community

Blessings in bad times

While it may not be divine intervention that brought us technologies like the communications platform Zoom, it is undeniable that 21st-century tech has made this bizarre, scary and tragic time a little less isolating.

Much has been written and said about the tragedy of this pandemic. The loss of life worldwide is devastating and heart-rending. Families and friends have been kept apart at the best of times. At the worst of times, however, when hugs and human touch are needed most, this is especially cruel. Saying final goodbyes by telephone or on a little screen is unbearably painful.

In the meantime, though, something has happened that probably few of us anticipated when this pandemic hit us full force in mid-March. We have seen people at their best, coming together to help those who need it, checking in on neighbours and family who are isolated, taking steps that are uncomfortable for us in the short-term because it is in our collective best interests in the long-term. What could have been a time exemplified by fear and anxiety, selfishness, isolation and retrenchment has been, in so many cases, including in our synagogues and so many other community organizations, a time of unparalleled flexibility, creativity and devotion to what really matters.

We cannot overestimate the power of a comparatively simple technology like Zoom. Presumably intended as a business tool, it has exploded into our pandemic world as perhaps the new century’s version of what old long-distance advertisements promised – it’s the next best thing to being there.

Nothing can replace a hug or even just the proximity of our loved ones. But imagine the alternative of going through these past few months without small miracles like technology that lets us see the faces of our friends. Human nature tends to take for granted whatever we receive almost as soon as we’ve got it in hand. But the future we marveled at in the 1960s while watching fanciful cartoons like The Jetsons is reality today. Not the flying cars (yet) but the wall-mounted video phones are better: we hold them in our hands or sit them on our laps.

The medium is the message, said the great Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan. In future, people will look back and ponder how the technologies that united us in this time of isolation changed us and the way we communicate. In the meantime, we can already see that technology has led to even more engagement with learning, socializing and spiritual exploration than happened in-person before we had heard of COVID. And, while so many warn that we are on the verge of being “Zoomed out,” a recent poll contradicts this idea, finding that Canadians overwhelmingly love the freedom to connect to everywhere from anywhere. For Vancouverites, especially younger ones who are forced to move some distance from their parents due to housing prices, Zoom and similar tools can permit virtual visits without hours of time-wasting (and environmentally deleterious) travel. An hour-long business meeting that might have required 45 minutes of commuting and parking time starts and ends at the dining room table, freeing up hours per week for children, partners, housework, leisure, hobbies or sleep.

As we now prepare to celebrate the High Holidays in ways that our ancestors could never have imagined, we will depend on these technologies to deliver an approximation of normalcy. It won’t be normal, of course. But it’s normal for now. And that is a blessing.

No Silence on Race: an update

It’s been almost two months since we launched our open letter on June 30 and so much has happened since then!

We have received hundreds of signatures of support from the Jewish community across Canada and several Canadian organizations, congregations and initiatives have written public statements outlining their commitment to our pillars. We have published these statements on our website and you can view them at nosilenceonrace.ca/statements. We’ve also received some coverage in Jewish publications across the country. We have made them available on our website as well. Although our set date of July 29 has passed, we are still accepting signatures and statements.

We have had conversations with leaders in our community and we know that many organizations are committed to action and to change. The work of creating inclusive, anti-racist and equitable Jewish spaces is a daily pursuit and we are encouraged to see the way our community has embraced our letter and the need for action and accountability.

Many of you have expressed interest in learning more about our pillars. Our team has launched a resource page (nosilenceonrace.ca/resources) on our website dedicated to furthering the conversation on each of our pillars and on how our community can collectively enact meaningful systematic change. We have also included equity consultants on this page that organizations can connect with directly to begin and continue this work.

Thank you to all of you who have reached out to us directly expressing your support and desire to get involved with our team and our work. We will be reaching out to you all soon. If you are reading this and would like to get involved with us, we’d love to hear from you! Please fill out our Get Involved page (nosilenceonrace.ca/get-involved) on our website to join us as we continue our work and create opportunities to connect with the community, grow our platform and take action.

We look forward to a time where we can create an in-person event and come together as a community. Until then, we encourage everyone to keep the conversation alive with your family, friends, communities and workplaces.

– Sara Yacobi-Harris, Akilah Allen-Silverstein and
Daisy Moriyama, co-founders, No Silence on Race

Trying to foster community

Two things will immediately strike readers of From the Outside In: Jewish Post & News Columns, 2015-2016 by Joanne Seiff – Seiff’s knowledge of Judaism and her empathy. She really knows her Jewish texts, as well as a thing or two about human nature. Yet, she doesn’t criticize from on high. She’s right in there in the muck, so to speak, not just making suggestions for others to carry out, but trying to play a positive role herself in whatever transformations she thinks might engage more Jews in Judaism and in community. Her heart is in the right place, and it shows.

Readers of the Jewish Independent were introduced to Seiff’s writing earlier this year, thanks to the JPN’s Bernie Bellan, who thought her work might be a good fit for the JI as well. He was correct. Her columns mix Torah lessons, everyday life moments and community-building ideas seamlessly, in an uplifting manner that invites contemplation rather than merely prescribing answers. She is not dogmatic, but rather is struggling herself to see what works in her and her community’s life.

While Seiff writes about the Winnipeg Jewish community, pretty much every issue she brings up – from involving younger congregants in synagogue life to getting more out of the weekly Torah portion to countering antisemitism to making communal activities more inclusive – can be found in our community. No doubt other communities will also see themselves in Seiff’s writing. And each of us will see a bit of ourselves, how we define our identity and how we move in the world.

And though you might not know it from her casual writing style and humble approach, Seiff has the education to back up her commentary. She has a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s in education from the George Washington University; she earned her bachelor’s cum laude in Near Eastern studies and comparative literature from Cornell University. Even so, she doesn’t have all the answers, and she doesn’t pretend to. She calls on many sources, from Jewish traditions and writings, to rabbis who have visited her community with advice, to lessons she has learned from family (her parents and as a mother of twins), community members and others. She brings in her own experiences of living in places where there weren’t many Jews – Kentucky, for example – and that of being a relatively recent immigrant to Winnipeg. She and her husband moved to the city in 2009 and the title of her collection reflects this perspective. As she writes in the introduction, “As a newcomer to Canada, I often see things differently than someone who was born and raised in Winnipeg.”

There is a lightness and energy to Seiff’s writing, which makes the book easy to read, even though she’s tackling some heavy topics and, often, the lethargy of a well- and long-established communal structure. It takes a delicate touch to be constructively critical and not disrespectful to those who either helped set up or maintain the way things “always” have been done. Her solutions-oriented outlook and can-do attitude will inspire anyone who would like to see change but thinks that anything that’s well-established – from our identity, to our Jewish community, to our larger world – is immutable. We may not have a huge amount of control over most things in life, but there are ways in which we can make things better. For ideas of where to start, From the Outside In can be purchased online. To read more of her writing, visit joanneseiff.blogspot.ca.

Good relationships matter

My parents, married 52 years, have a long-standing joke. Sometimes, they would go out and everything would be a disaster. We’d be in the neighbourhood pizza joint and someone would throw up. Or, one kid would spill something sticky all over somebody else. There would be a fly in the soup. We’d have a fight. The car would break down. We’d have an encounter with a terribly nasty person. Then, my mom would turn to my dad, poke him, and say, “Listen, Seiff, if this were a first date, I’d never go out with you again!”

Sometimes we’d all laugh but, often, we’d turn away with a wry smile, because that was all we could manage. Later, we knew it would be funny, because we didn’t base everything on that one outing … but sometimes people do! How often does one bad (Jewish) encounter ruin a first date, a first visit to a new synagogue, a networking opportunity? How can we salvage these awful experiences?

In the Torah portion B’midbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20), which we read last month, there’s a lot of census-taking and numbers. This isn’t counting every person, but those who can fight when assembling a military. There’s order in this parashah, so we understand that a strong army, or even a strong society, needs to be well-organized and administered. We need leaders, as mentioned in Numbers 1:16. Rashi points out that the elected ones, the chieftains of their tribes – “These were those called of the congregation; those who were called upon for every matter of importance that happened in the congregation.” We read edah as a tribe, but it can also mean a social or ethnic group (Yemenite Israelis, for instance) or a congregation.

Numbers matter, and good administration matters – but it isn’t all that matters. When Dr. Ron Wolfson came to visit Winnipeg in April as the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue scholar-in-residence, he asked a group of lay leaders and Jewish professionals, “How many Jewish people live here?” Immediately, there was an undercurrent of talk. Indeed, how many of us are in Winnipeg? My next thought was – does it matter?

In the same Torah portion of B’midmar, Nadav and Abihu are mentioned, in Numbers 3:4. However, because they offered “alien fire” (an unacceptable sacrifice) in the Sinai, they were struck down. Others were counted in their place. Nadav and Abihu made one bad mistake. They had one bad encounter (one bad date?) with the Almighty. That’s all it took for them to be killed and knocked out of Judaism forever.

It takes many positive encounters to reinforce a relationship. So, a Jewish person needs repeated positive experiences in a Jewish community to keep coming back. Some shake off a bad experience or two with a smile, joke or laugh. However, it depends on the person, and what happened. It can take “one bad date” to be turned off forever.

Wolfson described how small things make a huge difference in how we relate to one another. Greeting someone with a smile, offering them a warm participatory musical experience, some honey cake or a hug can make all the difference. These things aren’t expensive. They aren’t hard to do – but for some reason, many congregations still resist any change at all, even if it’s an entirely positive community-building shift that costs little or nothing to implement.

A joke followed. What does it say above the ark, the aron hakodesh, at your congregation? At Shaarey Zedek, it says, “Know before whom you stand.” Wolfson said that all shuls probably should have a different tag line – “But we’ve always done it this way.”

If you are entirely satisfied with how things go in your Jewish community, by all means, don’t change a thing. Keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you’re not satisfied? If your children don’t want to join, or the membership is declining, or people aren’t volunteering or contributing to your organization in the way you’d like, you need to stop and ask if the way you’re doing things is really working. Is your approach still relevant? Is it inclusive? Does it create positive encounters that matter?

B’midbar teaches us that numbers and administration matter – but only if you have committed members or people to count. Negative experiences can strike us down (like Nadav and Abihu) or just be a bump in the road, if you have a healthy long-term relationship. I was struck, at the end of a whole weekend of this Jewish learning and enrichment, by how energized some participants were with many good ideas for the future.

At the same time, I encountered those who said, “Thank you, but …” and wanted to say how they disagreed, what was wrong and what wouldn’t work here. Have you ever found that kvetching – without offering solutions – makes positive change?

Ever read the children’s book Stone Soup? A motivated, positive community can feed many people with a stone, some old vegetables, and maybe a stewing hen. Throw in some donations of flour and yeast and you have bread. It’s not expensive. It’s not hard to do. Yet, one must consistently ignore the naysayers while doing it. Are we willing to step up and make suggestions for building good, long-term Jewish community relationships?

Good. Bring your old carrots and dried up root veggies. Our skills and Jewish congregations can make something delicious together. Inexpensive solutions, kindness, smiles and constructive suggestions welcome. Let’s build our numbers by welcoming folks to the table with what we’ve got. Even a humble soup tastes better, or a song sounds richer, when we make it and sing it ourselves.

Joanne Seiff, a regular columnist for Winnipeg’s Jewish Post and News, is the author of a new book, From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016. This collection of essays is available for digital download, or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her on joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Putting heart into city

Heart of the City festival participants. (photo by David Cooper)

Community is at the heart of what Ruth Howard, Maggie Winston and Sharon Kravitz do, so it is no wonder they are participating in the Heart of the City Festival, which features more than 100 events at more than 40 locations throughout the Downtown Eastside Oct. 26-Nov. 6.

One of the projects is Realms of Refuge, which Howard (of Toronto’s Jumblies Theatre) describes as “an episode of Jumblies’ Four Lands national tour, which itself grew out of our 2015 west-to-east-coast tour, Train of Thought, for which Vancouver Moving Theatre was a key partner.” VMT is the main presenter of Heart of the City, and Howard has known VMT’s co-founder and artistic director Savannah Walling since 2003.

Realms of Refuge’s “four lands” concern senses, memory, history and dreams, explained Howard. “Over the course of the [two-week] residency, artists and community members create and bring to life these lands, through drawing, miniature models, words, music, movement and conversation. There will be drop-in art-making sessions at the Interurban Gallery (the project’s home-base), as well as some workshops in other locations with community groups and partners…. An open-ended number of people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities can take part in the activities and come to enjoy the evolving artwork.”

photo - Ruth Howard — Ruth Howard *(photo by Liam Coo)*

The intent of the project, said Howard, is “to spark thought and conversation and promote curiosity and understanding about the lives and experiences of people living on the same land.

“The ‘evolving gallery’ form, which I first invented and started to play with at Jumblies in 2009, involves setting up the framework for artistic creation in a gallery, studio or other suitable public venue, launching the starting point and facilitating its growth over a period of time. Generally, it starts with visual arts activities and then moves on to include words and simple performance. The idea is, rather than opening a gallery exhibition to be viewed in its finished state … we set the context for something that can’t happen unless diverse people come and take part; the nature and specifics are determined by those participating people, and we celebrate its closing state.”

Howard founded Jumblies in 2001. “I was always seeking ways to combine esthetic and social values and impact, and to blur distinctions between process and product; audience and participant; story and history; ritual and theatre; art and life,” she said.

“In 1990, I encountered the British ‘community play’ form, brought to Canada by writer Dale Hamilton, in a production in the Guelph area called The Spirit of Shivaree. This was for me a life-changing experience: I found a form of art-making that combined epic-scale theatre with wholehearted social inclusion and an astonishing capacity for social change.”

Howard wants to make art in ways “that don’t fit into standard disciplinary delineations,” to collaborate with others who have skills and perspectives she doesn’t, to learn “from people, places and stories that have tended to be left out of our cultural mainstream” and to “bring people together across real and perceived differences and remove restrictive delineations,” such as “youth” or “marginalized people.” She wants to “create an exciting, accepting and nourishing home and creative/social worlds in which my children – and also my friends, family, neighbors, colleagues and co-inhabitors of the land – can grow up and live,” as well as “have quirky ideas large and small and have the freedom to explore, develop and realize them.” She would like for art to be “at the heart of life.”

When asked if Judaism or Jewish culture has influenced her, Howard said, “My mother was a German Jewish refugee, whose immediate family escaped to England in 1938, just after Kristallnacht. Her father was a businessman and excellent amateur violinist, and her mother was a painter, well established in the Hamburg avant-garde arts scene before the war. I was brought up with a strong non-religious Jewish identity. As an adult, I joined a Toronto secular leftist Jewish organization (the United Jewish People’s Order and their summer community, Camp Naivelt), in which community I brought up my three children.

“Altogether my Jewish sensibility is hugely relevant to my life and work,” she said. “I was brought up with art as an essential part of life – both doing it … and witnessing it…. I was also brought up absorbing that it is important never to leave anyone out; not to support, tolerate or ignore separation of people into exclusive groups; always to have space at the table for unexpected guests; to welcome everyone; that ‘never again’ means ‘never for anyone.’”

Through her association with UJPO, Howard “learned to interpret and celebrate Jewish holidays for their social and cultural relevance to struggles of all humanity for survival, freedom and dignity.” She has created an oral history/theatre project with Camp Naivelt and, more recently, adapted a series of Passover seders to include the telling of other vital stories, such as Toronto’s indigenous history.

“When I first heard the word genocide used in relation to the treatment by European settlers of Canada’s indigenous people, I was stopped in my tracks; it was something that I couldn’t put aside…. Since then, I have made it a priority to learn and form relationships so that the work of Jumblies could support First Nations recovery, justice, equity, and new awareness for all of us who live here…. My ongoing artistic preoccupations include inherited memories of and present relationships with eradicated places, and the interplay and relative merits of remembering and forgetting. These themes are woven into the Four Lands/Realms of Refuge project. It isn’t particularly a Jewish project, but it springs from my particular Jewish mind … and the Vancouver iteration, with its focus on places of refuge, happens aptly to take place during Sukkot.”

Jewish culture has also influenced Winston, who grew up in a secular family.

“My upbringing in a family that is very engaged in politics, culture and the arts has definitely influenced who I am and how I approach the world,” said Winston. “I do believe that being culturally Jewish has contributed to my sense of being an advocate for others, of being confident in my ability to ask questions and explore ideas, and in feeling as though I am part of a greater community. Growing up in the United States in a suburb of Baltimore that was pretty white and Christian, I did feel different from my peers even though Baltimore has a huge Jewish population. Enjoying that feeling of differentness has led me to being a creative professional.

“Jewish folklore is a great source of inspiration and I would love to learn more,” she added. “My solo puppet and clown show Just Enough is based on the Yiddish folktale Joseph’s Overcoat, in which something is made from nothing and then passed down through family. In my version, it features a grandmother (a puppet) and her granddaughter (me, as a clown). The grandmother makes a quilt out of her old clothes for her baby granddaughter and, as she grows up, the grandmother cuts and sews it into other things for her until all that is left is a button.

photo - Maggie Winston — Maggie Winston *(photo by Juliana Bedoya)*

“As a theatre artist,” she said, “I am drawn to ritual and tradition in many forms. I have always found support for my work in the Jewish community, not only in Vancouver (through the JCC and the Chutzpah! Festival), but in other places around the world. I have started to make a few connections in the Jewish community in Montreal and am excited to see what evolves there.”

Winston only recently moved to Montreal, where her mother and grandparents grew up there. “Every summer of my life has been spent at our family cottage in Morin Heights, Que., just one hour from Montreal,” said Winston.

When she graduated in 2005 with a BA in puppetry performance from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, she wanted to move to Canada and, in the end, chose Vancouver “because I knew I could get to know people in the arts community easily through my relatives. Actually, it was through my aunt that I was originally connected to Terry [Hunter] and Savannah [Walling] of VMT back in 2008 when I got to be involved in We’re All in This Together, a shadow project in the DTES.”

However, “the pang of Montreal called me more and more,” so, this past January, she made the move. “The reason why I’m back in Vancouver right now is because of some other projects I had already planned last year…. Right now, in addition to working for Heart of the City, I’m collaborating on a music and puppetry project with Laura Barron (Instruments of Change), facilitating students in a Vancouver elementary school and then repeating the same project with students at a school in India. We did a similar program two years ago, and had already decided it would happen again this year.”

With Heart of the City, Winston is both an artist liaison, as well as a performer. She’ll be in It’s a Joke! – which has the theme “‘Stand-up for mental health” – with the Assembly, a group she’s been with about four years. “We are a playful and lofty collective of process-oriented, performance-driven, self-identifying women clowns, producing shows two to three times a year,” she said.

“Our performances at Gallery Gachet [on Oct. 28] will feature a few of the regular members of the Assembly doing short solo or duo acts from some of our previous shows,” she said. “In terms of the theme of the event … I can’t speak for stand-up comedy, as I’ve never done that before, but I can say that my mental health has been significantly affected for the better by my experience with clown. I know many other people who are similarly influenced. I hope the audience who attends this evening will get a taste of the deep psychological and spiritual power this art form has.”

Winston was in the festival last year with her solo show Just Enough and she has participated for several years – and will again this year – with Healthy Aging for the Arts, a program at Strathcona Community Centre. The group started in 2005, and it “consists of Cantonese-speaking women between the ages of 70 and 95. Every year, we explore a different style of puppetry with a theme that resonates with the members of the group. Sharon Bayly and myself have been the lead facilitators for the last five years.”

Winston noted that most of the seniors have been together since the beginning. “We all have aged together,” she said, “and I’ve been able to see the direct positive effect that art-making has on the well-being of these women.”

Despite the obvious importance of community in her work, Winston said, “I didn’t know that I was a community-engaged artist until other people started to identify me as such and until I started understanding the language of and paradigms of the art form.”

She said, “I always just did the kind of work that interested me and I got involved in whatever projects I could. I came to Vancouver with the intention of being a professional puppeteer and quickly discovered that, if I wanted to make puppet shows, I had to educate everyone around me, collaborate with artists of other disciplines and be as inclusive as possible…. Community engagement to me is simply sharing what I love to do with others. It’s about creating something together from scratch – from the ideas of those involved in the project…. I was never interested in being a traditional theatre artist, going to auditions, headshots, taking directions without having a say in them; I just wanted to tell stories and perform them creatively. Community engagement became an avenue for doing that.”

Community, in particular the DTES, is a focal point for Kravitz.

photo - Sharon Kravitz — Sharon Kravitz (photo by Ken Tabata)

“I felt a connection to the Downtown Eastside and particularly the Carnegie Centre almost immediately upon moving to Vancouver. I volunteered at Carnegie and then, the following year, I proposed a community public art project on the corner of Main and Hastings. My first night in the Carnegie in the winter of 1993 and my first summer on the corner are moments I will never forget. Coming there helped me become more of the person I wanted to be and so it will always have a very special place in my heart.”

Kravitz will come to Heart of the City with We Can’t Afford Poverty, “a participatory project that highlights the widening gap between rich and poor through community-driven art.”

“We will be making several appearances throughout the festival,” she said. “We’ll be co-hosting a print-making workshop with WePress, we’ll be taking part in the documentary night, we’re having an exhibit of kids’ art in the third floor gallery and we’ll be popping up throughout the festival with our mobile video soapbox.”

The arts play countless roles in individual and community health, she said. “The act of making art together and the bonding that happens through that process, the ability individually to respond to external and internal issues creatively helps us feel less powerless. It changes how we think, and it can change how others think.”

For Kravitz, in Judaism, “like all faiths, there is the common belief in how we treat others, and the knowledge that there is something in the world greater than all of us, who and whatever that is to someone. I grew up knowing that we needed to help each other, and it’s why were all here – to make things better for each other.”

Most Heart of the City events are free or by donation: visit heartofthecityfestival.com.

Letters offer insights

Prof. Debórah Dwork (photo by Jonathan Edelman)

Nearly two decades ago – and a full half-century after the end of the Second World War – a man in Switzerland cleaning out the apartment of his deceased aunt came across a stash of more than 1,000 letters. The discovery disclosed the aunt’s comparatively simple but valiant acts during the Holocaust and provides new insights into the lives of Jewish children and parents separated during the Holocaust.

The aunt, Elisabeth Luz, was an unmarried Protestant woman living near Zurich who appears to have stumbled into a role as the sole connection between hundreds of divided Jewish families. Because postal service between belligerent nations was restricted during the war, neutral Switzerland provided a potential channel for communication. Through what appears to have been happenstance aided by the compassion of a single devoted individual, thousands of letters made it to their intended recipients – and the record they provide demonstrates what families chose to say, and not say, in furtive missives in times of crisis.

The nephew knew that he had stumbled upon something important. He was familiar with the book Children with a Star by Prof. Debórah Dwork, a definitive study of the experiences of Jewish children under Nazism and the adults who helped them. He contacted Dwork to ask if she would like the letters. Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and founding director of the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, in Massachusetts, now possesses the letters and has studied them for years. She will be in Vancouver in just over two weeks to speak at the community’s annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture about what they tell us about families during the Holocaust.

Dwork cannot be certain how Luz came to be the intermediary for hundreds of families.

“From what I can piece together – and this is what I believe is the case – there was a refugee camp, sort of an internment camp, not a concentration camp, for refugees that had been established by the Swiss government in that town,” Dwork said. Luz went to the camp to give voluntary aid, Dwork believes, “to show with her presence that she cared about their plight.”

One of the men in the camp asked Luz whether she would be so kind as to send a letter to his wife.

“From there, it snowballed,” said Dwork. “Some of the letters that I have from the children, for example, say, ‘you don’t know me but Susie told me that you are an auntie who is willing to write to our mothers,’ and so on.”

The parents were mostly in “Greater Germany” – Germany and the areas it occupied. The children had mostly been sent to places thought to be safe, including Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Remarkably, the letters do not end in 1945. In the course of being a conduit between hundreds of parents and their children, Luz became a confidant to many of them – “Tante Elisabeth” – and remained in contact with several who continued their correspondence. The fact that the collection of letters exists at all is due in part to the fact that Luz hand-copied each one, believing that this would be less likely to catch the attention of war-era postal censors. She maintained the originals.

“Parents sent their letter to her, she copied every letter and then sent it on to the children and the children did the same in reverse,” said Dwork.

Some of the children were on the Kindertransport, the effort to transfer Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe to the United Kingdom, while others were sent by their parents to places considered safer for Jewish children.

“There were a number of children who were sent to family members or to friends or to religious organizations by their parents independently, individually,” she said, adding that there is much to be learned from the letters. “It tells us an enormous amount about family, the importance of family and the way in which family members use letters as thread to bind the family together. I think also it tells us about how children absorbed, adjusted, adapted – or did not adjust or adapt – to their ever-changing lives.”

What the letters do not always indicate is the fate of the families who sent them.

“We know a lot about the children who went on the Kindertransport to Britain, because they survived,” said Dwork. Less is known about the children sent to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. “Many of them did not survive as the Germans conquered and occupied those countries,” she said.

Of those who continued corresponding with Luz long after the war, many had lost their parents.

“Because of the relationship that developed between the children and Elisabeth Luz, those who continued to write, by and large, were now young adults whose parents did not survive and she, Elisabeth Luz, was the last tie to their prewar and wartime life,” explained Dwork. “So, she had become their confidant and that’s very important, the way Elisabeth became a confidant to the parents and the children.”

Vancouverites should join her in November not only to hear specifics about the contents of the letters, but also to reflect on some of the broader issues raised by a collection of this sort, which is a focus of Dwork’s academic work.

“The larger question, I think, is how do people keep in contact?” she said. “What do parents in Greater Germany say to their children? And what do children tell their parents about their daily lives?”

While the letters represent voices from the past, they have much to say to people today. “This is a very human story,” said Dwork. “And, as we are looking at refugees today far-flung from one spot to another, it may help us to think about how each one is a member of a family.”

The Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture takes place Nov. 1, 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. This article first appeared in VHEC’s Zachor.

Helping build brighter future

Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and the local Jewish community recently hosted Ethiopian-Israeli students Mazal Menashe and Ahuva Tsegaye. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Every second year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver hosts two Ethiopian students from the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya. This allows the students to come to Canada and intern in their chosen fields, giving them not only the educational experience but an advantage in finding work after graduation. The students also act as ambassadors for Israel while in the community and interacting with various local groups.

This year, Federation hosted Mazal Menashe and Ahuva Tsegaye. While in Vancouver for the month-long internship, the students stayed with host families Sam and Sandra Reich in Richmond and Ben and Nancy Goldberg in Vancouver; they spoke at synagogues, churches and schools.

photo - Mazal Menashe — Mazal Menashe *(photo from JFGV)*

In 1991, when Operation Solomon airlifted 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours, Menashe and Tsegaye were babies. Tsegaye’s mother, who was a midwife, gave birth to her alone on the way to Addis Ababa for the airlift, on the outskirts of Gondar. Menashe, granddaughter of Qes (Ethiopian for rabbi) Menasse Zimru, was born in Addis Ababa while her mother and father awaited the Israelis.

Menashe and Tsegaye both grew up in Israel, overcoming poverty and occasional racism to become successful young women.

Upon arriving in Israel, Tsegaye’s family lived first in Jerusalem, then Haifa, then Kfar Hahoresh in the north and, finally, Migdal Haemek, where they still live today. Her mother is a homemaker, and her father, who works for the city as a street cleaner, is now semi-retired.

Menashe’s family first moved to an absorption centre in Mabu’im in the south, near Beersheva. They lived there for a year before moving to Netivot, where they stayed until Menashe was 6, and then to Ashdod, where they live today. Her mother is a caregiver for the elderly and her father works in a factory.

Both Menashe and Tsegaye served in the Israel Defence Forces.

Menashe was drafted to the IDF in 2010, and completed training in the Logistics Corps as an outstanding soldier. After serving in the Paratroopers Brigade for two months, she was asked to go into officers’ training, which she did, becoming responsible for a company of 150 soldiers. When she was released from the army after five years, it was with the rank of lieutenant.

Tsegaye served for six and a half years, the only member of her family to become an officer. She served in an air traffic control unit in the air force as an instructional officer, and completed her service with the rank of captain.

“Serving in the IDF was the most empowering experience of my life,” said Tsegaye. Menashe agreed.

photo - Ahuva Tsegaye — Ahuva Tsegaye *(photo from JFGV)*

Menashe and Tsegaye didn’t meet in the IDF, but rather at the Interdisciplinary Centre, where they are both enrolled. In August, Jewish Federation brought them to Vancouver to work as interns in their respective fields: Menashe in law and Tsegaye in organizational psychology.

“We feel so blessed, so appreciative for what the Jewish Federation has done for us,” said Tsegaye. “And we are very grateful to have the platform to be advocates for Israel abroad.”

Both Menashe and Tsegaye have faced many challenges to get where they are now. Ethiopians in Israel face racism, poverty and challenges related to cultural and linguistic integration. The two students were both present at the mass protests that took place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last year calling for an end to racism and police brutality against Ethiopian-Israelis.

Menashe and Tsegaye broadcast strength and optimism. “We cannot wait for other people to save us,” they agreed. “We are not waiting for a savior, we will work hard and make the change ourselves.”

The power to shape their own lives, and their optimism about their ability to make the lives they want, are recurring themes in Menashe and Tsegaye’s conversation. This is fitting for members of the generation that is changing the realities of Ethiopian-Israeli life in Israel. “Our generation is entering the professional classes,” noted Menashe. “We are making a new future for Ethiopian-Israelis.”

Tsegaye added that the younger generation of Ethiopian-Israelis gives her hope. She told of going to a kindergarten where a nephew is enrolled and seeing a black doll. “I had never seen a black doll before in my entire life,” she said. “The younger Ethiopian-Israelis are much more integrated. They see themselves as Israelis.”

For community members wanting to support Jewish Federation programs such as this one, the annual campaign runs to Nov. 30. For more information, visit jewishvancouver.com.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Connect yourself in

Are you Jewish and living outside of Vancouver? The Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver wants to hear from you. Its Regional Communities Task Force has begun their work with a new survey to determine how best to engage Jews living beyond the borders of Vancouver, and they are asking you to respond.

From Whistler to Chilliwack, Federation wants to hear about the innovative and welcoming Jewish programs and services you – your friends and/or family – need close to your home.

The community is changing, with 46% of the Jewish community living beyond the borders of Vancouver, including many young families. They lack access to many Jewish community programs, services and institutions.

The fastest growing Jewish communities are Surrey/White Rock up 60%, Tri-Cities up 45%, Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows/Langley up 23%.

Almost 25% of Jewish children live outside of Vancouver, and very few attend Jewish schools or camps.

A growing number of young families are intermarried and have limited or no connection to Jewish life.

Our strength as an entire community depends on our ability to embrace our diversity and to be flexible and innovative as we engage Jews in new and increasingly relevant ways. Take a moment to respond and to reach out to your friends, family and acquaintances for them to also take the survey at jewishvancouver.com/survey.

Transit is a Jewish issue

For most Jewish-related services – cultural events, organizational meetings, day schools, high school, camps, Jewish social services – travel is required. (photo by Arnold C via commons.wikimedia.org)

Although there are multiple levels of government in Canada, it is often said, there is only one taxpayer. So it is frustrating to see necessary public policy delayed by intergovernmental squabbling.

This is what’s happening right now with plans for the future of transportation in Metro Vancouver. A year ago, area voters rejected a referendum proposal that would have seen increased taxes to fund better transit. Stagnation has been the status of transit policy since then.

In the budget tabled in March, the federal government ponied up $370 million for transit in the region.

Last week, the provincial government announced $246 million over a three-year period to improve bus and SeaBus service, purchase more SkyTrain cars and launch “initial work towards new major rapid transit in Vancouver and Surrey.”

The provincial minister in charge of TransLink, Peter Fassbender, said he expects Metro Vancouver municipalities to raise $124 million more, for a total of $740 million over three years.

Mayors of Metro municipalities have a grander scheme – to the tune of $7.5 billion over 10 years, which they would see funded through transit fare and property tax hikes, the sale of some TransLink property and more tolls on bridges and roads.

In this space, we are more accustomed to taking on manageable issues like Middle East peace rather than the seemingly intractable difficulties of moving residents of Metro Vancouver from one part of the region to another. But the issue of transportation is having serious ramification for Metro Vancouverites and things will only get worse if something nearly revolutionary doesn’t happen soon.

This has already had and will continue to have specific implications for ethnocultural communities, including the Jewish community. Real estate realities have driven successive generations of Jewish community members out of the erstwhile “Jewish neighborhood” of Oakridge, the heydays of which will be recalled in an upcoming exhibit of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.

Reflecting trends that transcend cultural boundaries, home buyers have moved in concentric circles in recent decades, outward from the city proper, first across the bridges to Richmond and the North Shore, then further east and south. Nearly half – 46% – of Metro Vancouver’s Jews now live outside the city limits, with recent years having seen notable increases in the Jewish populations of Surrey/White Rock, the Tri-Cities and the areas of Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows and Langley. While there are nodes of Jewish life in each of these locations, there is no doubt that, for most Jewish-related services – cultural events, organizational meetings, day schools, high school, camps, Jewish social services – travel is required.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver has long recognized the particular challenges of providing services to and maintaining cohesion among a community spread across a large geographic space. A recent effort, Connect Me In, is surveying Jewish British Columbians who live outside Vancouver and asking how the communal umbrella agency can serve their needs.

Federation is trying to provide services to people where they live so that it is less necessary to come “into the city.” Yet even the best laid plans well executed cannot erase the barriers of time and space between, say, Squamish and 41st and Oak. Moreover, the delivery of services where Jewish people live will still require some movement … from the core outward.

Maintaining cohesion within our community in such a situation depends both on the ability of our community agencies to respond to the needs, as well as the desire of suburbanites to maintain connection to the Jewish community. It also depends, in ways we should not underestimate, on the simple ability to move from Point A to Point B in the Lower Mainland. Transit is a Jewish issue.

Update from the Okanagan

Left to right: Evan Orloff, Melina Moore, Barb Pullan lighting the candles, Rebecca Morlang and Hilla Shlomi. (photo by Roger Tepper)

The Okanagan Jewish Community has been busy over the last couple of months. They are also gearing up for their annual golf tournament, which takes place in July.

On April 22, the OJC hosted a Passover seder at Summerhill Winery. Led by Allan Holender, approximately 150 people attended, including 30 kids under 12. Dr. Jessica Strasberg organized the children’s crafts and activities, Ronit Little made the charoset for all the tables and Steven Finkleman helped with many of the food preparations and putting together the 18 seder plates; David Spevakow and Barb Druxerman volunteered a great deal of their time on preparations and planning. Steven Cipes and his family, of Summerhill Winery, hosted the event.

photo - Writer and consultant Allan Holender leads the Passover seder with some young help — Writer and consultant Allan Holender leads the Passover seder with some young help. *(photo from Okanagan Jewish Community)*

Also in April, Cantor Russell Jayne from Beth Tzedec in Calgary came to the Okanagan to lead services. On May 7, with special guests from the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) in attendance, OJC member Evan Orloff led the services, after which there was a dairy potluck. A new rabbi has been contracted for the High Holidays this year and the OJC is looking forward to having Rabbi Lawrence Seidman and his wife Linda – who is also a rabbi – join them.

On May 15, Orloff and fellow OJC members Ed Aizen, Max and Peggy Mandelbaum, Barb Pullan, Hilla Shlomi and Seymour Zidle attended a Holocaust remembrance service held at the Lakers Clubhouse in Vernon hosted by the ICEJ. The event was put on because members of the ICEJ were greatly disturbed by the rising amount of antisemitism in the world. The ceremony included speeches, candlelighting and the presentation of a copy of the names on Schindler’s list encased in a replica suitcase which was accepted by Orloff on behalf of the OJC. Orloff is a retired teacher in Kelowna; he dedicated much of his career to educating students about the Holocaust and why it is imperative to remember. Melina Moore performed the theme song from Schindler’s List and sang Hatikvah. The service honored the lives of those who died in the Holocaust and the resilience and courage of survivors, as well as saying “never again” and “no” to antisemitism and prejudice in all its forms. The OJC is very grateful to the ICEJ, led by members Gail Mobbs and Daniel Morlang, for putting on such a touching ceremony.

During this past month, the OJC has had seven groups of students, ranging from 30 to 50 students per group from four middle and secondary schools in the area, participate in its Talks & Tours, hosted by OJC members Finkleman and Orloff. The students heard a presentation on Judaism and then enjoyed challah and grape juice with an explanation of the significance. Some of the schools attend the seminars annually, finding the presentations educational and interesting.

Last but not least, the 19th annual OJC Golf Tournament is being held on July 21. The money generated from the tournament each year enables the OJC to continue bringing in guest rabbis and cantors and to provide programming for the community; this year, part of the proceeds will also help Canadian Blood Services, a charity chosen in honor of the late Sid Segal. There is still room available for more golfers (and hole sponsors) so, if you are interested in participating in this day of golf, food, drinks and social interaction, visit ojcc.ca or contact Anne Zazuliak at the OJC office, 250-862-2305 or [email protected].