{"id":16592,"date":"2016-01-15T00:25:38","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T08:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=16592"},"modified":"2016-01-15T12:06:45","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T20:06:45","slug":"a-peek-at-limmudvan16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2016\/01\/15\/a-peek-at-limmudvan16\/","title":{"rendered":"A peek at LimmudVan\u201916"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eve Jochnowitz (photo from Limmud Vancouver)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Limmud Vancouver, a now-annual festival of Jewish learning, takes place Jan. 30 and 31. The \u201cpan-denominational\u201d event includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a diverse array of topics. This week and next, the Independent<\/em> features a few of the presenters who will participate in the local version of the international phenomenon that has now reached more than 60 Jewish communities worldwide.<\/p>\n

A national fish story<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Eve Jochnowitz calls gefilte fish the national dish of the Ashkenazi Jewish people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWherever you have Ashkenazic Jews, you have the Yiddish language and you have gefilte fish,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like DNA. It\u2019s in many different permutations and incarnations, but the gefilte fish pretty much goes wherever the Yiddish-speaking Jews go.\u201d<\/p>\n

A culinary ethnographer who hosts a Yiddish-language cooking show, Jochnowitz doesn\u2019t want to tip her hand too much in advance of her presentation here this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s just say there are some very surprising variations on gefilte fish out there and let\u2019s just say that the Ashkenazic Jews will come up with ingenious ways to have gefilte fish in the most unexpected situations,\u201d she said in a phone interview from her New York home.<\/p>\n

If there are so many variations, then what, at root, defines geflite fish?<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually it is made of freshwater fish; in Eastern Europe, most frequently carp, pike and whitefish,\u201d she said. \u201cThe more carp there is, the more dark and the more fishy, more flavorful, it is. Some people like it to be more fishy, some people like it to be almost a tofu substitute with the fishiness very understated and the gefilte fish itself being more of a base for some horseradish or egg sauce or whatever it is you choose to put on your gefilte fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

It may or may not have matzah meal, it may or may not have sugar, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is another very controversial issue with gefilte fish \u2013 should it be sweetened or salted or both?\u201d she said. The term itself means \u201cstuffed fish,\u201d but stuffing a fish is very difficult and labor-intensive, so \u201cmost gefilte fish is not gefilte.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although she is a gefilte fish maven, Jochnowitz stressed that Ashkenazi food is not limited to the familiar.<\/p>\n

\u201cYiddish food is a universe,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is much more to Yiddish food and Yiddish cooking than just challah and kugel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her other presentation at Limmud will focus on the little-known phenomenon of Jewish vegetarian cookbooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n

Two sides to the story<\/strong><\/h4>\n

David Matas, a noted human rights lawyer who represents the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, says the world needs to recognize that Palestinians are not the only refugee population that emerged from the war of 1948-49.<\/p>\n

\"photo
David Matas (photo from Limmud Vancouver)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhat we see is two refugee populations that were generated as a result of the Arab invasion to stop the creation of Israel,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Jewish population is, in fact, more numerous than the Palestinian.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United Nations, with a few exceptions, has been concerned about the Arab refugees from that time, but not the Jewish ones who were forced from their native lands across North Africa and the Middle East, he said. Israel has also not taken a strong lead on the issue until recently, he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael, on the whole, has not been a great advocate on this issue historically because there has been the Zionist mythos that people wanted to come to Israel rather than the fact that they came because they were refugees,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s only recently that Israel has itself adopted this position that these people are a refugee population and should be treated in any overall refugee settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also the fact that Jewish refugees have been given citizenship in Israel or other countries, while the Palestinian populations have largely remained stateless.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Arab population mostly has not been resettled and, in fact, they\u2019ve grown because their descendants have been classified as refugees,\u201d Matas said. \u201cThey\u2019ve remained as a perpetual refugee population. There\u2019s been an attempt to keep this population as a refugee population, as an argument for the destruction of the state of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matas and his organization believe both refugee groups should receive justice. Most likely, he said, a resolution might involve a compensation fund that wouldn\u2019t necessarily come from Israel or the Arab states, but possibly from the United States or third parties willing to facilitate a larger peace settlement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat compensation fund would be available to people who were victimized from both refugee populations, as well as their descendants, or something like that,\u201d he said. The idea of compensation for massive human rights violations is not new. \u201cThere\u2019s been lots of experience with the Holocaust, amongst other [cases]. You\u2019ve got a kind of jurisprudence and experience to draw on in order to make these programs work.\u201d<\/p>\n

While some commentators contend that the refugee issue can wait until later stages of any negotiated settlement, Matas disagrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s important to bring it in at this stage of the negotiations,\u201d he said. \u201cThis Palestinian notion that we are the refugees and the Jews aren\u2019t plays into this false narrative there\u2019s only one victim population when in fact there are two.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Polish journey<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Jewish Canadians often travel to Poland in search of their family\u2019s roots or as an exercise in history. Norman Ravvin travels there frequently, but he is as focused on the present as on the past.<\/p>\n

\"photo
Norman Ravvin (photo from Limmud Vancouver)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cYou can visit Poland on different terms,\u201d said the Montreal academic and author. He will lead a session on traveling Poland that focuses on the major cities of Warsaw, Krak\u00f3w, Lodz and Poznan, as well as his maternal ancestors\u2019 hometown of Radzanow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe overall depiction will be of Poland as a place that is alive and contemporary,\u201d he said. \u201cAspects of that are related to Jewish memory and parts of it have to do with contemporary Polish life and then the way that one feels as you go back to the ancestral place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Things are changing fast in Poland, Ravvin said. The end of communism, the integration into the European Union and the general march of time means things have altered significantly since Ravvin first toured there in 1999. One area of progress relates to Jewish and war-era history.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last 25 years, they\u2019ve become very effective at commemorating Jewish prewar life,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you had traveled to Poland in 2000, this wouldn\u2019t necessarily have appeared to be true, but now certainly it is true and, when you walk in Warsaw, the sidewalks are marked with these remarkable inlays which say this was the ghetto wall, so that you step over it and you actually feel that you understand the prewar and the wartime city and now the postwar city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the efforts, he speculates, are for the purposes of tourism, but he also acknowledges Polish efforts at education.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re doing a reasonable job of confronting how to live with the shadows of the past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Ravvin\u2019s mother\u2019s family fled Radzanow in 1935 and all those left behind were murdered. The family made their way to Canada, eventually to Vancouver, where Ravvin\u2019s grandfather, Yehuda-Yosef Eisenstein, was a shochet <\/em>(kosher slaughterer).<\/p>\n

Ravvin welcomes people to bring their own family history to his presentation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they\u2019re carrying their own version of this story,\u201d he said, \u201cthey might warm that up in their minds, their own families\u2019 Polish past, what they know about it, what they wish they knew, if they\u2019ve gone, whether they might go, so that the possibility is the thing they\u2019re considering and then maybe my talk will change the way they think about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

For this year\u2019s Limmud schedule, visit limmudvancouver.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eve Jochnowitz (photo from Limmud Vancouver) Limmud Vancouver, a now-annual festival of Jewish learning, takes place Jan. 30 and 31. The \u201cpan-denominational\u201d event includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a diverse array of topics. This week and next, the Independent features a few of the presenters who will participate in the local version of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1121,5155,5156,1122,278,5154,4582],"class_list":["post-16592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-david-matas","tag-eve-jochnowitz","tag-gefilte-fish","tag-human-rights","tag-limmud","tag-norman-ravvin","tag-poland"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}