history – Page 45

Transcribing Vancouver history

Left to right are Sam Sullivan, Glen Hodges, Cynthia Ramsay, Margaret Sutherland and Shirley Barnett with one of the Mountain View Cemetery ledgers. (photo by Lynn Zanatta)

“When we were restoring the Jewish cemetery at Mountain View, we spent two years going through City of Vancouver material trying to determine if the city actually had something in writing to prove the legitimacy of this Jewish section since 1892,” Shirley Barnett, who led the Jewish cemetery restoration project, told the Jewish Independent in an email. The committee couldn’t find anything in the city records.

While this lack of documented history lengthened the restoration agreement process significantly, it did not halt it. Barnett, as chair, opened the first meeting of the restoration advisory committee on Feb. 13, 2013, and the Jewish cemetery at Mountain View was officially rededicated on May 3, 2015. However, if the committee were to have started its work today, the information it sought would have been found, and the process would have moved much more quickly.

Sam Sullivan, member of the Legislative Assembly (Vancouver-False Creek) and former mayor of Vancouver, founded the Global Civic Society in 2010. As part of its mission to encourage “a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan citizenry to make strong connections to their community,” the society leads several initiatives, including Transcribimus, “a network of volunteers that is transcribing early city council minutes and other handwritten documents from early Vancouver, and making them freely available to students, researchers and the general public.”

Transcribimus project coordinator Margaret Sutherland has transcribed at least 155 sets of Vancouver City Council minutes. It was she who found what Barnett and her committee were looking for – in the council minutes of June 6, 1892. On page 32 of the minute book, it is recorded that correspondence had been received, “From D. Goldberg asking the council to set aside a portion of the public cemetery for the Jewish congregation,” and was “Referred to the Board of Health.”

Two weeks later, the minutes of June 20, 1892, note that the health committee had resolved, among other items, “[t]hat the piece of land selected by the Jewish people in the public cemetery be set aside for their purposes.”

photo - In addition to the transcribed council minutes, transcribimus.ca includes photos of the minute book pages. This image is of the June 20, 1892, minutes, which note that the health committee had resolved, among other items, “[t]hat the piece of land selected by the Jewish people in the public cemetery be set aside for their purposes.” — In addition to the transcribed council minutes, transcribimus.ca includes photos of the minute book pages. This image is of the June 20, 1892, minutes, which note that the health committee had resolved, among other items, “[t]hat the piece of land selected by the Jewish people in the public cemetery be set aside for their purposes.”

The cemetery first appears to have come up a few years earlier. In the July 29, 1889, council minutes, there is reference to a letter: “From L. Davies on behalf of the Jewish congregation of the city of Vancouver requesting council to set apart about one acre and a half in the public cemetery for members of the Hebrew confession. Referred to the Board of Works.”

In an email to Barnett, Sutherland wrote, “There doesn’t seem to be any indication from city council minutes that the Board of Works ever followed up on the above request. Although [Jewish community member and then-mayor] David Oppenheimer was on the Board of Works for that year, so was his opponent, Samuel Brighouse.”

On Dec. 7, 2018, the Jewish Independent met with Barnett, Sullivan, Sutherland, Lynn Zanatta (Global Civic Policy Society program manager) and Glen Hodges (Mountain View Cemetery manager) at Mountain View. In documents she brought to that meeting, Sutherland explains that Oppenheimer “declined to serve as mayor again at the end of 1891, citing poor health as his reason for retiring. Fred Cope was elected mayor in 1892 and served till the end of 1893.” So it was Cope who was mayor when the Jewish cemetery was established; Oppenheimer was Vancouver’s second mayor (1888-1891) and Malcolm Maclean its first (1886-1887).

The first interment at Mountain View Cemetery was Caradoc Evans, who died at nine months, 24 days, on Feb. 26, 1887. The first Jew interred in the cemetery is thought to be Simon Hirschberg, who “died of his own hand” on Jan. 29, 1887, and was, according the plaque erected by the cemetery in 2011 (the cemetery’s 125th year), “intended to be the first interment,” however, “rain, a broken carriage wheel on a bad road and his large size all contributed to him being buried just outside the cemetery property,” where he was “long thought to have been left near the intersection of 33rd and Fraser” until his body was moved into a grave on cemetery property. Oddly enough, the first Jew to be buried in the Jewish section was Otto Bond (Dec. 19, 1892), who also took his own life.

scan - This page from a Mountain View Cemetery ledger shows the entry for Otto Bond, the first Jew to be buried in the cemetery’s Jewish section — This page from a Mountain View Cemetery ledger shows the entry for Otto Bond, the first Jew to be buried in the cemetery’s Jewish section.

So far, since its inception in 2012, Transcribimus has seen more than 300 transcripts produced by almost 40 volunteers, although a handful of them are responsible for the lion’s share to date. Many people have donated their time, technical advice and, of course, funds to the project. Barnett sponsored the transcribing of the city council minutes for 1891, and fellow Jewish community member Arnold Silber sponsored the transcription of the 1890 minutes. A few other years have also been sponsored, including 1888, by the Oppenheimer Group.

About nine years’ worth of minutes have been transcribed (1886-1893 and 1900), leaving much more work to be done, as the city kept handwritten minutes until mid-1911. After that, minutes were typewritten and these documents can be scanned and read with OCR (optical character recognition), said Sutherland.

The Transcribimus website (transcribimus.ca) is one of the best-designed sites the Independent has come across. It is both visually appealing and incredibly easy to use. In addition to the transcribed council minutes, it includes photos of the minute book pages. As well, it features letters from Vancouver’s early years, historical photographs and a few videos, including a film by William Harbeck of a trolley ride through Victoria and Vancouver in 1907, which has had speed corrections and sound added by YouTuber Guy Jones. (Astute viewers will see that the trolley is driving on the lefthand side of the road. British Columbia didn’t switch to the right until 1921-22.)

In the material Sutherland brought to the December meeting at the cemetery office, she included the transcription of the short letter that city clerk Thomas McGuigan wrote on June 23, 1892, in response to Goldberg’s letter that was mentioned in the council minutes. In it, McGuigan confirms “the grant made by council to the people of the Jewish faith of a piece of land in the public cemetery,” but adds that “they will be unable to give you title for the same, as the land was set apart by an Order in Council of the provincial government for burial purposes and they refuse to give any other title.”

Sutherland hadn’t come across Goldberg’s letter, that of Davies or any response to Davies. It’s likely that these letters have been lost or destroyed, but they might turn up in another file, she said.

However, Sutherland did find a brief letter to the editor of the Vancouver Daily World newspaper, dated Nov. 1, 1898, from L. Rubinowitz, which she emailed to the Independent. Rubinowitz wanted the application for the Jewish cemetery by “a certain number of Jews of this city” to be refused. In his view, “all the Hebrews of this city are not combined as one body” and “To avoid trouble between them and for the sake of peace, as one party will claim that they have the sole right to it, the other party will claim that they have the sole right to it, therefore, as it is now under the control of the city, we are well satisfied to let it remain so, as in my opinion the city will have no objections for us to make any improvements if necessary.”

The old joke comes to mind of the Jewish man who, when stranded on a deserted island by himself, builds two synagogues – the one he’ll attend and the one he won’t set foot in. Community cohesiveness is a heady task; always has been, and definitely not just for the Jewish community.

As more council minutes, letters, photographs and other documents are found, transcribed and shared, the holes in our understanding of the past and how it has formed the present will be filled. To support or participate in Transcribimus or other Global Civic Society projects, visit globalcivic.org.

How RGB got her start in law

Marty Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) arrive at court in On the Basis of Sex. (photo from Focus Features)

A news flash for members of the tribe who’ve been kvelling over a Jewish woman on the U.S. Supreme Court for fully a quarter of a century: Ruth Bader Ginsburg long ago matriculated beyond a symbol of ethnic achievement.

Last year’s hit documentary, RBG, noted that Justice Ginsburg is an enormously popular role model for women in their teens and 20s, and she has achieved pop culture celebrity to boot. The latest film – released recently in Canada and, as of press time, still playing in Metro Vancouver – is On the Basis of Sex, which applies the Hollywood treatment to Ginsburg’s beginnings as a smart but struggling lawyer and situates her smack in the mainstream. To coin a Lincolnesque testimonial, now she belongs to the masses.

Director Mimi Leder and screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman (who happens to be Ruth and Marty Ginsburg’s nephew) frame On the Basis of Sex as an underdog saga. And, like a lot of underdogs in Hollywood movies, our heroine has a superpower that she only discovers – and masters – on her journey.

The movie is effective, and ultimately inspiring, in a way that doesn’t remotely challenge viewers other than to ask them to follow clever legal strategies.

The film opens with Ginsburg’s first days at Harvard Law School, where her husband Marty is in his second year. Immediately and repeatedly, she (and the viewer) is reminded of her second-class status as a woman in a man’s world.

It takes awhile to reconcile the confident Justice Ginsburg of public record with the somewhat skittish character that British actress Felicity Jones creates. On the one hand, as a wife and a mother who – like every other aspiring woman professional of the time – never wears pants, Ginsburg is plainly a grownup. But she’s patronized by everyone from the law school’s WASPy dean (a villainous Sam Waterston) to her husband (a stalwart Armie Hammer), and she risks being seen as a rabble-rouser (it’s the late 1950s) simply by standing up for herself.

Although the film does not conceal or finesse the Ginsburgs’ Jewishness, it presents casual misogyny and the entrenched old boys’ network, not antisemitism, as the obstacles Ruth needs to navigate. Consequently, she has to devise ways – both direct and elliptical – to raise the consciousness of every ally, including her devoted husband, before she can even challenge potential adversaries. While Marty certainly recognizes his wife’s brilliance, he’s a product of his upbringing and the times.

On the Basis of Sex or, as it’s referred to at your favourite corned beef dispensary, “RBG: The Early Years,” devotes considerable screen time to the couple’s relationship and, for many viewers, that will serve as the emotional heart of the film. Others will derive more pleasure from Ginsburg finding her footing and her voice as a scholarly attorney.

As Stiepleman noted in an interview during a recent visit to San Francisco, “Coming out of law school, [Ginsburg] had three strikes against her: she was a woman, she was a mother and she was a Jew. Any one of those things alone, law firms had taken the risk. It was the three together that made her unhire-able in their eyes.”

Unable to find a job practising law, she takes a teaching position. Through a combination of determination, persistence and luck, she comes across a unique case that addresses the inequities of gender discrimination. The complainant, who looked after his mother but was denied the tax deduction for caregivers, is a man.

Earlier in the film, there’s a crucial chain of events when her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Ginsburg not only took care of him (and their small daughter), but got them both through law school. That experience as a caregiver gives her both the empathy and the understanding to identify with and persuade her would-be client, as well as to research and argue the case.

The lengthy courtroom scene that comprises the film’s last 20 minutes or so is genuinely effective and even emotional, despite the formulaic staging and the fact that we know Ginsburg will prevail. At the pivotal moment, we witness a character coming into her own, grasping her abilities and realizing her destiny. And with that, the underdog becomes a superhero.

On the Basis of Sex is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Shalvi reaches the sky

Alice Shalvi, an Israeli professor and educator, has played a leading role in progressive Jewish education for girls and advancing the status of women in Israel. Her autobiography, Never a Native (Halban Publishers, 2018), reads almost as a personal diary. Otherwise, how could this 92-year-old recall the most minute details of her life?

The youngest of two children, Shalvi was born in Essen, Germany, to Benzion and Perl Margulies, religious Zionists who owned a wholesale linen and housewares business. In 1933, soon after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, their home was searched, prompting her father’s move to London, England. The rest of the family followed in May 1934.

In London, Shalvi’s father and brother imported watches and jewelry. When the Blitz began, they temporarily moved to Aylesbury, 50 kilometres north of London.

In 1944, Shalvi studied English literature at Cambridge University. In 1946, she was sent to the Zionist Congress in Basel as a representative of British Jewish students and, in 1949, after completing a degree in social work at the London School of Economics, she immigrated to Israel, settling in Jerusalem. She became a faculty member in the English department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and she earned her PhD there in 1962.

In May 1950, Shalvi met Moshe Shelkowitz (changed later to Shalvi), a recent immigrant from New York, whom she married in October of that year. They had six children between 1952 and 1967; Moshe Shalvi died in 2013.

The 25th issue of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (fall 2003) was dedicated to Alice Shalvi, “who made the dream of a journal devoted to Jewish women’s and gender studies possible.” When the concept of Nashim was first presented to her, the special issue notes that Shalvi greeted it not only with enthusiasm but as an idea whose time had finally come – she and her friends, pioneers of second-wave Jewish feminism, had raised it long before. “Subsequently, as rector of the Schechter Institute (1997-2001), [Shalvi] added her voice to the approval process for the issue’s first publication. She has remained on Nashim’s editorial board ever since, contributing her wise and warm guidance on issues of editorial and academic policy and herself serving as consulting editor for our issue on Women, War and Peace.”

In an interview by Elana Maryules Sztokman for the Lookstein Centre at Bar-Ilan University some years ago – after Shalvi had been awarded the 2007 Israel Prize for life achievement – Shalvi commented: “I felt that, through the work we had done on behalf of women, an enormous change had occurred in the status of women, in the self-image of women, in the self-assurance of women and, most importantly – because that’s what the prize recognized – in the awareness of the importance and centrality of the subject of the status of women in society at large.”

Shalvi spoke about the Pelech School for Girls and the Israel Women’s Network. “The school has created a generation of young modern Orthodox women who are changing that entire social system within modern orthodoxy,” she said. “The other thing I’m proud of is the years at the network, which saw the largest number of legislative changes and reforms in women’s status because what I call the ‘alumnae’ of the network were so prominent in the Knesset.”

In her autobiography, Shalvi emphasizes “that it’s all about the home,” and acknowledges the impact her parents had on her. “What I saw at home,” she writes, “was an open attitude, observance but openness. My mother always used to set an extra place at the table on Shabbat in case my father brought home a stranger from synagogue, as was the custom in those days. And, in my family, I learned about tzedakah in the very best sense – always a readiness to help others, not only from my father, who did it on a both public and personal level, but also from my mother.

“The other thing I absorbed was Zionism. It was a strongly Zionist household, and my father was very active in the religious Zionist community. From very early on, I knew that I would come on aliyah one day. I didn’t know when, but it was definitely there in the future.”

When asked to convey one message to the next generation, Shalvi said, “Reach for the sky and don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. Even if you know you’ll never attain what you’re reaching for, persist. Keep at it. I like to quote Robert Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’: ‘Aye, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for.’ Keep on striving because, even if you don’t attain that goal yourself, the chances are that, for the next generation, it will be easier.”

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language Shuk Walks in Machane Yehuda, she has compiled and edited nine kosher cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Journalist in Israel.

Gourmet anything but lazy

Susan Mendelson, founder of the Lazy Gourmet, shares a little about herself and her business at the launch of this year’s The Scribe. (photo by Kenneth I. Swartz)

One of Vancouver’s most successful food industry professionals shared her story recently, helping to launch this year’s edition of The Scribe, the journal of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.

The topic of the 2018 issue is food, covering restaurants and related sectors from the early days of the community up to destinations that are still operating today. Susan Mendelson, best known around town as founder of the Lazy Gourmet, brought her thespian side to the audience at the Western Front Nov. 28, eliciting laughter as she guided the packed hall on a tour through her remarkable career.

“My mother’s mother, Grandma Faye, was a large influence in my life,” Mendelson said. An extraordinary baker and cook renowned in her small Jewish community of Quebec City, Grandma Faye took it as a challenge to keep a deep freezer filled with baking for when friends dropped by or to be ready for a tea party.

As a child, Mendelson loved to cook and bake. When the Six Day War broke out in Israel, in 1967, the family rallied to raise funds to send to Israel. Young Susan planned a bake sale in their backyard. She made all of her favourite squares and cookies and the neighbours snapped them up. Mendelson’s mother only told her years later that the cost of the ingredients was on par with what was raised that day. Thankfully, Mendelson told the audience, that wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.

Mendelson came to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia and gravitated to the theatre department. Her theatre professor, Larry Lillo, became a close friend. He broke the news to Mendelson that she would never be a great actress … though he really loved her cheesecake.

After third year, Mendelson took a break from school and worked in a group home for troubled teens. There, she met Deborah Roitberg, with whom she made the food for the kids in the group home. An instant friendship developed.

After traveling to Europe and Israel, Mendelson thought she would return to school and pursue social work. Around that time, Lillo had founded Tamahnous Theatre, an experimental ensemble that was becoming the resident company at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He hired Mendelson as house manager, which allowed her to go to school during the day and work at the Cultch, as the institution is familiarly known, at night. But the salary didn’t cover her expenses, so she began to make cheesecake to sell at intermission, later adding carrot cake and Nanaimo bars to her repertoire – “when the curtain came down at intermission, the lobby was stormed by people pushing in line to make sure that they got their piece of the cake.”

Anne Petrie of CBC radio’s afternoon show called Mendelson, having heard about the cheesecake phenomenon, and asked her to come on the program.

“I told her that I was putting myself through university with the recipe, but that I would come onto her show to tell her listeners how to make chocolate cheesecake, a recipe that my friend Miriam Gropper had given me,” Mendelson said.

Her cheeky attitude was a hit with audiences, and she was asked back. She returned for Valentine’s Day, talking about aphrodisiacs. Soon she had a regular radio gig paying $25 per appearance.

Mendelson’s boss at the Cultch started asking her to cater opening night parties. Wedding catering followed and then Mendelson was given the responsibility of catering to all the performers at the first iteration of the Vancouver Children’s Festival. She and Roitberg discussed opening a take-out food business.

“Our concept was that people would bring in their casserole dishes and platters and we would fill them with our food and they would take them home and pretend that they had made them themselves,” she said. “We would call ourselves the Lazy Gourmet, in honour of our customers who wanted gourmet food but were too lazy to make it themselves.”

Over the years, Mendelson had shared scores of recipes with radio listeners and some asked her to put them in book form. Mama Never Cooked Like This sold out and went into reprints; it was picked up by an American publisher.

To coincide with the publication of her second book, which was written for children and titled Let me in the Kitchen, the producer of the Children’s Festival, Chris Wootten, asked Mendelson to produce her own show. The best part of that experience, Mendelson recalled, was that a single dad in the audience brought his 7-year-old son and they bought the cookbook and made recipes

from it. “Six years later, I met those two,” she said. “And, seven years later, I married the dad and became stepmother to the most wonderful young teen. I was so happy that Jack and Soleil had experienced that show and that in some way we shared that amazing experience of my life.”

TV appearances followed and Mendelson was asked to write a souvenir cookbook for Expo 86.

But the trajectory was not entirely positive. After expanding the Lazy Gourmet from one store to three, the company began losing money. They eventually abandoned two of the storefronts and Roitberg left the business to raise a family.

Soon after the birth of daughter Mira, Mendelson was invited to cater a new event that was coming to Vancouver: the Molson Indy Vancouver.

“If you thought that the Children’s Festival wore me out … you can’t even imagine what that event did to me physically,” she said. “But, of course, I loved it and, by the last few years of the race, which took place on Labour Day weekend – Jack will tell you that it was our anniversary weekend that we didn’t celebrate for nine years – we were also catering the Abbotsford Airshow, which took place two weeks beforehand and, two weeks before that, we catered the Skins Game at Predator Ridge in the Okanagan.”

In addition to hard work, Mendelson credits her success to hiring people who she says are smarter and more talented than herself. A couple of years ago, she gave shares in the company to two long-term team members and moved into a part-time role. The company continues to expand, including a lifecycle catering department. “We call it womb-to-tomb catering,” she said, citing baby-namings, britot milah, b’nai mitzvah, weddings and funerals, as well as personal events. More recently, Mendelson took on catering the lunches at Vancouver Talmud Torah.

The Scribe launch also included words from Cynthia Ramsay, editor and publisher of the Independent, who has also, for the past nine years, edited The Scribe.

“When I started the job, the journal was a mix of academic essays and community-related history,” Ramsay said. “But it soon changed to become a means by which the museum could highlight its collection; the oral histories, photographs and other artifacts that it houses on the community’s behalf. We’ve done issues on the Jewish Western Bulletin, the Jewish Independent’s predecessor; on the furniture industry; scrap metal dealers; the clothing industry; on some of the community pioneers who are buried in our cemeteries all around the province; and, this year, of course, our issue is on the food and service industry.”

She credited museum staff Alysa Routtenberg, Marcy Babins and Michael Schwartz, and the publications committee, which this year included Routtenberg, Perry Seidelman, Gary Averbach, Debby Freiman, Fred Swartz and Ronnie Tessler. The JI’s production manager, Josie Tonio McCarthy, does the layout for the journals.

Seidelman, president of the JMABC, urged audience members not to throw out photographs or documents. “Give them to us,” he said.

Mystery photo … Dec. 14/18

Women at the Beth Tikvah Sisterhood spring conference, which took place at Beth Israel, 2000. Shelley Ail is the first on the right, but the others are unknown. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.11302)

If you know someone in this photo, please helpthe JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s)collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected] or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos,visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.

The final note

photo - The new bell being lifted to the top of the YMCA tower in Jerusalem — The new bell being lifted to the top of the YMCA tower in Jerusalem. *(photo by Ashernet)*

YMCA’s new bell. (photo by Ashernet)

Ever since the YMCA opened on King David Street in Jerusalem in 1933, the building, designed by Arthur Lewis Harman (of New York’s Empire State Building fame), has been a famous landmark; in particular, its iconic tower has been part of the city’s landscape. The tower contained a carillon of 35 bells made by the British bell foundry Gillett & Johnston in the early 1930s. It is the only carillon in the Middle East, but there was one note – in other words, a bell – missing from it. A recent anonymous donation made it possible for the YMCA to order the missing bell from the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in the Netherlands and, in a precisely managed operation earlier this week, a large crane raised and placed the new, 36th, bell into its place in the tower.

Mystery photo … Nov. 30/18

Selling bagel sandwiches at a Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver Chanukah event, circa 1990. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.18422)

If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected] or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.

Playfulness and style

Ralph Lauren in 1978. (photo by Edgar de Evia)

Born 79 years ago, in New York, to Frieda and Frank Lifshitz, immigrants from Belarus, Ralph Lifshitz, better known as Ralph Lauren, has become a universal household name.

The youngest of four siblings clothed in hand-me-downs, the fashion legend never imagined becoming a designer – he did, however, yearn to be the next Joe di Maggio or Cary Grant. His favourite pastimes were sports, listening to the radio, watching TV and movies. And it is from these influences that his dream to design clothing came.

At 16, Lifshitz switched to the name Lauren after experiencing years of ridicule. At the same time, he embraced and embellished his own sense of style, buying oversized and rugged clothing from the army surplus store because he liked how they made him feel, and had an aspect of originality. His preference for military-style clothing predated his draft to the American army, in which he served two years. It was in the army that his respect for the uniform further developed and he incorporated the style into many of his subsequent designs.

In the years that followed, Lauren began working by day for a buying company while studying at night. It was during this period that he had the idea of making ties from scraps, and making and selling his unconventional ties turned into a profitable side business.

While working for men’s fashion house Brooks Brothers, Lauren tried to get them to sell his ties, but to no avail. Moving on to work for tie manufacturer Beau Brummell, an upscale men’s brand, Lauren’s potential started to be realized, as he acquired a “drawer” in their showroom of the Empire State Building to sell his flamboyant ties. In 1967, Lauren started the label Polo, the name reflecting his love of sports, and his creations’ international and sophisticated vibe. Lauren sewed on each label, together with his new bride, Ricky. He also made all the deliveries himself, to the likes of Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdales. During the first year, Polo made $500,000. The young Jewish boy from the Bronx’s design career was on its way.

By 1968, Lauren was making his own suits, which were, once again, offbeat; not what his colleagues were wearing. Lauren believes that fashion is all about playfulness, expressing one’s individuality and not conforming to one look. He has held this belief through his many years in the industry, and it has no doubt provided the foundation of what he has built into a multibillion-dollar empire.

photo - Maartje Verhoef walking the Ralph Lauren spring-summer 2015 fashion show — Maartje Verhoef walking the Ralph Lauren spring-summer 2015 fashion show. *(photo by Christopher Macsurak)*

Lauren’s classic innovations include making women feel that wearing a tuxedo was sexier than a gown; turning tailored men’s shirts unisex; and transforming American folk art (patchwork) into fashionable sweaters, coats and dresses, borrowing from cowboys’ attire the rich colour of turquoise, fringed jackets and boots.

Lauren’s talents did not end at the design table. He used the platform of advertising unconventionally, working with real people, not models, in ads that covered multiple pages to tell a story through his clothing’s many different looks and fabrics. This creative approach was developed in part with photographer Bruce Weber.

Lauren has outfitted Wimbledon players, won the Coty Award for both women and men’s wear, opened the first freestanding store in Europe by an American designer, and established a home collection. Other highlights include being the costume designer for Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in the Oscar-winning movie Annie Hall, and creating a men’s and women’s fragrance in 1978 that is still emblematic. Upon receiving a lifetime achievement award in 1992, presented to him by actor Audrey Hepburn, he said, “I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.”

Ricky, Lauren’s wife of more than five decades, is one of his muses. Her elegant and natural style has been a continuous inspiration for him and it is her sense of self that he tried to emulate in his clothing designs. Together, the couple built the Ralph Lauren brand not only as a fashion domain but as a family business, operated with their two sons and daughter.

In addition to his material and creative successes are Lauren’s contributions to philanthropic causes. Among them, Lauren and cancer surgeon Dr. Harold P. Freeman founded the Ralph Lauren Centre for Cancer Care in Harlem, N.Y., in 2000, with the resources of the Polo Ralph Lauren Foundation and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre. The residence, care and support facility’s mission is “to fight health disparities in the community … [and] become a beacon for quality, dignity and accessibility in cancer care.”

Ariella Stein is a mother, wife and fashion maven. A Vancouverite, she has lived in both Turkey and Israel for the past 25 years.

Keeping clean then and now

The mikvah at Herodian, which was apparently built during the Second Temple period (530 BCE and 70 CE). (photo by Deborah Rubin Fields)

The Dark Ages weren’t given their name for nothing. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, sanitation virtually disappeared. During the Dark Ages – also referred to as the Middle Ages or the medieval period – few people bathed regularly. What did they do? Those who could, or were so inclined, covered up body odour with perfume.

Progress does not always move in a forward direction – the older, classical civilizations bathed far more than did medieval Europe. In the non-Jewish ancient world, the earliest unearthed bathing and plumbing systems date back nearly 6,000 years to the Indus River Valley, in today’s Pakistan. There, archeologists excavated copper water pipes from the ruins of a palace, as well as the remains of what appears to be a superbly constructed ritual bathing pool at Mohenjo-daro. And, in a find dating 3,000 years later, archeologists found a pottery pedestal tub on the island of Crete that measured five feet long.

By instituting a practice of daily bathing, the Romans improved the general level of sanitation. Baths, moreover, functioned not just to raise the level of hygiene, but also provided opportunities to socialize, to exercise, to read and, importantly, to conduct business. From 500 BCE until 455 CE, Roman public baths were common. Moreover, privately owned Roman baths were quite luxurious, often taking up a whole room. The comprehensive sewage system of the baths consisted of lead and bronze pipes and marble fixtures.

Now, note this contrast: until the 1800s, most water pipes in the United States consisted of no more than hollowed-out trees, and the first cast-iron pipes in the United States were imported from England. Only in 1848 was a U.S. plumbing code enacted, with the passage of the National Public Health Act. In 1883, both the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Co. (now the American Standard Co.) and the Kohler Co. began adding enamel to cast-iron bathtubs to create a smooth interior surface. Kohler advertised its first claw foot tub as a “horse trough/hog scalder [which] when furnished with four legs will serve as a bathtub.” Kohler began mass-producing these tubs, as they were recognized as having a surface that was easy to clean, thus preventing the spread of bacteria and disease.

To give additional perspective, consider this finding: after the First World War, the United States experienced a construction boom, and bathrooms were fitted with a toilet, sink and bathtub – but, even in 1921, only one percent of American homes had indoor plumbing.

Since antiquity, Jews have maintained a relatively high level of sanitation, due in part to the prescribed hand-washing ritual before eating and to the religious practice surrounding the mikvah, or ritual bath. In Israel, the oldest discovered mikvah dates back to the Second Temple period, more than 2,000 years ago. In recent years, archeologists discovered Europe’s oldest mikvah – in Sicily’s ancient Syracuse, it goes back to the Byzantine period, or the fifth-century CE.

But two important questions need answering: how do we know bathing was so important and what is a mikvah? The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 57b, provides this insight: though anointing (oil) and bath (water) do not enter the body, the body benefits from them. Moreover, in Tractate Sanhedrin 17b, we learn that scholars were forbidden from residing in cities that did not have public baths.

Historically, municipalities often barred Jews from bathing in their rivers, and Christians blocked Jews from using public baths. Moreover, there was a fear that Jewish women might be molested in a general public bath. So, there was a need to construct separate facilities, and Jews built bathhouses, many with mikvot close by. Thus, Jews began to link the concept of the mikvah with physical hygiene.

Significantly, the mikvah was never a monthly substitute for a bath or shower. In fact, Jewish law calls for immersion only after one has bathed or showered. Oceans, rivers, wells and lakes, which get their water from springs, can usually serve as a mikvah. The common thread between these bodies of water is that they are natural sources. To traditional Jews, they are derived from G-d. As such, they have the ability to ritually purify.

A human-made mikvah must be built into the ground or built as an essential part of a building. There are two pools: one that contains collected rainwater and the other, the actual immersion pool, is drained and refilled regularly with tap water. The pools, however, share a common wall with a hole that permits the free flow of the water, so the immersion pool also receives rainwater.

When the Temples stood, the high priest immersed in the mikvah at prescribed times. But, today, when there is no Temple, for the Orthodox, the mikvah serves the following four functions: a woman uses the mikvah after menstruating and after giving birth; immersion in a mikvah marks the final step in converting to Judaism; before beginning to cook and eat from them, Jews use the mikvah to immerse new pots, dishes and utensils; and the mikvah is also used to prepare a Jew’s body before his or her burial. Men go to the mikvah before their wedding and before Yom Kippur, and many Chassidic men use the mikvah before each Shabbat and holiday.

photo - Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The plague of Florence in 1348” — Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The plague of Florence in 1348.” *(photo from wellcomecollection.org)*

It is speculated that up to 60% of the general European population died of the Black Death. There are no statistics as to how many Jews died of the plague, so it is hard to actually say that Jewish bathhouses or the Jewish practice of hand washing or other sanitation prescribed by Jewish law kept Jews safer than the general medieval public. Two points, however, may be stated with certainty:

In a number of instances, European Jews were blamed for the Black Death. As a consequence, beginning in November 1348 in Germany, Jews were massacred and expelled from their homes. In February 1349, 2,000 Strasbourg Jews were murdered. Six months later, Christians wiped out the Jews of Mainz and Cologne. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been eliminated.
Even today, comments on the subject need to be scrutinized for possible antisemitic motives.

As for today, in the Western world, there seems to be an obsessive amount of soap bars, soap liquids, no-soap cleaners, hand wipes and wet wipes. Can one over-clean? Yes.

In an interview with Global News earlier this year, Dr. Anatoli Freiman of the Toronto Dermatology Centre explained the negative consequences of excessive showering or bathing. “The skin can dry out,” he said. “But the message is, after the shower or bath, you need to pat yourself dry and moisturize to seal it.”

Prof. David Leffell, chief of dermatological surgery at Yale School of Medicine, gives these guidelines about keeping clean. “You don’t want to do the Lady Macbeth thing, where you’re scrubbing and scrubbing,” he told businessinsider.com. “The purpose of showering is to eliminate dirt.” This can be done, he explained, in less than a few minutes by focusing on the grimier parts of the body (armpits and groin) and not overdoing it with soap elsewhere. He advised using warm, not hot, water; aiming for a three-minute shower; and moisturizing while the skin is still damp.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

Revealing truth elicits threats

University of Ottawa’s Prof. Jan Grabowski delivered the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Jan Grabowski, a University of Ottawa professor who is a leading scholar of the Holocaust, delivered the annual Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15 – the same day he filed a libel suit against an organization aligned with Poland’s far-right government.

The Polish League Against Defamation, which is allied with the country’s governing Law and Justice Party, initiated a campaign against Grabowski last year, accusing him of ignoring the number of Poles who saved Jews and exaggerating the number of Jews killed by their Polish compatriots. Grabowski’s book, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. An English translation of an even more compendious multi-year analysis undertaken by a team of researchers under Grabowski’s leadership will be published next year. His Vrba lecture provided an overview of some of the findings in the new work. It is a harrowing survey that brought condemnation from Polish-Canadians in the Vancouver audience.

The new book, which does not yet have an English title, is a work of “microhistory,” Grabowski said. Holocaust studies is one of the fastest-growing fields of historical research, he said, partly because it got off to a slow start and really only picked up in the 1980s. Much of the written work being completed today is in the area of survivor memoirs, second- and third-generation experiences, including inherited trauma, and “meta-history,” the study of the study of the Holocaust.

“This assumes that we actually know what has happened,” he said. Grabowski maintains there is still much primary research to be done. “We are still far away from knowing as much as we should about this, one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”

There are millions of pages of relevant historical documentation almost completely untapped – primarily in provincial Polish archives, police records and town halls – that spell out in detail the often-enthusiastic complicity of Poles in turning on their

Jewish neighbours. By combing through these previously ignored records, Grabowski and his co-authors have amassed evidence of widespread – and eager – involvement of Polish police and other Poles in assisting Germans to identify, hunt down and murder Polish Jews.

The work has been met with official condemnation. Earlier this year, the Polish government adopted a law that would expose scholars involved in the study of the Holocaust to fines and prison terms of up to three years. The criminal component of the law, including imprisonment, was rescinded after international backlash, but the atmosphere around Holocaust inquiry in Poland remains repressive.

Grabowski said that the “explosion of right-wing extremists, xenophobia and blatant antisemitism” in Poland is related to the “undigested, unlearned and/or rejected legacy of the Holocaust” – the fact that Polish society has, by and large, refused to acknowledge the wounds of the past or to deal with its own role in the extermination of three million of its Jewish citizens between 1939 to 1945.

The concept of microhistory, which is the approach Grabowski’s team uses, is not local history, he said, “it is an attempt to follow trajectories of people.” He instructed his researchers to focus on the exact day, often hour by hour, when liquidation actions took place in hundreds of Polish shtetls and ghettoes. To do so upends a conspiracy of silence that has existed for decades.

“Why the silence?” he asked the audience. “There were three parts to the silence. One was the Jews. They were dead. They had no voice … 98.5% of Polish Jews who remained under German occupation, who never fled, died. You have a 1.5% survival rate for the Polish Jews. So, the Jews couldn’t really, after the war, ask for justice, because they were gone.”

The communist regime that dominated Poland for a half-century after the war was viewed not only as a foreign power inflicted on Poles from the Soviet Union, Grabowski said, “but, more importantly, as Jewish lackeys – that was a term that was used.

“So, it wouldn’t really stand to have trials of those accused of complicity with the Germans for murdering the Jews,” he said. “That would only confirm the widespread accusations that the communists were here doing the Jewish bidding.”

The third factor in the silence were the interests of Polish nationalists, whose ideology is inherently antisemitic, and who are the dominant political force in the country today.

image - Hunt for the Jews book cover — *Hunt for the Jews* won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

While clearly not all Poles were collaborators, it would have been impossible for almost anyone in the country to claim ignorance of what was happening.

“Mass killing was taking place in the streets,” the professor said. Researchers found bills of sale charging city officials for the sand municipal workers needed to cover the blood on sidewalks.

“When you say that blood was running in the streets, it’s not a metaphor, it’s just a description of what really happened,” he said.

In some ghettos, as many as half the Jewish population was killed on the day of the action, with massive participation from Polish society.

“One area more, one area less,” he said. “Usually between 10 and 20% of Jews were slaughtered simply in order to frighten the remaining 80% to go to the trains, to be herded to the trains,” said Grabowski.

In Poland’s smaller communities, centuries of Jewish and Polish social, commercial and civic interactions did not result in camaraderie – on the contrary.

“The deadliest places of all [were] small shtetls, small towns, where anonymity was not available when the authorities were not far away,” he said. In one instance, a Jew in hiding heard his neighbour assure the Nazis he would return with a hatchet to help them break into the hiding place seconds before the door was axed down.

In another example, Grabowski described in minute detail the atrocities committed by Germans, Poles and Ukrainian recruits in Węgrów, a town in eastern central Poland with a Jewish population of about “10,000 starving Jews who have been terrorized for nearly three years and now the final moment has come.”

Rumours of liquidation swirled for months, as Jews fleeing neighbouring communities brought narratives of destruction. In the day or two before the liquidation, wives of Polish military and other officials rushed to their Jewish tailors, shoemakers and others craftspeople to obtain the items they knew would soon become unavailable.

“With mounting panic, people started to prepare themselves for a siege,” said Grabowski. “They built hideouts to survive the initial German fury, they started to seek out contacts on the Aryan side of the city, looking for help from former neighbours, sometimes friends and former business partners.”

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1942, Polish officials in the town were instructed to assemble horses, wagons and volunteers. A cordon of Nazis and collaborators surrounded the city at intervals of no more than 100 metres.

The mayor of the town wrote: “Jews who woke up to the terrible news ran like mad around the city, half-naked, looking for shelter.” The same leader noted that, when the Germans demanded he produce volunteers to help with the task of rounding up their Jewish neighbours, he feared he would not be able to meet their needs.

“Before I was able to leave my office, in order to assess the situation and issue orders for the removal of the bodies,” the mayor testified, “removal of the bodies had already started. There were carts and people ready. They volunteered for the job without any pressure.”

For Jews, the Germans were to be feared, but their Polish neighbours were also a threat.

“The greatest danger was not associated with the Germans, but with the Poles,” said Grabowski. “Unlike the former, the latter could easily tell a Jew from a non-Jew by their accent, customs and physical appearance.”

Poles were rewarded with a quarter-kilo of sugar for every Jew they turned in.

“The searches were conducted with extreme brutality and violence … the streets were soon filled with crowds of Jews being driven toward the market square, which the Germans had transformed into a holding pen for thousands of ghetto inmates,” he said.

On the streets, “the cries of Jews mixed with the shouts of the Germans and the laughter of the Poles,” according to an eyewitness.

“All of this was done in a small town where everybody knows each other,” said Grabowski. “It’s not only the question of geographic proximity, it’s social proximity. These people knew each other.”

People were taking clothes, jewelry and other possessions from the dead bodies. A husband would toss a body in the air while the wife pulled off articles of clothing until what was left was a pile of naked cadavers.

“They even pulled out golden teeth with pliers,” said Grabowski. A court clerk responded defensively to accusations that the gold he was trying to sell was soaked in human blood. “I personally washed the stuff,” he protested.

The prevalence in the Polish imagination of a Jewish association with gold partly accounted for the actions.

“This betrayal, due to widespread antisemitism and hatred of the Jews, was combined with the seemingly universal conviction that Jewish gold was just waiting to be transferred to new owners,” Grabowski said. “The myth of Jewish gold was so popular and so deeply rooted among Poles that it sealed the fate of [many Jews].”

The historical records indicate many Poles saw no need to cover their collaborationist tracks. Police and others who took it upon themselves to aid the Nazis without pressure defended their actions.

One policeman, after the war, depicted the killing of Jews as a patriotic act, one that saved Polish villagers from the wrath of the Nazis, who would have learned sooner or later about Jews in hiding and who then, he claimed, would have burned down the entire village.

As efficient as the Nazi killing machine was, Grabowski contends it could not have been as effective without the enthusiastic complicity of so many in Poland and other occupied countries.

“It was their participation that, in a variety of ways, made the German system of murder as efficient as it was,” he said.

With trepidation, Grabowski and his fellow researchers followed the documents and met with people in the towns. They would review documents from a 1947 trial, for instance, then go to the village in question.

The entire village would be conscious of its war-era history, he said. And the people who are, decades later, ostracized by their neighbours are not those who collaborated in the murder of Jews.

“The person that is ostracized is the family who tried to rescue the Jews, because they broke a certain social taboo and it still visible 75 or 76 years after the fact,” he said.

“Every time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide.”

In the question-and-answer session, Grabowski shut down a persistent audience member who identified as Polish and who took exception with Grabowski’s research, arguing that Poland has more Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem than any other country.

“Every time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide,” said Grabowski, who was born and educated in Warsaw. “The thing is, do you know how many Jews needed to be rescued? Poland had the largest Jewish community and using today Polish righteous as a universal and, let’s say, fig leaf behind which situations like I described here can be hidden is absolutely unconscionable. I protest against any attempt to overshadow the tragedy of Jewish people [with] the sacrifice of very, very few Poles.”

While Poland’s far-right government removed the mandated jail sentence for anyone found guilty of “slandering” Poland or Poles with complicity in Nazi war crimes, acknowledging the participation of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust remains a civil offence and Holocaust scholars in the country – and in Canada – face death threats and intimidation.

In introducing Grabowski, Richard Menkis, associate professor in the department of history at UBC, paid tribute to Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who escaped Auschwitz and brought to the world inside information about the death camp, its operations and physical layout. Vrba, with fellow escapee Albert Wetzler, warned in 1944 that Hungarian Jews were about to face mass transport to the death camps. The news is credited with saving as many as 200,000 lives.

Vrba migrated to Canada and became a professor of pharmacology at UBC. He died in 2006.

The Vrba lecture alternates annually between an issue relevant to the Holocaust and an issue chosen by the pharmacology department in the faculty of medicine.