Na’amat Women’s tea, 1955. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.12592)
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 archives@jewishmuseum.ca or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
Nolan Hupp and Annika Hupp play two schoolchildren who protest to save the shul in The Original Deed. (photo by Gayle Mavor)
When Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, z”l, sometimes known as the “Singing Rabbi,” visited Victoria on a concert tour in the 1960s, he heard about a plan to move the city’s downtown synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El, to the suburbs. According to local lore, the singer/songwriter’s impassioned advice to the shul community was, “Don’t sell the place. There’s too many prayers in the walls!”
In The Original Deed, staged for the first time last month by the play’s author, Sid Tafler, a similar thought emerged from the lips of the story’s main character, Sam Abelman, played with pathos and humour by Toshik Bukowiecki.
Sam, an amalgam of several longtime Victoria residents, invited his granddaughter, Ellen (delightfully portrayed by Ava Fournier), to listen as they walked together through the synagogue on a wet November day.
All Ellen heard was the sound of traffic outside. Sam smiled and said he heard people praying, even though the two of them were the only living souls walking around the old shul.
The plan of Sam’s son, Morris, to sell the old synagogue puts him at odds with his father, who had his heart set on restoring it. Their struggle fills most of the play, providing a perfect storm of difficult family dynamics made even more poignant by Jewish geography.
An active city-centre heritage synagogue is rare in Canada. During the last half-century, most urban Jewish communities moved to the suburbs, but not Victoria. This play helps us imagine why.
Performed at Congregation Emanu-El, the action unfolded within the synagogue’s sanctuary, mystically directed from the bimah by the ghost of Sam’s wife, Rivka.
The role of Rivka was tenderly portrayed by Zuzana Macknight, an accomplished Czech actress forced from her homeland in 1968 after it was invaded by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Macknight expressed a deep affinity for Rivka’s emotional journey through life as a child Holocaust survivor. Rivka felt such a passion for peace in her family that she managed to influence the play’s happy outcome from beyond the grave.
The greatest magic in this play swirled around its youngest actors. As Sam tells his granddaughter the story of his solo escape from Germany on a Kindertransport train to England during the Second World War, Nolan Nupp stole the show as Sam’s younger self. Nolan is a natural as Young Sam, who gave his bewildered little sister, Esther (played by Nolan’s real sister, Annika), a candy to help her remember him, as their mother tearfully forced them apart at a German train station.
In another flashback, Nolan communicated the horror Sam experienced as he watched the destruction of his beloved German synagogue during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which unmasked the Nazis’ murderous intent in November 1938.
All four child actors staged a protest as Victoria Hebrew School students, chanting and waving signs proclaiming, “Save our Shul,” dressed as the elders who inspired them.
Although you may have missed this heart-warming show, which only ran four nights to packed houses in Congregation Emanu-El’s storied sanctuary, you can still visit. Come for Shabbos on a Saturday morning when you can hear prayers in the walls and add your own.
Shoshana Litman, Canada’s first ordained maggidah (female Jewish storyteller), lives in Victoria.
“Maoz Tzur,” recording by Abraham Tzevi Idelsohn. (photo from Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880-1948 by Yehoash Hirschberg)
What do we have every year at Chanukah but rarely think about in terms of their origins? The songs. In a Hadassah Magazine article of some years ago, Melanie Mitzman quotes Velvel Pasternak on this subject. He said Chanukah songs are no more than a century old because Chanukah is a post-biblical holiday.
Pasternak is a musicologist, conductor, arranger, producer and publisher specializing in Jewish music. He has been described as “an expert on the music of the Chassidic sect and probably the largest publisher of Jewish music anywhere, although he is quick to note that publishing Jewish music is a business that attracts few rivals.”
The founder of Tara Publications, Pasternak has been responsible for the publication of 26 recordings and more than 150 books of Jewish music since 1971, spanning the gamut of Israeli, Yiddish, Ladino, cantorial, Chassidic and Holocaust music.
Most Chanukah songs, he told Mitzman, have been adapted from old folk melodies, have more than one set of lyrics and/or have been translated from language to language.
“Maoz Tzur,” for example, is called “Rock of Ages” in English. As Ariela Pelaia explains on thoughtco.com, it was written sometime in the 13th century by someone named Mordechai, and is a Jewish liturgical poem or piyyut, written in Hebrew originally, about “Jewish deliverance from four ancient enemies, Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman and Antiochus.” It is usually sung after lighting the chanukiyah. Its six stanzas correspond to five events of Jewish history and a hope for the future. Of its six stanzas, often only the first stanza is sung (or the first and fifth), as this is what directly pertains to Chanukah.
The authorship of the Yiddish song “Oy Chanukah,” or “Chanukah, Oh Chanukah,” in English, is unknown. According to the Freedman Jewish Music Archive at the University of Pennsylvania Library, alternate names of the Yiddish version of song have been recorded as “Khanike Days,” “Khanike Khag Yafe,” “Khanike Li Yesh,” “Latke Song (Khanike, Oy Khanike),” “Yemi Khanike” and “Chanike, Oy Chanike.” The standard transliteration of Chanukah in Yiddish, according to the YIVO system, is Khanike.
The Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg published two classical compositions that make extensive use of this tune: “Freylekhs” for solo piano by Hirsch Kopyt, published in 1912 but performed as early as 1909; and “Dance Improvisation” for violin and piano by Joseph Achron, published in 1914 (composed in December 1914 in Kharkov, Ukraine).
The lyrics of the Hebrew version, which has the same melody, were penned by Avraham Avronin. The words correspond roughly to the original (more so than the English version), with slight variations for rhyme and rhythm’s sake. Thus, the first line names the holiday; the second calls for joy and happiness (using two synonyms); in the third, the speakers say they’ll spin dreidels all night; in the fourth, they will eat latkes; in the fifth, the speaker calls everyone to light the Chanukah candles; the sixth mentions the prayer Al Hanissim (On the Miracles).
The only big change is in the last line. Whereas the original calls us to praise God for the miracles He performed, the Hebrew one praises the miracles and wonders performed by the Maccabees. This reflects the anti-religious attitude of early Zionism, evident in many other Israeli Chanukah songs. In Israel, it’s still a very popular song, but, since the country has a rich inventory of Chanukah repertoire, it is not as popular as the English or Yiddish versions in North America.
“I Have a Little Dreydl,” also known as the “Dreidel Song,” is very famous in the English-speaking world. It also has a Yiddish version. The Yiddish version is “Ich Bin a Kleyner Dreydl,” “I Am a Little Dreidel.” The lyrics are simple and are, not surprisingly, given its title, about making a dreidel and playing with it.
The writer of the English lyrics is Samuel S. Grossman and the composer is listed as Samuel E. Goldfarb. The Yiddish version apparently was both written and composed by Mikhl Gelbart, known as Ben Arn, the Son of Aaron. Therefore, there is a question about who composed this music, as the melody for both the Yiddish and the English versions are precisely the same and the meaning of the lyrics in both versions is largely the same. However, in English, the song is about a dreidel made out of clay, which would be hard to spin, whereas in the Yiddish, the four-sided spinning top is made out of blay, which is lead.
Another popular dreidel song is “Sevivon,” with sevivon, sivivon or s’vivon being Hebrew for dreidel, which is the Yiddish word for a spinning top. “Sevivon” is very popular in Israel and with others familiar with Hebrew.
“Al Hanasim” is another popular Hebrew song for Chanukah. It is taken from the liturgy, but it is also an Israeli folk dance. The song is about thanking God for saving the Jewish people. The most popular tune, however, is relatively recent, having been composed by Dov Frimer in 1975.
The Chanukah song “Mi Y’malel” opens with the line, “Who can retell the mighty feats of Israel,” which is a secular rewording of Psalms 106:2, which reads “Who can retell the mighty feats of God.”
“Ner Li” translates as “I Have a Candle.” This is a simple Hebrew Chanukah song that is more popular in Israel than in the Diaspora. The words are by Levin Kipnis and the music is by Daniel Samburski.
Kipnis also wrote the words for “Chanukah, Chanukah,” which is a traditional folk song originating in Israel. In a completely different vein, “Judas Maccabaeus” is an oratorio by George Frideric Handel. During Chanukah, the melody for the oratorio’s “See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes” is used by Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities for the hymn Ein Keloheinu.
Last for this article, but certainly not the only remaining Chanukah song, is “Ocho Kandelikas.” This Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) song was written by Jewish-American composer Flory Jagodain in 1983, explains Pelaia. She adds that its lyrics describe “a child joyfully lighting the menorah candles,” saying that “beautiful Chanukah is here,” and describing all the wonderful things that will happen this time of year. The song counts out the eight candles for the eight days of Chanukah.
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.
Group at Hillel House, University of British Columbia, 1988. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.11124)
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 archives@jewishmuseum.ca or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
Alison Pick discusses her new novel, Strangers with the Same Dream, at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival Nov. 25. (photo by Emma Lee)
“Here they were, she thought, in this remote land of Palestine, far from their homes and families. They had left their lives as they knew them to turn the Balfour Declaration, and the idea of a homeland for the Jews, into truth. They were strangers with the same dream…. But this was the thing: Zionism was not just an idea. It was something that was happening, now and now and now. It was something she could make happen.”
So thinks Ida, one of the three main characters in Alison Pick’s latest novel, Strangers with the Same Dream (Knopf Canada, 2017). Pick will be in Vancouver to open the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Nov. 25, 7:30 p.m., at the Rothstein Theatre. Appropriately enough, the title of her conversation with Jerry Wasserman is Idealism vs. Reality.
Ida has come to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, on her own from Russia, having seen her father killed and knowing that the brutal attackers also raped her mother; her sister, “Eva, thank God, had been at school.”
It is 1921. Ida is part of the Third Aliyah, one of many other young idealists, most of whom had no idea at the harsh conditions that awaited them – the heat of the dessert, the abundance of malaria-spreading mosquitoes, the backbreaking work, the relinquishment of individuality and, of course, their new Arab neighbours, who were displaced by their arrival.
The leader of Ida’s particular group is David, who immigrated during the Second Aliyah, in 1910. He “had helped establish the moshava [settlement] at Kinneret, planting eucalyptus trees along the muddy banks, negotiating with the fellaheen [farmers]. Ida heard he had traveled the entire length of Eretz Yisrael on horseback, meeting the Arabs in every tent and marketplace, learning their various customs so as to help in the purchase of land.”
And there is David’s wife, Hannah, who, “like David, had arrived in the Second Aliyah, which meant the halutzim [pioneers] instantly respect her.” While the “historic speeches fell to David; Hannah was left with the logistics.” For example, Hannah was the one to request that the new olim (immigrants) voluntarily surrender all of their valuables “to the enterprise they were building together. She did not want strangers circulating like policemen to take each other’s belongings. Especially not after what so many of them had been through in Czarist Russia.”
Strangers with the Same Dream is divided into three sections, each of which is written from the perspective of one of the three protagonists – Ida, David and Hannah – about the same series of events.
“Following the writing of my memoir Between Gods, I was very interested in the relationship between truth and memory, and the ways in which different people (family members, as one example, or characters) experience the same events very differently,” Pick told the Independent. “I love to challenge myself with each new book and so I decided to try and tell the same story through three different sets of eyes. I wanted the reader to have the pleasure of seeing things the characters did not; that is, miscommunications, misunderstandings, falsely attributed motivations.”
The protagonists could be considered archetypes of a sort. “Although I didn’t set out to write it that way,” said Pick, “Hannah certainly has some of the Mother in her, and Ida has the Maiden. David, I suppose, could be seen as a Trickster, although that might be a generous way to characterize him.”
The novel is introduced by a short prologue, written in the voice of a ghost – a former halutza – who sets up the narrative and then enters it occasionally.
“The ghost is a link between the past and the present,” explained Pick. “Because the three narrative voices were necessarily so limited, I wanted an additional over-arching outside view – outside of time, even – who could reflect both backward and forward. I was also thinking about the idea of haunting – that Israel today (as with Canada, as with many other places) is haunted by history, by the very real lives of those who came before us and influence how we live and how we understand our own stories.”
Pick chose to set the novel in 1921 for a number of reasons.
“I’m not an historian, although I do love writing historical fiction – and, while there is a lot of leeway in fiction as a genre, it is important to me to get the historical facts right. So, I set relatively narrow parameters for myself – all the action takes place roughly over the course of one year. The kibbutz in Strangers with the Same Dream is fictional, but it is loosely based on Kibbutz Ein Harod, established in 1921. While there had been other, smaller attempts at kibbutzim, Ein Harod was the first attempt on a bigger scale, and it is a kibbutz that has, still today, a mythical presence in the collective psyche of Israel.”
The novel took Pick about three years to write, and she did research in Israel.
“At Kibbutz Ein Harod, there is an incredible archive about the early years of kibbutz life,” said Pick. “I was able to access first-person diaries, many written by the female pioneers, which I had translated from Hebrew. Both the translator and the archivist herself were wonderful sources of information about the early years, and they introduced me to an elderly man (who has sadly since passed away), who was there at the establishment of the kibbutz in 1921. So, I read, I researched, I listened, I imagined. And then I tried to breathe life into a world of the past, to bring it to life for readers today.”
While some readers might find the ghost an intrusive presence, I found the novel completely engaging, in part because it shows some of the grim realities the halutzim faced, not only from the land and their Arab neighbours, but from one another. Readers will be able to picture what it was like in those early days. If I wasn’t sure before, I am now that I would have made a poor halutza – the hard work and strange surroundings wouldn’t have been nearly as daunting as the high risk of malaria and the challenges of living in a collective with few resources. I came away from the novel with more admiration for (most of) those who worked to make the idea of Zionism a reality. At least one reviewer, though, has imputed an anti-Zionist message to the novel.
“I confess I have been surprised by the (few) reviews that take the novel as anti-Zionist,” said Pick. “Perhaps I’m naïve – and I am certainly a newcomer to Judaism, which is no secret – but I adore Israel. I traveled there three times during the writing of the book and, each time, I fell more madly in love with the place.
“It did not occur to me that exploring the psyche of those early Zionists – who at the very least did realize that the place they were ‘settling’ was already populated – would be construed as anything other than telling the simple truth. I did not start out with a political message and, indeed, I think to do so is anathema to good fiction. The role of art, as I see it at least, is to open, to unravel, to make space for more questions rather than to judge, decide or condemn. Although one of the characters [David] is decidedly a villain, albeit I hope one in whom the reader sees humanity, the other two main players (Hannah and Ida) are, to my mind, hugely sympathetic. Everyone in the novel – Jews and Arabs alike – are simply trying to make do in a both remarkable and remarkably difficult situation.”
For tickets to hear Pick, and for the full book festival lineup, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.
Laurence Rees, former head of BBC TV History and author of the award-winning book Auschwitz, has written a very compelling and authoritative “new” history of the Holocaust, based on 25 years of research, and on many personal meetings with survivors and perpetrators – The Holocaust: A New History (Public Affairs, 2016).
The “new-ness” of Rees’ book is evidenced in the 100 pages of footnotes, which contain more than 100 references to “previously unpublished testimony,” plus new evidence from heretofore unrecorded diaries, speeches, stenographic reports, Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters, journals, private conversations and interviews. Add to this the results of “hundreds” of visits Rees made to exact killing locations, all of which have their first exposure here.
As with other great one-volume histories of the Holocaust, such as Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1986) and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), Rees’ history is difficult to read – not because of the writing (Rees’ prose is more engaging than either Gilbert’s or Hilberg’s) but because of what the reader has to face in reading about the Holocaust. The cold, impersonal, machine-efficient systematization of genocide; the brutality, the humiliation, the sadism and the ear-piercing silence of the church: all are offered here in unremitting detail. The silence of the world-at-large is also indicted here – as one survivor told Rees about her “liberation”: “What liberation? No one wanted us. There was no Israel, no England, no America and no Canada, with its wide open spaces.”
Rees lays his cards on the table in his prologue: “make no mistake about it – the Holocaust is the most infamous crime in the history of the world.” Rees’s words echo almost exactly the words of Winston Churchill in July of 1944.
To his credit, Rees sees through the usual “excuses” for the Judeocide – that is, need for “Lebensraum,” for “ridding of the world of a bacillus” or for the preventing of a Jewish plot for world domination. Rather, says Rees, the perversions which truly fueled the killing machinery were mad racism thoroughly laced with sadism and opportunity for profit.
On the usual controversial points: first, Rees agrees with Ian Kershaw that “No Hitler, No Holocaust”: no one who studies Holocaust history, he says, “can help but conclude that Hitler was primarily responsible for the Holocaust.” Second, Rees sides persuasively with the “functionalists” rather than the “intentionalists,” an old dilemma among historians of the period wrestling with the idea of whether the Judeocide was planned out in advance (“intentionalism”), or just came about piecemeal (“functionalism”). Third, as mentioned, Rees is adamant that the Holocaust was unique: “a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race.”
Rees is particularly, and rightly, harsh on the slavish complicity of the Dutch civil service (75% of the Dutch Jewish population perished) and the atrocious treatment of Jews in Vichy France, and bitterly condemns the hideously self-serving complicity of the Romanians in joining up with the German Nazis. But he saves his bitterest attack for the end of the book, vehemently accusing the Hungarians of a major crime for allowing what he rightly refers to as the “Hungarian Catastrophe.” (Nor does Canada escape indictment: Rees reminds us of Mackenzie King’s loud admiration of Hitler in the late ’30s, and of the antisemitic pronouncements of Canada’s Immigration Branch in 1938, preventing any Jewish immigration to Canada.)
Rees has some interesting insights on the “Danish Rescue” – the spiriting away to Sweden of almost all of Denmark’s Jewish citizens. Jews were thoroughly integrated into Danish society, and there had been a great number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews in Denmark. In never-before-published interviews, Rees offers heart-warming evidence of the bravery of Danish non-Jews in warning, hiding and planning passage for their Jewish neighbours. As a result, says Rees, when the Germans called, “most of the Danish Jews were not at home.” Rees offers “no simple explanation of why this happened in Denmark and nowhere else,” but he guesses that the Nazi functionary (Werner Best), known to have warned the Danish police about the upcoming “Action” in October of 1943, may have been motivated by the need to “avoid bad feeling” in a country that was supplying considerable food supplies to the Reich. No less of a motivating factor, Rees further conjectures, was the fact that Best, who had been appointed in his 20s to a judgeship, was intelligent enough to foresee the Nazis’ future defeat and subsequently “needed to start improving his CV as far as the Allies were concerned.”
Rees’ book reminds us, then, that history, ironically, is always “new” – and we are, therefore, reminded to constantly view it, and to re-view it, through ever-changing historical lenses.
Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria is the subject and setting for The Original Deed, which opens Nov. 15. (photo by Sid Tafler)
Established in 1863, Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in Canada. As the saying goes, if those walls could talk. Well, journalist and author Sid Tafler, a longtime member of Emanu-El, has given them a voice, of sorts.
Tafler, who has worked in theatre as a writer, actor and producer, has created The Original Deed, an historical drama about the synagogue.
Despite being such a landmark, Emanu-El “was nearly lost forever a generation ago, when a move was afoot to sell the old building and relocate to the suburbs,” reads the description. “The play tells the story of Sam Abelman, a Holocaust survivor and downtown jeweler, who fights to save the shul from the wrecking ball, while his son Morry tries to sell out and move the congregation to the suburbs. As the father/son struggle reaches a climax, Sam invokes ‘the Original Deed’ and a ghostly figure from his past emerges to salvage his dreams and his memories.”
Performed in the sanctuary, it features Toshik Bukowiecki as Sam, Zuzana Macknight as Rivka Abelman and Bobby Cleveland as Jack Abelman. John Roebuck plays Morry, while the rest of the Abelman clan is performed by Maureen Van Wyck as Leah, Annika Hupp as Esther, Nolan Hupp as Young Sam, and Ava Fournier, 12, who plays Ellen. Bill Taylor takes on the character of Phil Cogan, the lawyer.
“The play is set circa 1980,” Tafler told the Independent. “I say circa because the issue of selling the shul was discussed a number of times over 15 to 20 years, so 1980 is an average.”
Tafler mined the synagogue’s archives and online historical information, as well as the book Sefer Emanu-El, which was published by the synagogue on its 150th anniversary in 2013.
“I found that much of the written history about the shul is about the dynamic era of the founding in 1863 and the colourful figures of the gold rush and late 19th century,” said Tafler. “There is comparatively little about recent history. Some older members of the congregation knew about the proposed sale, which was discussed at board meetings, but not much detail about the how and why – specifically, why the idea was dropped.”
Tafler was inspired “by the intrigue and thinking behind this idea of selling the shul and moving to the suburbs, which many communities have done. When it first came up, the building was not the lovely restored heritage landmark it is now. It was covered in stucco and the ceiling had been lowered to exclude the balcony.”
In the real-life situation, there were proposals to buy an old church or to purchase land near the Jewish Cemetery on Cedar Hill Road, said Tafler.
“I created a family called the Abelmans to embody this story,” he explained. “Sam, an aging Holocaust survivor, is desperate to keep the old building, while his son Morry, head of the building committee, wants to sell out and move to a waterside location in Gordon Head (near the University of Victoria). Everyone gets involved: Sam’s wife Rivka, his granddaughter Ellen, his other son Jack, a wanderer; even his lawyer, Phil Cogan, who holds his finger to the wind and listens to his mother to decide which side he’s on.
“The stakes are very high for Sam,” said Tafler. “As a boy, he looked out the window of his home in Germany and saw his shul being destroyed on Kristallnacht. Soon after, he was shipped off to England in the Kindertransport, and never saw his family again.”
In addition to the history, Tafler said he was “also inspired by Zelda Dean, Emanu-El’s theatre maven, who suggested I write a play about the shul.”
It took two years and nine months for this production to go from idea to the stage, he said. “But, in some ways,” he said, it took 20 years. “My last play, Ghost on the Road, was produced at the Victoria Fringe Festival in 1997.”
The Abelmans are not real people, said Tafler, “but I have grown up with Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren from my earliest years. When I was still a toddler, my parents took in two teenage survivors from Hungary, a boy and a girl, who lived with our family in Montreal for a few years. In school, many of my classmates’ parents were survivors and I heard these stories firsthand. Here in Victoria, the survivors were a major presence in our shul.”
So, on whom is Sam based?
“Sam Abelman is one part Jack Gardiner. One part Peter Gary. One part Willy Jacobs. One part Ray Rose. One part each of my grandfathers, Sam Tafler and Eli Shetzer,” said Tafler. “But mostly, Sam, the lead character in The Original Deed, is himself, played by Victoria actor Toshik Bukowiecki.
“Jack, Peter and Willy were Holocaust survivors and members of our shul at different times,” Tafler explained. “They taught us about terrible loss and despair, redeemed by liberation, healing and building a new life.
“Ray was born in Victoria in 1920 and operated Rose’s Jewelers on Douglas Street, a business started by his father Joseph in 1912. He was a bombardier in the RCAF in the Second World War and flew 33 missions over Europe,” said Tafler.
“Sam and Eli were both born in shtetls in the Ukraine and immigrated to Canada in the early 20th century. They found work and raised families in Montreal and their many descendants now live across North America.”
As to some of the reasons Morry, or community members like him, wanted to abandon the historic building and move to the suburbs, Tafler provided several excerpts from the play, all spoken by Morry (Morris):
The Original Deed runs at Congregation Emanu-El Nov. 15-16 and 18-19, at 7 p.m. Tickets ($20/$15) are available at Ticket Rocket, ticketrocket.co/event/details/101436/the-original-deed.
Congregation Beth Israel event, 1990. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.09769)
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 archives@jewishmuseum.ca or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
Balfour Street in Jerusalem. (photo by Pat Johnson)
One hundred years ago, on Nov. 2, 1917, one of history’s most consequential letters was typed. Simple and short, the Balfour Declaration, as it would become known, is a central artifact in the history of Zionism, the state of Israel and the ongoing conflict over claims to the land on which Israelis and Palestinians reside.
The letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, was addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader in the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It informed Rothschild that the British cabinet had approved this one-paragraph statement:
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The letter was enormously historic for a number of reasons, not least that the first Zionist Congress had taken place a mere 20 years earlier, the first tangible expression in two millennia that the Jewish people should reasonably anticipate self-determination in the land of Zion. And now one of the world’s great powers was on record as supporting the endeavour.
The letter was also hugely presumptuous because the area in question was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans would not be thoroughly vanquished by the British-French-Russian allies until 1918. Yet the allies were so confident of eventual victory that the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 was already (on paper) carving up the region between the European powers.
Nevertheless, the document stood as a testament to British allegiance to the Zionist ideal in the interwar period. That allegiance, of course, amounted to very little in practical terms. In response to Arab protests (including mass murder in Hebron in 1929), the British froze Jewish migration to Palestine at the very moment in history when it was more urgently necessary than ever. The Holocaust – which can be said to have begun in earnest on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, 21 years to the day after the Balfour Declaration was made public – occurred, of course, because of the Nazis’ Final Solution. But it could only have occurred in the enormous extent that it did because no other nation on earth would welcome the imperiled Jews of Europe. Palestine was the most obvious place for them to go, but British resolve folded in the face of Arab protest and Jews were trapped in Europe, where six million would die.
Likewise, the British commitment to Zionism amounted to nothing when it mattered again after the Holocaust. Still preventing widespread Jewish migration to Palestine, the British eventually gave up on the entire enterprise and threw the troubled land into the lap of the newly founded United Nations. The UN, for its part, eventually passed the Partition Resolution that would have seen two states – one Jewish, one Arab – formed in Palestine.
The reality remains that one significant sub-clause of the Balfour Declaration stands out to the contemporary eye. The statement that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” would certainly be viewed by many as remaining unfulfilled. The civil rights of non-Jewish citizens of Israel are protected in law, but serious inequalities remain. More significantly, the statelessness and associated lack of civil rights experienced by Palestinians in the Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank would certainly not live up to the well-intentioned words of Balfour.
Some say the British government should apologize for their role in advancing an independent Jewish state. British Prime Minister Theresa May batted that one back in a letter to her party’s Conservative Friends of Israel, saying, “We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel.… The task now is to encourage moves toward peace.”
If apologies are in order, the British government might consider apologizing for giving little but lip-service to the Zionism enterprise throughout the 20th century.
The Balfour anniversary is an interesting time to reflect on history – and the past has an important role to play in informing us of the present. But, as always, we should keep our focus on the future.
Beth Israel National Confab (clergy), 1975. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.09862)
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 archives@jewishmuseum.ca or 604-257-5199. To find out who has been identified in the photos, visit jewishmuseum.ca/blog.
