Op-Ed – Page 49

Perspective gained at camp

On a logging road near Smithers, B.C., the Unist’ot’en people occupy their traditional land in order to stop work on the 11 pipeline projects that would run through the area. Located beside Wedjin Kwa (Morice River), the camp is one of the only places left in the world where it is safe to drink directly from a natural body of water. Add to this the rustling trees, abundant huckleberries, countless wildlife and more, and it is clear why it is worth fighting for this land.

The Unist’ot’en maintain a checkpoint where all visitors must answer a series of questions posed by a member of the clan to assess the level of support for the clan’s action before being allowed into the territory. Supporters and allies have been allowed into the camp, as well as loggers with preexisting contracts; however, pipeline workers and helicopter crews arrive often and are reminded that they have not followed the appropriate channels to be permitted to do work on the land.

During my visit, the camp was on high alert after a tip that police planned to raid and demolish the camp, and arrest people living there. Stories around the campfire included many accounts of police misinformation and aggressiveness from veterans of the land defence struggle since the Oka crisis in 1990. There were also accounts of police following members of the camp when they went in to town, and of helicopters and surveillance drones flying overhead more than six times a day.

As those telling stories began to reminisce about siblings and parents in the residential school system, I saw the patterns of trauma visible in my own family and community emerge. The way that pain is passed through generations reveals an eerie overlap. I see remnants of the Holocaust in the way my grandparents raised my parents, my family’s relationship with food and eating, and the way they remember and guard their identity because someone once tried to take it away. With new research into genetics and epigenetics, we now know that trauma during a person’s lifetime can be passed to their children through their genes. This means that both habits and practices built during a lifetime, as well as genetic responses to stress, can be passed on.

An authority that once promised to keep them safe has betrayed both my ancestors and the people at the camp. When one elder spoke about watching as his siblings and childhood friends disappeared at the residential school, it echoed the blank pages that are so many Jewish family trees since the 1930s. I also see similarities between the Holocaust and the genocide of First Nations peoples through the reserves and the residential school system, the devastation caused by smallpox and alcoholism, much of which was propagated by the state. Not to mention continued racism.

I understand that the situations are not identical but there is enough commonality that it warrants a deeper look. I do not understand why peoples who have gone through cultural and physical genocide don’t come together in dialogue and support for each other’s survival. Throughout the last 70 years, we have promised repeatedly to “never forget,” but First Nations peoples still suffer discrimination, and this should command our attention. When there is injustice for some, there is no justice for anyone, and who better to stand in support of equal rights and freedoms, than a people who also has a long history of being oppressed and having to fight for survival.

Ariel Martz-Oberlander is a theatre artist, activist and poet living in Vancouver, Coast Salish territories. She is grateful every day for the people who work to make the world a more lovely place to be.

Denkmal

This is not about Dachau, although
these things happened there.

When my son and I visited the Denkmal,
as the Germans refer to Dachau,
it was late afternoon,
and it was deserted.
The weather was rainy and cool.
Vancouver weather: warm for
December in Bavaria,
I was told.

We walked around, peering
curiously into the barracks
where the living dead stared with eyes
like those of African night mammals
at the stunned American cameramen,

and then we stepped into the “Duschbad,”
and then into the crematorium
and then back outside into
the drizzle –

Finally, I stopped to look at the bronze memorial
to the “Unknown Prisoner”: a stooped, skeletal
Muselmann
in rags, ashy and green from the wet Bavarian winters;

leaving a pebble on the pedestal, as I had been taught,
I turned to leave.

My son had lingered behind.

Fifteen, tough and big;
standing quietly in front of the pitted bronze,
his black football jacket dripping rain,
sloppy, untied Adidas hightops
and blue/white acid-dyed jeans soaking through –

he slowly reached up
to his soggy old Detroit Tigers
baseball cap,
and politely

between wet thumb and forefinger,

tipped the brim.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia and Banff School of Fine Arts. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Comparing refugee response

While American political discourse around whether to accept Syrian refugees smolders under the embers of xenophobia, Canadians have been opening their hearts and their wallets to bring in Syrian refugees.

Canada is one of the only countries with a private sponsorship option, which means that groups of ordinary citizens can provide funds and demonstrate their intention to provide emotional and logistical support to refugee families for one year, thus enabling the absorption of refugees whom the government might not otherwise have been able to afford.

Like many faith and neighborhood communities, Jewish communities, especially through synagogues, are on the frontlines of this effort.

It’s not often that a rabbi’s sermon gets reprinted in the daily newspaper of a major city, but such was the case for Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom. “For too long, we have thought of religion in passive terms, counting how many people are sitting in the pews or paying dues,” she wrote. “All this is necessary but not sufficient. I want us to count how many lives we change, how many people we help, how many hearts we touch.” Her synagogue is sponsoring at least one refugee family.

Meanwhile, a sermon delivered on Kol Nidre this year by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom in Vancouver helped capture the hearts and minds of his congregants. “Tonight, I want to ask you to do something great. I want to ask you to save a life, the life of a stranger – because we were once strangers in the land, because we are human beings and that is the only similarity that we really need.” It didn’t take long for the congregation to come up with the $40,000 necessary to sponsor a refugee family. They are now fundraising to bring a second. Other synagogues across the city – including the Jewish Renewal Or Shalom, which is sponsoring three families – have followed suit. (See story, page 1.)

In Toronto, Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, one of nearly 100 organizations across the country that enjoys sponsorship agreement holder rights, has been flooded with sponsoring requests.

I spoke to Ryan Friedman of Darchei Noam and to Pippa Feinstein of First Narayever Congregation, two Toronto-based synagogues that are sponsoring refugees. Feinstein in particular noted that, while wanting to “ensure a safe place for any refugee family who is looking to come to Canada,” her congregation is aiming to launch “parallel awareness-raising activities” around the plight of persecuted minorities in the region.

Among those minorities are the Yazidi people of Iraq, who are being faced with a genocide – in the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – at the hands of ISIS. In collaboration with other faith groups, Winnipeg’s Jewish community has spearheaded an effort to sponsor multiple Yazidi refugees. As Belle Jarniewski described it, “When I saw the article about the mass grave [of the Yazidis], I really responded to it viscerally. It reminded me that we keep talking every year “never again” and, as Jews, we talk about this all the time, how important it is … and what are we doing about it?”

In my own city of Ottawa, Lori Rosove and Dara Lithwick of Temple Israel launched a community-wide effort to sponsor a refugee family. As Rosove explained it, “It’s the human thing to do.”

I, too, have helped launch a cross-denominational grassroots sponsoring effort, working through both Jewish Family Services of Ottawa and the United Church of Canada. Since a handful of us gathered in a neighbor’s living room in early September, we now number 250 participants and have raised $150,000 so far, enabling us to sponsor six families. So as to provide the suggested “soft-landing” that settlement agencies advise, each family will live with a neighborhood host for the first couple of months.

And what of pushback from community members? Moskovitz explained that, while 95% of his congregants have been enthusiastic, a few were not. “I met with each individual or group who registered a concern,” explaining the “rigorous UN screening and the Canadian screening [process].”

For their part, American Jewish groups have been doing what they can. There was the statement of moral clarity issued by 10 Jewish organizations. And there is a rabbis’ letter drafted by HIAS, urging their elected officials to “welcome the stranger.” In addition to lobbying Congress to accept refugees and supporting local resettlement agencies in their efforts, the U.S.-based Religious Action Centre of Reform Judaism has taken the initiative to help American congregations partner with Canadian ones in order to support their neighbors’ efforts. As RAC head Rabbi Jonah Pesner told me: “To sit at our [Passover] seder tables every year and [tell] the story, [starting with] ‘my father was a wandering Aramean,’ and to live through 5,000 years as a community of refugees, not to model for the world what it means to welcome the stranger would be an abdication of our legacy.”

So, while the U.S. Congress wrings its hands over whether to accept a meagre 10,000 souls, Canada (one-tenth the population) has pledged to receive 25,000 Syrian refugees by February, of which 10,000 are expected to be sponsored privately. When private citizens are empowered to help people from across the globe, the bluster and rhetoric can be bypassed while the real work of saving lives and opening hearts can take place.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

Are food banks here to stay?

In March 2013, 833,098 persons were served by food banks in Canada. Food bank use remains high and many Canadians depend on food banks for weekly, semi-monthly or monthly grocery items in order to put food on the table. One-half of the families being served include children and close to one-half are two-parent families. More than one-third of food bank recipients are children, many of whom are school age and go to bed hungry.

In Richmond, 1,300 persons are served each week by the Richmond Food Bank. Of the 1,300 recipients, there are 524 persons who actually attend this food bank and they represent 2.4 persons per household. The majority are seniors and people with mental health issues. These groups usually visit each week. Others who use the food bank are on low incomes and use the service as needed. Users must be Richmond residents. Once residency is proven, recipients are granted food packages on an honor system. The average value of a food hamper is about $100 and the food bank tries to ensure the five basic food groups are included.

The Jewish Food Bank in Vancouver serves 350 persons, of whom 55 are children under 18 years of age, and 95 are seniors. If, as it is estimated, 16% of the Jewish community lives on or below the poverty level, it is possible that many in need are not being served or are being served by other organizations. The value of each Jewish Food Bank hamper for a single individual, for example, is $54. Larger family units receive more food. This is in addition to food vouchers supplied by Jewish Family Service Agency. Food that is made available is seen as “supplementary,” enough to fill the gap until the next pay cheque or income. Food hampers are delivered every two weeks to those unable to attend for personal pick up.

For seniors, this is a very troubling scenario. As of two years ago, three out of five women in Greater Vancouver over 65 lived on an income of less than $25,000 per year (as reported by United Way). Many seniors on low, fixed incomes must make major decisions each month. Once rent is paid, are there enough funds for food or do they have to choose between prescription drugs (if not covered by a drug program) and food? Will there be funds for sundries, clothing and entertainment? Will there be enough money to eat out once or twice during the month? Most of us who live in the comfort of our warm homes take this for granted. For a good description of the need for affordable housing, see David Hume’s excellent article in the Nov. 23 Province.

It is generally accepted that food banks had their origins in the early 1980s during a major recession. Hunger was affecting the lives of many Canadians who were unemployed, unable to work, under-employed or whose incomes were below a living wage. It was to be a short-lived situation until the economy improved, as it eventually did, and the need for food banks diminished. However, today, food banks are an integral part of the social fabric. There are currently about 500 food banks across Canada, a sad commentary for a rich nation. In this writer’s opinion, food banks have become secondary extensions of weakened social safety nets. In this respect, food banks may be seen as undermining the state’s obligation to respect and fulfil its requirement to ensure that none of its citizens go hungry. Food banks are driven by poverty but in no way solve the problem of poverty. If anything, the goodwill they provide allows governments to opt out of taking their leadership role in decreasing the need for food banks.

Those persons who staff and volunteer at food banks are not “do-gooders looking for recognition.” Volunteers are the backbone of most not-for-profit organizations. The volunteers that I met while observing one food bank in action were made up mostly of senior citizens who were giving back to the community, who understood the plight of those being served and who served them with respect and genuine caring. Thousands of individual donors, many anonymous, provide millions of dollars each year in support. Many corporations take great pride in supporting food banks, in kind and in cash. They often make the public aware through advertising, hoping what they do will encourage other corporations to do the same.

Food banks will be needed for some time in the future until governments at all levels – federal, provincial and municipal – develop, embrace and put in place a viable national anti-poverty program. Food banks can collectively lobby for stronger and sustainable social safety nets for those in need. In a recent publication, Dignity for All: A National Anti-Poverty Plan for Canada (2013), a number of priorities were considered: income security, housing and homelessness, health, food security, early childhood education and care, jobs and employment. If two or three of these were prioritized and put into operation, it would bring many thousands into mainstream Canada.

Much has already been studied and written about poverty and its effects on too many Canadian citizens. It is time for a concerted and coordinated plan of action. Until that happens, thank G-d for food banks.

Ken Levitt is a vice-president of the Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver and a former chief executive officer of Louis Brier Home and Hospital.

Remain open to discussion

As hot as things have become in Israel and the West Bank over the last many weeks with escalating violence, here in North America a chill is palpable. It comes in the form of silencing within and across communities – in private homes, on university campuses and in community institutions. It’s coming from both sides: those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” and those who call themselves “pro-Israel.” While the Palestinian solidarity side uses boycott and silencing, the Jewish community has its own internal conversation watchdogs.

Recently, a speaker at the University of Minnesota was shouted down, his talk delayed by 30 minutes. The invited scholar was Moshe Halbertal, a philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a professor of law at New York University. It was a scholarly talk: the Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, sponsored by the university’s law school. Halbertal is also a noted military ethicist who helped draft a code of ethics for the Israel Defence Forces. The Minnesota Anti-War Committee took credit for the stunt; Students for Justice in Palestine endorsed it.

If you’re concerned by the extent to which civilians have born the brunt of violence and destruction in the Israeli-Palestinian context, Habertal is someone you’d want to speak with, especially in an academic context, where the point is the free exchange of ideas. But it’s hard to pose tough questions if you’re trying to silence the person.

This blocking of Halbertal’s speech is a trend that gets its fire from the academic and cultural boycott of Israel organized by the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, along with the more general push against what many Palestine solidarity activists call “normalization,” meaning ordinary engagement with Jews and Israelis and their ideas. Activists argue that the target is institutions, not individuals. But the effects on individuals and open speech, as they were at the University of Minnesota, are clear.

Continuing in this vein, producers of Dégradé, a film about Gaza told from the perspective of clients at a hair salon, pulled it from the Other Israel Film Festival sponsored by the JCC Manhattan because it’s a “Jewish” festival. While it seems that the producers’ decision was their own, it suggests a dangerous precedent: fortifying the silos between acceptable audiences and unacceptable ones in the world of art, ideas and culture.

Meanwhile, while the Jewish community doesn’t talk in terms of boycott and anti-normalization, it has its own troubling rules of engagement.

There are the narrow speaker guidelines for those with whom campus Jewish groups allow their members to publicly engage in dialogue. The guidelines for Hillel International, the world’s largest Jewish student organization, exclude anyone who “delegitimize[s], demonize[s] or appl[ies] a double standard to Israel, or supports the boycott, divestment and sanction movement.” While it’s natural that Israel supporters would bristle at those things, the rules effectively preclude Hillel students from inviting for debate and dialogue any Palestinian solidarity activists, almost all of whom, unfortunately, have jumped on the BDS bandwagon.

When my seven-year-long columnist post was cut from my local Jewish community paper last summer, I was told that it was to “make room for new voices.” Since then, it’s become clear that the publisher wanted only one angle on Israel. The columnist who focuses almost exclusively on the failings of Israel’s adversaries remained in place, while my replacement is steering clear of Israel altogether.

And then there are the corners of quiet shunning. I recently organized a Jewish community youth project involving rotating hosts. One of the participants pulled out, citing the fact that her husband “didn’t want me in his home.” He was appalled by my last Globe and Mail piece. When it comes to “support for Israel,” they said, “there is only one side.”

But some – young Jews in particular – are pushing back against this narrowing of discourse. First there was Open Hillel, a grassroots organization devoted to opposing the speaker guidelines mentioned above. (Disclosure: I am on the group’s academic advisory council.) And now there’s the Jewish People’s Assembly, which has launched in Washington. The group is demanding that Jewish federations – the main funding body of local Jewish communities – “not condition support for Jewish institutions and organizations on these institutions’ adherence to red lines around Israel.”

One might fantasize about casting all the silencers into a room where they can sit in silence with each other to their heart’s content. Meanwhile, the rest of us can continue to try to talk, to write and to publicly grapple with the dilemmas of the day, trying to search for bits of common ground wherever they might be.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published by the Globe and Mail.

Kohelet and Kristallnacht

“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” The day of remembrance for Kristallnacht was this week. Looking at what’s happening in Israel and globally, I’m reminded of the Preacher. By the Preacher, I mean Kohelet, traditionally thought to be King Solomon, whose writings in the Tanakh are known in English as Ecclesiastes. The first line, in Hebrew, reads: “Havel havalim. Hakol Havel.”

Everything is havel, which, better than vanity, is translated “vaporous, breathlike, fleeting.” Everything is vapor. Like Abel, whose Hebrew name is Havel, and whose life was like vapor, blown apart by Cain. Like what we thought we had gained in Israel, once upon a time: a state of our own that had mostly won the world’s respect and affirmation through blood, sweat and tears. A refuge. We thought we had pushed back the red sea of ancient, irrational hatred. The world had, to an amazing degree, recognized our right to a homeland in our homeland. The horrors of the Holocaust were understood and widely contemplated.

Yet, in the past months, much of what has happened has the character of a bad dream. The New York Times writes that the Temple Mount may not have been where the Jewish Temple was after all (later retracted under pressure). The United Nations declares ancient Jewish holy sites to be under the rightful control of a future Palestinian state, even as Palestinian Arab terrorists torch Jewish holy sites. In Europe, organizers of a Kristallnacht commemoration declare their plans to turn it into a commemoration of the Palestinian suffering for which Israel bears responsibility.

And the stabbings. The Palestinian leadership put the word out that Jews planned to change the “status quo” on the Temple Mount, where Al-Aqsa Mosque also stands. Currently, only Muslims have free access to the site, with everyone else having very limited or no access to this sacred space, revered by Jews especially but also Christians and Baha’is. “Changing the status quo,” according to Palestinian fears, would entail increasing access for non-Muslims (at least) or tearing down al-Aqsa and replacing it with a synagogue (at most). Israel has no intention of either: not of expanding access (although surely that would be a step forward for human rights and decency were that to happen) and certainly not of razing Islam’s third holiest site. Yet the claim enflames the Palestinian street, as it did at the start of the 2000 Intifada. Mothers begin celebrating the deaths of their children who died to “defend Al-Aqsa,” even giving out candy on TV. A Palestinian Arab mother names her newborn baby “Knife of Jerusalem” after the attacks. Mahmoud Abbas, who Western media falsely portray as a moderate, calls for the shedding of Jewish blood and declares that the “filthy feet” of Jews will not besmirch Al-Aqsa.

Mainstream Israel wants to negotiate an independent state for Palestinian Arabs yet a majority of Palestinian Arabs believes Israel wants to take their land and evict them. Tellingly, this is in fact what the Palestinian Arab leadership wants – to take back all Israeli land and eliminate Israeli Jews, as the Hamas charter and popular Palestinian songs, media and school textbooks demonstrate. In a classic psychological move, the Palestinian Arab imagination projects onto Israel its own desires: what is within is used to interpret what is without. This narrative has spread beyond the borders of Israel and the disputed territories to capture the imaginations of people all around the world. So, our refuge has begun to feel, increasingly, like a new ghetto, where we can be once again easily separated out and demonized.

Havel havalim. Hakol havel.

After experiencing years of checkpoints, poverty, “collateral damage,” the Gaza wars and more, it is certainly understandable that Palestinian Arabs feel sorrow and rage. It is even understandable that they hate the Israeli government. But to blame Israel and all Jews for their suffering, and not the racist, Israel-negating, violence-inciting, kleptocratic Palestinian leadership?

Israeli self-defence is viewed as aggression; the most enlightened state in the Middle East is slandered as an “apartheid state”; Zionism is viewed as racism by people whose denial of Zionism is in fact rooted in racism. Havel havalim.

Where do we look for something solid to hang on to? The opinions of the world, the justice of its courts and institutions, are failing us. And we ourselves are not immune to being blown apart by this hurricane wind on the inside and losing anything worth fighting for. In Israel, Jewish mobs have formed to attack “enemies” internal and external. Hatred and anger against the Palestinian Arabs grows. We are in danger of forgetting their humanity and their pain. We are in danger of losing our ability to think rationally, to think long term. We cannot and will not find security in the courts of the world. We must make our own reality, one that reflects what we know to be true. And we must hold to that reality with strength and with love. That is what we are already doing in our best moments:

A Jewish restaurant gives a 50% discount to Jews and Arabs who eat together.
There are peace rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Israelis find a variety of ways to laugh through what is happening and share them online.
Doctors in Israeli hospitals treat Palestinian terrorists alongside their victims.

We know that Israelis want peace, and that Jewish values in no way mandate injustice or aggression towards Palestinians or anyone else. We must make our own peace and our own future, through clinging to our own highest values like a rudder in the storm. And, as we find a way to a just divorce with the Palestinian Arabs, as Amos Oz so rightly said we need to do, both for their sake and for our own, we must at no time forget the humanity of each Palestinian Arab. We must not demonize them, must not forget that every Palestinian Arab is made in the image of God. Our own spiritual tradition, the beating heart of our highest values, mandates that we do not return hatred for hatred. At no time may we forget to fear the loss of our own humanity under the impact of their knife blades and bombs and stones. That is the way to commemorate Kristallnacht.

Matthew Gindin is a writer, lecturer and holistic therapist. As well as teaching holistic medicine, Gindin regularly lectures on topics in Jewish and world spirituality, and has a particular passion for making ancient wisdom traditions relevant in the modern world. His work has been featured on Elephant Journal, the Zen Site and Wisdom Pills, and he blogs at Talis in Wonderland (mgindin.wordpress.com) and Voices (hashkata.com).

Need different view of Jerusalem

Sirens always make me pause. I fall silent and count one off, praying that there won’t be another. Because two sirens, as we used to say, are not women in labor.

Distant memories from the Intifada segue into those of summer last. Somehow, the rise of conflict in Jerusalem always comes along with the rising temperatures. But after the emergency meetings, the touring politicians, the dramatic headlines, there comes the first rain, and everything calms down. Then the countdown begins for next summer.

Some, though, aren’t content with just counting the days. Jeremy made aliya from D.C. six years ago. A reserve paratrooper officer, he rides his bike to work, halfway across town, each time reassuring his mother, thousands of miles away, that he wasn’t anywhere near the most recent attack. Last month, he joined a crowd of 5,000 to watch Matisyahu, the famous Jewish-American rapper, perform beneath the Old City walls. “Jerusalem If I Forget You gets a whole new meaning these days,” he tweeted, referring to the ancient prayer borrowed by Matisyahu for one of his songs.

Michal is a mother of four. At night, after putting her own children to bed, she has been going downtown, where she volunteers for a group seeking out dialogue with angst-filled youth bent on revenge. To her ever-concerned sister, she vows never to leave Jerusalem, with its crisp, cool air and still-low crime rates. It’s her husband who drops off the kids at school the following morning, where they are taught about the complexities of living in a mixed city, where you have to defend yourself with one hand and reach out to your would-be enemies with the other.

Another person is Ibrahim, a Hebrew University law student, and also a resident of Ras el-Amud, a Palestinian suburb shaken by recent events. Intimidating glares by Hamas supporters notwithstanding, he goes online every day, trying to convince people to stop the cycle of violence. Despite the long-standing advice of friends to relocate to Ramallah or the United States, he clings on to his naïve faith that there’s still hope in this conflict. Meanwhile, he alerts the authorities to suspicious happenings and, a few weeks back, confiscated a knife off of a 15-year-old brainwashed neighbor kid.

Then there’s Batia. She is an ultra-Orthodox woman. Every day she walks to work at City Hall. Despite having recently bought a canister of tear gas as a precaution, she prefers to put her faith in G-d and in the ubiquitous policemen. Just before Shabbat, she often goes up to them, to deliver fish, meat and chicken and to make their shift a little more pleasant.

Jerusalem keeps going, not through pompous statements, but through the hard work and devotion of its people, some elected officials, some social entrepreneurs and some ordinary citizens, united by relentless optimism and a profound love for their city. When things started getting really bad, I put out a call for an emergency meeting of Jerusalem civil society organizations. Within three hours, representatives from 33 organizations sat around a conference table at City Hall. It came as no surprise; even during “normal” times, the amount of people willing to sign up for civilian “reserve duty” is astounding.

There are teenagers handing out Israeli flags. Elderly people handing out small gifts to security personnel. Psychologists supporting youth in distress, activists helping out local businesses, and a string of independent online campaigns. These ordinary citizens allow the city to keep on living its life: thousands of students going back to school, the basketball team fighting to retain its championship title, and Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, joining 2,000 people at the International Astronautical Congress last month.

This energy, this drive to take responsibility and think out of the box, are precisely what is needed to resolve the complexity of current events. We have to crack down on violence, while empowering moderate leaders; fight incitement on both sides and defend the right of every man and woman for freedom of worship; and make sure East and West Jerusalem get their share in infrastructure investments.

It’s time for this fresh perspective to rise from the bottom up. We are tired of instant solutions, quickly denounced by this side or the other of the political map. We are tired of those who take turns making political gains out of our hardship. Jerusalem is a different place, and requires a different point of view. The one we, young people of Jerusalem, discovered 10 years ago, when everyone else said the city was lost, and we formed Wake Up Jerusalem.

From this point of view, there is a lot of good to see. And even more to do.

Hanan Rubin is a Jerusalem city councilor and a co-founder of the solution-oriented political movement Wake Up Jerusalem, which focuses on quality of life issues for all Jerusalem residents.

Learning from the Holocaust

The following remarks have been slightly modified from the original address given at the closing session of the interdisciplinary conference Global Connections: Critical Holocaust Education in a Time of Transition, which took place at the University of Victoria Sept. 1-3. Participants “had the opportunity to discuss how decades of research on the Holocaust can be used to help understand and educate about other human rights issues and, in turn, how local histories can shed light on the way the Holocaust is represented and taught.”

I would like to thank the organizers for imagining and then managing a complex, well-structured, well-organized and thought-provoking conference that allowed us to think and talk about one of the most disturbing dimensions of human and political history.

In the last three days, the scholars and community members who gathered for our Global Connections conference have traveled great distances in time and space. We have moved from the meeting rooms of Versailles to the war rooms of Berlin, from Jewish homes to death camps throughout Europe, all the way to 1990s Rwanda, and then to present-day Turtle Island and the borders of Hungary and Macedonia.

We have learned about the pedagogical challenges facing Holocaust educators in North America and Europe. We have heard heartbreaking stories from survivors, from the children of survivors, from the grandchildren of survivors, from the children and loved ones of heroes, and from people deeply affected by the dehumanization of colonialism.

We have talked and we have listened. We have heard poetry and music and watched films. And now it falls to me to do that impossible thing – to offer some final words. It is impossible, of course, not just because I am surrounded by scholars who have spent their whole careers studying genocide, but also because I am surrounded by individuals and also by family members and by communities scarred and burned and torn apart by suffering that precludes closure.

In the face of such suffering, sometimes the right thing to say is nothing – sometimes that is the most fitting way to honor the missing parents, the lost siblings, the worlds that were not created because of these violent ruptures. But, in Europe, Rwanda, North America, Armenia, Cambodia, or the many other places torn asunder by inhumanity, silence colludes with geography and distraction, and prevents us from seeing, feeling and knowing things we must see, must feel, must know.

So, speaking is inadequate, but necessary. And so, like a good yeshiva student, I will respond to what I have been taught by posing questions. I would like, in particular, to leave you this afternoon with four questions or issues to consider. There are others one might pose, of course, but these four seem to capture many of the general themes we explored in the last three days.

First, what does it mean to talk about the Holocaust or any other genocide here, in Victoria, on what I only half-jokingly call Fantasy Island? One of the conference speakers reflected upon her students at Smith College, whose approach to the Holocaust often surprises and disappoints her. Many of us here on Vancouver Island who teach about the Holocaust experience similar things. After all, many of our students feel they have won a kind of political lottery by being born, or at least now living, in one of the most peaceful societies on earth. How might we reach such students, make them uncomfortable with their privilege, make them aware of the blood on the ground, the dark clouds hovering over the world for centuries – and still?

Second, the past has been made present in this room – but so, too, has the present seemed to haunt our discussions of the past. Every day, almost every hour, someone drew attention to the current refugee crisis that is stirring up so many anxieties not just in Europe but, as Wassilis Kassis (professor of educational sciences, University of Osnabrück, Germany) insisted, in the world. Of course, there are so many differences between the Europe of the Shoah and the Europe of today’s refugee crisis, but perhaps it is at this moment that we will see some of what we have learned from the Holocaust. If we fail this test, then we will have more people beside us when, in the coming decades, we ask ourselves why we did so little.

Third, we have mostly avoided talking about the ways people come to take possession of great catastrophes even when the individuals are only remotely connected to them. What kind of social capital and political momentum are generated by such attachments? To put it another way: what should we make of people who feed upon the misery of others in this way? The flipside of this question, of course, is what we should make of – and how we should respond to – the will to forget, the drive, the public demand, just to move on, to turn the page. The answer is not obvious, but the question needs to be asked.

Fourth and finally, we have been looking at mutilated bodies and mangled politics and sadistic ideologies, but where can one finally locate the pathologies that led to this pain? Is the origin economic inequality? Religion? Ignorance? Capitalism? Colonialism? Patriarchy? Fascism? Stalinism? Xenophobia? Racism? Yes. No. Partly.

I have heard many tidy post facto explanations of why such and such an act of colossal cruelty happened in place X, or why it didn’t happen in place Y. They are all good and interesting explanations, and we need more of them. We need to continue to improve the ways we explain both singular convulsions of violence, as well as systematic campaigns of extermination. Nonetheless, no matter how well we build our explanations for why an event occurred in a particular place, with particular actors in a particular historical period, some mystery always remains. I must confess that I worry that these accounts give us a false sense of the predictability of human behavior and the preventability of future genocides.

Perhaps this underlines the value of simply sometimes standing at the edge of the abyss and confessing ignorance. This is not to suggest we ought to throw up our hands, but rather that we must sometimes invite deeper, more humble, more sustained investigations of the dark corners of the human heart.

I thank you all for taking part in these investigations, for helping us see better how the heart can break and how the heart, nonetheless, continues to beat. Thank you for joining us in these conversations.

Paul Bramadat is director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, Department of History and the Religious Studies Program, University of Victoria.

From Israel to Poland

Dor Brown wrapped in the Israeli flag as he approaches Treblinka death camp. (photo from Dor Brown)

Israel’s Journey to Poland – the equivalent of the Diaspora’s March of the Living, but without the Israel portion – is organized by the Israel Education Ministry and funded mainly by the parents.

Sept. 4, 2015

Every year in Israel, senior classes from high schools across the country have the option to travel to Poland on an organized tour of those terrible, yet important, Holocaust death camps. I chose to join my class and am now writing this from the bus on my way back from the Majdanek death camp. It’s probably been one of the most difficult and emotional days of my life.

We were in Majdanek for a grisly four hours. Going into the “showers.” The barracks. The room where the Nazis burned the dead bodies. At the end of the tour, we held a very touching ceremony near the mountain of the ashes. Yes, a literal mountain.

With my hand on my heart, this trip is a must for every Jew worldwide. Until you go to Poland and see firsthand these horrific sights, you really cannot fully understand the depth of the horrors and misery and death.

A snapshot. One hundred fifty students from my school crying their hearts out while looking at those terrible sights. Weeping while holding the Israeli flag. While crying out loud, we were all shouting together in our hearts and minds and with great pride: “Am Yisrael chai!”

photo - Left to right: Dor Brown, Alex Katz and Oren Bizuener — Left to right: Dor Brown, Alex Katz and Oren Bizuener. *(photo from Dor Brown)*

Sept. 7, 2015

Today, we were in Auschwitz I, the labor camp and concentration camp that is now a museum. It was very difficult and very moving. Piles of hair. Piles of discarded shoes. Piles of glasses. It was unbelievably difficult to look at. An experience we should all have, however tough, to really understand how low civilization stooped.

After Auschwitz, we boarded our buses to the Plaszow labor camp. What remains is basically a beautiful memorial site. Amon Goeth was the cruel, barbaric and sadistic commander of this camp. He was the one who famously shot Jews for fun and practice. And tortured them in terrible ways.

Wrapping up the tour, our guide shared a story about a certain Jewish prisoner.

One morning, a Nazi guard came to this prisoner and told him he must run to his bunk. The prisoner did as he was told. When he arrived, he was greeted by Goeth. His meagre belongings were strewn across his thin cot.

Goeth was hunkering over his stuff with a picture in his hands. The picture was of Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl. “Who is this!” Goeth barked.

“Theodor Herzl,” replied the prisoner.

Goeth mocked, “The crazy Jew from Vienna who thinks there will be a Jewish country?!”

The prisoner was shaking with fear. He thought his death was near.

Goeth laughed and spat out, “The chances that it will happen are as slim as you becoming a cabinet member in that country’s government, or an ambassador.” With that, Goeth struck the man so hard that the poor prisoner blacked out.

Forty years later, that prisoner – Zvi Zimmerman – fulfilled Goeth’s prophecy. During his life, he not only was ambassador to New Zealand and a Knesset member in four Israeli governments but was also a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament.

Upon finishing his story, the guide – with tears in his eyes – shouted, “Am Yisrael chai!”

For the rest of the day, we were all Zvi Zimmerman.

photo - The whole group at Auschwitz concentration camp under the infamous sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work Makes You Free.” — The whole group at Auschwitz concentration camp under the infamous sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work Makes You Free.” *(photo from Dor Brown)*

Sept. 9, 2015

Our last day in Poland. We woke up at 6:30 a.m. and headed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the death camps. The largest death camp the world has ever seen. And, hopefully, the last death camp the world will ever know.

We saw lots of difficult places and sights over the past week but this was the toughest. I can’t describe the chills of dread going through my body as we entered the gate. The images of death running through my mind as I walked through the camp, the death place of my ancestors.

“Work Makes You Free.” Indeed.

The camp is huge. And beautiful. The surrounding trees are tall and green. To think that those trees were the last sight that almost one million of our people ever saw. How dare the camp be so beautiful today.

At the end of the tour, we had a ceremony where we each had to read out loud the names of persons who died in the Holocaust. It was a sad and exhausting roll call.

As the ceremony wrapped up, with tears pouring down our cheeks like rain, with hearts and souls broken, we all shouted together our rallying cry of the week: “Am Yisrael chai!”

As Yigal Alon said: a country that doesn’t know its past will have an uncertain present and future.

Dor Brown is the son of Bruce Brown, who immigrated to Israel more than 20 years ago from Canada. Dor and his family live in Rehovot. Dor is finishing high school this year, and will enter the Israel Defence Forces in October 2016.

Working in community

Sidney Shmilovitch retired this July from Jewish National Fund, Pacific Region, after 19 years. (photo from Sidney Shmilovitch)

Being at the forefront of the baby boom generation, I was born in Vancouver after my father returned from serving overseas. The opportunity of work on Vancouver Island saw our family move and live in the small communities of Maple Bay and Departure Bay for the next 10 years. Moving back to the Lower Mainland, my parents and I settled in West Vancouver, where I graduated from West Vancouver Secondary. I then attended B.C. Institute of Technology and graduated with a diploma in X-ray technology, followed by a two-year stint as a Cuso volunteer working in small hospitals in the north and south of Nigeria.

Upon returning to Canada, and after a number of years working in Toronto, I moved back to the West Coast. Living in Abbotsford, I met and married Dan Shmilovitch, who was heading efforts to form what eventually became known as Ha’Emek Jewish Community. Holiday programming in the community was enhanced by the services of Chabad rabbis from Vancouver. When our children became of school age, we began attending Jewish events in Vancouver. A wise rabbi there told us that if we wanted our children to remain Jewish, we had to move to the city, join a synagogue and put our children in Hebrew school. So we did, in 1987, which marked the beginning of our relationship with the Jewish communities of Richmond and Vancouver.

In 1988, I began my first job in the Jewish community, working in Richmond as part-time secretary for Eitz Chaim Synagogue. This was my first experience working in the Jewish religious world and learning the complexities of growing a young congregation. Two years later, searching for full-time work, I was hired for a joint position with the Canadian Zionist Federation, Camp Miriam and the World Zionist Organization aliya department at their shared office space at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The five years I spent working with these organizations introduced me to the important work of Jewish professionals, dedicated board members and volunteers.

In 1996, I joined Jewish National Fund, following in the footsteps of Maisie Myerthall, who was retiring after 26 years. And now, after 19 busy years working with JNF, it was my turn to retire this July. I will miss the special working relationships I had with colleagues in JNF offices from Vancouver to Montreal, especially of course, Ilan Pilo, Moran Nir and Liisa King in the Vancouver office – all part of the JNF family. It was a privilege for me to work with six JNF shlichim (emissaries) over the years, all of whom I admired for their humanity, love of life, energy, drive and determination.

As for me, now that I’m retired, I will volunteer with the JNF, and am considering other volunteer opportunities in the community – I’m open to ideas! And we will travel. So far, Dan and my travel plans revolve around visiting our kids and grandchildren on the east and west coasts of the United States.

I have many thanks to send. To my friends at the JCC, some of whom I have known for 25 years – keep up the good work! My sincere appreciation to the staff of communal organizations, synagogues and schools who were so accommodating and helpful to me. My love and thanks to the members of the JNF executive and board for all their support, hard work and devotion to Israel, and for being so enjoyable to work with. A thank you to all the leaders who have built a strong, vibrant and exciting community that will go from strength to strength. And, to the philanthropists, kol hakavod for your vision and inspirational generosity that make it all happen.