education – Page 4

Teaching about Shoah

Lise Kirchner, director of education of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, demonstrates the online exhibition Fragments in Focus: A History of the Holocaust (photo by Pat Johnson)

The school year that begins next month is the first in British Columbia to include mandatory Holocaust education in the curriculum. As teachers throughout the province prepare to address this challenging topic in the classroom, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre has unveiled a wide-reaching online exhibit to both assist educators and to launch students into independent exploration on the complex network of moral and historical issues the subject raises.

In October 2023, the BC government announced that Holocaust education would be mandatory in the Grade 10 social studies curriculum beginning in the 2025/26 academic year. Many teachers were already addressing the topic as part of Social Studies 10, which covers the Second World War. An elective course, Genocide 12, also exposes students to the history of the Shoah. However, this is the first year that it will be impossible for a student to complete Grade 10 in the province without some exposure to the Nazis’ attempts to destroy the Jewish people and other groups they deemed undesirable.

While mandating that the topic be covered, the ministry of education’s guidelines for learning outcomes are extremely vague. Lise Kirchner, director of education of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, said teachers have great flexibility in how to address the topic – and how much time to give it.

“The teacher can choose to spend four minutes, four hours or four months on the subject,” she said.

Given that many teachers will be seeking trusted resources to teach this material for the first time, the VHEC’s exhibit promises to deliver everything educators need to address the subject effectively, no matter how much class time they allocate to it.

“Over the last 18 months, the VHEC has been working with the ministry of education to articulate this new learning standard for Social Studies 10 and also to develop teaching resources to support educators as they implement Holocaust education in the classroom,” Kirchner told attendees at the VHEC’s annual general meeting in June, where she demonstrated the new online resource.

The exhibition is called Fragments in Focus: A History of the Holocaust. It has been produced with the support of the Digital Museums Canada investment program and the financial support of the Government of Canada. The website is in English and French and meets accessibility standards for people with disabilities.

The online exhibit showcases more than 160 primary sources, including artifacts, survivor testimonies and archival records from the VHEC’s collections, presenting the history of the era through these items.

Fragments in Focus explores Jewish life in Europe before the war, the Holocaust and its impacts, and postwar Jewish life. Users can explore digital 3D models of artifacts, engage with an interactive map and hear from survivors – most of those featured settled in British Columbia after the war – adding human faces and stories to the artifacts and the broader history.

Accompanying the Fragments in Focus exhibit are 20 integrated learning activities and a comprehensive teachers’ guide, providing everything required to navigate the exhibit, construct a complete unit on the Holocaust or supplement existing lessons using unique primary sources, according to the VHEC.

The VHEC’s education team is also available to support educators as they prepare to cover these topics, offering training workshops throughout the province.

Textbooks, which earlier generations might associate with high school, are mostly a thing of the past. Online resources have replaced most hard copy resources, making Fragments in Focus both relevant and accessible.

Historical introductions to each of the exhibit’s sections lead into artifacts, and students can then pursue their own explorations by finding out more about the individual associated with the item, their experience of survival and their life after the war.

For example, students can view a recipe book created by Rebecca Teitelbaum while she was an inmate in Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp. Risking her life, she stole paper, pencils and thread to compile the collection of favourite foods. The tiny booklet became a source of comfort for the women in Ravensbruck, allowing them to imagine a future of well-being and plenty.

The late Alex Buckman, Teitelbaum’s nephew and himself a survivor of the Holocaust, inherited the recipe book, which he eventually donated to the VHEC. During speaking engagements to young audiences, Buckman would share his aunt’s recipe for gâteau à l’orange and some students would make the cake at home, while sharing with their families what they had learned at school.

With the new exhibit, students can explore the recipe book, expand the image to see the stitching that held the book together, and then read transcripts of the recipes. More than this, they can then dig deeper and learn about the family’s story, of Rebecca’s survival and her reunification with her husband, Herman, and daughter, Annie. They can hear Buckman’s story of how he survived but lost both his parents and was raised by the Teitelbaums.

Students also can see the correspondence Rebecca received while in hospital after the war, informing her that both Herman and Annie had miraculously survived.

These artifacts and records help put this almost inconceivable history into context, said Kirchner.

“They now are reading these intimate letters between husband and wife, where they are dreaming of being together again with her daughter,” she said. “I think it brings a whole different dimension to how we understand history, the importance of these primary objects.”

The fact that almost all the objects have a BC connection adds richness to the experience, she said.

As director of education, Kirchner has led a team in bringing Fragments in Focus to fruition. Though the exhibit was in development before the province announced the curriculum change, the shift helped guide the VHEC team to make the resource especially responsive to the needs of educators and students.

Fragments in Focus is based on an earlier physical exhibit developed by former VHEC director of education Ilona Shulman Spaar, former executive director Nina Krieger and others, including Kirchner, who has been involved with the VHEC for about 25 years in various capacities.

“We mounted In Focus – we didn’t call it Fragments in Focus – as the first exhibition in the new renovated space,” Kirchner told the Independent, referring to a major upgrade to the museum in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Centre, which substantially increased the capacity to display items from the collections. “It was kind of a celebration of the fact that we had just digitized our entire collection – that was a very big project. With the new visual storage facilities, it gave us the ability to actually have multiple artifacts on display, over 100, so that was a pretty big deal for us.”

The ongoing digitization of the VHEC’s entire archives allows global audiences to access its collections. For BC students, starting within days, Fragments in Focus will open doors for self-guided learning.

“We give them just enough information so they can put it in context, but also pique their curiosity a little bit so that they start to see themselves as the ones that ask these questions and start to make sense of this history and to give it meaning. It’s taking ownership of that history,” said Kirchner. “We are just planting seeds and making sure they have enough information to ask the right questions and to see the complexity of that history.”

The online exhibit launched Aug. 20 at fragmentsinfocus.ca and is available to everyone.

The school year ahead

Back to school is a time of excitement and anxiety for parents and kids. It is a time of new beginnings. For Jewish people, it generally coincides, as it roughly does this year, with the new year and the High Holidays. This confluence creates a somewhat chaotic frenzy in many households.

Jewish tradition is deeply tied to cycles of time, weaving renewal and return into every layer of life. The turning of the calendar is reflected not only in Shabbat, the progression of holy days and the annual cycle of Torah reading, but also in agricultural rhythms, the monthly sanctification of the new moon and daily prayers mapping sunrise, midday and nightfall.

This year, as we move from the beginning of the school year through the procession of holidays, we approach the anniversary of Oct. 7, and the terrible realization that the surviving hostages in Gaza have been held for nearly two years – as well as the continued reality facing Israelis, Palestinians, Jews worldwide and everyone who cares about human life.

As the new school year begins, Jewish families have additional anxieties, knowing as we do that the public school system – not least some teachers’ unions in Canada, including the one in British Columbia – in many cases have not only failed to address the unique challenges faced by Jewish students but exacerbated existing problems while creating new ones. Almost everyone has heard anecdotally of insults and distress faced by Jewish students in public schools, and the situation on post-secondary campuses locally and internationally has been in the news for all the wrong reasons for most of the past two years.

Additionally, this school year marks the first in which British Columbia’s education system officially mandates the teaching of the Holocaust. Most students did learn about the Holocaust before, but it had been left up to the discretion of individual teachers. Now, the Social Studies 10 curriculum requires that the topic be included. (See jewishindependent.ca/teaching-about-shoah.) This is something that the Jewish community and others have long promoted.

It does, however, create new openings for challenges. Given the allegations of genocide in Gaza, and overheated rhetoric against Israel in the public discourse – often invoking the memory of the Holocaust, the mantra “never again” and the appropriation of Jewish historical experiences for political advantage – there is a real possibility that individual teachers in the comparative privacy of their classrooms will attempt to inculcate anti-Israel narratives in the guise of genocide education. We expect there will be reports of inappropriate comparisons made between the Jewish experience in the Shoah and current tragedies in the Middle East – and we know that most such incidents will never be reported.

It should never have come to this with regard to antisemitism, but powerful new generations of Jewish leaders have been forged on university campuses and, yes, in high schools and even elementary schools, rising to occasions they should never have had to meet, but doing so in ways that often have surprised even themselves. As tough as the past two years have been, all evidence so far points to young Jews continuing to rise to every challenge.

When all is said and done, we hope that the next generation of our community grows up stronger, smarter and more determined, individually and collectively. To students and parents: May you go from strength to strength this year and always.

What to do with all our stuff

Recently, I was in the car with one of my twins and we were discussing how easy it is to accumulate too much stuff. We’d just had a conversation with a neighbour who mentioned that his sibling had moved into their parents’ house as an adult. It was a large, old home, now sadly so full of stacks of papers and other belongings that one had to turn sideways to navigate some of it.

I commiserated with my neighbour, misunderstanding the level of hoarding. I imagined how hard it must be to move, as an adult with a household, into a home already full of one’s parents’ belongings. Alas, our neighbour said, it was a mental health issue. It’s sometimes referred to as a hoarding disorder or Diogenes syndrome. It was serious.

In the car with my kid, we found ourselves understanding how people get to this point. He said, quite astutely, that our society pushes “more, more, more.” We both agreed that it is hard to resist the siren song of acquisition that we’re constantly hearing. Choosing to stop, clean, tidy and cull things and acknowledge what we don’t need is even harder than resisting new acquisitions.

I was faced with my own “hoarding” scenario. My personal, free email account is more than 20 years old. Suddenly, I got a warning about a month ago that the storage on these accounts would be slashed dramatically. I could choose to pay a fee every month or delete a lot of messages. My husband got a similar warning, but his account was not as old or big as mine. Even so, we commiserated, because deleting some of these saved emails felt painful. Save the baby photo elsewhere and then delete the message? One by one, it didn’t seem to make a dent. Eventually, I figured out how to move older messages to a folder on my computer and I didn’t have to delete messages from people I’d loved who have now died; I didn’t have to cull every family photo.

Still, this exercise made us look around. My kids, about to start high school, decided that they didn’t need about 75 books on their shelves, acquired over the years from Scholastic book fairs, PJ Library and elsewhere. They are making plans to sell or donate the books.

Each kid, getting ready for a new school year, worked to empty out enormous middle school binders. They recycled tons of paper. They acknowledged that we no longer needed a Grade 5 workbook leftover from those pandemic days of learning at home. Both kids realized we needed to make space in their backpacks: for new intellectual growth and a new school year.

As my kids grow physically this summer, I’m knitting as fast as I can to make them new sweaters for winter but I’m knitting a sweater now out of “stash” yarns that I acquired when they were infants. Both kids are now bigger than me. The sweaters I make from now on will likely be too big for me when they outgrow them.

This is a balancing act, of course. It’s normal in our household to get some new things for a new school year, even if we reuse the old stuff, too. This celebration of something new even has a word for it in Modern Hebrew. We might say “Tithadash!” or “May it renew you!” when you see someone with new belongings.

At the same time, I’ve been studying the Babylonian tractate of Avodah Zarah. It explores how Jews are to interact with non-Jews or those who might worship idols. One of the concepts it covers is whether one can reuse anything that might have been used by someone who engaged in idol worship. This is a complicated topic. It involves both “decommissioned” idols and whatever was used to sacrifice to the idol. One also must consider whether any of these items might be ever “reused” in Jewish worship or sacrifice, in the days when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. It goes even farther, examining what one does about an idol created by Jews in the first place, like the Golden Calf. The tractate is sometimes confusing because it’s in so much detail.

That said, I returned to something else the text seemed to be telling us. In some cases, these items can be reused. The underlying message explores what we waste or throw away, versus how we can give things “new lives” even if their first use wasn’t ideal.

Nobody is worshipping idols at our house, but we’re discussing reuse, as well as the acquisition of new things for the upcoming school year. I see 14-year-olds evaluating their lunch bags and considering making themselves new ones. There was a pile of shirts in the give-away pile after we cleaned up today. I even saw a completely tidy sock drawer. This may never happen again!

I’m not sure how to always resist or even push back against our consumerist culture. However, the talmudic debate over physical leftovers from idol worship and what might be used again and/or refurbished made me realize that this struggle isn’t new. Just as we hope our kids are off to learn more with each school year, we also hope they’ll hold onto the good, sweet things that they embodied at younger ages, too. New, shiny ideas and things are tempting, but there’s something powerful and potentially meaningful about reuse, too.

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

FSWC gives workshop

Left to right: Emily Bonnell-Marcus (Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre), Zelda Dean (Emanu-El), Johanna Herman (FSWC), April Nowell (Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island), Frances Grunberg (JFVVI) and Jaime Stein (FSWC, Western Canada). (photo from FSWC)

On Aug. 12, more than 80 people from diverse faith backgrounds gathered at Victoria’s Congregation Emanu-El for Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s flagship antisemitism education workshop – Antisemitism: Then and Now.

Geared for professionals, community members and volunteers who are interested in combating hatred, the workshop is presented by Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island in partnership with FSWC. It is designed to build historical understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust, examine how antisemitism shows up today, offer practical strategies to recognize and respond to antisemitic rhetoric and behaviour, and strengthen an organization’s capacity for allyship and inclusivity.

While in British Columbia, FSWC advocacy team members also attended the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference. During the event, they strengthened their partnership with the Canadian Police Knowledge Network to advance the development of a national antisemitism training module, which will be made available to police services across the country. They also established new connections to support their law enforcement training initiatives, and promoted the upcoming Building a Case Against Hate Conference in Vancouver, scheduled for February.

For more information, visit fswc.ca.

– Courtesy Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre

Power of propaganda

Understanding the past, including the darkest eras, can help people recognize the symptoms of a society going off the rails.

A forthcoming book for young readers, titled Can Posters Kill? Antisemitic Propaganda and World War II, by Torontonians Jerry Faivish and Kathryn Cole, explores how propaganda and racist imagery desensitized a society to atrocities.

Faivish, a retired lawyer, has collected Jewish posters since young adulthood, building one of the world’s largest private collections. The son of Holocaust survivors, he created this book with Cole, an illustrator, art director, editor, designer and publisher, to educate young people about the dangers of hatred and the powers of persuasion used for evil ends.

The richly illustrated publication spotlights how vivid imagery and repetition intended to evoke fear, distrust, loyalty or revulsion served to influence populations to accept (even collaborate in) barbarism.

“By understanding the visual language of propaganda from the past, we can learn to recognize and resist messages of hate – an essential skill in a digital world where information is spread in seconds,” according to the publisher, Second Story Press.

Aimed at readers 13 and up, this book about the past has its purpose firmly planted in the present and future.

“Like social media today,” write the authors, “visual communication in the ’30s and ’40s – from movies to newspapers to paper posters – was clever and interesting, engaging and effective. But, under Nazi manipulation, it became deadly.”

The focus of the book is visual, befitting a volume of this topic, with just enough copy to contextualize the imagery and point out salient aspects that the reader might not have noticed. It is also perhaps a perfect mix of text and graphics for the generation it aims to reach.

The authors provide a brief overview of the post-First World War economic conditions in Germany, the impacts of the Treaty of Versailles, and Hitler’s rise to power. This history tilled the soil for the hate-messaging showcased.

“A false message, when repeated often enough, can become the truth in the minds of people who are frightened, oppressed and searching for someone to blame for their misfortune during hard times,” the book warns.

Can Posters Kill? also delves into how graphic design played into the success of the brainwashing – “clever use of different typefaces grabs the attention of passersby,” among other innovations.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ minister of propaganda, who more than any other individual is associated with this sort of material, did not overestimate his audience.

“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine,” he is quoted in the book. “Propaganda must, therefore, always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run, only he will achieve basic results in influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in the simplified form, despite the objections of intellectuals.”

The messages his department imparted were subtle as sledgehammers.

In one poster, a doctor or scientist is looking through a microscope at a vicious “Jewish” disease devouring healthy tissue. Jews are characterized as sexual deviants and blamed for spreading tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer.

“It’s a chilling message because it can quickly turn into ‘kill or be killed,’” the book says.

In another poster, a Jew hovers menacingly over the globe, spinning a web from his index finger.

“This reinforces the Nazi-supported notion that Jews are power-hungry and backed by secret cabals or conspirators,” the authors write.

Jews are depicted as the mortal enemy of Christianity and the Star of David is equated alongside the communist red star, implying a dual-pronged threat to German society.

Faivish shares his family’s story: his mother’s experiences in various ghettos, work and concentration camps, and at extermination sites such as Auschwitz, and his father’s defiant escape from a cattle car headed for the gas chambers. Faivish’s father lost his parents and his eight siblings in the Holocaust. His mother had just one surviving brother and one remaining sister out of a family of 10.

Faivish goes into some detail about the experiences of his mother in the constellation of Nazi ghettos and camps, and his father’s unlikely survival in hiding, thanks to a gentile Polish family. He places significant emphasis on the heroism of non-Jews.

“After the war, my parents met in Bergen-Belsen, the DP camp where they married and started a family,” he writes. “My older sister was born there in 1949.… In 1952, my parents immigrated to Canada. In 1953, I was born in Montreal. For my parents, the question of how to deal with recurring hate, and what could be done about it, was more than philosophical. It became a guideline for how to live their lives and what to pass on to their children. The lessons they taught us are still applicable and valuable today.”

He includes nine values his parents instilled in him and that he hopes the book will pass on to others, including: be proud of who you are and embrace your faith and culture [because the] aim of the “Final Solution” was to annihilate Jews and to destroy Judaism; respect your fellow human beings and treat them well; and recognize and eliminate hate and evil as much as possible.

A timeline of historical events and an excellent glossary of relevant terms are included at the end of the book.

As British Columbia and other provinces institute mandatory Holocaust education in school curricula, books like Can Posters Kill? Antisemitic Propaganda and World War II provide powerful resources for educators to convey the lessons of history in ways that are impactful but age-appropriate, with undeniable and clear lessons around critical media consumption for contemporary generations.

While not formally related, the book is also a valuable complement to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s current exhibition, Age of Influence: Youth & Nazi Propaganda, which is being reconfigured into a traveling exhibit.

Israeli dance sessions

The Vancouver Israeli Folk Dance Society hosted their annual BeLev Echad Workshop at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver May 23-25. The society is holding an open house on Sept. 10 for anyone interested in seeing what Israeli dance is all about. (photo from VIFS)

The Vancouver Israeli Folk Dance Society (VIFS) hosted their annual BeLev Echad Workshop at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver May 23-25. With a spring theme and the Dance with One Heart slogan, VIFS welcomed more than 100 dancers from at least 12 different cities from all over the world, as far east as Italy and as far south as Costa Rica. This year’s guest choreographers/teachers were Tamir Shalev from Israel, on his ﬁrst visit to Vancouver, and Marcelo Marianoff from Argentina – on his ﬁfth consecutive visit.

The weekend started with a Shabbat dinner catered by Nava Creative Kosher Cuisine, followed by a dance party that only wrapped up at 1 a.m. Saturday was devoted to teaching and dancing, meeting new friends and catching up with old acquaintances, and even trying one’s hand at a 1,000-piece puzzle. Attendees could choose between a more relaxed-paced room or the main auditorium for more advanced dancers. Both circle and couple dances were taught. The evening session began with games of balloon pickle ball, and there was a caricaturist artist on site as well. After Havdalah, the dance party began with line dances, circle and couple dances. The hardiest and most energetic dancers continued dancing until 2 a.m.! On Sunday morning, dancers once more gathered for some new learning and a review of all the dances introduced over the weekend.

The event was sponsored by the Snider Foundation, the Lorna Donner Fund, the JCC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver. It could not have been as great a success as it was without all of those who organized and led it. Many thanks to the wonderful volunteer helpers throughout the weekend. Planning for next year’s workshop is already underway: mark May 29-31, 2026, on your calendar.

VIFS is an inclusive and welcoming community where people of all ages, background and abilities come together to explore and nurture a deep love for Israeli dance and music. On Wednesday, Sept. 10, the society will hold its annual open house, and all those who are interested are encouraged to come and see what Israeli dance is all about.

On Oct. 22, VIFS starts its next season of Beginner’s 1, where new dancers and those who may want a refresher course can learn the basics and start to learn the repertoire. The intermediate class season will also begin on this date, and it will help incorporate dancers into the larger group, as well as teach more of the repertoire. This will be followed by an open session, which combines circles and couples, teaching the newer dances that are currently circulating. There will also be a Monday afternoon session that is only circles, and is devoted to dancing and teaching older repertoire that may not have been danced for many years.

Everyone is welcome to any of VIFS’s sessions – no dance experience is necessary, just a smile and lots of enthusiasm. For more information, contact Pam at 604-839-3931, Nona at 778-834-3488 or Yael at 604-993-0223; or visit vancouverisraelidance.com.

– Courtesy Vancouver Israeli Folk Dance Society

New day school opens

Tamim Academy of Vancouver is accepting kindergarten through Grade 5 applications for the 2025-2026 school year. (photo from TAV)

Tamim Academy of Vancouver, a new Jewish day school, is accepting applications for the 2025-2026 school year.

Located at Granville and 62nd, in what was the premises of Vancouver Hebrew Academy, Tamim will offer an integrated Judaic and general studies curriculum, with small class sizes.

Vancouver Hebrew Academy had been struggling financially. Several VHA staff members will help as the transition to Tamim takes place. New staff will also be joining the team and “will undergo intensive summer training to prepare for Tamim’s unique, child-centred educational approach,” Rabbi Shmulik Yeshayahu, who sits on the board of the school, told the Independent.

Open to all Jewish families, no matter how observant, Tamim will start this fall with a kindergarten through Grade 5 program and expand to include Grade 6 in 2026 and Grade 7 in 2027. Additionally, Ner Atid, a full-day early-years program for children 5 years old and under, just launched, with the aim of providing a smooth transition into the elementary school. Spots for younger siblings in the Ner Atid daycare program, adjacent to the school, are available as well.

“Together, Tamim and Ner Atid offer a seamless educational journey rooted in tradition and ready for the future, beginning in infancy and extending through the foundational years of learning and growth,” said Yeshayahu, who is also the director the Ohel Ya’akov Community Kollel.

The school day will be from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with optional extracurricular activities – an hour before and/or an hour after those times – included at no extra cost.

“Our objective is to create a school that offers a unified, child-centred and future-ready approach to Jewish education, where academic excellence and spiritual development go hand in hand,” Yeshayahu said.

“At Tamim, general and Judaic studies are integrated, not compartmentalized – reflecting the belief that students should be empowered to live as their whole selves in every environment. We educate the whole child,” he said, “nurturing intellectual growth, emotional well-being, social responsibility and Jewish identity in equal measure.”

Yeshayahu emphasized that each student at the school will have their own learning plan, developed to meet their unique strengths, interests and areas for growth. Tamim offers an educational model that is personal, and designed for the real world, he said.

According to Yeshayahu, the school will include Hebrew taught by native speakers; a values-based culture that stresses kindness, responsibility, resilience and leadership; a nutritious hot lunch; and a diverse community.

photo - Tamim Academy of Vancouver will offer an integrated Judaic and general studies curriculum, with small class sizes — Tamim Academy of Vancouver will offer an integrated Judaic and general studies curriculum, with small class sizes. *(photo from TAV)*

Among some of the additional program highlights will be gardening, nature exploration (hiking and wildlife observation) and art across several media. The school, with access to a large field and playground, will also feature outdoor play.

“Tamim students don’t just learn, they flourish,” said Yeshayahu. “They leave school each day feeling capable, connected and proud of who they are.”

Yeshayahu made clear that, while the Tamim Academy is situated on the location of the former Vancouver Hebrew Academy, it is a completely new school with a distinct vision, leadership team and educational model.

“Tamim Academy of Vancouver is part of a growing international network of schools that are reimagining Jewish education for today’s world,” he said.

“We honour the legacy of Jewish education in this city,” said Yeshayahu. “Tamim carries that commitment forward with renewed energy, a modern educational philosophy and a warm, inclusive community. We welcome Jewish families of all levels of observance and are proud to offer a space where every child is supported, celebrated and inspired to grow.”

Laen Hershler, the school’s director of education, is currently a teaching associate and mentor for pre-service teachers at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on literacy education, creative pedagogy and inclusive teaching methods. He has previously served as a Judaic educator at King David High School, developed interactive and performance-based learning programs, and contributed to curriculum development across K-12 and post-secondary education.

Itay Reuven – a former army officer and commander, with a background in business studies – is the school’s operations and safety coordinator, and Preet Brar serves as director of student life, innovation and learning enrichment.

Khezia Gibbons is the manager of Ner Atid Early Childhood Centre. She brings more than a decade of experience in early childhood education and, most recently, worked with the Township of Langley, where she guided young learners.

Tamim Academy of Vancouver will be the third Tamim in Canada after those established in the York region north of Toronto and the Kineret Tamim Academy, which opened in Victoria last year. (See jewishindependent.ca/groundbreaking-may-26.) There are 20 such academies in North America, and others around the world. The name stems from Tomchei Temimim, the first formal yeshiva system of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that was founded in 1897 by Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneerson in Russia. Each student was referred to as tamim: pure, perfect or complete. The assumption is that each child is inherently holy and good, with the concept of “wholeness” being the foundation of the education model.

For more information, visit tamimvancouver.org.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Marazzi at VHEC helm

Hannah Marazzi is the new executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. (photo by Alina Ilyasova)

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which is marking three decades of educating about and commemorating the Shoah, has a new executive director: Hannah Marazzi. She is the first person of non-Jewish background to hold the role.

Barry Dunner was the first executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance, the not-for-profit organization that operates the VHEC. Ronnie Tessler then helmed the centre, followed by the late Dr. Roberta Kremer, then Frieda Miller. Nina Krieger served more than a decade as head of the institution before successfully running for the British Columbia legislature last fall. (See story, jewishindependent.ca/krieger-takes-on-new-roles.)

Marazzi had been the VHEC’s director of communications and special projects for about 10 months before being appointed interim executive director. Her permanent appointment was announced on June 17, at the annual general meeting of the society.

The organization’s president, Al Szajman, credited Marazzi’s background as a good fit.

Formally announcing Marazzi’s appointment, Szajman noted her role as “Irwin Cotler’s right-hand person” and her existing relationships with partner groups like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and with various foundations, government leaders and influencers locally, nationally and internationally.

“In short, we’ve come to recognize Hannah as a leader, someone with passion, vision and maturity. Her Italian-Mennonite background reminds everyone that you don’t have to be Jewish to stand against antisemitism and advance the lessons that everyone should have learned about the Shoah,” he said.

Marazzi has an undergraduate degree in history, political science and government from Trinity Western University and a master’s degree in public policy from Cambridge, where she served as an assistant editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Early in her career, she was working on Parliament Hill when Cotler reached out to her boss, then-MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country John Weston, to become involved in the case of a woman sentenced to death in Iran. Through the Cotler connection, Marazzi went on to help organize the Nuremberg Legal Symposium. The gathering, which was co-created by March of the Living and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in 2016, educated legal professionals and the next generation about the lessons of Nuremberg and how to apply them today, especially as the legal sector addresses hate, denial and incitement. Marazzi became administrative coordinator for the event.

She went on to work for the Cardus Institute, a Christian think tank, and then for United Nations Volunteers, in Amman, Jordan, before Cotler coaxed her to join him when he was appointed to inaugurate the office of Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

Marazzi returned to the West Coast – she grew up in the Fraser Valley – to be closer to her family when her father faced a health crisis.

Addressing the VHEC annual meeting, Marazzi paid tribute to the founders of the organization, who opened the doors to the centre 30 years ago, including Dr. Robert Krell, the founding president, who was present at the meeting.

She reflected on her first visit to Auschwitz, at age 22, 10 days after graduating from university.

“I did not know then that I would return to places like Auschwitz, Treblinka and many other sites of memory and begin learning in my own country at places like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre,” she said. “I feel strongly in my bones that we must not allow the lessons of the Holocaust to fade from memory. As my mentor Irwin Cotler says, ‘No one can say that we did not know. We knew. But we did not act.’ This is why I believe so resolutely in the power of Holocaust education to awaken us to the reality of what happens when a society, through silence and inaction, allows evil to flourish unchecked.”

The VHEC has become Western Canada’s leading Holocaust museum dedicated to the promotion of social justice, human rights and genocide awareness. It is at a turning point in its history, as all such facilities prepare for an era when there are no longer eyewitnesses to the events who can share their narratives.

Holocaust museums have increasingly used technology to capture and immortalize those stories – and Marazzi credited Krell as a pioneer in that field, having begun one of the world’s earliest archives of video-recorded survivor testimonies, beginning when the technology was fresh.

Broader developments in the community will have a profound impact on the VHEC. The centre is slated to double in size and attain a new visibility thanks to JWest, the redevelopment of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, where the VHEC is located.

Marazzi emphasized the importance of partnerships in the VHEC’s success, including local connections, such as with the Roma and Rwandan communities. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the VHEC partnered with the University of British Columbia to bring to Vancouver

Dr. Nataliia Ivchyk – an expert on Holocaust studies in Ukraine and East-Central Europe, focusing on gender, memory politics and the experiences of Jewish children during the Holocaust – who was identified as a scholar-at-risk. At the VHEC, Ivchyk took on the Russian-Language Holocaust Testimony Project, conducting interviews with Russian-speaking survivors in the Lower Mainland.

Internationally, World Jewish Congress has reached out to borrow the centre’s current exhibit, Age of Influence, which focuses on how the Nazi regime used propaganda specifically targeted at raising and indoctrinating young Germans. Demand for this exhibit, an original VHEC creation, has led to the creation of traveling versions.

Marazzi acknowledged that, when she tells people where she works, they sometimes suggest it must be a depressing daily grind.

“It’s actually the most hopeful place you can be at this time,” she said. “You have the survivors who have experienced unimaginable horrors and yet not only are they here with us contributing to society in extraordinary ways, they are willing to dig deep into what was the worst experience of their life and share it to educate students.”

The VHEC has never been busier, she added. Hundreds of kids, teachers and adults, including elected officials and diplomats, law enforcement, groups of coworkers, unions and others, attend the exhibits every week. At national and international conferences, Marazzi has discovered this is not the case in all such institutions. Security fears and possibly other factors have seen attendance drop in many Holocaust education institutions, she said, even amid a flourishing of antisemitism and intolerance, the phenomena they are intended to address.

Marazzi credits the trajectory of success with the work that the VHEC has done for the past 30 years in creating relationships based on trust and mutual respect with other communities, school districts and educators across the province.

“We are completely inundated and it’s exhausting but it’s delightful,” she said.

The confluence of events – Marazzi’s appointment, the impending expansion of the VHEC and the global increase of antisemitism – place the organization at a moment of challenge and opportunity, said Szajman.

“The moment is – I was going to say big, but it’s huge,” he said. “In my lifetime, I’ve never seen the kind of antisemitism that I’m witnessing now. It sounds horrible, but I’m glad my father, a Holocaust survivor who passed away a few years ago, doesn’t have to see it. I think there’s been a very overt and visible right-wing antisemitism for decades. What we’ve witnessed over the last few years in particular is this explosion of left-wing antisemitism, sometimes overt, sometimes veiled – and thinly veiled at that.”

The organization’s work has never been more important, he said.

While the eventually expanded VHEC will accommodate more visitors, Szajman noted that the centre has always reached beyond its walls, going to audiences where they are – both in-person and through virtual technologies even before these became everyday tools during COVID.

Szajman used to call the VHEC “the little engine that could.”

That’s not true, though, he said.

“It’s the little engine that does. It’s remarkable. This tiny little group of people who bust their butts every day putting in incredible hours, are so committed, including not just Jewish staff. It’s non-Jewish staff, too, that are so committed to this that, as a board member and as president, I couldn’t be any more motivated if you paid me,” he said, adding with a trademark laugh: “And they don’t.”

Editor’s note: This article is different than the print version that ran July 25, 2025, to reflect more fully the list of executive directors who helmed the VHEC.

Family Day at the farm

Family Day at Stable Harvest Farm was educational – and fun! (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Sunday, July 6, was a beautiful sunny day. Perfect for a visit to Stable Harvest Farms, in Langley, to enjoy one of its Family Days.

My wife and I joined the first tours of the morning. Our group of maybe 50 people, including lots of young children, was split into two, after a brief introduction by one of the university student interns who work on the farm over the summer. We were then led through some of the fields, where we learned a bit about the vegetables and flowers being grown there, while the other half of the group started at the petting zoo.

photo - two pigs at Stable Harvest Farm — Just two of the many animals at Stable Harvest Farm. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Stable Harvest Farms, a nonprofit founded by Syd Belzberg, welcomes more than 15,000 visitors a year – families, educators, students, volunteers, members of various groups. Several Jewish organizations have participated in the educational offerings. For example, Vancouver Talmud Torah has been involved since the farm’s establishment five years ago, with students from grades 2 to 7 visiting once or twice a year.

“We continue to feed and support organizations both Jewish and non-Jewish through JFS [Jewish Family Services] and Meals on Wheels, and countless other nonprofit organizations,” Belzberg told the JI.

Stable Harvest has donated well over 360,000 pounds of produce since 2020 to various communities in Greater Vancouver. On our tour, we found out how that produce is grown and harvested organically, stopping at some of the 12 education stations that have been created for visiting schoolchildren and others. The stations cover a wide range, from what’s in a seed, to what organic agriculture is, to methods of irrigation. One of the coolest stops was the bat boxes, houses for owls and bug hotels station. But, I have to admit, feeding the sheep and the Nigerian dwarf goats was the most fun. And we got to see the beekeeper in action.

photo - On our tour, we found out how that produce is grown and harvested organically, stopping at some of the 12 education stations that have been created for visiting schoolchildren and others — On our tour, we found out how that produce is grown and harvested organically, stopping at some of the 12 education stations that have been created for visiting schoolchildren and others. *(photo by Cynthia Ramsay)*

In addition to the learning stations, there are signs everywhere. All the crops are labeled with what’s being grown and fun facts abound. Did you know that there are some 27 different types of broccoli, for instance? Or that snapdragons are edible, and can be used for dyeing cloth?

Farmer Maya led our group, making sure we all had enough water and were faring well in the heat. All the staff are “mentored by an experienced educator to develop and deliver impactful, age-appropriate learning experiences aligned with BC’s Ministry of Education goals,” Belzberg told me later.

The focus, he said, has been making sure the learning stations “link directly to the BC curriculum’s ‘Big Ideas’ and core competencies (e.g., communication, thinking, social responsibility),” as well as being sensory- and inquiry-based.

photo - The beekeeper in action at Stable Harvest Farm — The beekeeper in action at Stable Harvest Farm. *(photo by Cynthia Ramsay)*

“Students engage through touch, smell, sight and movement – using storytelling, questioning and games to spark curiosity,” he said.

As our Family Day tour proved, the activities offered are inclusive and adaptable for diverse needs, and the staff are well-trained to keep visitors young and old, with varying levels of physical and mental nimbleness, engaged. My wife and I had both an educational and entertaining time. It was well worth the drive from North Vancouver, where we live. Most everyone would enjoy the fresh air and welcoming atmosphere, I think.

To keep track of the many things going on at the farm, including volunteer opportunities, follow it on Instagram and check out the website, stableharvestfarm.com, every now and again. You can find out when the next Family Day is and book a visit on the website or by email, [email protected].

Looking for volunteers

Israel Connect is once again seeking English tutors.

Have time to volunteer? Consider Israel Connect, a program where local adult volunteers connect one-on-one, via Zoom, with Israeli high school students to help them improve their English conversation and reading skills. The program starts in November and is organized by Chabad Richmond, with Israel Connect and the Israeli Ministry of Education. It entails a commitment of 45 to 60 minutes once a week for the school year.

“No previous tutoring or teaching experience is necessary, and the curriculum is provided,” said Shelley Civkin, local Israel Connect coordinator.

The only requirements are that the volunteer be an adult, fluent in English, have basic computer skills and own a computer with a camera – for continuity reasons, a minimum commitment of one school year is requested. Volunteers do not need to speak Hebrew and can tutor from home. Basic training and technical support are available. A criminal background check is necessary for all tutors and will be arranged through Israel Connect. Time preferences of volunteer tutors/mentors will be coordinated beforehand.

To register as a volunteer, go to chabadrichmond.com/israelconnect. For more information, contact Civkin at 604-789-5806 or [email protected].

To support the Israel Connect program, contact Chabad Richmond at 604-277-6427 or [email protected].

– Courtesy Chabad Richmond