Op-Ed

Remembering the Great Roundup

Entire Jewish families were rounded up and interned in the Vel d’Hiv and other places in France, when La Grande Rafle began on July 16, 1942. (unattributed image)

It is 80 years this summer since La Grande Rafle (the Great Roundup) took place in France. It is not only a significant, tragic anniversary for the Jewish people, but one that impacted me directly.

“Happy like God in France” was a saying sometimes heard among Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe a century ago, even though antisemitism was fairly widespread in France and few years had passed since the Dreyfus Affair. Falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was publicly humiliated and sentenced to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. However, in the end, justice prevailed: Dreyfus was proven innocent and restored to his rank. Jewish loyalty to France remained unshaken. In 1939, as in 1914, Jewish men, citizens and immigrants alike, volunteered to fight in the defence of France, but the country for which they spilled blood betrayed their trust.

The humiliating defeat of 1940 led to the division of the country into two main zones, a Germany-occupied zone in the north and a so-called “free zone” in the south. It also led to the collapse of democracy and a replacement of the republic with a fascist regime, called Etat Français, in Vichy, headed by Marshall Philippe Petain. That regime enacted the sweeping antisemitic Statute des Juifs, the most racist legislation in occupied Europe. Its application was entrusted to a special commissariat for Jewish affairs, of which the first incumbent was Xavier Vallat, who declared to the younger hauptsturmführer (captain) in the SS, Theodor Dannecker, in Paris, “ I am an older antisemite than you are: I could be your father in these matters.”

Vallat was soon replaced by the more vicious Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a gutter journalist, who, as early as 1937, proposed in one of his screeds to “solve the Jewish problem in France” by wholesale extermination.

At the time, there were 300,000 Jews living in France, who represented less than one percent of the population. Their origins were diverse; Ashkenazim, Sephardim, immigrants from a variety of European and Mediterranean countries, religious and non-practising, etc. That population was composed of native and naturalized citizens. The Census of 1940 placed French Jews under the protection of the Vichy government, while at the same time expelling them from the professions, civil and military. Non-naturalized Jews were liable to internment at the discretion of regional police prefects. Instinctively respectful of the laws of France, even Jews who bore French surnames and spoke fluent French obeyed the order to register.

The regime created a Gulag-type network of internment camps that covered both major zones of the country. Beginning in 1941, Jewish men were summoned by groups, depending on their nationality, to present themselves at the police commissariat nearest to their places of residence (there were no ghettos in France). They were sent to hard labour in camps, of which the most notorious were Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, northeast of Orléans, and Drancy, a transit camp in a suburb of Paris, from where departed the deportation cattle car trains bound for Auschwitz. Naturalizations granted after 1927 were ordered rolled back.

Beginning on July 16, 1942, a dramatic change in the deportation policy was initiated: La Grande Rafle. Entire families were now targeted, regardless of age or sex. Beginning at 4 a.m., police squads bearing lists of the names and addresses of about 27,000 Jewish immigrants fanned across Paris in vans and requisitioned urban buses, knocking at countless apartment doors. About half of the targeted victims, warned by the Jewish communist underground, were able to escape arrest and find shelter among gentiles, mainly in rural areas. Arrested during that roundup were 3,118 men, 5,019 women and 4,115 children (3,000 of them born in France and, therefore, French citizens).

The Grande Rafle, codenamed by the police Vent Printanier (Spring Wind), was the greatest mass persecution in the city of Paris since 1572, when thousands of Protestants were murdered on the night of St. Bartholomew by Catholic mobs unleashed by Queen Catherine of Medici.

The 1942 military-style operation against the Jews in Paris was carried out from start to finish by French policemen, with no German participation, as they did not have sufficient resources. In fact, the Germans had ordered the French not to arrest children below the age of 16 for the time being, since, as stated, 3,000 of them were born in France. However, then-prime minister of France Pierre Laval averred that it would be “inhuman” to separate children from their parents. On his own initiative, he declared that he assumed the burden of “ridding France of its Jews.”

Laval ordered that entire families be rounded up and, pending deportation to the east, interned in the Winter Circus (Vel d’Hiv), Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Conditions of interment in the Vel d’Hiv were hellish: suffocating heat, the stench of public latrines, next to no medical attention, and scant distribution of food and drink. Many people went mad, some died. In the end, families were split all the same: adults were transported from Drancy to Auschwitz, while children initially sent to Pithiviers were next carried in the cattle car trains, along the same harrowing itinerary of death, with almost no adult supervision. Many of those children were brutalized by French policeman, who even robbed them of what their parents gave them.

One month after the Grande Rafle, similar atrocities were perpetrated in the free zone of the south, where there was no German occupation and the French government retained complete sovereignty over internal affairs, bearing no obligation other than supplying the Nazis with the products and produce that they demanded.

Caught when we illegally crossed the demarcation line, which divided France’s two major zones, my parents and I were among those “assigned to residence” in a requisitioned hotel of the small town of Lons-le-Saunier, near the Swiss border.

On the morning of Aug. 26, a rafle collected hundreds of Jews across the city, including my mother and me; happening to be on an errand, my father escaped. A pitiful column, we were marched across the city – hurried along by policeman who brutalized and insulted us, calling us “dirty Jews” – to the railway station, where a train awaited to transport us to the gruesome concentration camp of Rivesaltes, near the Spanish border.

The railway station became a scene of unrestrained police brutality, which spared neither adults nor children. I was seized by the hair and the seat of my pants by a brute who was about to throw me on the train, when I was saved by my maternal aunt, a French citizen, who, through personal contacts, obtained my release thanks to the timely intervention of a gendarmerie officer. I last saw my mother as she was being violently dragged along the floor of the station, then waved to me from a window, as the train departed for Rivesaltes. From there, with fellow victims of the rafle, she was transported several days later in a train that traveled north, this time to Drancy. And, there, she was squeezed into a cattle car train bound for Auschwitz. At least two-thirds of the women who left in that convoy either perished along the way, or were gassed following the selection on arrival.

Few of the Vichy regime organizers, policemen and other perpetrators of the summer 1942 and subsequent rafles paid for their crimes. Laval was tried and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1946; Petain was sentenced to life exile on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean; René Bousquet, chief of the national police, was briefly deprived of citizenship rights by General Charles de Gaulle and then resumed his functions, until he was mysteriously assassinated in his Paris apartment shortly before he was to be tried for crimes against humanity in 1980.

Obsessed by his wish for national reconciliation of the French, de Gaulle put a stop to any prosecution of persons who had collaborated with the Nazis. Throughout the postwar decades, the French deluded themselves with the myth that most of them supported or joined the resistance.

It was not until 1995 that then-president Jacques Chirac publicly declared that the opposite was the case – that “France had committed the irreparable,” that at least some financial compensation should be awarded to the survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered or lost relatives to French collaboration with the Nazi action.

It should be noted, however, that nearly 75% of the Jewish population of France survived the Holocaust, thanks to the assistance offered by French citizens, both urban and rural, who sympathized with the Jewish people. Also, unlike Holland or Belgium, small, crowded countries, the French countryside offered vast areas of wilderness in which many Jews found shelter or joined the resistance.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Never waste life’s many gifts

The author with her grandmother. (photo from Becca Wertman-Traub)

In the story of the Jewish people, it is not just about our patriarchs but the matriarchs, too. I grew up knowing that both my grandparents, Babi and Zaida, were Holocaust survivors. Zaida would tell me his stories – I know them backwards and forwards from how he spoke about them. But Babi, who was just 13 when the Second World War began, did not really tell hers.

She did talk about her brother – Shaike – who was taken to his death by the Nazi SS when he came out of the house to help young Frieda carry a pail of water. He was taken to a police station and killed in its basement along with numerous other Jews from the town. And she told us that her father, mother, sister and another brother all perished in the Holocaust. But not much else. She was too busy making blintzes, perogies, chicken patties, chicken soup with kreplach and more for her family.

Thankfully, though, she did have the extreme courage to tell her full story to the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, where I learned the details of how she survived. Frieda’s childhood home in Kamionka-Strumilowa, Poland, became part of a ghetto. During the liquidation of the ghetto, Frieda and her brother, sister and mother hid in a hiding space in the wall and managed to survive, when the rest of the Jews of the town were taken to their deaths at Belzec extermination camp.

Following the liquidation, the German’s declared the town “Judenfrei,” free of Jews, but Frieda and her remaining family were still there. Since their home was located on the edge of the ghetto, they jumped off the balcony, surpassing the ghetto’s fence, and walked to Busk, a town 30 kilometres away, where they had heard that Jews were still living. They went to the Busk ghetto and lived with an aunt. Frieda’s mother died of typhoid there, and Frieda was left with her brother and sister. Unannounced, the Nazis started liquidating the ghetto, and Frieda again hid but was separated from her brother and sister – she never saw them again.

While in the Busk ghetto, Frieda worked as a gardener for a German man who said, if she returned to Kamionka-Strumilowa, he would help hide her. At the time, Frieda did not believe such a thing was possible and simply mentioned it to her cousins. However, after the liquidation, with no immediate family, she decided to give it a shot and walked back to her hometown by herself. The man took her to the village of Obydiv, where she met Mr. Svets, a Polish farmer. Frieda hid in this Polish farmer’s barn for 12 months and, today, his sister-in-law Janina Pelc is listed among Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations.

Frieda was one of just 20 from a town of 3,000 Jewish people who survived the Holocaust and lived to tell her story.

And did she live!

Babi and Zaida met after the war and moved to Vancouver in 1949. Babi was always walking, or speed-walking, usually leaving Zaida behind so she could do laps back and forth around him. She just could not sit still, whether it was cooking for her three children and, later, eight grandchildren, or cleaning the entire kitchen with a single square of paper towel – there could never be any waste. I remember sitting at Babi and Zaida’s kitchen counter as a little kid and Babi giving me milk in a tiny shot glass because “if you finish this, you get some more.”

Babi played tennis at Richmond Country Club, exercised at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, and dined at the finest restaurants and cafés in downtown Vancouver.

Even when Zaida passed away, she was not done living. Right up until the end, my dad took her out for coffee.

In September, just a few days before my wedding, we were out for coffee and she took my left hand, looked at me and said, “Is he Jewish? Is he from a good family?” I said yes, and reminded her that she was coming to the wedding.

At 95, she came to my wedding. And she danced at it – to none other than “Od Lo Ahavti Di,” Hebrew for “I have not loved enough.”

Babi appreciated life and everything it had to offer to its fullest, never allowing any of its gifts to go to waste. We mustn’t either.

May her memory be for a blessing.

Becca Wertman-Traub grew up in Vancouver and currently lives and works in Jerusalem.

Reuse, recycle, make anew

I was driving down the back lane, kids in the car, when I saw a neighbour. I stopped and rolled down the window for a chat. The neighbour’s children lived nearby and they were looking for flooring to refinish the landing on their stairs. Our family, through an ordering snafu, ended up with more flooring than needed. In fact, we’d avoided using any new flooring at all. We had asked our clever contractors to help us reuse 110-year-old quarter-sawn oak flooring from elsewhere in the house and the floor refinishers hadn’t needed any of the new “special order, not returnable” flooring. I asked the neighbour if her kids were still interested in it, because we had a lot. She said she’d ask.

The neighbour then asked me if we were doing serious “purging.” I smiled and said it was more like “redistribution.” She laughed, saying she’d have to remember that. She liked this way of seeing things.

We like to think of ourselves as a family that reuses, recycles and repairs things. While we’re not purists, we try to limit what ends up in the trash as compared to the compost. We try to give away or repurpose the things we no longer can use for their original purpose.

If one imagines three kinds of models for one’s household economies, there are sometimes three terms bandied about. A linear economy involves “take, make, use and waste.” A recycling economy involves something like “take, make, use, recycle, make, use … on repeat and eventually … waste.” A circular economy has a much more complicated chart or trajectory, involving words like “take, make, use, repair, make, reuse, return, make, recycle” but very little becomes waste. Everything is used.

The talmudic-era rabbis were part of a circular and recycling economy. We know it wasn’t entirely circular (most ancient civilizations weren’t) because archeologists keep finding the detritus of all those communities. Ask anyone interested in history about this. They wax rhapsodic about pottery shards, bone fragments, mosaics and more – these are essentially the great finds that finally broke completely. These trash bits were thrown down a privy a hundred to couple thousand years ago. Even that ancient trash has its use now: it tells us a lot about societies long gone.

I thought about all this as I began to study the talmudic tractate of Ketubot as part of Daf Yomi. In the practice of studying a page a day, it takes 7.5 years to finish reading the whole Babylonian Talmud. Nevertheless, this page-a-day approach is superficial. It’s just too much text for me to study in detail, so I try to explore one thing every day that I find interesting.

In Ketubot 4, there is a discussion about what to do if a death happens right when a wedding is supposed to take place. The short version is, well, it depends, according to the introduction offered by Rabbi Heather Miller for My Jewish Learning. However, in many circumstances, the wedding is supposed to happen even if someone has to leave a dead body nearby in another room. Why? There are several reasons.

One important reason is that there was no refrigeration. If a wedding feast was prepared and it couldn’t be sold to someone else, the food shouldn’t be wasted. It can’t be assumed that there was enough food to just waste a whole wedding feast. The rabbis really valued “bal taschit,” or “do not waste,” which comes from the Torah, from Deuteronomy 20:19.

Also, if the bride’s mother or the groom’s father died, it was essential to continue with the wedding. These parents had important roles in the planning of the wedding. Canceling the event would take away from their children’s opportunity to benefit from that work. A bride depends on her mother to help her get ready and setting up a wedding later, after a mourning period, would mean a do-over. The bride’s mother wouldn’t be alive to help then, either.

In a discussion with my online Talmud study group, it was pointed out that, in many cases, rabbis throughout history will find every way possible to help people not waste. If a poor family makes a potential kashrut mistake, asks the rabbi what to do and the rabbi knows they will be hungry without the food, the rabbi finds a way to enable the family to eat the food.

This tradition gives me hope for Jewish sustainability in the future. Here are legitimate Torah and Talmud references that encourage us to avoid waste and to reuse and value others’ work. It gives me extra motivation to recycle when it’s difficult to do so, or to patch and reuse a pair of pants yet again.

In some Jewish situations, these notions of avoiding waste are not always followed. Think of a big holiday meal or Kiddush, where everyone used disposable paper products and plastic utensils and, afterwards, it all went in the trash. Consider some well-to-do congregations where holiday services are a fashion show, and where being seen in new clothing is more valued than just being appropriately dressed. These are instances where perhaps we’ve fallen prey to a consumerist, linear economy.

It’s still possible to dress up or wear something new or different on a special occasion. It’s OK to occasionally make more trash than usual, too. However, doing it on a regular basis is not just bad for the earth now. It also affects us in terms of climate change. It’s probably also a violation of the rabbinic obligation to avoid waste.

It’s true that cleaning, decluttering and renovation trends these days are all about how much can be discarded. Maybe it’s time to save the old growth lumber. Reuse something really good. It’s also good to pass along that new flooring so it, too, can be used sustainably rather than discarded. Don’t just throw everything out and produce more waste. Reuse, recycle, make anew … the rabbis said so.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

The romance of good bagels

Winnipeg has had a bagel renaissance. It’s not exactly a bagel mecca, and these are definitely not the New York City bagels my husband was raised eating. However, the recent bagel trends here are a step forward.

In the earlier days of the pandemic, summer 2020, my kids and I were out at the park when we met another family who seemed to recognize us, I’m not sure from where. I was surprised when they struck up a conversation but we had such a nice moment. Now that we’ve all spent so much time on our own, I have come to realize how important these outdoor encounters can be to our health and well-being.

Towards the end of the chat, these kind strangers handed us a bagel, straight from a brown paper bag that contained a couple dozen, as my twins were missing snack and getting hangry (hungry angry). We divided it up and ate. Ohhh. It was good. Not exactly a Montreal bagel, more like a combination between a New York City and a Montreal bagel, but definitely better than anything I’d ever had in Winnipeg.

I rushed home to tell my husband how to acquire more of these. Bagelsmith was, at that time, almost an underground bakery with a simple website. It didn’t have an open storefront, due to the pandemic, but if you got online right at 8 p.m. Sunday night, you could get bagels delivered on, say, a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. There were also schmears, but these all had strange things mixed in with the cream cheese, which my purist spouse could not abide even considering. Soon, we were up to ordering three or four dozen of these at a time.

It should be noted that these bagels have a hole in the centre and are properly boiled but, although we enjoy sesame, poppy or everything bagels, they have way too many seeds for our taste. In fact, we’ve collected the seeds from the bottom of a paper bag, filled a spice jar with them and used them for challah toppings. (That is way too many seeds for a house with kids in it. They get everywhere and our dog doesn’t like them!)

I clarify all this because we have been treated to all kinds of bagels over the years that, quite frankly, are not bagels. Round things with a hole perhaps, but they haven’t been boiled, or boiled things that have no hole, or varieties that are absolutely abhorrent to a purist. The Big Nope – blueberry bagels. We’ve lived in a variety of places, including North Carolina, Kentucky and Buffalo, N.Y., and had to do without, because some bagels aren’t worth the calories.

My husband spent part of his childhood getting pletzels and biales from Kossar’s on the Lower East Side in New York and bagels from Russ and Daughters. (Of course, in New York City, there are a lot of good bagel places!) His grandparents and the extended Eastern European family have strong memories of what things should taste like. He has very high standards. Years ago, on a work trip to Montreal, his colleague and good friend (who happens to be Muslim), took my husband on a tour of all the famous Montreal bagel places. Then, the friend loaded him up with so many bagels and so much Montreal smoked meat that it was hard to carry it all home on the plane. This is the kind of love they have for each other, a perfect experience – two longtime colleagues who affectionately value each other through food!

Back to Winnipeg … as the bakery grew and the pandemic situation changed, there were times when we could not get these bagels delivered. The bakery was downtown in a spot that wasn’t far away but was hard to negotiate by car. I even figured out that the bagel baker had children who went to our kids’ school. However, when everybody’s in remote school, that morsel of information is useless. When we couldn’t get them delivered, we went without. This wasn’t a life or death situation. I baked our bread regularly and, when the local bakery was open, we got sourdough bread, baked in a wood-fired oven.

You may think that I could try harder, and maybe that’s true. I bake lots of bread, but draw the line at any recipe that takes more than 24 hours or is fidgety. I leave croissant production, bagel boiling and sourdough to the experts. After one multi-day sourdough experiment in hot weather in Kentucky, we agreed that, while the pink thing I grew was definitely alive, it wasn’t likely to be edible or safe. Lucky for me that my husband is a scientific researcher, because that weird starter attempt was not worth the risk to health and safety.

OK, back to our bagels. A huge thing has happened. Our favourite, artisanal, expensive bagel bakery has opened a second shop, and it’s easy to get to and just about in the neighbourhood. Today was the grand opening. It was also our 24th wedding anniversary.

My husband went out in between work meetings and came home with two dozen – yes, 24 – bagels. No, it’s not flowers or wine or a fancy meal, but to my partner, this is as good and romantic as it gets.

Bagels are an ethnic delight for Polish Jews. To be honest, I wasn’t raised with steady access to good bagels, growing up in Virginia. Bagels weren’t my (more North American assimilated, with some Western European roots) family’s biggest food focus. However, the Talmud speaks to this, too. We have a papercut, framed in our kitchen, of this phrase. Check out Pirkei Avot 3:17 – “No bread, no Torah. No Torah? No bread.” If you don’t have food, you can’t learn properly and without learning? You can’t earn your bread, either.

So, here’s to a good bagel, and a person, a partner, with whom I can continue to learn and grow. Here’s to another 24 years. L’chaim! B’tayavon. Enjoy your meal. Eat in good health!

Stand for truth – again

Last week, John Horgan sent a welcome letter to the Pacific regional office of CIJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. The British Columbia premier committed to fighting antisemitism, including using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism as a measuring stick in the ongoing fight against anti-Jewish discrimination.

The premier’s statement came on the very day that Abacus Data, an opinion research firm, released data from a survey of 1,500 Canadians. The alarming results show that a huge number of Canadians subscribe to appalling ideas.

Nearly one in five Canadians, according to the survey, believe there is a cover-up to hide the “fact” COVID vaccines kill people, while fully another 25% of Canadians think that might be true or aren’t sure.

One in 10 believe that vaccines implant a microchip to control human behaviour, and another 14% think that could be accurate.

Things go downhill from there. More than half of Canadians say that official government statements cannot be trusted – a serious allegation in a democratic society.

The poll also found that 44% of Canadians believes a “secret cabal of elites” control world events. As alarming, about 37% of respondents agreed with the statement: “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Canadians with immigrants who agree with their political view.”

Whenever phrases like “secret cabal of elites” are employed, informed people know exactly to whom that dog-whistle refers. And the second concept, dubbed the “Great Replacement” theory, was the motivation for the mass murder of 10 Black people in Buffalo, N.Y., last month. The “group of people” frequently accused of masterminding such alleged “replacement” are, of course, Jews. This was something that came to broader public awareness during the fatal white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago, when tiki torch-bearing racists chanted “Jews will not replace us!”

It is above our paygrade to understand or explain the socio-psychological reasons why, at the first sign of crazy, attention seems inevitably to turn to Jews. (At least the caricatured Jews of the antisemites’ imaginations, a pathology that inevitably has impacts on actual Jews.)

For whatever reasons, as we noted in this space a month ago, when a society leans into conspiracies, it seems inevitable that sights turn to Jews. These poll numbers suggest Canadians are further down this slippery slope that we might have imagined.

Canadians – Jewish and otherwise – can be forgiven for feeling a sense of smugness in recent years as we have watched some seriously messed up stuff happening with our nearest neighbours. Many of us have hedged our bets, knowing that, in societies that are in some ways going off the rails – not only the United States, but parts of Europe and other erstwhile stable liberal democracies – Canada cannot be immune from some of these tendencies. And, it seems, we are not.

It is important that government officials say the right things, as Horgan did last week. Of course, that so many Canadians do not trust elected officials presumably dulls the impact of these actions somewhat, but this does not detract from the urgency of forging ahead with what we know is the right thing to do.

The answer remains, as it was when we wrote about this issue (albeit less urgently) a month ago: we must stand verbally and forcefully against misinformation and disinformation. We must recommit, every day, to liberal values of tolerance, pluralism and the quest for truth and justice. We must ourselves exercise as well as teach young people the critical thinking skills to discern truth from fiction, and how to evaluate facts. And we must challenge politicians, commentators, family and friends who promote, or justify, the sorts of ideas that, we now know, are held by far too many Canadians.

The importance of attribution

There’s a story in the Babylonian Talmud, in Tractate Yevamot 96b, that cut close to home when I studied it. It’s a brief episode but it addresses modern interpersonal issues. It features Rabbi Elazar, who goes to the beit midrash (study hall) and quotes halachah (Jewish law). However, Elazar makes a big mistake – he doesn’t attribute this teaching to Rabbi Yohanan, who taught it. This news gets back to Yohanan. And it doesn’t sit well.

Now, the backstory. Rabbi Yohanan, according to Rabbi Dan Ornstein’s My Jewish Learning summary online, is seen as “dangerously oversensitive” and quick to anger. Yohanan also apparently had (at least) 10 sons and they all died. He is so sad that, in Tractate Berakhot 9b, he is carrying around a tooth (or a bone?) from his youngest child who died.

Back to the current story: rabbis Ami and Asi, Yohanan’s students, try to calm him. They say anger isn’t good and offer a story about Elazar and Rabbi Yosei, who get so angry with each other that they tear a Torah. Yohanan becomes angrier, because they are comparing Yohanan and Yosei (teachers) with a student (Elazar).

Along comes Rabbi Yaakov bar Idi, who takes a different approach. He explains that everyone knows that all of Elazar’s teachings come from Rabbi Yohanan, who is, in their time, “our iteration of Moses.” In fact, “Everyone knows Elazar is quoting you, even when he doesn’t quote you by name. You have nothing to fear.”

This diplomacy soothes Yohanan, who then corrects Ami and Asi, pointing out this was a great way to manage the situation.

There was so much in this story that affected me. First, there’s the matter of, in modern terms, “copyright.” Everybody deserves credit for their work. It’s not right to just claim somebody else’s ideas, images or innovations as your own.

There’s also the issue of context. Rabbi Yohanan had great personal tragedy and loss. People with this much trauma might be sensitive or angry – and that’s entirely understandable.

It’s also awful to try and “teach” your instructor through the example of one of their poorly behaved students. It disregards Yohanan’s wisdom and authority. Recognizing this trauma and honouring elders means treating them with respect instead of talking down to them, as rabbis Ami and Asi did.

The talmudic story continues: the teachings of a great person speak to us from beyond the grave. Yohanan’s legacy is his teaching of Jewish law and Torah. It’s erased if Elazar fails to acknowledge where it came from. When a person loses their children and hopes that his students will help his name live on? It’s demoralizing and infuriating when his students “erase” him instead.

OK, yes, but this is just an old story, why did it matter to me?

As an author, I care about copyright issues. Most authors don’t earn more than, at most, a dollar when each book is sold. Most writers (myself included) cannot make a living on their books or other writing. So, seeing bootlegged downloads of my books on the internet is infuriating – it’s just another way to “erase” a person’s value and intellectual property.

Then, there’s the issue of our personal story and how it affects our work. We’ve all known people who’ve suffered losses or struggled. Rabbi Yohanan is a good example. Perhaps some learn from this suffering and gain wisdom. Yet Yohanan’s students condescend to him and belittle his anger because “he might tear a Torah” like one of his students? This is not consolation. It’s demeaning.

Rabbi Ornstein uses the word “flattery” to describe what Yaakov bar Idi did, saying that everyone knew Elazar got everything he knew from Yohanan. I think that’s the wrong take. In trying to soothe Yohanan, Yaakov bar Idi gives him respect and credit. This shows how much our work means to us. As a good teacher, when calm, Yohanan made the experience a lesson for his other students. In other words, everything is Torah – we can learn how to be better people from any situation, no matter how upsetting or demeaning.

Occasionally, work situations pop up that “put us in our place” or give us context about what we do. Recently, I opened up my work email to discover I’d lost seven-plus months of emails from my inbox. Now, of course, an organized person would have addressed every issue, filed every email, and had an empty inbox. I hang on to things, I don’t spend enough time on tidying, and I keep things so I can think about them. Mea culpa.

After trying every technical solution available, it became clear that those emails were gone forever. No idea what happened. I had to let go of the panic and the upsetting situation. I hope my work has value, and that people will get in touch if they want to work with me.

Losing my emails this way felt like being erased. Middle-aged women, who are also caregivers, often earn less for the hours we work. We earn nothing for the hours of household labour we do to take care of those around us. It’s natural to feel angry about this. Rabbi Yohanan’s anger reminds that we all want to be acknowledged, have our work valued and respected. It’s not hypersensitive or unreasonable to want to leave a legacy to others. Taking on someone else’s teaching without attribution, as Elazar did, is the erasure that happens to many of us, and Rabbi Yohanan shows us that anger is a human response. Yaakov ben Idi suggests that acknowledging his teacher with respect is the compassionate way forward.

In a perfect world, my inbox would magically repopulate. I’d get offers from new clients showing my value as a writer and editor. My elementary school twins would suddenly acknowledge and thank me for all those meals and chauffeur moments. In reality, we all have to remind ourselves to reach out, acknowledge others, and treat them with respect. It doesn’t always happen automatically. Yohanan’s students valued his wisdom but they had to learn to acknowledge his work and recognize that his feelings mattered, too.

In this way, Rabbi Yohanan’s wisdom teaches us from beyond the grave. We must not erase others’ contributions. An erasure or even an empty inbox doesn’t make anybody’s life fulfilling. We must validate and value each other.

Opportunity to be healthier

There’s been much discussion about mental health, physical health and well-being as it relates to the pandemic. This can only be a good thing. It shines a light on something we should all think more about. For example, asking: “How are you doing? How are your family members and friends doing? Do they need support? Are they sad, isolated, lonely or not feeling well?” and actually hearing the responses.

Yet, once we start raising these questions about well-being, we have to acknowledge that we just don’t have the bandwidth or the social and medical infrastructure to deal with the outcomes. Many times, no one has cared, asked or listened when someone has spoken up and said things weren’t OK. It might be new for some to acknowledge that we’re not always “fine” and that there’s often not much professional help available either. (Just look at wait times to get mental health or addictions support.)

Our household had a great weekend recently. The weather was outstanding, warm and sunny, with highs of 20 to 23°C. We had outdoor experiences, with low-risk social experiences. We participated in a friendly neighbourhood cleanup and a big picnic with soccer and badminton. My kids gave me handmade art for Mother’s Day, with notes they wrote themselves. There was time for lots of good food, walks, playing and even some household cleaning. All four of us commented on Sunday night that we’d done so much, eaten well, and had so much fun.

I had so many feelings about this. I, too, loved the sunshine and the weekend’s events. I also felt physically well and energetic, capable of celebrating it all. That said, being absolutely prepared ahead of time, with lists of what we needed for each outing, a schedule, and carefully pre-organized and prepared meals was a lot of emotional labour. Like moms everywhere through the pandemic, I’ve shouldered much of this. When I woke up Monday morning, I was really tired.

The kids went to school. My partner settled down to his online meeting. I threw together food in two slow cookers for dinner and went to my desk – to work and to process my intense feelings. I knew I’d been starved for company. Seeing people outdoors, even strangers, with smiles and an intention to socialize and get to know us, was gratifying. Also, breaking out of our normal cold weather weekend pandemic routine was both fabulous and more work. Choosing to go out and chat with strangers – it was all good but also alien. That strange mix of feelings led me to think harder.

Working, I opened a fascinating listserv email about an informal comparison between Modern Hebrew, Yemenite Hebrew and Samaritan Hebrew. A Canadian engineer named Bahador Alast hosts YouTube interviews for a wide variety of languages in which he explores language, linguistics and culture. In this video, an Israeli speaker of Modern Hebrew, a Samaritan Israeli and a Yemenite Israeli all take apart informal sentences, a sentence of poetry, a sentence from the Torah (and liturgy) and another from the Mishnah (part of the Talmud). They easily code switch between their dialects of origin (Samaritan/Yemenite), Modern Hebrew, English and Arabic. They discuss the origins of their community’s pronunciations and conversational styles, their relationship to other Semitic languages and Modern Hebrew. With focus, they do all this in less than 20 minutes. It’s also done in such a friendly, open way that the moderator, Alast, who does this with many different cultures and languages, mostly sits and listens to the magic unfold.

This content stretched me intellectually, especially my auditory capacity, since I hadn’t heard these differences explained and formalized before. I loved this rare learning moment and the very specific linguistic context and comparison.

My personal realization about the weekend’s events and warmth and my Monday morning exhaustion was that context matters. The reason why it was all so fun was that we came into the weekend prepared. Also, all felt well rested and ready for lots of activity. Since the pandemic started, there has been acknowledgement of women’s household burdens with the cancellation of “regular” activities, but context matters. I had mostly the same burdens pre-pandemic and the normal run of activities made life overwhelmingly busy. The break in obligations allowed me to see the emotional labour in getting everything ready. I now sometimes can get my spouse to take on some of the load. Sometimes, we restructure things or do less.

The pandemic forced us to hit pause in many ways. Hopefully, it’s also opened up moments to make positive changes. People have always asked each other how we were, but did everyone listen to the responses? No. Many of us didn’t even have the time to listen to ourselves. Our own health and well-being can sometimes be hard to figure out. We need that quiet space to contextualize our experience. “Does this hip hurt more than it used to?” a physio might ask. However, if we don’t stop to think about what hurts or to discuss our feelings, experiences and needs, we cannot possibly contextualize them, either.

Judaism teaches us that we’re obligated to one another, in families, communities and society. Yet, if we aren’t listening to one another, we can’t help one another. Whether it’s speaking a common language with dialects or providing one another with mental health and other supports, we cannot lift one another up if we’re not listening or trying. We need to be self-aware to listen to our own bodies, minds and feelings. Then we can listen to and help others, too.

We may have a lot of health issues ahead, from long-COVID, health concerns left undiagnosed and mental health struggles. We have an obligation to recognize that we don’t have the social and medical infrastructure we need to manage it all. It’s up to us to start bridging the gaps. Listening to one another, offering context and support, is a first step. It’s an important opportunity to make things better.

The kill fee – and its fallout

I was honoured with the opportunity to chant the first aliyah for the Torah portion Aharei Mot. I’m still new to chanting Torah, so I practise every day. I can read and translate Torah but, for some reason, I didn’t reflect on what I was reading at first. I was chanting that very sensitive set of instructions given from G-d to Moses to pass along to his brother Aaron.

A few weeks ago, we read in Leviticus 10:1-7 that Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu offered “strange” or “alien” fire. Their sacrifice was overeager and unusual. They drew “too close” – in some readings of Leviticus 16:1 – to G-d and were struck down. They were killed.

After the death of Aaron’s sons, the instructions Moses passes along to Aaron are crucial. He isn’t to go into the Holy of Holies, behind the curtain, because G-d dwells in a cloud above the cover. Aaron’s sacrifices and his approach to the holiest spaces are scripted, careful and correct. When reading rabbis’ commentaries on this, their thoughts are all over the place, from quoting Sting’s lyrics “Don’t Stand so Close to Me” to talking about vulnerability and the divine. This is a text that has a lot to unpack.

As a freelancer, I do writing and editing jobs with various deadlines. Sometimes, I write a piece months in advance, submit, and hear nothing back until the publication arrives in the mail with payment. With other jobs, I get to revise and review copy edits, the editor says exactly when the piece will run and I’m paid early without prompting. Others require me to submit an invoice or I don’t get paid at all. Every gig is different. I’ve even worked for publications that have gone bankrupt before my article was to appear. So, I did all the work but, in the end, received nothing, not even a publication credit.

In other situations, I write or edit something with a short deadline. These can be very satisfying jobs that happen quickly. Sometimes, it’s a political analysis piece that runs in the newspaper. Other times, it’s a healthcare editing job that might improve the lives of breastfeeding moms. There’s a thrill to a tight deadline where I manage to get it done, and perhaps make a difference.

Before Passover, I submitted some queries (ideas) to a publication with which I’d worked before. I got a very fast response. The editor said she’d been about to write on one of these topics. Would I cover it instead? I said sure, asking for her outline and any other details she wanted included. Instead, she suggested I write it on my own, without her outline. I did this as fast as I could, as I also faced the hard deadline of cleaning and cooking for the holiday. I asked for quick feedback, since my time was limited, but I didn’t receive any.

Almost a week later, the editor asked me for revisions, asking why I didn’t include several items, which were on her mental checklist, unbeknown to me. I didn’t feel prepared to do it, but I researched and did one more rewrite before Pesach.

During the middle of the Passover, the copy edits arrived. I’d never seen so many before! Much of it seemed to ask me to prove mundane things with academic sources. Many copy editors have provided me with corrections and solutions over the years, and it’s usually just an “approve” track changes or a comment or two to move ahead. Responding to these comments took nearly three hours. I felt as though perhaps I’d written something wrong, although I’d been researching, writing and teaching on the topic for years.

The next day, I received a note from the editor. It would take too long for us to come to agreement over the edits. I was sent a “kill fee.” A kill fee is usually a quarter to a third of the amount agreed to for the whole project, if the project cannot go forward. This was a bit of a relief. I had more time for the holiday. I could be done with a hassle that already had earned me less than minimum wage.

Moments after I accepted the kill fee, the editor was on social media, writing glib jokes about the article topic and how she had to write the article herself. So, not only had I lost the gig, but there was some shame now, too. This was public “punishment.” Somehow, I’d been incapable of writing on this supposedly easy topic. With the holiday’s end and Shabbat approaching, I had ample time to reflect on the crummy experience.

For context … in the book Little Women, published more than 150 years ago, the character of Jo March is offered a $100 US prize payment for a story she wrote. I was offered $150 Cdn to write this story and paid a kill fee $50 Cdn.

When I thought back on Aaron’s painful loss of Nadav and Abihu, and how they’d been warned not to do things the wrong way, I wondered what lessons I could find there. I don’t make sacrifices at an altar. I never want to lose my children in such an awful way. However, on a much smaller scale, I pushed myself too hard to meet an elusive last-minute work goal. It cut me close when I failed, and then to be shamed via social media for it. I had my work “killed” – perhaps because my writing failed to come close enough to the editor’s ideas, or maybe because it was a little too detailed or uncomfortable and they questioned it. Who knows? Just as we will never know what Nadav and Abihu were thinking, I couldn’t be inside this editor’s thoughts either.

Unlike Aaron, I don’t have to work with this editor/client again. Aaron serves G-d, and cannot make the same mistakes his sons did. He is in a painful place where he must learn to do better. I, too, am in a place where I need to reconsider how I work and what I will work towards.

Luckily, I didn’t lose anything so precious as did Aaron. I can still explore how to make things better – it’s important to find a work/life balance that works, because that article was not worth the hassle. As the TV advertisement goes, some (important) things, like our family and holiday celebrations, are priceless.

Happy 74th birthday, Israel!

Like many Jewish kids who go to religious school twice a week, my understanding of Israel and its history was, well, simplistic. That changed when I was 16.

I went to live, on my own, on Kibbutz Beit HaShita for a year as part of their “American school” program. It was transformative for me in many ways. Among other things, I learned that Hebrew was a living, dynamic language, Jews were a diverse and complex people and that the land’s history was complicated. Also, I found out that, even far away from home, if, heaven forbid, something went wrong, there were, as Mr. Rogers described, helpers all around me. It was like all these strangers were distant relatives, a feeling I’d never experienced before.

I was a teenager, speaking in my third language, at a bus stop late one night in Jerusalem. I was scared I would miss the bus and not make it back to my class or back to the kibbutz. The motherly woman at the bus stop engaged me in small talk. “Oh,” she said, “You sound like you come from Beit HaShita. My cousin lives there. Don’t worry. If you miss the right bus, you can spend the night on my living room couch.” I felt alarmed at the time, but the bus arrived and I got home safely. I still remember that kind person’s offer – and it’s been more than 30 years.

For several reasons, I’ve never been back to Israel. I’ve wanted to go but life got in the way. Also, I did a lot more learning, in undergraduate and graduate school, and the complexity of the political situation felt intense. I navigated the opinions expressed in the Arabic classes I took and those of friends from all over the world. Due to antisemitism or facing someone who “hated Israel,” it sometimes felt hard to explain where I’d lived. I didn’t feel OK about some of Israel’s policy choices at times. I believed (and still do) that Palestinians deserved their own state, much the way many Israelis do, but I wasn’t Israeli so I didn’t vote there. It wasn’t my place to shift their politics. I just didn’t want to erase Israel. Yet, I also wasn’t sure if my very limited travel money should be spent on that tourism industry.

All this began to change after my twins were born. Winnipeg is a city of immigrants. Many newcomers I met in the Jewish community here spoke Hebrew and had lived for awhile in Israel, even if they were born elsewhere. After many years of only using prayer Hebrew, my brain woke up. Modern Hebrew sometimes began coming out of my mouth again. Suddenly, I was standing at the coat racks outside of the preschool classroom, trying to help a 2-year-old new to the school from Israel and, whoa, the preschooler Hebrew just came out of my mouth at a quick pace. My twins were stunned!

After the May 2021 war in Israel and Gaza, I spent time unfollowing and changing my social media habits. I wanted less hate and more nuanced news sources. Some of that news now arrives in Hebrew first, with occasional other languages mixed in. I got back in touch with my Hebrew study partner from university days, who lives in Jerusalem. When we streamed services from synagogue or made a seder, I felt more connected to those prayers about the state of Israel than I had in a long time.

The recent deaths in Israel, caused by terrorists who killed civilians, border patrols and police officers, Jews, Druze, Christians, Israelis and even Ukrainian workers, hit me hard. It felt again like I was losing cousins and friends. Even amid the isolation of pandemic times, I keenly felt the loss of these Israeli souls.

Birthdays are funny things. There are years when my own birthday comes and goes without much fanfare. I make myself a chocolate cake, some relatives or friends call, nothing much happens. I’m not much for big parties. Even before the pandemic, sometimes my early January birthdays were frigid and unremarkable. This year, though, I anticipate Israel’s 74th with a more deeply felt celebration.

I’m not likely to be part of a big event on Yom Ha’atzmaut and, for now, my travel budget remains small. Rising antisemitism in the world makes me worried though. It reminds me of how we need to ensure this safe place for future generations. I am in awe of just how much Israel has accomplished so far – in technology, education, medicine and more.

This is a year when I feel a big need to celebrate Israel and its continued existence amid adversity. Sometimes, bad things happen. Finding a space for gratitude helps remind us of what we do have – places to call home.

Happy birthday, Israel! Wishing you and all your inhabitants a happy, healthy and peaceful year to come. May you grow in mitzvot and success this year – and wishing you many, many productive years to come.

Again: war triggers memories

Again and again the world does not learn. The ego of dictators and high-ranking politicians is inflated, bordering on insanity. There are many conflicts in the world, but it is Russia’s war on Ukraine that I’m thinking of at this moment.

Who is suffering from all this? The mother with her scared child in her arms, the father who is forced to stay behind and fight, the old and frail, the children in the orphanage who have nowhere to go, the 36-day-old baby boy who does not have yet an identification paper, a name of his own. Who is suffering? The expecting mother who is running, injured, between the ruins of the hospital; the children, scared, hiding in the bomb shelters, hearing explosions and not knowing if they will have a home to return to.

Again and again, people are running in fear, looking for safe shelter. All around them, shelling, sirens, bombardment, hundreds of tanks parading on main city streets, explosions, ruins and distraction.

All this is taking me back decades to another time, the Second World War: Romania, 1940. It triggers memories of my early childhood journey of displacement, fear, cold and hunger. Then 2 years old, my family and I – and thousands of other Jews from northern Romania – were driven out of our homes to the unknown. For one year we were forced to live in a ghetto in a city called Czernowitz (now in Ukraine) in terrible conditions.

After one year, the ghetto was dissolved and we were forced for days to walk by foot in deep mud, carrying bundles of our meagre belongings on our backs toward an area called Transnistria. Long lines of frightened people, old and young, crying babies, the sick and those with disabilities. Those who could not walk were left behind or shot. The Romanian or German soldiers riding on their horses where shouting and beating up anyone who did not comply with their orders.

They forced us to walk from village to village until we arrived in a place called Djurin, where we settled down. There, we lived for four years in terrible condition. My father was taken from us to a work camp. My mother collected dry wood bunches from the nearby forest and exchanged them for food with the Ukrainian women who felt sorry for us. Toward the end of the war, my mother was injured in a bombardment when the Germans were retreating.

I am glad that I was too young to remember most of my fears, but I can’t escape the ripples of horror from those times. They are engraved in my psyche, in my pores. I tremble now when I see the young children on the TV screen with their big, scared eyes. Maybe they are hungry, cold or frightened. I wish I could hug and console them and feed them with my special chicken soup.

image - “Earth Don’t Cover Their Blood” by Sidi Schaffer, Gesher Project, 1998, mixed media — “Earth Don’t Cover Their Blood” by Sidi Schaffer, Gesher Project, 1998, mixed media.

For us, there was no place to seek shelter, nobody wanted us, and nobody cared. The world was silent to our plight. We were denied refuge from most countries. We should remember the destiny of the St. Louis ship, which carried Jewish refugees trying to escape the terror of the war in Europe but was not allowed to enter Cuba, the United States or Canada. The ship had to return to Germany, where 254 of the passengers were murdered by the Nazis. Nor should we forget the ship Struma’s disaster – it was torpedoed and sunk with 800 Jewish refugees, who were on their way from Romania to Palestine. We should not forget Canada’s Frederick Blair, who was in charge of the immigration branch at the time, or then-prime minister William Lyon MacKenzie King’s immigration policy “None is too many,” just when the Jews of Europe were in despair and looking for shelter.

War is evil, then and now and always. Still, I can’t stop being amazed at the differences I see in the world’s reaction of kindness and compassion toward the Ukrainian refugees these days. Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, Poland, Romania and Germany – all have opened their gates with outstretched arms to help the tired mothers, scared children, orphans, the sick and the old. The world’s reaction shows me that the world is changing – including Canada – and that gives me hope.

Israel is bringing in thousands of people from the war zone. They give humanitarian assistance wherever needed. Synagogues in Ukraine, and Jewish congregations from around the world, help bring people to safety, like the Odessa orphanage children that were taken to Berlin.

Still, millions of people suffer because of politics and a madman who wants to expand his territory and his pockets.

I wish that we had in our camps some support, food and warm clothing, medical attention and safety. For us, the world was blind. Only the ones who survived live to tell.

We child survivors are now home for one another.

Sidi Schaffer was born in northern Romania. In 1940, she and her family were put into a ghetto in Czernowitz and, one year later, they were driven toward a concentration camp named Djurin, in northwestern Ukraine. There, in terrible conditions, they survived for four years. In 1945, they returned to Romania and, in 1959, they immigrated to Israel, where she received her degree in art education. In 1975, with husband David and their three sons, she came to Canada. In Edmonton, she went back to her studies and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Alberta. In 1998, she and her family settled in Vancouver. Schaffer is a proud member of the Child Survivor Group of Vancouver.