement in Isles of the East: An Illustrated Guide by W. Lorck, published by Royal Packet Steam Navigation Co. (KPM) in 1912.
Like many other German and Dutch Jews, most of these merchants were assimilated to European society and identified with national groups in the colony. They belonged to Dutch and German clubs and contributed to patriotic celebrations. Indeed, Hirsch complained of the European Jewish merchants that they represented themselves as Christians, were lost in bitter competition with one another, and were utterly lacking in piety. With many secular and/or assimilated Jews, there seems to have been little impetus to form Jewish institutions.
Dutch Jews and war
At the end of the First World War, there was high demand for expatriates to come to the Deli region to manage plantations and serve the colony. Many Dutch Jews responded and went to work for plantations, Dutch companies or the government; there are also a few examples of Jewish doctors. But newspaper archives suggest that numbers remained tiny, and only from the mid-1920s is it possible to speak of community activities.
One tantalizing biography from the 1920s is that of writer, painter and planter László Székely, born to a Jewish family in what is now eastern Hungary, with a birth name given as László or Smiel Ziechrman. Arriving in Sumatra in 1914, his life and work is rather overshadowed by an affair with a Dutch planter’s wife, Madelon Lulofs, that scandalized Deli colonial society. After divorce and remarriage to Székely, Lulofs, in works such as Rubber (1931), became one of the principal literary voices critical of Dutch colonial power. Székely also wrote literary sketches of his own, mostly for the Hungarian press. His novel, translated into English as Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (1937), provides a candid picture of colonial planters’ life in Sumatra, now considered an important social commentary on that vanished society. The couple settled in Budapest in 1930.
When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Jewish community raised funds to support relief efforts, but, by March 1942, Sumatra, too, had fallen to the Japanese. Some Jewish families found themselves under threat at both ends of the world: persecuted in Europe on the basis of their Jewish identity, and in the Indies as Dutch enemies of the Axis Japanese. Adolf Cornfield died in a Japanese internment camp. A Dutch Jewish physician who worked on the east coast of Sumatra, Dr. Hans Koperberg, was also captured and imprisoned by the Japanese. In a book of poetry titled Bittere pillen en scherpe pijlen (Bitter Pills and Sharp Arrows), he wrote about his experiences of being moved from one camp to another, dedicating his book “to my two sisters murdered by the Huns, Uncle Dr. Felix Catz and Aunt Brama and to all the friends murdered by the Japs.”
Our investigations have so far found little record of Jews in Sumatra after the Second World War. Survivors left for the Netherlands or perhaps Australia and, by 1958, Sukarno had expelled all Dutch citizens from Indonesia.
Budiman Minasnyis a professor of soil landscape modeling at the University of Sydney with an interest in Indonesia colonial history. Josh Stenberg is a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Sydney. An earlier version of this article was published in Inside Indonesia 146: Oct-Dec 2021.
The Diamond Foundation is leading the way in contributing to JWest, with an historic $25 million gift – and community donors have matched this gift with another $25 million.
The Diamond Foundation’s matching gift is the first philanthropic contribution to the project and it is the largest donation ever made by the Diamond Foundation. Completing the match means $50 million toward the JWest capital campaign target of $125-plus million.
Alex Cristall, chair of the JWest capital campaign, had this response: “I want to thank the Diamond Foundation for this transformational gift. A project of this magnitude will not be possible without the tremendous generosity demonstrated by the Diamond Foundation, as well as philanthropic support from the community at large. It is our hope that the Diamond Foundation’s incredible community leadership will serve as inspiration, and we are now calling on others to work with our team to champion this project in an equally impactful way.”
The Diamonds’ gift will have a significant impact on the plans for JWest, providing a social, cultural, recreational and educational asset for all. This is the most extensive project in the history of the Jewish community in Western Canada and it is estimated to cost more than $400 million. Bringing it to life will require philanthropy, government funding and astute financing.
Gordon and Leslie Diamond, who are honorary JWest campaign co-chairs and members of the Diamond Foundation’s board, shared: “We are pleased to be the first family to make a significant contribution to JWest’s capital campaign. Our family has called Vancouver home for almost a century, and we have always believed in contributing whatever we can to ensure there is a bright future for our children and their children.”
The announcement builds on the $25 million funding provided in 2021 by the B.C. government.
“Mazal tov! I’m so pleased that our government’s shared mandate commitment of $25 million and a $400,000 investment in redevelopment planning has been bolstered with philanthropic support from the Diamond Foundation and community,” said Melanie Mark, Hli Haykwhl Ẃii Xsgaak, minister of tourism, arts, culture and sport. “These generous contributions underscore the importance of a renewed Jewish Community Centre to 22,590 Jews and all people living in this community. It speaks to the power of working together to shine a light on our province’s diversity and inclusion.”
The new space, once complete, will deliver a state-of-the-art community centre, expanded space for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, double the current number of childcare spaces, expanded seniors’ programming, a new theatre, a relocated King David High School and two residential towers that will provide mixed-use rental housing (a portion of which will be below-market rates).
“JWest is the amalgamation of decades of work, and the fact that we saw our gift matched so quickly sends a clear signal that the community stands behind this project,” said Jill Diamond, executive director of the Diamond Foundation. “The Diamond Foundation has had a unifying focus to assist and advocate for initiatives in the Vancouver area that help improve the quality of people’s lives. The impact JWest will have on the Jewish community and the surrounding Oakridge community is undeniable.”
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The Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation has added two new members to its board of directors: Mervyn (Merv) Louis and Michelle Karby. They join an impressive group of volunteers, who for the past decades, have donated both their time and funds to care for the elderly of the Vancouver Jewish community.
Mervyn (Merv) Louis (photo from Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation)
Louis, a certified public accountant, emigrated with his family from South Africa to Canada in December 1978 and joined a small accounting firm in Vancouver. In the summer of 1979, the firm was acquired by Grant Thornton LLP. In 2016, Louis retired as a partner of Grant Thornton LLP, where he worked for 38 years, of which 33 were as a partner specializing in audit, accounting and business advisory services. Louis advised and worked with clients in many different industries, including manufacturing and distribution, real estate investments and construction, entertainment, and professional practitioners.
After his retirement from Grant Thornton LLP, Louis worked as the chief financial officer of Plotkin Health Inc. and MacroHealth Solutions Limited Partnership until retiring again, in August 2020. During these years, he successfully helped merge a U.S. partnership and a Canadian company to form the parent partnership of MacroHealth Solutions Ltd. Partnership, a medical cost management and solutions provider in North America.
Louis has been married for 46 years and has two sons. He and his wife love to travel and are particularly fond of cruises; they have toured North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Southern Africa. Louis is an avid sports fan and, while his playing days are over, he loves watching all sports, notably hockey, golf and rugby.
Michelle Karby (photo from Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation)
Karby is an experienced wills, estates, trusts and corporate lawyer heading up the wills and estates group at Owen Bird Law Corp. She helps clients plan, build and protect their legacies. Prior to developing her expertise in this area, Karby spent many years in and out of a courtroom honing her skills as a commercial litigator.
While born and raised in Vancouver, Karby’s adventurous spirit and love of travel translated into 18 years studying and working in places that included Montreal, Toronto, Israel, Cape Town, Melbourne and Sydney. Now settled in Vancouver with her husband and two teenage sons, Karby enjoys the beautiful natural environment, being close to her family and giving back to the community that she grew up in.
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Kimberley Berger has joined Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver as its new outreach worker in the regional communities. In particular, she will focus on White Rock, South Surrey and New Westminster.
Berger has worked in the nonprofit sector for more than 30 years, focusing on community development and family support. She has held many roles, ranging from frontline work to executive director of South Vancouver Family Place. She also dedicates time to supporting parents whose children are undergoing cancer treatment at B.C. Children’s Hospital with the West Coast Kids Cancer Foundation.
Berger believes that a strong sense of connection makes both individuals and communities more resilient. Building relationships is central to her role at Jewish Federation and in her own personal life with her family of four in East Vancouver.
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This year, the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library raised more than $30,000 for the library. These funds will help it purchase new books and supplies for programs. Thank you to all of the Friends of the Library, and to the volunteers who helped make the fundraising a huge success.
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Boys Town Jerusalem ranked in the top 10% of 838 high schools examined over the 2021-22 academic year. (photo from Boys Town)
The Israeli Ministry of Education has granted Boys Town Jerusalem an Award for Excellence. The school ranked in the top 10% of the 838 high schools examined over the 2021-22 academic year.
In releasing its findings, the Israel Ministry of Education cited Boys Town Jerusalem (BTJ) for reaching outstanding achievements in the academic and social realms, as well as for instilling crucial ethics and values. BTJ principal Yossi Cohen noted that the prize reflects the ministry’s findings of the extraordinary efforts by BTJ instructors to spur students to reach a high academic level, avoid dropout and advance to Israel Defence Forces enlistment and higher education.
This marks the third time in the past decade that Boys Town Jerusalem has been awarded the prize for excellence, and the first time in which the school has reached the top-echelon rank. The Ministry of Education Award for Excellence includes a monetary reward for teachers among the highest-scoring schools.
In saluting BTJ’s instructors, Cohen stressed the COVID-related hardships over the past two years, which have demanded exceptional efforts to keep students focused and excelling despite the increased illness, poverty and strife they face at home.
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Cutting the ribbon, left to right, are Ruvik Danilovitch, mayor of Beer Sheva, Israel Defence Forces Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Ben-Gurion University president Daniel Chamovitz and Avi Jacobovitz, Gav-Yam real estate company director general. (photo from Canadian Associates of BGU)
A ceremony dedicating the new home of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Communications Branch School for Software and Cyber Security was held in August at the Advanced Technologies Park (ATP) located at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).
BGU president Prof. Daniel Chamovitz, IDF chief-of-staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, head of the communications branch Col. Eran Niv, Be’er Sheva Mayor Ruvik Danilovich and other officials and guests were in attendance.
The school’s new location will enable collaboration with BGU and the high-tech companies in the ATP. The school is the first of the communications branch units to move south as part of the national move to strengthen the Negev following the government decision to move the IDF south. The branch’s new main base is under construction alongside the ATP.
The move will assist in the preservation, development and empowerment of the technological human-power in the IDF while creating opportunities and a space for new collaborations in the south.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity (EWF) in New York is launching a new impact-driven philanthropic strategy to advance human rights around the world.
The foundation, led by Elisha and Marion Wiesel, will adopt a hybrid approach that will not only grant funds but also work with organizations directly as partners, offering access to innovative thinking partners and acting as an emblematic megaphone to champion their cause.
The foundation’s recalibrated grantmaking program will seek to fund organizations that embody Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s legacy as an educator and activist. Grants to educators will support moral educational programs inspired by Jewish values. The foundation is seeking to support programs and projects that foster dialogue, especially in engaging ways.
Activist grants, meanwhile, will focus on programs that restore the rights and dignity of the Uyghur population, in keeping with Elie Wiesel’s belief that “sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the centre of the universe.”
The foundation will be awarding one or more grants in each portfolio for its next cycle, ranging in size from $50,000 to $200,000. Applicants must be financially sound 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations or have a U.S.-based fiscal sponsor at the time of application, and be able to demonstrate realistic plans for carrying out the program or project for which they seek funding. Submissions will be reviewed internally through various stages and finalists will be considered by a group of notable names, passionate about the respective value track. Grant applications are being accepted online through the foundation’s website (eliewieselfoundation.org) and are due by Dec. 15, 2022.
“The values my father stood for – combating indifference, educating youth, calling out injustice and defending human rights – continue to be the moral bedrock of the Elie Wiesel Foundation,” said Elisha Wiesel. “We are so excited to announce our new grantmaking program to provide nonprofits that embody those values with the resources to achieve lasting impactful change.”
“Elie Wiesel was my dear friend and trusted partner in the fight for human rights around the world. I think it is very appropriate that his foundation put the fate of the Uyghur people as one of its main priorities and will be focused on delivering resources and moral support to those advocating for the Uyghurs,” said human rights activist and EWF advisory board member Natan Sharanksy. “The free world cannot stay silent about China’s horrific persecution of its Uyghur minority. I know firsthand the power of outside support to those standing bravely against totalitarian regimes. That is why I am glad to serve as an advisory board member at the Elie Wiesel Foundation, dealing with this issue.”
Other members of the advisory board on the Uyghur crisis include Mark Hetfield, president and chief executive officer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the oldest resettlement organization in the world; and Gulhumar Haitiwaji, the daughter of a Uyghur woman who survived a Chinese re-education camp.
The advisory board on moral educational programs includes neuroscientist, actress, podcast host and author Mayim Bialik, an outspoken activist for mental health and Jewish causes; Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, a professor of religious studies and the director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Centre at Manhattan College; and Sarah Idan, the founding chief executive officer of Humanity Forward, a multi-dimensional organization that promotes education and peace.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation was established after Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Under the direction of Wiesel and his wife Marion, the foundation developed, implemented and funded several critical humanitarian programs in Israel, including the Beit Tzipora Centres and the Darfurian Refugee Program. This new direction will allow the foundation to widen its scope through meaningful, action-driven partnerships.
Yael Eckstein, president and chief executive officer of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. (photo from IFCJ)
Twice a year, the president and chief executive officer of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, Yael Eckstein, heads into Ukraine’s rural districts to visit elderly Holocaust survivors. Eckstein says she prefers to make the three-hour flight to Kyiv from her office in Jerusalem in the winter, when the temperatures in Ukraine have often plummeted, and country roads to small, out-of-the-way villages are overgrown with ice and snow and almost impassable. She knows that’s when these Jews, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s now, will need help most: when the summer’s vegetable harvest is almost gone and there’s no money by which to purchase food, when “it’s freezing, so freezing you can’t feel your fingers and there’s no heat” because there’s also no electricity.
For 18 years, Eckstein has been making this trek to connect with Ukraine’s most vulnerable Jews, those who survived the pogroms and Nazi exterminations in the 1930s and ’40s and are distrustful of their neighbours, so have lived self-sufficiently for decades. For many of these residents, Eckstein said, maintaining formal connections with local Jewish communities is viewed as a risk. “They don’t want to be on any lists of the Jewish community or of the synagogue, because they were the lists that Ukrainians used in order to find the Jews and kill them [during the Holocaust].” And so, for decades, they have done their best to live on what they can grow and preserve themselves.
“That’s a lot of hard, physical labour and work. When they get to 80 or 90 years old, suddenly they can’t do that any more. They can’t go chop wood [for their wood-burning stoves]. They can’t grow the vegetables,” said Eckstein. And they can’t haul enough water from the well ahead of winter to store in their kitchens when it’s icy, “so it leaves them literally starving, without heat and water.”
This past winter, those needs became even more pressing. The IFCJ was already networking with the country’s many small Jewish communities when Russia began amassing its forces at the Ukrainian border. About 200,000 Jews in the former Soviet Union were receiving humanitarian aid, including life-saving aliyah to Israel. A war could further jeopardize Ukraine’s most vulnerable residents.
“Around four days before the war broke out in Ukraine, I flew into Kyiv and assessed the needs on the ground,” said Eckstein. “When I got back [to Israel] the first thing I did was [give] a $1 million emergency preparedness grant to Jewish communities across Ukraine.” She urged them to use the money to buy canned food, mattresses and other emergency supplies in case war broke out. Eckstein said they also connected with major charities in Ukraine, to formulate a broader plan for helping Jewish refugees displaced by the conflict.
As a Jewish philanthropy organization whose success is largely driven by Christian donors, the IFCJ holds a unique role in garnering support for Israel and Jewish causes. It remains one of the largest pro-Israel charities in the world and its data show that it has raised more than $2.6 billion US for Israeli and Jewish causes since its inception in 1983. Since this February, the organization has contributed more than $6 million in aid to Ukrainian Jewish communities, with $1.5 million coming through its Canadian affiliate, the IFCJ Canada.
When it comes to raising funds and support for aliyah, the IFCJ is a powerhouse. In 2021, it brought more than 5,500 olim (immigrants) to Israel. Another 4,000 were resettled this year, including 38 Holocaust survivors who got to Moldova on stretchers. The cost of the transportation to Israel and medical treatment were paid for by the IFCJ, “but the second they landed in Israel, the Israeli government took full responsibility,” said Eckstein.
But, as stated, aliyah isn’t the only way that the IFCJ has provided aid to Ukrainian Jews. In February, the Moldovan government opened its airspace so that the IFCJ could land a plane carrying 15 tons of supplies for Ukrainian refugees displaced by the conflict.
“We off-loaded the 15 tons of humanitarian aid to our partners on the ground to drive it to [refugees] inside of Ukraine and then we loaded the plane with 180 Jewish refugees who were making aliyah and flew them to Israel. When we had enough olim to fill two flights, we immediately flew two flights,” Eckstein said.
Partnering with other Jewish aid organizations has been key to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews’ efforts to provide aid for Ukraine refugees. (photo by Jhanelle Alleyne / IFCJ)
Partnerships are key to the success of many of IFCJ’s programs, especially to getting food and clothing to those in need. “We gave the [Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)] and Chabad, for example, millions of dollars. The IFCJ often works with the Jewish Agency in Israel, as well. We create the criteria and the program and they are able to implement it on the ground,” explained Eckstein. “[In] areas like Moldova, when there’s no one else who is able to do it, the fellowship creates the programmatic ability and implements the life-saving plans” that are then carried out by partners.
The IFCJ (initially called the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews) was launched in 1983 by Yael Eckstein’s father, the late Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. According to the organization’s website, its mission was “to fulfil his vision of building bridges of understanding and cooperation between Christians and Jews,” a focus that was reflected in the rabbi’s writings, speeches and broadcasts. In 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fellowship launched its On Wings of Eagles program to fund the transport of Soviet Jews to Israel.
In 2003, the fellowship’s sister organization, IFCJ Canada, was launched to connect with Canadian donors. It contributes to a variety of global humanitarian programs.
“In regard to aliyah,” said IFCJ Canada executive director Jackie Gotwalt, “we work on the ground with local partners providing support and resources for newly landed olim to help them start their new lives in the Holy Land.”
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews chartered planes and facilitated the aliyah of thousands of Jews this year. (photo by Jhanelle Alleyne / IFCJ)
Since 2003, the Canadian organization has raised more than $120 million from its largely Christian donorship, which goes both to supporting aliyah and humanitarian aid in the former Soviet Union and other countries with at-risk Jewish populations, such as Ethiopia, Venezuela and, recently, France.
“The IFCJ focuses on support from Christian friends of the Jewish people to further efforts we support to address the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and in bordering countries and, in particular, assist members of the Jewish community caught in this tragic conflict,” Steven Shulman said.
Shulman serves as the president and chief executive officer of Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA, which ensures direction and control of charitable funds raised by Jewish federations throughout Canada. He said the Jewish federations across Canada and IFCJ fundraise independently, though they both work with the Jewish Agency and the American JDC to further the same goals, which are to facilitate aliyah for those who request it and provide humanitarian aid to Jewish communities in the region.
Eckstein said there are many reasons why their Christian donorship contributes to the IFCJ, but at the core is a sense of obligation and a belief that they are doing their part to help Israel stay strong.
“It’s really biblical. Protestant and Evangelical Christians are mostly our donor base. What makes them unique from the other streams of Christianity is that they put a big focus on the Torah. They read the Tanach, what they call the Old Testament,” which places an emphasis on helping the Jewish people return to Israel, Eckstein explained.
“What I’ve seen in the past 18 years of working with Christian friends of Israel is they feel so lucky to be able to play a small part in both saving Jewish lives who [they feel] have been forgotten, neglected [or] persecuted by [others]. [The fact that] now, as Christians, they are able to help them, is something they feel [is] an opportunity and privilege.”
Jan Leeis an award-winning editorial writer whose articles and op-eds have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism and Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as a number of business, environmental and travel publications. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.
Ephraim Mirvis, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, issued a special prayer in English and Hebrew to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. It was shared by Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld at the opening of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign Sept. 8, hours after the Queen passed away.
“In an age of profound change, she signified order and justice; and in times of tension, she offered generosity of spirit,” the prayer read. “A defender of faith with an unfailing sense of duty, she was a steadfast guardian of liberty, a symbol of unity and a champion of justice in all the lands of her dominion.… In life, she was a most gracious monarch, who occupied a throne of distinction and honour. In death, may her legacy inspire the nations of the world to live together in righteousness and in peace.”
History’s longest serving British monarch, Elizabeth II passed away 70 years and 214 days after ascending the throne upon the death of her father, King George VI.
Canada’s Governor General Mary Simon paid homage to the Queen and, on Monday, the government announced that Simon and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, perhaps accompanied by others, would represent the country at the monarch’s funeral Sept. 19.
President Isaac Herzog will represent Israel at the Queen’s funeral. Jewish leaders around the world joined others in lauding the Queen’s service.
In 2005, the monarch attended a ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. According to reports, she refused to be ushered away by staff, instead remaining to speak individually to the attendees and listening to each of their experiences of survival.
“She gave each survivor – it was a large group – her focused, unhurried attention. She stood with each until they had finished telling their personal story. It was an act of kindness that almost had me in tears,” the late British chief rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote afterward. “One after another, the survivors came to me in a kind of trance, saying: ‘Sixty years ago I did not know if I would be alive tomorrow, and here I am today talking to the Queen.’ It brought a kind of blessed closure into deeply lacerated lives.”
Queen Elizabeth II was patron of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a British government-funded charity that promotes International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Buckingham Palace seems to have maintained an unspoken boycott of Israel, one of the countries the Queen never visited, although she met many Israeli leaders and knighted the former prime minister and president Shimon Peres.
Manfred Gottfried and a group of men on the stairs to the Dr. Sun Yat-sen mausoleum. (photo from VHEC: RA001-5-o7-5-9-0339x)
A little over 20 years ago, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre started the Shanghai Oral History Project. Led by Roberta Kremer and Daniel Fromowitz, the project recorded the oral histories of Vancouver’s small Shanghai Jewish survivor community. They interviewed 10 survivors and/or their descendants, learning about their rich and unique experiences of survival in Shanghai.
This project, along with loaned artifacts and memorabilia, became the basis for VHEC’s 1999 exhibition Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust. It opened alongside another exhibition, Visas for Life: The Story of Feng Shan Ho. Both were well received, and included film screenings on the topic of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and a demonstration of mahjong, a game which remains popular in the Jewish community in Vancouver. Once the exhibitions concluded, materials were returned to their lenders or safely placed under the VHEC’s care, and the interviews were catalogued and filed away.
In January 2022, I began my co-op position as digital projects coordinator with the VHEC. One of the first tasks assigned to me was to help improve accessibility to the Shanghai interviews and the audiotape transcriptions. In the 20 years since these oral history transcriptions were created, the VHEC has changed its digital file management and storage system. Some files were missing while others were mislabeled. Many files would no longer open within the current version of Microsoft Word. At the top of some transcriptions was a disclaimer: “The whole tape is not transcribed, only that which is related to Shanghai.” Throughout the transcriptions, comments like “(side discussions)” denote what the original transcriber believed to be unrelated to the subject matter.
In 1999, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre held the exhibit Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust. (image from VHEC)
Rummaging through these transcriptions, it became apparent that I would not simply be “tidying up.” By revisiting the Shanghai Oral History Project, my goal was to do more than just emphasize the unique experiences of this small group of individuals. As I listened to their interviews and transcribed their words, I wanted to offer a glimpse into how Shanghai Jewish survivors expressed themselves and reflected on their time in Shanghai, while also highlighting things that weren’t considered when the exhibition first opened 20 years ago.
On the list of possible interviewees for the Shanghai Oral History Project, George Melcor’s was the only name with “very elderly” added beside it in parentheses. Listening to George’s interview, it became clear that this would be a challenging transcription. George sometimes mumbled, which made it difficult to comprehend his words, or he would mix up his stories. But, for 88-year-old George, Shanghai left an impression. When asked by interviewer Daniel Fromowitz what memories of Shanghai come to mind, George lit up with excitement. “Shanghai was alive all the time. Never closed, always open.… Clubs and gambling, everything was free. Shanghai was a very free city.” At this point, the slow progression of the interview sped up: the emotions in George’s voice suggest that he was reliving his 16-year-old self. For a moment, George was not elderly.
What is striking listening to the Shanghai audiotapes is the dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee. Lore Marie Wiener was interviewed about her experiences in Shanghai by both Roberta and Daniel. But rather than just giving answers, Lore proceeded to converse with both interviewers, asking about where they were born, their experiences growing up and whether they faced antisemitism. Lore was also very reflective. She questioned the nature of Jewishness and what it consists of; she questioned “… why did we not interfere in Rwanda, and we do interfere in Yugoslavia?” With the former, there was a back-and-forth between Roberta and Lore, but, with the latter, Daniel was not sure how much to engage. These side stories provide a picture of Lore that is more than just her experiences of escaping the threat of Nazi violence and survival in Shanghai; it is the continuation of her life after the Holocaust.
Lastly, how did the interviewees recall, if any, their connection to the local Chinese and Japanese communities? In general, although interviewees were in Shanghai, Chinese people featured only in the background. They were acquaintances, as was the case for Anne Chick and the two Chinese kids living in her neighbourhood. For most interviewees who did interact with Chinese people, it was through a working relationship with Chinese servants, workers or amahs.
For Lore, she employed several Chinese tailors in her shop, as well as a chauffeur and a cook called Dun-zen. Interracial relationships were also possible. Kurt Weiss noted that, after divorcing his first wife, he had a Chinese girlfriend until he left Shanghai. Gerda Gottfried Kraus mentioned in passing how, in postwar Shanghai, one of her acquaintances married a Chinese woman and wanted to bring her with him to the United States. Knowledge of some Chinese, particularly Shanghainese, was also a common theme found in these interviews, though many interviewees state that they’ve either forgotten it after not using it for so long, or knew only the absolute basics. Additionally, they never learned how to read Chinese characters.
Gerda Gottfried Kraus, 1940s. (photo from VHEC: RA0001-05-00-02-0099)
Knowledge of Japanese people was more limited. Kurt’s success as a suit salesman was due to his patron relationship with a Japanese engineer named Kato. Lore mentioned she was helped by a Japanese engineer when she and her mother were stranded in Harbin. But the one individual whom most interviewees referenced was Ghoya, the Japanese commandant of Hongkew ghetto. Ghoya developed a reputation as an unpredictable ruler: while Lore mentioned that her father and husband were treated well by Ghoya due to their academic connections, other interviewees mentioned episodes of violence committed by Ghoya and his guards against the Hongkew inhabitants. Their brutality is matched only by their treatment of the local Chinese. Most interviewees mentioned the mistreatment that local Chinese faced.
The experiences of Shanghai Jewish survivors are often overlooked when compared to those who survived in Europe. Lore was very concerned about this. At the end of her interview, she stated: “I’m not uncomfortable with anything. [But] … just try to be careful about the parts where I am too pleased with my life because there are so many people who suffered.” With the “global turn” in academic research into the Holocaust, the sub-category of “Shanghai survivor” has been gaining strength. It is a term that validates the experiences of refugee Jews and others who survived the Holocaust in Shanghai, while also acknowledging the unique circumstances and challenges they faced.
It is heartening to know that, in the 20-plus years since the VHEC’s Shanghai exhibition, research into this dimension of the Holocaust and the voices of these survivors have not been obscured, but, instead, have expanded into a vibrant subfield. By revisiting past projects and exhibitions, and making them more accessible, we can hopefully gean new information about the Holocaust and the multiplicity of survivors’ experiences.
Ryan Cheuk Him Sunis a PhD candidate in the University of British Columbia department of history. His research examines the entangled histories between Jewish refugees escaping Nazi oppression and the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore. He is also interested in the journeys that took Jewish refugees to East Asia, and their experiences in transit onboard ships and trains. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article was originally published in the VHEC’s Spring 2022 issue of Zachor.
The Masorti synagogue in Chernivtsi Ukraine has become a refuge for Ukrainians fleeing the war. Its new aron kodesh, built by grateful refugees, has become a symbol of the partnership being forged between small, out-of-the-way communities and those fleeing for safety. (photo from Schechter Institutes Inc.)
As the war in Ukraine continues, educational and religious organizations that helped support the country’s fledgling Jewish communities are finding they have a new mandate these days: to help the millions of refugees that have been left homeless by the Russian invasion.
More than 12 million people have fled their homes in Ukraine, eight million of whom are internally displaced. According to a May 5 report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, most of those affected are women and children. In many cases, the refugees have either lost family members in the bombings or have been separated from loved ones. A significant number are struggling to find shelter, food and resources.
Schechter Institutes Inc. president Rabbi David Golinkin told the Independent that synagogues and Jewish day schools have become refuges for Jews and non-Jews alike in recent months. The institute’s educational program, Midreshet Schechter Ukraine, which partners with Masorti Olami, provides funding and educational services for Conservative communities in Ukraine. Golinkin said three of the four Masorti (Conservative) synagogues are located in regions that have been hit by bombing, including in Kyiv, where Schechter had just opened a facility in January.
Golinkin said the two nonprofits had spent more than a year finalizing the purchase of a building that would be big enough to house a sanctuary, as well as a full array of youth programs and services. Two weeks after purchasing the property, however, Russia invaded Ukraine, forcing the community to suspend the opening. As Russian troops advanced toward Kyiv, community members were urged to leave the city. Some congregants sought refuge at the Masorti synagogue in Chernivtsi, near the Romanian border, while others headed out of the country to Poland, Moldova or Romania.
Three months into the war, the Chernivtsi synagogue, tucked away in southern Ukraine, has become known for its hospitality toward those fleeing the conflict. A steady flow of refugees fills the city every day, many turning up at the Masorti facility looking for a bed or a meal. Others head to the Chabad House located nearby. Golinkin said the two organizations have learned to work together, and will refer refugees to the other community when their own facility is full. No one is turned away, whether they are Jewish or not.
Schechter and Masorti Olami also work with partners across Western Europe, Israel and North America to help Ukrainians who are seeking refuge outside of the country. Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, who serves as the executive director for the educational programs of Midreshet Schechter and oversees programs in Ukraine, said hundreds of refugees have relocated to Israel, Berlin and other places with the help of Masorti congregations across Europe. She said the most moving example was the rescue of a teenage boy from eastern Ukraine whose parents had died. Volunteers made the 1,000-kilometre trip through war zones to bring him to Chernivtsi.
“[It] was a terrifying experience for him,” Gritsevskaya said, “since it took three days without basically sleeping or eating [to reach Chernivtsi]. Finally, with a lot of help from the Israeli government, we managed to bring him [to Israel].” She said he seems happy with his new home and his new school. “He always wanted to come to Israel,” she said.
Cities in eastern Ukraine are still hemorrhaging populations, driven by the escalating war in border cities and villages. Yuri Radchenko, who leads the Masorti synagogue in Kharkiv, is the director and co-founder of the Centre for Inter-Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, a think tank of researchers who specialize in Eastern European and Jewish history. He said most of the members of his small synagogue were able to flee the city. A few chose to remain behind.
“Some teachers [have] elderly parents who are … unable to move from the city,” said Radchenko. He estimates that 30-50% of Kharkiv’s two million residents escaped before the Russians captured parts of the city, which has been heavily damaged from Russian shelling. Many residents sought cover for months in Kharkiv’s fortified subway and other makeshift shelters. Recent estimates suggest at least a quarter of Kharkiv’s residential housing has been destroyed, along with crucial infrastructure.
Still, Radchenko said many who fled the country hope that they may one day be able to return home. “People understand that it is hard to make a change,” he said, noting that immigrating to another country often means starting at a lower employment level in an unfamiliar culture. He speculated that some residents will follow the example of other postwar populations and return to rebuild their city if Ukraine wins the war. And, indeed, many of the residents who sought shelter in Kharkiv’s underground shelters are gradually returning home to repair their apartments and clean up the rubble.
Radchenko said he can empathize with them. Much of his own work was put on hold when he was forced to flee. “I would come back to Kharkiv,” he said definitively. “[If] I could move back, I would not wait. I think I would visit to see how it looks like, but I would come back if my apartment and the district where it’s located were safe.”
For now, Schechter and Masorti are taking the long view of the war. Russia’s continuing attacks mean increased risk to civilian populations, more refugees on the run and more uncertainty. The conflict also means an even greater need to bolster resources at the Chernivtsi synagogue, so that Jews can continue to come and pray, learn and find a good kosher meal there, and refugees can find support. But Schechter and Masorti know that a significant number of Jewish communities in Ukraine will need to be rebuilt. And that will take both time and money.
The Masorti synagogue in Chernivtsi Ukraine has become a refuge for Ukrainians fleeing the war. Its new aron kodesh, built by grateful refugees, has become a symbol of the partnership being forged between small, out-of-the-way communities and those fleeing for safety. (photo from Schechter Institutes Inc.)
Schechter’s director of development Michal Makov-Peled said the Cantors Assembly will be hosting an hour-long telethon of music and stories on June 12 to raise money for Schechter and Masorti Olami’s emergency campaign. She said the funds will go toward assisting Jewish communities in Ukraine, as well as increasing support for refugees, which is expected to be an ongoing need, for now.
“We have 11 apartments that we are renting [to refugees in Chernivtsi],” Makov-Peled said, adding that they also distribute food to Jewish communities in Kyiv and Odessa, where residents are slowly returning, but which have been economically impacted by the conflict.
In Chernivtsi, communities are also finding rhythm and a new way of life. Some are exploring ways to expand the small synagogue’s services, others want to pay back the generosity they have been shown. Gritsevskaya said the synagogue now has a new aron kodesh (ark) to house its Torah, built by grateful visitors who saw a need. “Many aren’t members of the Chernivtsi community, but were just passing through,” said Gritsevskaya.
The June 12 Cantors Assembly performance, Mivtza Ukraine, will be aired around the world on YouTube and Facebook. To make a donation or for more information, log on to cantors.org/mivtzaukraine.
Jan Leeis an award-winning editorial writer whose articles and op-eds have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism and Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as a number of business, environmental and travel publications. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.
March 18, 2022, marked the 100th anniversary of the first bat mitzvah ceremony in the United States.
Judith Kaplan, daughter of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, became the first woman to publicly celebrate the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremony. Becoming a bat mitzvah, or “daughter of the commandments,” signifies that a young woman has attained legal adulthood under Jewish law.
A bat mitzvah is based on the centuries-old ritual of bar mitzvah, or “son of the commandments,” the ceremony for 13-year-old boys. Today, it typically involves months or years of study, chanting Torah in front of the congregation and giving a reflection on the week’s Torah reading.
Since that day in 1922, coming-of-age ceremonies for Jewish girls have gradually become more popular, especially in more liberal branches of Judaism.
As someone who studies how legal and social changes intersect to advance the rights of women in religious communities, I see bat mitzvah as having a transformative impact on the rights of women in Jewish life, one that continues to reverberate in important ways today.
Growing equality
For many years, the significance of becoming a bat or bar mitzvah was very different. For boys, it marked the moment when they took on all the privileges accorded to adult men in the tradition, including the right to be counted in a minyan, the minimum number of people required for community prayers; to be honoured by being called up to give blessings over the Torah reading; and to read from the Torah itself. For girls, meanwhile, it often marked a celebration of maturity, but did not necessarily bring along the rights to full and equal participation in synagogue rituals.
It is only in recent decades that the rituals enacted and the rights bestowed for boys and girls have become substantially equivalent, and only in more liberal movements.
Indeed, because of controversies over whether women should be permitted to read aloud from the Torah, Judith Kaplan was not given the honour of being called up to read from a Torah scroll – part of the ordinary routine for bar mitzvah boys. Rather, she spoke after the service had formally concluded, reciting prayers and reading selections from the biblical passages out of a book.
Even today, bat mitzvah girls in some communities read passages from sacred texts after services on Friday night or Saturday morning, instead of during the standard Saturday morning service. But the bat mitzvah ritual, in varying forms, has become widespread in all movements within Judaism. It is widely practised in Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist – a branch of progressive Judaism later founded by Kaplan’s father – communities and is increasingly popular in the Orthodox world.
The introduction of bat mitzvah was a steppingstone to expanding roles for women in every part of the Jewish world. In the Conservative movement, for example, women’s inclusion in bat mitzvah created tensions with their exclusion from other aspects of ritual life and leadership. Girls and women who were educated alongside boys and celebrated their bat mitzvah in similar ways later found themselves excluded from adult roles.
Jewish studies scholar Anne Lapidus Lerner summed it up this way: “The bar mitzvah ceremony marks a young man’s entrance into adult Jewish responsibility and privilege – the first, it is hoped, of many such occasions. But a bat mitzvah would mark a young woman’s exit from participation. It would be the only time she was permitted to go up to read the Haftarah,” selections from the biblical books of the prophets, read after the Torah portion each Sabbath.
The push to resolve this inconsistency led to an expansion of women’s roles within Conservative Judaism, including the ordination of women as rabbis.
Orthodox women continue to push boundaries around bat mitzvah. Many Orthodox synagogues have special programs devoted to girls coming of age and host celebrations marked by lighting Sabbath candles and sharing their learning about sacred texts in a speech to the community. Some Orthodox communities host women-only prayer groups where girls read from the Torah, while families in other communities host ceremonies in their homes.
New directions
As the ritual of bat mitzvah became more widely accepted, adult women who had been denied opportunities to study for it as children have sought out bat mitzvah as well. They may choose adult bat mitzvah because they seek to become more involved in ritual leadership in their synagogue community, or to enhance their skills so that they can guide their children when it becomes time for them to begin training for their own bar or bat mitzvah. Becoming an adult bat mitzvah may also provide a public forum to mark important transformations in one’s Jewish identity.
Project Kesher, an American nongovernmental organization that fosters Jewish women’s leadership in the former Soviet Union, supports programs for adult bat mitzvah. These initiatives allow women who were forbidden to receive a Jewish education by antisemitic state policies to reclaim their identities.
Sometimes, the ritual of adult bat mitzvah celebrates a more personal journey. In a recent episode of And Just Like That, the sequel to Sex and the City, the character Charlotte faces a crisis when her child does not want to participate in their Jewish coming-of-age ceremony. Charlotte saves the day by using the occasion to have her own bat mitzvah, to celebrate her own Jewish identity as a “Jew by choice,” after converting to Judaism years ago.
The TV episode also highlights another emerging innovation around the ritual of bat mitzvah: the adoption of more gender-neutral terms “b’nai mitzvah” or “b-mitzvah.” In many contexts, the rituals of bar and bat mitzvah have become identical, but the names of the ritual are still sexually differentiated: “bar mitzvah” for boys and “bat mitzvah” for girls. Some congregations, like Charlotte’s, have moved to using the term “b’nai” – children of the commandments (though b’nai literally means “sons,” it is also used to describe gender-mixed groups) – or simply “b-mitzvah” as a term that embraces all children, including those who identify as non-binary. (The Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture uses the term p’nei [faces of] mitzvah.)
So, when North American Jews celebrate the 100th anniversary of bat mitzvah, they not only celebrate a momentous occasion in the life of one young girl, but an innovation that has paved the way for wider inclusion of generations of women, children and those previously excluded from a central ritual of Jewish life.
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe is director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law, which explores the tension between women’s equality claims and religious laws. Her research focuses on gender and multiculturalism in family law and on the intersection between secular and religious law. She is a co-founder of the Boston Agunah Task Force, devoted to research, education and advocacy for women under Jewish family law. This article is republished from The Conversation, and the original can be found at brandeis.edu/jewish-experience.
A friend described to me once what Warsaw looked like in the aftermath of the Second World War. A small boy then, he remembered vividly the ripped apartment buildings, whole sides of buildings missing. When you raised your head, he said, you could see a bed up there, one leg hanging over the precipice, the chimney, a chair stuck in half fall. The lives turned into ruins and exposed.
The “noble” war, as Russian President Vladimir Putin calls it, has killed thousands. Other thousands have been taken into filtration camps by Russians. The war has uprooted the lives of millions. It has separated wives from husbands, children from fathers. It has laid bare what is usually concealed from the eyes of a stranger: human attachments and loves, support for one another and acts of kindness. But also, the seismic faults running through so many families; their discontents, their arguments, and the way they cope with them in the time of crises.
Inadvertently, I became privy to the lives of many simply because I happened to be there at the time of their great vulnerability and need. Those I met (and, with rare exceptions, these were women with children) were going through the horrors and desolation of war. All, without exception, were traumatized. All needed practical help, advice, information and, above all, empathy.
But what they also needed, I discovered, was to talk about what they had gone through. That need was spontaneous and raw. They broke into stories easily and without invitation on my part. Each story was different, yet many followed the similar pattern: destruction and loss of property or homes; weeks in basements with scarce water, food supplies and electricity; the howl of air raid sirens; separation from loved ones and concern about their well-being; screams of traumatized children; and, then, finally evacuation, finally escape, over many days. Escape on foot, by trains, buses or sometimes cars, with detours necessitated by rockets and missiles; crossing rivers on boats where bridges were blown up.
I heard repeated gratitude to Ukrainian volunteers who facilitated the escapes, relaying families from one safe place to another; informing about the dangers on the way and how to bypass them. I heard stories of churches that sheltered families overnight; of people harbouring strangers in their homes; of volunteers who organized food that awaited fleeing families at different points of their long and hazardous journey to safety. I learned a new word – humanitarka, meaning clothing (and perhaps food) that poured into Ukraine from the West as humanitarian aid.
And I heard stories of the brutality of Russian soldiers towards civilians. I heard stories of looting, torture and rape. I heard stories of Russian soldiers leaving villages and shooting in their wake every cow, every chicken, so that the owners would be left with nothing; gratuitously smashing all the preservatives Ukrainians traditionally prepare for winter. I heard how Russian soldiers pretended they would allow villagers to run to safety, only to shoot them in their legs, and finish them off later like hunted animals. I heard stories of booby-trapped corpses, of Russians abandoning their dead.
In the two-and-a-half weeks I volunteered with the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at a border crossing and in a refugee shelter several kilometres away from the Polish border with Ukraine, I met people of all walks of life – I met the Ukrainian Nation.
I met a grandmother who escaped missiles with her six grandchildren and made it to Poland while the parents of the children had perished.
I met a man, a welder, looking after his old and infirm mother. They couldn’t possibly live with any family, the man explained, because his mother became psychotic and incontinent, and he regularly had to clean up after her. The welder was now trying to bring to Poland his former wife with her new husband and their three children, one of whom was his.
I met 60 elderly Baptists from Zaporizhzhia who were on the way to Amsterdam, where a sister Baptist church was going to shelter them. Zaporizhshia is the site of the largest atomic plant in Europe and it had been overtaken by Russian soldiers. It’s the city where my relatives live. Talking to these refugees, I realized that my aunt had been concealing the truth from me all along: the rockets are falling 10 kilometres away from the city.
I discovered that the most painful subject and the last thing that came up in conversations was the fact that women had had to leave their loved ones behind. The worry for their soldier sons and husbands, their parents, grandparents and siblings, was a deeply hidden, yet constant, heartbreak. It was a breaking point for many. I will not forget those eyes, dozens and dozens of women’s eyes: blue, grey, greenish; eyes magnified by tears at the thought of the separation from loved ones. When a collective image of Ukraine comes to my mind, it’s women’s eyes. Embarrassed to cry in front of me, a stranger, they tried to look away. The older sister would often say to the younger, “Enough already, just stop it!” while breaking into tears herself.
Another move that caused tears was my offering of money to refugees, the generous donations that I had received while I was still in Vancouver. In Canada, I had packed lots of envelopes to put the money into, for a civilized handout. How naïve I was! In the chaos of a refugee centre, it was quickly handing over money from hands to hands. A scared look and the initial refusal to accept was universal. I had to come up with some strategy to overcome the mutual embarrassment. “This is not my money,” I would say. “This is from Canadian friends, people like you. Canadians care about you. They want to help you. But they can’t be here. They asked me to do it for them. Please take it.” A grateful look. Tears. A hug.
The refugee centre was a temporary shelter. Refugees could spend several nights there and then move on: to some city, some country.
The vast majority of the refugees I met were determined to return home once the war was over. But they had made it to Poland and many would have liked to stay there while the war was raging. Poland was familiar; it has cultural and historical ties with Ukraine, especially with the western part of Ukraine.
In the post-Soviet times, before this war, thousands of Ukrainians had gone to Poland for work: a member of the European Union, Polish standards of living and salaries were higher than Ukrainian. Besides, the Polish language was closer to Ukrainian than any others of the countries that came forward to help. It would be manageable somehow; it could be learned, if not by everybody, at least by the younger people. But Poland couldn’t take in any more refugees. Posters in the refugee centre read in Ukrainian: “We are happy to welcome you, but our cities are full. Our small rural communities are cozy and peaceful. Consider moving there.” But even small villages were full and couldn’t afford to welcome any more people.
The women who arrived at the refugee centre accepted with resignation the fact that they would have to be on the move again. The way they decided where to go next somewhat surprised me: it wasn’t on the basis of a better financial package or living conditions. Rather, the criteria was proximity to Ukraine. The first question that women asked me about various countries also seemed unusual: they wanted to know if they would be able to find work quickly. I would talk about the hardships they had just endured; the necessity to rest, to take a break, to look around first. But that didn’t register. They have worked all their lives, they said. They are used to work. Living for free at somebody’s expenses was a no-no.
Most of the Ukrainian women I met were mild-mannered and perhaps less assertive, less forceful, compared to North American ones. All were both surprised and grateful for the help and goodwill they’d seen from so many. They couldn’t praise enough what the Poles did for them. They were deeply touched by the smallest acts of kindness. And none took the help for granted. “If this happened to other nations and we, Ukrainians, would have to do this for somebody else, would we have done the same? I am not sure,” said one woman.
Few discussed the wider political implications of the war. They didn’t talk about Putin or his goals, or the future of their country. Their concerns were more practical and immediate: food, clothing and the well-being of their children, their elderly mothers.
But I remember one woman, Nina, and her fiery indignation: “What have we done to Russians? What do they want from us? We didn’t bother anybody. Nazi? What Nazi? We live peacefully with our neighbours: gypsies, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians. We all speak Ukrainian and Russian!”
Another, older, woman, while waiting for the bus to Germany, was even more emphatic: “You tell me why Russians believe Putin’s propaganda? Why do they have the mentality of slaves? We Ukrainians may have our problems. But we’re free people. Russians are slaves! Slaves.” (The word “slave” in Russian usage has strongly negative connotations, implying the qualities of subservience, fear, and the desire to please the master.)
I thought about these words. I don’t have an answer to her question. Nor do I have any convincing arguments against her harsh indictment.
I’m still trying to comprehend and, in some way, come to terms with what I experienced over 16 days. It began when I flew into Warsaw from Vancouver and was picked up at the airport by a JDC representative. Together with two volunteers from the United States, we were driven to the Polish-Ukrainian border, where a small group of Holocaust survivors was to arrive. The drive took four to five hours and, by the time we got to the border, it was totally dark and bitterly cold.
Arrangements had been made with Germany that it would take in the Holocaust survivors. The German Red Cross ambulance bus had traveled 13 hours. I learned later that everybody in the ambulance was a volunteer – the driver was a history teacher, the three women were professional nurses donating hours and hours of service.
I wondered how it was possible to find a few Holocaust survivors in a warring country and bring them to safety. It turned out that the Jewish Agency had used the lists of survivors receiving financial assistance before the war to contact and evacuate them.
What struck me most at the time was the sight of several empty white canvass stretchers on the dirt next to the bus. It started to drizzle; the Germans stacked the stretchers and covered them with a tarp. The stretchers, soon to be filled with people, were a menacing sign of the proximity of war, invisible yet close. When the bus from Ukraine finally arrived, one body was carried out on a stretcher. So emaciated and skeletal was this body that, for a moment, I wondered why they were transporting a corpse with the living. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a woman, wounded and emaciated to an extreme degree but alive. For the next while, the Germans administered an IV to the seemingly unresponsive body. I overheard a conversation between two nurses: one wondering if the woman would be able to make it to Germany. They asked her a question – I translated – was she in pain? The woman shook her head. The Germans proceeded to take care of others.
Six other women got off the bus with some help from the Red Cross people and us.
One lady clutched her battered black purse that was overflowing with some papers. She refused to board the ambulance bus. A nurse and I held her up against the bitter wind, while she told us that her son was waiting for her here, around the corner, that he was going to pick her up. We finally figured out what she meant: her son was in Germany and she believed that she had arrived to Germany, not Poland. Efforts were made to contact her son right there, and somebody got him on the phone or they said they did, I’m not sure. But somehow the matter was settled: the woman agreed to board the ambulance.
None of these old and frail women escaped with any possessions to speak of: a handbag, a sack, was all they managed to take. But that little something was now the focus of their attention; a symbol of their lost nests, and they feverishly clung to it.
One woman finally settled on a stretcher inside the ambulance, her purse sitting on top of her chest. Another plowed through her handbag in search of a watch, the only item left from her late husband, she said; she couldn’t find it, believed it was stolen and was distraught.
Yet another was worried about her frequent need to urinate. A nurse and I led her to the blue booths on the side of the road. She whispered in my ear, asking if I could take her alone: the nurse had accompanied her to the booth before; it was too embarrassing to need to go again.
None of the Holocaust survivors seemed to be clear about what was going on and where they were going next. Finding out that there would be another 13 hours of travel to Frankfurt on top of the hours of travel behind her, one of the passengers refused to go. “I won’t be able to take it,” she said. “I lived through German occupation once and now it’s the Russians. I’ve had enough.”
The last to arrive (I think in a separate bus) was a man. With nothing in his hands, he seemed to be unperturbed by the lack of any worldly possessions. He came from Kyiv. “I didn’t want to leave. But I’m an invalid. I live on the third floor and can’t go downstairs into the basement during the air raids,” he explained. “My son was worried and decided to pack me off to Germany. One way or the other, what difference does it make for me after all I’ve lived through? I remember the Germans. They didn’t do to us what the Russians are doing.”
For almost anyone, this would be the most stunning statement. The Nazis, the Germans, and their allies, committed terrible atrocities during the Second World War (“the Great Patriotic War,” as it was officially called in the Soviet Union, where I grew up). They were inhuman in their cruelty; they were beasts. I still remember the games of my childhood that we played in our yards: the good guys were Russians, the bad ones were Nazis, the Fritzes, as we called them.
I thought about it as I was watched the German nurses taking care, with utmost attention and patience, of the elderly Ukrainian Jews, the Holocaust survivors, escaping Russian atrocities in the 21st century.
Marina Sonkina is a fiction writer, and teaches in the Liberal Arts Program 55+ at Simon Fraser University. She immigrated to Canada with her two then-young sons, as the Soviet Union was breaking up. When Russia attacked Ukraine, she applied as a volunteer with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She arrived in Poland early this month and was a frontline responder for 16 days, offering refugees medical and psychological support.
