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סוכן המוסד לשעבר

סוכן המוסד לשעבר: “עזרתי לישראל לחשוף את תוכנית הגרעין של סוריה” – חלק שלישי. (צילום מחוסיין עלי סומדייה)

המשך הראיון עם הסוכן הכפול לשעבר של עיראק, ולאחר מכן של המוסד, חוסיין עלי סומדייה (53), שגר בקנדה ומנסה למנוע את גירושו בשנית לתוניסיה.

מה בעצם אנשי המוסד רצו ממך?

הם ידעו שאני טיפוס מאוד חברתי ויש לי קשרים רבים. הם ביקשו ממני מידע על כל מי שנחשב סיכון לישראל ורצה למשל עשות פעולות טרור נגדה. הייתי בקשר עם לא מעט סטודנטים ממדינות ערב שונות או פלסטינים, שלמדו או עבדו במנצ’סטר.

האם הצלחת להביא מידע משמעותי למוסד?

כן. מפעילי התעניינו בעיקר בשני סטודנטים שהיה לי קשר טוב עימם. אחד בשם ג’מאל אבו ג’מוס פלסטיני שגר בסוריה. והשני תאופיק שגם כן גר בסוריה. התברר דרכי למוסד ששניהם נשלחו על ידי השלטון הסורי ללמוד על נשק גרעיני, באותה אוניברסיטה שבה אני למדתי. בעצם בזכותי המוסד למד לראשונה כי סוריה מתכוונת לפתח תוכנית גרעין. המבצע שלי עם המוסד היה מסובך ונמשך מספר חודשים. יצרתי קשר בין ג’מאל לאנשי המוסד והצגתי אותם בפניו כעיתונאים. אנשי המוסד הבינו כי ניתן לקנות אותו בכסף ולכן התחילו לעבוד קודם כל עימו ולאחר מכן עם תאופיק. אני התבקשתי מייד לנתק את הקשרים שלי עם שניהם. אנשי המוסד הצליחו לאט לאט ובכסף לשאוב מידע רב מג’מאל. יותר מזה אינני יודע כי ניתקתי קשר עם השניים.

היו לך עוד הצלחות?

הייתי מבקר קבוע באירועים ומסיבות בשגרירות עיראק בבריסל, מצלם תמונות של המשתתפים ומעביר אותן למפעילי במוסד. מתברר שהם התעניינו במיוחד באחד האורחים באירועים אלה. מדובר היה מדען טילים קנדי בעל שם עולמי, ד”ר ג’רלד בול. התברר למוסד שהוא נשכר על ידי סאדם חוסיין לפתח את תותח העל “יום הדין”. עוד התברר שחברות בריטיות עזרו בקמת שני מתקנים לבניית טילים בפאתי בגדד. מתקן אחד לטילים שיכוונו נגד איראן ומתקן שני לטילים שיכוונו נגד ישראל. אינני יודע עד כמה תרמתי בנושא הזה, אך אני כן יודע שמפעילי במוסד לא אהבו לראות את ד”ר בול באירועי שגרירות עיראק. ידוע לי לאחר מספר שנים הוא הוצא להורג. (לפי פרסומים בתקשורת ד”ר בול החוסל בבריסל ב-90 ע”י המוסד ר.ר).

בגלל שחשש לשלום משפחתו ולאור שהרגיש כי הוא נחשף על ידי העיראקים החליט סומדייה לגלות להם שעבד עם המוסד. ב-1990 הוא עזר אומץ וברח לקנדה וביקש מקלט מדיני כאן.

האם באמת הפסקת לעבוד עם המוסד בגלל שפחדת?

כן. התחלתי להרגיש שעולים עלי ב-85 בשגרירות עיראק בבריסל. לכן במקום להמתין שיתפסו אותי הלכתי הישר אליהם וסיפרתי שאני עובד עם המוסד. אבי ששמע על כך חתם על מסמך ההוצאה להורג שלי. נשלחתי לבגדד וסאדם חוסיין החליט לחון אותי באם אעבוד שוב עם העיראקים, וארגל נגד נגד ישראל מאנגליה. נשלחתי ללונדון וכדי למנוע את שהותי באנגליה כדי שלא אעבוד עם העיראקים, החלטתי שאצור לעצמי בעייה פלילית. בכוונה תחילה גנבתי כרטיסי אשראי ואז הבריטים גרשו אותי והגעתי לארה”ב. באמצעות השגרירות העיראקית בניו יורק שוב הוחזרתי לעיראק. הצלחתי לברוח משם לתימן ומשם דרך אירופה הגעתי לקנדה ב-90. אנשי הסי.איי. איי האמריקאי שפגשו אותי בטורנטו הציעו לי לעבוד עבורם תמורת ‘גרין קארד’. אך הפעם אני סירבתי כי זה כבר הספיק לי. ב-91 פירסמתי את ספר באנגלית על קורותי “מעגל של הפחד”. אז גם התחלתי בהליך לקבל מקלט מדיני בקנדה שנמשך בעצם עד היום הזה.

האם קיבלת כסף מהמוסד עבור שירותך?

כן. קיבלתי הרבה מאוד כסף מהם.

בינתיים בעת שהותו בקנדה במשך כשלושה עשורים הספיק סומדייה להתחתן כבר בפעם השלישית, ויש לו שלושה ילדים. המשפחה גרה כיום בהמילטון ויש לו חברת שיפוצים שנקראת “סם אנד קרו”. בראיון ‘לנשיונל פוסט’ אמר: “אלו היו עשרים ושמונה שנים. יש לי את החיים שלי, יש לי את המשפחה שלי, יש לי את העסק שלי. מיקמתי את עצמי כאן בקנדה. זה הבית שלי”. הוא הוסיף כי לאור המקרה שלו אמו ושתי אחיותיו קיבלו מעמד של פליטים בארה”ב. בשל ההליך המתנהל נגדו בקנדה, הוא אינו יכול לטוס לחו”ל ולכן לא הצליח להגיע להלווית אמו ב-2016.

Courage in a time of change

Rabbi Irwin Kula speaks in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. (photo from JFGV)

The world is in a time of historic shifts and the way we interpret and respond to what is happening can make each individual a player in this civilizational drama.

This is the promise of Rabbi Irwin Kula, who will speak in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. Kula is co-president of Clal, the National Jewish Centre for Learning and Leadership.

“We are living in one of the most dramatic, exciting times in human history,” Kula told the Independent in a telephone interview. “Whenever one lives in a dramatic transitional moment, the call to responsibility is also dramatic. The fear and the anxiety that we are feeling is all understandable. But managing the fear, managing the anxiety and, therefore, managing some of the loss that comes in these great moments of transition, is how we move on the journey.”

Kula promises audience members more than an interesting talk.

“Anyone who is going to be in that room, anyone who is willing to speak about it this way, really has an opportunity to be a part of not only the solution but one of the great adventures in the human drama right now,” he said.

At Clal, Kula is part of a team that is “reimagining Judaism for this era.”

“And not only Judaism, but religion in general,” Kula said. “What is religion and Judaism going to look like in an information age? In an age of globalization? In an age when the borders and boundaries of their identities are more permeable?”

Kula is an eighth-generation rabbi and holds a degree in philosophy. He has served congregations in Jerusalem and St. Louis, Mo., and, over the last 30 years, has been involved with Clal, which describes itself as a “do-tank” – “The thinking actually has to apply to people’s doing,” he explained.

Kula works “at the intersection of religion, innovation and human flourishing,” he said. “Those are the lenses I use.”

Kula analyzes how information, entertainment, media, retail and other components of society are affected by innovation. In his 2007 book Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, Kula considers the relationship between what we desire and how we live.

“Yearnings is a fancy word for desires,” he said. “The central insight in the book is that what animates us, what animates our lives, are our desires. They are sources of great wisdom for who we are as human beings. We know our most intense desires – our desire for love, our desire for the truth, our desire for meaning, our desire for happiness, our desire to be creative and have a purpose and to contribute.… The interesting thing about looking at our desires is, the more one can understand our desires, the wiser our lives are.”

Whatever the day’s headlines, Kula said, maintaining optimism is critical to making positive change in the world.

“Being an optimist doesn’t mean you have to be Pollyanna,” he said. “You can be an optimist and be 51-49 about it. The difference between being a 51-49 optimist and 51-49 the other way may be the biggest difference of all.”

And when the nightly news brings stories of authoritarian ascendancy or other alarming developments, the long view is an antidote.

“I use a long-term, macro-evolutionary take,” said Kula. “This is where Martin Luther King, I think, is right. The arc of history bends toward justice. But it doesn’t bend linearly. It’s not one plus one plus one plus one. It’s sometimes two steps forward and a step backward. We are in now a very, very significant moment of transition. There’s a lot of ways to talk about that transition – postmodern, information age, technological age – and all of the changes are hard to metabolize. So, it takes a very serious responsibility for elites and cultural creatives and people who experience themselves at the cutting edge of these changes to take very seriously the costs and pains and dislocation of these changes for different people. That is what I think we are all called to do.”

People may look at the state of the world and feel helpless or hopeless. But the better response, Kula said, is not only to acknowledge the ways in which we might affect improvements, but also to take individual responsibility for the situation.

“Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, said, in the face of trauma and in the face of political tragedies, the first thing to ask is how am I complicit in what is transpiring,” said Kula. “Not in a giant moral drama of blaming, because, if we are actually interdependent … then what’s happening with people with whom we deeply disagree is connected to us. It’s not some other, evil person over there.”

This is not to say there is not evil in the world, he cautions. But, asserting that those with whom we disagree are evil can potentially misallocate cause.

“In America, there aren’t 60 million evil people who voted for Trump that want America to be destroyed and become a homophobic, primitive, psychologically regressive place in the world,” Kula said. “It behooves us, says Maimonides, to address very seriously what have I missed and, therefore, perhaps been complicit in allowing this to emerge?”

Courage and a sense of adventure can help us navigate times like these.

“If we mitigate a little bit the fear and just stand at that burning bush and not be so scared, know there is tremendous possibility,” he said.

For tickets to FEDtalks, at the Vancouver Playhouse, visit jewishvancouver.com.

Fringe mixes drama, comedy

Naomi Vogt performs in Big Sister, written by her real-life sister, Deborah Vogt. (photo from Fringe)

The Vancouver Fringe Festival has started and there are (at least) a few shows that readers should try to fit in around the High Holidays. Jewish community members Deborah and Naomi Vogt, David Rodwin and Gemma Wilcox are presenting very personal works that examine issues with which we all deal, such as self-esteem, family relationships, finding and losing love, and the search for meaning. And they do it with humour and energy.

Local playwright Deborah Vogt and her sister, actor Naomi Vogt, “are still making tweaks” to Big Sister (Revue Stage), Deborah Vogt told the Independent. “However, I’m not sure if there will ever be a ‘final version,’ given that the script is a reflection of our ongoing conversation as sisters attempting to learn more about each other. Additionally, Naomi loves to ad lib and so the play will be slightly different every evening depending on who is in the audience. However, the dream would be to take it to other Fringe festivals, especially Edinburgh (the world’s largest Fringe Festival – and my personal dream). There is something very special, however, about premièring this show in the city that we grew up in and the community that we know and love.”

The idea for the show came up last summer at the Edinburgh Fringe. “Over there, I saw so many beautiful, personal solo shows that tread the line between monologue and standup. I thought, ‘I would love to do this, but I can’t act. Who do I know that could perform a solo show that I could write?’ The answer was obvious: my sister. We spent two weeks traveling together shortly after the Fringe, where we brainstormed ideas for shows in between hikes and wine bars. We abandoned most of those ideas when we realized the only story we could honestly tell was that of our relationship as sisters, and specifically how our relationship has changed over the last few years in the wake of Naomi’s 75-pound weight loss.”

Camp Miriam makes an appearance in Big Sister, said Vogt, “because my sister Naomi went there for a few summers as a preteen and our mother went there for many, many years when she was younger…. The show focuses on Naomi’s weight loss, and talks about what being a fat kid at camp was like. Naomi loved Camp Miriam, but we also acknowledge that no camp experience is easy if you don’t look like the other children.”

Naomi Vogt performs the whole play. “For the most part,” said her sister, “she is playing herself, but the version of herself that I have written through my perspective. And, on occasion, she plays me as well. I just have to sit in the audience every night and hear the ways she’s manipulating my words. Part of the joy of the show is the various power dynamics at play – as a playwright, I have shaped Naomi’s personal story but, as an actor, she is able to change my words at any moment.”

There were many challenges to writing Big Sister, said Vogt. “First of all, it was difficult trying to find the balance between Naomi as my real human sister and Naomi as a character. We wanted this show to be entirely truthful, while still presenting a piece of theatre. And this show touches on painful aspects of both of our lives (in a funny way, of course), so trying to write that without overstepping my place or lying to the audience about what actually happened (two sides to every story, right?) was difficult to manoeuvre.”

In a nutshell, the show is about weight loss. “It touches on how being heavy can affect all aspects of life, and particularly sibling dynamics,” said Vogt. “Both of us have lost weight … but Naomi’s journey was far more significant than mine. Through telling her story of weight loss, we’ve learned a lot about each other, our childhoods and the community we live in.”

* * *

photo - David Rodwin shares his sometimes-heartbreaking dating experiences in F* Tinder — David Rodwin shares his sometimes-heartbreaking dating experiences in F* Tinder. *(photo by Julia Farr)*

“F* Tinder is 100% autobiographical,” said David Rodwin. “Only the names have been changed. But I only have 75 minutes to talk about dating 120 different women over two years, so there’s a lot I have to leave out. But every story I tell, I do so as accurately as I can recall – with a theatrical flourish.”

F* Tinder: a love story (Performance Works) began as a book, when a friend who was writing his first book challenged Rodwin to do the same.

“I’d moved to San Francisco after my last serious relationship ended in L.A. and, over a year and a half on Tinder and other apps, I’d experienced some bizarre and noteworthy experiences in the lawless dating wilds of the Bay Area,” he said. “So, I had an unorganized collection of short stories I’d been developing…. Around that time, I met the one woman I truly fell in love with. That inspired me to write like crazy. But (spoiler alert), when she dumped me, I got writer’s block for the first time in my life.

“Though I wasn’t able to continue sitting alone at my desk typing out these tales, I couldn’t stop telling them to friends and in storytelling shows like The Moth, which I’ve done for years. Finally, it became clear that, rather than just a bunch of short anecdotes, this was a full evening of stories with its own narrative integrity…. And though I’d written half the book, I threw out everything and started over because I find that writing with my mouth creates a more natural, humorous and vibrant live performance than when I type something, memorize it and recite it.

“It’s a thrilling and terrifying process for me each night, not knowing quite how it’s going to go and I hope it creates a more visceral, authentic and deeply intimate experience. And it’s a technique I inherited from my mentor Spalding Gray. But it’s meant that the show has changed a lot over time. The first version was 60 minutes long, then it grew to 90 minutes. Now, it’s 75 minutes. But there have been multiple versions of each one…. I’m also able to adjust certain sections to fit specific audiences. I’ve even added a curling joke for my Canadian audiences, making fun of Americans’ inability to understand the sport.”

Rodwin continues to work on the book F* Tinder and, later this year, he said, “I’ll begin directing a web series of F* Tinder set in San Francisco, and also a feature film of my previous show set in Los Angeles, called Total Novice. That one has an even edgier narrative than F* Tinder, if you can believe. Let’s just say I was a ‘nice Jewish boy’ who went to Princeton and I was a very late bloomer who became fearless (and occasionally stupid) in my pursuit of things that I considered off limits when I was younger.”

F* Tinder includes Jewish elements, said Rodwin, “because they directly affected how I look at relationships.”

In the show, he shares how, on one Shabbat, while chanting prayers he’d said for 30 years, he stopped midway through the V’ahavta, “when I said, ‘And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.’ It suddenly hit me that I didn’t have children, and I couldn’t fulfil this prayer in a literal way. I always thought eventually I would. But, at 45, when I read that, I fell silent, contemplating how I’d lived my romantic life in such a way that I was childless. And what it meant for me. And what I should be doing with the woman I was in love with. And it directed my next choice in how that relationship went.”

Rodwin shared another touching, and Jewish, element of his show.

“The woman I fell in love with told me she could tell I was falling for her and I shouldn’t do that because she’d already decided we weren’t going to work out in the long term, and she didn’t want to hurt me. So, she told me to build a wall around my heart, or she wouldn’t see me again…. I agreed to do so because I was afraid if I told her the truth, that I was already hopelessly in love, I’d never see her again. Now, I’m not a biblical scholar, but the next morning a piece of Torah came to my mind, out of the blue, while she lay sleeping next to me. Deuteronomy 30:6 – I’d studied it eight years earlier with Rabbi [Sharon] Brous and I didn’t understand it, so it stuck in my mind. The phrase, ‘You must circumcise your heart … so that you may live,’ baffled me. But, that morning, it suddenly made sense to me, and I decided I had to circumcise my heart and careen it against the wall around her heart until I either broke through or I broke. And people can come see the show, to discover the surprising ending.”

* * *

photo - In Magical Mystery Detour, Gemma Wilcox explores the detours that happen in life and how we can find and trust our own centre — In Magical Mystery Detour, Gemma Wilcox explores the detours that happen in life and how we can find and trust our own centre. *(photo from Fringe)*

There are many twists and turns in Magical Mystery Detour (Studio 1398) by Gemma Wilcox. Set in the United Kingdom in 2012, the action is prompted “by a letter from her dead mother, [and] the protagonist, Sandra, and her dog, Solar, take an unexpected car journey from London to Land’s End, Cornwall, at a pivotal and sensitive time in her life.”

Created in the summer of 2012, Magical Mystery Detour premièred at the Boulder, Colo., Fringe Festival that year.

“It is a semi-autobiographical piece, heavily based on aspects of my life at that time,” Wilcox told the Independent. “I wrote this show very shortly after the death of my mother and the ending of a very significant love relationship with a man I thought I would marry and have children with. It was inspired by the tender and vulnerable process of dealing with and letting go of my mother’s death, the getting over and releasing this powerful love relationship, as well as some of my magical journeys through the sacred, beautiful landscape in the southwest of the U.K.

“The show reflects some of the themes I was fascinated by and exploring at that time in my life,” she continued, “such as learning how to trust and surrender to the detours that happen in life, when we think our life is going in a certain direction, but then it dramatically changes. I was also interested in exploring how we can find and trust our own centre when those we love are not there anymore, and when we feel lost or that life is too chaotic or not going the direction we want it to.”

Wilcox was born and raised in London, and moved to the United States in 2001. She has been based in Boulder since 2004. “I moved to the U.S. to explore yoga and embodiment practices, was in the Shakespeare Company in Austin, Tex., for a couple years, and found my theatrical/creative family in Boulder, as well as touring across the U.S. and Canadian Fringe festival circuit every summer for the past 11 years,” she said.

Magical Mystery Detour is one of a handful of shows that Wilcox and director Elizabeth Baron have worked on together. In creating it, said Wilcox, Baron was incredible, advising “me on how to stay both open and vulnerable as a performer, whilst also staying protected and safe and able to show the many shades and subtleties of a character.”

Wilcox writes comedy-dramas. “I find that it is highly important to balance the ‘light’ material with the ‘darker’ material, humour with seriousness – for me as a performer, and also for the audiences,” she said. “It is easier to receive and digest more poignant or shadowy material when juxtaposed in appropriate moments with humour and lightness. Humour is a huge aspect of my work – humour that comes from identifiable and sometimes embarrassing situations or honest admissions.”

For the full Fringe lineup, visit vancouverfringe.com. The festival runs to Sept. 16.

Bringing the invisible to light

Actor Ching Valdes-Aran in a scene from The Washing Society. (photo from The Washing Society)

Faced with the challenge of making a documentary for which the voices of undocumented immigrants were crucial, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker had to push the boundaries of convention. The result is The Washing Society, which will see its Canadian première at the Vancouver International Film Festival, as part of the festival’s Impact programming.

“For this year’s Impact stream, we decided to foreground films that represent prominent themes found in the festival at large – themes that are extremely topical at this historical moment,” said Alan Franey, director of international programming at VIFF, in a release. “Refreshing in their cinematic artistry, insights and lack of platitudes, these films have the power to inspire actual change.”

The Washing Society combines research, interviews, acting, dance, artistic images and other elements to introduce viewers in 45 minutes to some of the laundromats in New York City, which are disappearing, and the people who work in them. Olesker and Sachs, who both live in Brooklyn, will be in Vancouver for the festival and the Independent interviewed them by phone in anticipation of their visit.

The filmmakers are practically neighbours, and they met each other through their daughters, who are about the same age and have the same piano teacher. It was at a piano lesson where they first crossed paths. “Then we saw each other’s work, and really admired what each other were doing,” said Olesker.

The origins of the documentary are in a performance Olesker was commissioned to do in a laundromat, upon which she wanted to expand. Thinking that film would be a good element to add to it, she contacted Sachs.

“We had a series of conversations, which led me to unexpected places in how to think about laundry and women doing laundry, and so it became a deeper, more fruitful collaboration,” said Olesker.

Over a span of about two years, the pair researched the topic, then co-created the play Every Fold Matters with the actors performing it, as well as writing their own text. The site-specific performance and film project – which was performed in laundromats and various venues throughout New York from 2015 to 2017 – formed the basis for what has become The Washing Society.

“We’ve been working together now for probably over four years,” said Sachs, “because we spent almost a whole year traipsing all over New York City – mostly Brooklyn and Manhattan – trying to do the convention of documentary practices, ‘Let’s go into laundromats, let’s talk to workers.’ But the issues in New York are that so many of those workers are undocumented, so they’re very hesitant to have a conversation in front of a camera. So, we would have conversations and we would go back and write pieces and create characters based on all of those interviews we did, which we didn’t film. But then, over the course of time, as it shifted from being a live performance with media to a film, we got better at finding people who were willing to speak in front of the camera.”

They did this, in some cases, with the help of an actor or a translator, who then became more involved or involved in other ways. “One of the things both of us are really interested in,” said Sachs, “is breaking down the conventions of roles in the project.”

Both Sachs and Olesker have done cross-disciplinary work before.

“It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”

“I’m really interested in how documentary crosses over into fiction, and how fiction informs the documentary aspect,” said Olesker. In this project, she said, “It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”

The Washing Society contains a lot of theatre. “That’s an issue that raises questions with audiences in good ways and in challenging ways,” said Olesker, for whom this film is her first foray into documentary-making.

Sachs, however, has made this type of documentary before, mixing lived experience with fiction; for example, Your Day Is My Night, which she brought to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2013. “Working in this way,” she said, “has started to make me to question all forms of documentary, or even narrative film, because you see a narrative film and it’s really a document of a bunch of people getting together and making a fictional story.”

One passion “that has been very nourishing for both of us in our work is our relationship to history, to the historical document,” said Sachs.

“With this film,” she explained, “when we came across the story of the Atlanta washerwomen, we found it absolutely riveting and astonishing that there was this moment in American history in which a group of 3,000 black women had enough power or wherewithal or vision … to organize and to change their working lives. Any art project that gives you an excuse to research, I think, is pretty exciting.”

The title for the documentary is inspired by what these washerwomen accomplished in 1881. As for more recent history, The Washing Society both exposes the harsh working conditions in laudromats and laments the loss of these neighbourhood establishments.

“I think it’s interesting to explore that contradiction,” said Olesker. “It is grueling, underpaid, under-recognized work. It’s also necessary work – not necessarily in the form that it’s taken, of dropping off your laundry and paying someone to wash and fold it, but someone is always going to have to do the wash, so that sense of broad history and the roles that women have had in doing that work is something that was behind the project, as well.”

“My nostalgia,” said Sachs, “is any space where there is an intersection.… It’s what makes cities great, the idea that there is a space in which there are intersections, and that people who have less and people who have more are in the same space and they’re spending time [together]. And that all has changed so much now. The thing is, though, that the basic infrastructure – of there being a large group of people who are hidden in some way, and they are doing service work for other people, who have much more access or means – isn’t going to change because, even if it [laundry service] becomes an app, like we show at the end of the film, there are still people doing the work, they’re just not as visible.”

One purpose of the film is to make that invisibility visible. But, said Olesker, “What’s interesting about the film to me is that we’re not so much leaving you with something that we think should happen. We’re opening it up as a question and saying, ‘Look inside this.’ We looked inside and now we’re taking you inside, what is this about?”

There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government….”

In the United States, added Sachs, the idea of the document “comes down to a sense of security.” There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government, and so there is this resistance to being in front of our camera until they can find something that legitimizes their status here in another way that will serve them.

“And it actually comes down to the whole project of making art,” said Sachs. “To whose advantage is it? For example, we’re getting to go to Vancouver and we were talking about, Could we manage to bring one of the people from the film? There is a lot of questioning about what access the artwork gives. We’ve tried to bring along the people in the film as much as possible, but we aren’t always able to.

“There’s even a point in the film where we have Chinese and Spanish … sometimes we translated that and sometimes we didn’t, because we wanted to give opportunity for people who are in the audience who had access to those languages to feel that they were in positions of strength over the rest of us. There’s something about subtitling that, if you subtitle everything, you bring it all into the English window, and people stop listening.

“A big part of the film,” she continued, “is to go outside of issues of work and of cleaning in an urban situation, which becomes involved in service … [and to delve into] all the layers of existence or the layers of identity that happen in cities these days, and who listens to whom. We hear Spanish all the time [in the United States], but are we really listening to it or is it something we can just pass by? Same with Chinese.”

Both Olesker and Sachs are Jewish.

“I’m from New York so, growing up, it’s been a part of my life,” said Olesker. “Not in a religious way, but certainly in the culture of my family and my world. And specifically around labour and labour history, union organizing – not that anyone was an organizer in my family, but there was always an awareness of that, so that is part of my identity in terms of the work I’m interested in making.”

Sachs is a member of Kolot Chayeinu. “The rabbi and founder of the congregation – her name is Ellen Lippmann – she’s always been a hero of mine,” said Sachs. “She’s just retired, about a month or so ago, after 25 years running Kolot Chayeinu. It’s a very, very progressive congregation and I worked with her just a couple of years ago on something that I found very moving.”

Lippmann would often ask Sachs to film various activities for the synagogue and, in 2016, when B&H photo and video store, which is run by ultra-Orthodox Jews, was challenged by labour activists for the company’s treatment of its warehouse workers, “a bunch of people from Kolot decided to organize with the workers in front of B&H,” said Sachs. “I was there to videotape it and so were some television stations. And I think that Ellen Lippmann really wanted to say, this is not, to our mind, following an ethical frame of reference that we want to claim as Jewish.”

Olesker pointed out that the B&H walkout was organized by the Laundry Workers Centre. “So, we actually made a little film, which is kind of a postscript to The Washing Society, where they organize this march through east Harlem to a laundromat … where two of the workers who were part of the Laundry Workers Centre went in and presented a list of demands to the owners … to talk about unfair labour practices and long hours and being underpaid and no breaks. We were part of that march and demonstration, which Lynne shot on film and we edited.”

The video epilogue, as well as teasers for The Washing Society, can be found on vimeo.com. For the film festival lineup, visit viff.org. The festival runs Sept. 27-Oct. 12.

Global, contextualized access

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre has developed a collections management system (CMS) that integrates the components of the centre’s diverse holdings into an online platform featuring educational resources aligned with the B.C. secondary curriculum to support teaching with primary source materials.

The CMS allows visitors to the VHEC and online users to explore the various holdings in a way that eliminates divisions between the museum, archives, library and audio-visual testimony collections.

“When you search for a keyword term, it will return records from each collection,” said Caitlin Donaldson, the VHEC’s registrar, who was on the project team that coordinated the development of the system. “We worked collaboratively to design the metadata so that catalogue records are fulsome and so that users will get really rich relationships between items.”

The user-centred design approach prioritized the needs of the centre’s educational mandate and community.

“The VHEC’s system has some administrative modules and features that can track conservation, storage location, loans, accessions and donations,” said Donaldson. “So it’s a really powerful tool for us as a nonprofit organization with a small staff.”

A researcher, student or visitor to the VHEC can view the video testimony of a survivor, then easily see all the centre’s holdings that relate to the individual, such as books written by or about them, documents or artifacts donated by them and broader information about their place of birth, their Holocaust experiences and the camps, ghettoes or other places they survived.

The VHEC is committed to assisting teachers to use primary sources effectively in the classroom to teach about the Holocaust and social justice broadly. The centre has created materials to guide students through searching the CMS and analyzing artifacts. Lightbox is a tool within the CMS through which users can create, manage and share collections of items from the catalogue. Students can use this digital workspace to collaborate on projects and further independent research.

The CMS was developed using Collective Access, an open-source collections management and presentation software created by Whirl-i-Gig, which provided development services for the VHEC. Collective Access is also used locally by the Vancouver Maritime Museum and the newly opened Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia.

“The open-source software allowed us to benefit from the collected knowledge of other institutions and to also contribute back to that base of knowledge through the development of some modules that were created just for our needs,” said Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC. “This collections management system allows us, our visitors, researchers, students and anyone in the world unprecedented access to our collections, with the opportunity to contextualize artifacts and information in ways that were not remotely possible when the centre was created two decades ago.”

The VHEC is continually adding records and digitized items to the catalogue. Researchers are encouraged to contact VHEC collections staff to inquire about its full holdings and to access non-digitized materials.

The development of the online catalogue and CMS was made possible through a gift from the Paul and Edwina Heller Memorial Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver. To explore the VHEC collections online, visit collections.vhec.org.

A version of this article was published in Roundup, Spring 2018, issue 272, by the B.C. Museums Association.

What does power mean?

Necessity is the mother of invention. Throughout Jewish history, whenever economic or social restrictions have been applied against Jewish populations, those same targeted Jews have responded by finding means to succeed despite the hurdles placed in their way.

In notable instances, the “invention” itself has become problematic. By excluding Jews from a range of guilds and thereby denying them the right to participate in the broader economic life of the community, medieval Europe pushed Jews into marginal occupations. One such occupation was moneylending, which created a dangerous dynamic that helped define European Jewish existence for hundreds of years. Existing in a bleak place between the power of the aristocrats and dukes, on the one hand, and the rage of the peasant mobs, on the other, Jews were forced from one place to another in part because of the economic role they were forced to play in society.

More cheerfully, our ancestors understood that learning was an intangible asset that no ducal dictator or antisemitic horde could take away. Continuing the tradition of study practised by for generations, the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, saw Jews turn their minds to secular studies like sciences and the humanities. In a modernizing world, this proved a tremendous advantage. Much of the success enjoyed by Jews today is founded on the collective dedication to learning that began in ancient study halls and continues this very week as Jewish kids return to classrooms all over the world.

Zionism is a natural descendant of the theory of necessity and invention. For hundreds of generations, Jews prayed for a return to Zion and Jerusalem. But when, after the Middle Ages gave way to Enlightenment and emancipation, the place of Jews in Europe still proved precarious, as Theodor Herzl concluded during the Dreyfus Affair, the idea of Jewish self-determination as a national political movement took flight. Necessity increased in the first decades of the 20th century and Zionism went from a somewhat obscure idea to one almost universally accepted by Jews, though its realization would be too slow to save six million lives.

Attacked by its neighbours at the moment of its birth, Israel was forced to pull together a military defence. The alternative was unthinkable, and the generation faced with that reality during the War of Independence had learned just a few years earlier the danger of complacency and unpreparedness.

Facing existential threat once more in 1967 with the Six Day War, Israel again triumphed. The Eichmann trial, still fresh in the collective Jewish memory from earlier in the decade, created a stark awareness in Israeli and Diaspora minds about the precariousness of Jewish existence and the determination of those who would seek to destroy us.

Since 1967, there has been no doubt that Israel is a regional military powerhouse. This truth is axiomatic. If Israel were not a regional powerhouse, it’s likely Israel would not exist. This is what makes uncategorical criticism of Israel for its militarism so infuriating, as it fails to even acknowledge that the “invention” was made necessary by the world’s unquenchable antisemitism.

And so, it seemed, this was among the messages Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was trying to convey in a speech last week adjacent to Israel’s nuclear research centre, home of the country’s unacknowledged nuclear weapons program. He made some stark statements about the dangers of weakness.

“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive,” he said. “The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and, in the end, peace is made with the strong.”

Some have made the case that Netanyahu’s bluster and warnings to enemies are un-Jewish, that acknowledging power, and reveling in the benefits it presents, is antithetical to Jewishness. Perhaps.

Yet, we should also realize that we are in a time of changing paradigms. In the vast scope of Jewish history, the decades since the establishment of the state of Israel are the blink of an eye. We are still recalibrating what it means to be Jewish in an age of Zionism. As Jews in the Diaspora and as Jews in the Jewish homeland, we are redefining our identities and connections in a time of incredible flux. What does Jewish mean now? How do we accommodate and respond to power? What measures must we take to redefine our relationships with non-Jews, including the leaders of other countries, in a time when we have the power to defend ourselves and no longer rely on the ephemeral kindness of strangers?

As Rabbi Irwin Kula (who will speak in Vancouver this month; see page 5) says, we who are alive in this time of extraordinary transition can be a part of “one of the great adventures in the human drama right now.”

Given an option, we may have chosen to live in duller times. But we are here now – and that necessitates us inventing ways to thrive in the world we have inherited.

A personal perspective

April Ford (photo by Antonella Fratino)

In the fifth and final articles of a series on sexual harassment and violence, the Jewish Independent speaks with Montreal writer April Ford.

As the late Maya Angelou wrote in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Montreal-born fiction writer and essayist April Ford, who has been working as associate publisher for Southern Fried Karma, a literary press in Atlanta, Ga., since December 2017, knows this all too well.

“I’m honoured to stand alongside any woman who’s been mistreated, whether or not there’s a hashtag appended to her experience,” said Ford, a bold, heart-on-her-sleeve survivor of abuse. “The #MeToo movement, like any grassroots quest for equality, is one of unleashed compassion, controversy and confrontation … and, right now, it’s a mess. Sometimes, it seems more interested in the public shaming du jour of a celebrity sexual predator than in collective healing, and that frustrates me.”

Ford said she is not a believer in public shaming. “Black Mirror brilliantly depicts this nastiness in White Bear, season 2, episode 2,” she said.

“I’m even skeptical about how much the #MeToo movement can help women who’ve been abused, but who don’t have Twitter accounts, blogs or access to other popular venues for the dissemination of dark secrets to the masses … in exchange for emoticons and the chance to go viral,” she added.

In terms of some of the stories that have come out of the movement and how they have affected her, Ford said, “The story I’ve followed most closely is that of Concordia University in Montreal, where I completed the undergraduate creative writing program in 2007. Throughout the course of my degree, I spent a lot of time on campus as an aspiring but uncertain writer, and I sought mentorship from a handful of professors. I was consistently treated very, very well – there were no strings, pressures or consequences attached to the help and encouragement I received. That said, thanks to rumours, I knew to stay away from certain individuals within that concentrated world.

“Also, I started the program when I was 23 and, I think, being a few years older than the typical undergraduate student buffered me against harassment. Or maybe the negative experiences in my life outside of the program had trained me how to get through a situation as cleanly as possible, without giving anything away that wasn’t part of the experience I had signed on for, or having it taken from me without my consent.”

Regarding some of the high-profile people who have been outed as abusers via the #MeToo movement, Ford said, “I certainly have an opinion about how to cope with the abusive actions of people, whether family members, friends, mentors, celebrities or demi-gods. First, you have to be clear on your definition of abuse … and consistent. If you’re going to accuse one person of abusing you, then you can’t switch to a sliding scale when some actor or comedian you love is proven guilty of the same offence. And, no, I don’t believe you can separate the teacher, leader or artist from the abuser. That’s like saying you can separate all the white fur from the cream fur in a cat the colour of sand. It’s ridiculous.”

Ford was adopted as a child and only discovered after marrying a Jewish man (they have since divorced) – that her birth family may have Jewish roots.

When she was 15 years old, her adoptive parents, who had been fighting for years, decided to call it quits. Her mother left their home. Not long after, Ford lost her virginity to Bruce, a 34-year-old man. Up until then, she said, she “had hardly kissed a boy.”

Bruce instructed her to start taking birth control, “which I did,” said Ford, “as soon as I found a clinic that would dispense the pill to me for free and without questions like, ‘Where are your parents?’

“While my parents were dealing with the failure of their marriage, I was dealing with the euphoria and confusion that come with being a 15-year-old girl with no adult in her life to anchor her to a safe place. My mother, in trying to move forward from the damage my father’s abuse had caused her, was unable to be a mother to me. My father, in trying to hold his world together with rage, essentially fast-tracked me into the hands of a man who … [abused] me. I did my best to keep quiet – to hide the fact that this man I had rebelliously told everyone that I loved more than life itself was raping me every weekend.

“A lot of people in my life at the time could sense there was more to the story,” she said. “But, instead of getting involved or simply buying me a hot chocolate and asking how I was doing, they stopped being my friends.”

At that time, the mothers of Ford’s former friends insulted her with terms like “slut” and “whore” and said she had no business being anywhere near their daughters, sons and husbands. Ford went from being a decent student at a private Catholic high school for girls, a horse-lover and aspiring Olympic rider, to being what she referred to as “someone to be ashamed of, an afterthought.”

Ford can still vividly recall the whispers that, to her ears, were like screams of “all-knowing” grownups predicting that she was – at that young age – already done for; that she would end up pregnant, hooked on drugs and collecting welfare.

“None of that happened,” said Ford. “Not even close. Over the years, I’ve occasionally reconnected with people from that period. And, after they express exaggerated delight to see how well I’ve done for myself, they’d defensively stammer things like, ‘You seemed so mature and into your own thing … we just figured that’s how it was…. You said you were happy. Anyway, look at you now. Everything happens for a reason, right?’ No, it doesn’t.

“I’m sure some survivors can relate to my next statement: Bruce didn’t abuse me all the time. Not every time we had sex was rape, and there were times when he tried to initiate and I refused, and my wish was granted.” But there were several instances, as well as other types of abuse, that are too graphic to describe here.

Ford finds the whole concept of “moving on” troubling.

“It’s not a tidy process and it takes time,” said Ford. “It takes a lifetime. For me, moving on involved a lot of self-injurious behaviour in my late teens through to my 20s, and a lot of self-hate that I eventually learned to disguise as wit.

“My ‘disguise’ actually helped me push forward, to appear exponentially more confident than I was, so that I could create opportunities for myself. I’ve found there’s an expectation of real-life survivors of abuse to tell our tales demurely, to dab our eyes and conclude with, ‘But that was then, and I am stronger for it.’”

One message Ford has for other survivors is to not assume that people, including family and friends, will protect the deeply personal stories and truths you tell them. She advised that survivors tell their stories to the authorities and to people in positions to protect them, physically and legally. Most importantly, Ford stressed that survivors take charge of their emotional safety.

“In the years immediately following my break up with Bruce, I felt constantly in need of confessing my unworthiness to anyone who didn’t know the story, from new acquaintances to college professors to bartenders,” said Ford. “Thankfully, there haven’t been many cases where someone I’d confided in judged me unfairly. Mostly, people are compassionate and kind. But then, just last year, a pair of colleagues at the university where I had taught for eight years ‘profiled’ me, let’s call it … because they disagreed with a choice I’d made in my private life. They accused me of victimhood, based on what I’d shared with them in our friendships. We are no longer friends.”

As a self-described atheist, when in need of support, Ford prefers systems she can interact with directly, such as “proper nutrition, regular exercise and sleep hours, close friends and cuddly animals, work and pastimes that light joyful fires in her belly, and the occasional double shot of rum with a splash of Coke on the side. These things I can trust to always be available to me, and I am free to adjust and readjust their proportions to fit my always in-flux needs.

“What has not worked for me, in terms of healing, is writing about my experiences for the sole purpose of healing. I am a fiction writer to the bone. Sure, I graft details from my life onto the stories I write. But, actually, I use fiction to explore other people’s nightmares, so that I can take a break from my own. I need one kind of noise in my head to cancel out the survivor noise, if that makes sense.”

While Ford hopes that sharing her story here will do some good in the world, she would rather not impose her story on anyone. Further, she feels strongly that no one who has been abused is obligated to become a spokesperson for others.

“Sometimes,” she said, “the abuse a person experiences is so extreme that she needs the rest of her life just to learn how to step outside of her house without fear.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Learning negotiation together

The Pathways program pairs Arab and Jewish high schools for two-day experiential workshops about interest-based negotiation skills. (photo by Emily Singer)

As politicians debate about how to bring peace to the Middle East, or if it’s even possible, a newly formed nonprofit organization is bringing together hundreds of Jewish and Arab children across Israel every year and teaching them how to get along.

The Pathways program, directed by Avi Goldstein and facilitated by Michael Schnall, pairs Arab and Jewish high schools for two-day experiential workshops about interest-based negotiation skills. The program, sponsored by the U.S. embassy and run in partnership with school networks and community organizations, is based in large part on concepts from the international bestselling book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton (Penguin Books, 2011) and on methodology developed at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Thanks to the initiative of the Darca network, the school where I teach, Shaked Darca on Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, has had the tremendous privilege of participating in Pathways for the past two years.

The Pathways program combines a few goals, the most important of which would be difficult to say. Last year, when we received the invitation to apply to participate, I saw it as an exciting opportunity to expose my students to two intensive days of study and conversation in English. The entire program is in English, and this is a natural common language for communication among the Jewish and Arab students. But the program exposes the students to so much more.

With rich and varied activities, the students learn English as the international language of negotiation, conflict resolution and peace. They develop many new skills with one central message – in order to “win,” you don’t need for someone else to “lose.” When you listen to others and you are curious about their needs, instead of reaching a compromise, you can often reach agreements in which both sides walk away with a feeling of success.

And all of this takes place in a setting in which students have the opportunity to meet kids from a very different population and culture. Or maybe not so different.

The program opens with an activity designed to foster cooperation among the students, while emphasizing what they share. They are divided into mixed groups and given the task to build a paper chain made up of things everyone in the group has in common. Sound simple? Now try it with one hand behind your back. Literally. The students need to talk and plan together, and also to write, cut and paste, all with lots of cooperation, creativity, and even laughter.

Throughout the program, the kids are given situations in which they have to negotiate with each other. For example, a kid lends his friend his iPod. The next day, after the iPod is returned, he discovers that it doesn’t work and he wants his friend to buy him a new one. This is his “position.” But, before he goes into negotiation with his friend, he has to weigh a number of important issues. What does he think his friend is going to claim? Might there be any truth to it? How valuable is his friendship with this person? What is most important to him, and on what is he prepared to compromise?

There is a lot of discussion over the two days about “positions” versus “interests.” If each side comes to the table after serious consideration of what is really important to him or her (their “interests”) and curiosity about what the other party wants and needs, this leaves open the possibility for empathy as well as creative, outside-the-box thinking, and then the sky’s the limit.

The students are exposed to a wide variety of situations that must be negotiated, but none of them addresses the political conflict in which they live. They are able to make connections and compare shared values with students whom they might never otherwise meet, in a setting where the “sides” are mixed up, so they are not negotiating as Jews and Arabs, but rather “Table 1” against “Table 6,” “parent” versus “child,” or friend and friend.

The first day concludes with two powerful exercises. In one, the students are asked to divide into pairs, lock arms and “try to bring their partner’s arm down to the table as many times as possible.” The students proceed to arm wrestle. Mike, the program facilitator, asks why the students felt a need to struggle with their partner. “Did anyone notice that with cooperation, both players could arrive at much higher results?”

The final activity of Day 1 is an improvisational role play of a negotiation between a father and child. The child wants to go to a party and to come home late. Mike is the stubborn father who says, “By 10:30.” The part of the kid is played by students, who take turns volunteering. It begins with a classic negotiation of compromises. Midnight? No, 10:40. How about 11:30? No, 10:45. Whatever the outcome, someone will walk away disappointed. Until one student finally goes up to the stage and asks the Pathways magic word, “Why?” After a real conversation about interests, the boy understands that his father is worried about safety on the roads at night, and he’s feeling too tired to stay awake until his son arrives home safely. So, the boy suggests he stay overnight at his friend’s house and return home in the morning. Dad agrees. Everyone “wins” and walks away happy.

The second day begins similar to the first. After another ice-breaker, volunteers are invited to participate in a game. The kids are divided into two teams. There is a long rope, and each side has to pull the middle of the rope over the red line on their side as many times as possible. Rida, my Arab partner teacher, and I stand there watching in disbelief as the two sides struggle with all their might to “win.” Do they not remember the arm wrestling from the day before? Why are they not working together? But we learned from this and from many other activities that these skills are like muscles. Our habits and assumptions need to be understood and new skills need to be developed and exercised often. The good news is that they are relevant in every aspect of our lives – whether with friends, colleagues, family or business partners – so there is no shortage of opportunities to practise.

By the end of the second day, the students leave with a new language of negotiation – positions versus interests, options versus alternatives, communication, legitimacy, obligation and, of course, everything in English. They also leave thinking a bit differently about “the other,” with some students exchanging emails and telephone numbers.

Unfortunately, after the two days, the program ends and the students remain 45 minutes away, but worlds apart. This year, Pathways has begun new initiatives to build on the program for the future. To this end, I participated in Pathways’ Negotiation Education Teachers Fellowship, funded by the U.S. embassy, designed to bring together a community of teachers to integrate the learning of problem-solving negotiation skills into the English-language curriculum. We are also looking for ways to continue bringing the students together.

I feel incredibly blessed to be a part of the Pathways program and the rich community of Arab and Jewish English teachers in Israel who devote their lives to making the world a better place through education. I’m deeply grateful to the Darca network and to my school, Shaked Darca, for their support and their ongoing desire for innovation and alternative education. I also appreciate the contribution of the U.S. embassy, and Mike and Avi, who created Pathways and continue to keep it going, always thinking how the program can be improved and expanded. Most importantly, I am thankful to our fabulous students, mine and my partner teacher Rida’s, without whose open minds, open hearts and willingness to try new things and to dare to speak in English for two straight days, none of this would be possible.

Our children are truly our future. The more they know the language – and tools – of communication, cooperation and peace, the better our world will be. For more information on Pathways Institute for Negotiation Education, see pathwaysnegotiation.org.

Emily Singer is an English teacher and coordinator at Shaked Darca School on Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in Israel. Singer taught at Vancouver Talmud Torah and her husband, Ross, was rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation until 2004.

World without prisons?

Prof. Liat Ben-Moshe teaches disability studies at the University of Toledo. (photo from Liat Ben-Moshe)

University of Toledo assistant professor Liat Ben-Moshe moved to the United States in 2002 to do her doctorate in disability studies at Syracuse University, as the field was not offered in Israel at the time.

Ben-Moshe describes the field as one “that looks at disability as an identity and a culture.”

“So,” she said, “we read things about mad culture – ‘mad’ as in ‘crazy’ – deaf culture and a variety of disability histories, disability laws and social movements related to disabilities … as well as representation [of] people with disabilities and disability, in general, in films and in literature.”

Ben-Moshe is a member of and has been a leading voice in the disability community. She works to educate anyone who will listen about disability rights, to change the outlook.

“We are not asking for charity,” said Ben-Moshe. “We are asking for what is rightfully ours, like an increase in disability stipends and things of that nature. At that time, there was also no kind of formulated disability law.” Now, there is, and there are both similarities and differences between such laws in Canada, the United States and Israel, she said, noting, “They are all rights-based laws, discrimination-based laws.”

As Ben-Moshe was developing her understanding of disability law and how society began looking differently at people with disability, she started seeing correlations between how people with disabilities were being treated in institutions and how prisoners were being treated.

Society has dismantled many large institutions for people with mental and intellectual disabilities. “People don’t really understand how massive these institutions were,” said Ben-Moshe. “Some of them housed 3,000 people with intellectual disabilities in the heyday.

“Closures of these facilities came out of a desire to really change the way that we understand what disability means and how to react to it on a social level,” she explained. “We don’t need to be segregated in order for the civility to be viable in our communities. And the reason I’m connecting it to the prison arena is because there has been – and, today, for sure – a vibrant, although quite small, social movement that advocates for the closure of prisons…. By that, I mean prison abolition.”

Ben-Moshe contends that people should not be locked away as punishment.

“It’s really a radical framework – to understand how we can react to each other differently and how we can respond to harm that’s done to us differently … without segregation, without locking people away,” she said. “When you take this [locking up] idea of out of sight, out of mind, [something] that only exacerbates the root of the harm, you can see a lot of connections between this [non-segregating] framework and the framework of deinstitutionalization.”

Just as some people thought that deinstitutionalization could not work, there are those who don’t believe that decarceration is achievable. But Ben-Moshe said we can learn from how deinstitutionalization took place in most American states and in Canada, and how well it has worked, in general.

“How do we learn from it, as a historical precedence?” she said. “A lot of my work is about bridging those two ideas – frameworks and social movements.”

Ben-Moshe mentioned the 128-page ebook called Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (Penguin Random House, 2003). In it, says the description online, Davis argues that “American life is replete with abolition movements and, when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom…. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.”

There is no short answer to the question of how to abolish prisons. But, according to Ben-Moshe, the answer has to come from communities. The prison abolition movement in the United States, she said, is led by the black feminist movement and, in Canada, it is led by indigenous groups, as these communities are most impacted by the prison system.

Insofar as the movement’s success in both countries, Ben-Moshe said, “I’d say, definitely, there is, in Canada, a pretty vibrant prison abolition movement. As it is in the U.S., it’s pretty varied. Some of it does come from the indigenous perspective. For example, the idea of sentencing circles.

“In many indigenous communities, there has never been a prison. So, we don’t necessarily need to go back in time to see what it means to live in a world without a prison. We can talk to the indigenous people who have never bonded to this idea of prison. Not to romanticize it. I mean, harm has been done in those communities, but how did they deal with it? That’s definitely something that’s going on in Canada, as well.”

Ben-Moshe pointed to the somewhat new concept of using ankle bracelets, as opposed to imprisonment, as a misguided move. The way she sees it, by doing this, instead of reducing incarceration, the prison walls become endless.

“These are for-profit things that people who are incarcerated have to pay for,” said Ben-Moshe. “And what we see is that people who would have not even been incarcerated before now get ankle bracelets.”

In the same way that disability can’t exist in a place with no barriers, prisons can cease to exist if people are taught how to better work within society’s limits.

“If everyone spoke sign language, those who are deaf wouldn’t even be categorized as disabled, because they would just be a linguistic minority,” said Ben-Moshe. “Disability is not something in people. It’s something in the interaction between people and their environment.

“In disability studies, we talk about ‘ablism’ (able-ism), which is oppression that people with disabilities face. But, I also connect that to racism, sexism and other forms of oppression, to say that we’re always living simultaneous forms of privilege and oppression.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

About the Rosh Hashanah 2018 cover art

The print edition’s cover photo of the salmon run on Adams River by Leah Ramsay was taken in 2010 at Tsútswecw Provincial Park, near Kamloops, B.C. Formerly named after conservationist and author Roderick Haig-Brown, the park was renamed Tsútswecw this past June.

Tsútswecw (pronounced choo-chwek) translates to “many rivers” and the park, established in 1977, encompasses the spawning beds of the sockeye, chinook, coho and pink salmon. Every fourth year is a “dominant” run, with millions of salmon returning – 2010, when this photo was taken, was a dominant year, as is 2018. In honour of the occasion, there is a festival held at the park, called Salute to the Sockeye, which runs this year from Sept. 28 to Oct. 21.

One of the symbols of Rosh Hashanah is the fish head – “we should be the head and not the tail.” There are the themes of creation, rebirth and renewal, as well. In the run, the salmon return from the ocean to their natal stream to spawn, after which most die, their bodies providing nutrients to the vegetation and animals, and the lifecycle begins anew. This all happens in British Columbia from September through November.

“Seeing one of the peak years of the Adams River sockeye run had been a desire for many years and it didn’t disappoint,” said Ramsay. “Even non-hardcore nature nerds are impressed – it is such a huge mass of life all moving to the same goal.”