history – Page 55

Poland’s wartime contradictions

In August, Poland’s right-wing cabinet approved a bill that would criminalize using the phrase “Polish death camp” or “Polish concentration camp,” with punishments including fines or imprisonment.

The bill raises questions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. It echoes the country’s communist-era stance on the Second World War – that Poland was a victim and heroically saved Jews.

Growing up, I was told the opposite by my family, my Jewish day school and the broader community – that Poland was antisemitic and complicit in the Holocaust.

But recently, I’ve come to believe that both narratives are true. As we approach the High Holy Days and Yizkor, I think it’s worth reflecting on whether we as a community can see Poland’s role in the Holocaust differently.

This summer, I visited Poland for the first time with my sister, and the trip was full of contradictions. For example, we learned that Christian Poles – including our local guide’s grandparents – were sent to concentration camps, too. The Nazis killed two to three million Christian Poles and three million Jewish Poles. In total, Poland lost one-fifth of its prewar population – more than any other European country. But, those numbers represent roughly 10% of the Christian Polish population and 90% of the Jewish Polish population.

At the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, I learned about Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews. The Polish government-in-exile created it to support and fund Jewish resistance in Poland, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; it was the only such organization created by a European government.

At Yad Vashem, Poland has the most Righteous Among the Nations of any country. Yet, it also lost one of the highest percentages of Jews of all European countries.

We found that Holocaust memorials were also inconsistent, dependent on local policies rather than a unified national one. In our baba’s hometown of Wlodawa, the Jewish cemetery is now a park, without a Holocaust memorial, unlike the many memorials around Warsaw, Krakow and the preserved camps. This inconsistency seems to reflect the divisions within Polish society about whether, and how much, Poland took part in the Holocaust.

In our zeyda’s (z”l) hometown of Bilgoraj, we spoke with three people (through our guide) who live near his former house, which was recently torn down to build a shopping mall. One of them, who had the same build and attire as our zeyda, recognized our family name and said that our zeyda’s next-door neighbors were rumored to have hidden Jews (including, possibly, one of our zeyda’s younger sisters). Another neighbor said her mother hid a Jewish man for three days before he fled town, and that Jews and Christians lived in peace before the war. (Our grandparents never expressed that.)

Nearby, a new development claims to recreate the town shtetl, including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s house, a Belarusian-style (not a local-style) synagogue and luxury apartments. We called it “shtetl Disney.” We didn’t see any information on display about why the real shtetl disappeared, and I only hope that no one will want to live in a place that seeks to profit from nostalgia for a lost community. But that, too, depends on how people see their country’s role in that loss.

At the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, we took a synagogue walking tour with a guide who, like a growing number of Poles, has discovered her own Jewish ancestry since communism ended. (She’s now a Yiddish lecturer at Columbia.) We learned that Polish-Jewish history dates back 1,000 years, since Jews fled the Crusades and got special protection, including freedom of religion, from a series of Polish kings. We also saw “Jewish-style” restaurants run by and for non-Jews, and “shtetl rabbi” statuettes being sold in the Old Town – we felt uncomfortable seeing people exoticize and capitalize on our culture.

We also saw a play, based on a true story, about a Jewish Torontonian with Polish roots who visits Poland for the first time, confronts the history and legacy of the Holocaust and witnesses the country’s “Jewish revival,” led by Jews and Christians. Seeing some of our experience reflected back at us emphasized, for me, that Polishness and Ashkenazi Jewishness are partly intertwined, whether or not we acknowledge it.

Realizing that our family is more Polish than we’d thought was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. On our way to Wlodawa, we bought fresh forest blueberries along a highway, and realized our grandparents would have grown up eating them, rather than discovering them in Vancouver as adults, as we’d assumed. In Wlodawa, the restaurant where we ate lunch could have been our baba’s dining room: the walls were peach, the curtains were lace and doilies covered the tables. In Lublin, flea-market stalls sold porcelain figurines just like the ones in her glass-doored cabinets. Were we in Poland, or at home?

Several times, I’ve wondered what to make of these contradictions.

The Jewish community, coming from collective trauma, can insist that Poland was a perpetrator; the Polish government, wanting to avoid collective reflection or partial responsibility, can insist it was a victim or martyr.

The truth is, some Christian Poles collaborated and killed Jews; some joined the partisans or hid Jews; most did nothing. The country was occupied and partitioned, and no one (Jewish or Christian) knew what was going to happen. There was a death penalty for resisting or hiding Jews. The truth is, societies are messy and heterogeneous, and we can’t make universal statements about them.

My question is, do Jews and Polish society want to perpetuate narratives that deny the differences within Polish society during the Second World War? Or do we want to heal?

If we want healing, I believe both communities need to accept that Poland was both perpetrator and victim, complicit and righteous – much as we may not want to, and much as that may feel difficult or even impossible. If we can accept this paradox, maybe then we can move from our respective pain to some kind of healing.

Tamara Micner is a playwright and journalist from Vancouver who lives in London, England. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books.

Contribute to new podcast

The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia’s Feeding Community project wants your story. (photo from JMABC)

What does an egg taste like when it’s been boiled for hours with onion peels and coffee? Have you ever consumed a meal while sipping on a carbonated yogurt beverage? What kind of oven do you need to make cubana, a dough that you leave on the fire from Friday late afternoon to Saturday?

These are just some of the questions the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia has encountered in the early days of its research for the Feeding Community project. JMABC researchers have devoured cheesecake on Shavuot while talking about the use of dried lime in Persian cooking. They have asked a rabbi to divulge the secrets of his cholent recipe. They have pored over handwritten recipes and black and white photographs of Sephardi Jews in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. It’s been a rewarding and immersive sensory experience, learning about the community’s diverse roots and traditions – and the findings will be shared through a podcast being developed for the JMABC.

Some might say that too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth, but the opposite goes for making a podcast. The more people the JMABC hears from, the richer the podcast will be. The JMABC is interviewing members of the community, hoping to unravel what the act of eating and traditions of food mean for individuals and in terms of family. As much as the JMABC hopes people will listen to the series, it also encourages people to be contributors.

Whether your family arrived in Canada by way of Mexico, Minsk or Morocco, Argentina, Albany or Azerbaijan, South Africa, Sri Lanka or Shanghai, the JMABC would like to hear from you. To learn more about Feeding Community or to contribute information, email [email protected] or call 604-257-5199.

Storytelling overtaken by facts

Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem gave us delightful fables about the shtetl, the overcrowded villages of Eastern Europe, with endearing characters that contended with abysmal poverty, deadly pogroms and false messiahs. However, life in the shtetl was not always so dreary.

In a new book that effectively undermines the archetypical shtetls of our imagination, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern in The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton University Press) redraws the image of the shtetl. A professor of Jewish studies at Northwestern University and author of several books, Petrovsky-Shtern documents a brief period in history, from the late 17th century to the mid-18th century, when life was not so bad in those towns of our ancestors in eastern Poland and Ukraine.

book cover - The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe Petrovsky-Shtern looks closely at three provinces with 44 shtetls in Eastern Europe. Relying mostly on documents that were previously overlooked, he discovers that many of the shtetls at that time were neither poor nor especially pious. On the contrary, they were thriving communities with stable economies built around popular market fairs. Some shtetls had trading firms that rivaled those found in large cities. Some had fancy restaurants and a rich cultural life.

Although Jewish businessmen were prominent, the Jews were a minority in many of the towns. Jews and Christians lived and worked together.

As might be expected in any neighborhood, the Jewish community also had its share of characters of questionable integrity. Petrovsky-Shtern goes through historic court records that reveal stories of bribes, counterfeiting, smuggling, informants and collusion of Jewish businessmen with crooked clerks. Even the rabbinical leadership comes under his microscope.

Jews came to Eastern Europe with the Greek colonizers more than 2,000 years ago but the Jewish presence in the region was minimal until Polish nobility encouraged Jewish migration from Western Europe.

The Jews were invited to run country fairs and sell liquor, two activities that provided significant tax revenues to the Polish authorities. The Jewish businessmen brought new “Western” approaches to trade. They put stores and stalls under one roof, and sold exotic merchandise from distant lands. They opened inns offering a place to drink and a bed. They injected a cosmopolitan slice of urban life into rural agricultural areas. They expanded trade, bringing prosperity to the region.

By 1840, however, the golden era had started to fade. The Russian monarchy, which had ruled the region with benign neglect since the partition of Poland in the late 1700s, began asserting its authority. Discriminatory laws against Jews contributed to the decline of the shtetl, as authorities shifted economic and political power to larger urban centres. Once-vibrant communities turned into depressed outposts of the Russian Empire, the shtetl of popular Yiddish literature. They struggled to survive in their diminished state, until the Nazi regime wiped them out.

A fascinating and often ignored aspect of the shtetl described by Petrovsky-Shtern is the relationship of the shtetl Jews with the Holy Land.

In the late 18th century, about 500 Jews from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went to Palestine to build a religious utopian community. Followers of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Zalman, the Mitnagdim idealists, were convinced that resettlement would pave the way for the Messiah. The rabbi, also known as the Vilna Gaon, had predicted the Messiah would arrive in 1840, coinciding with the year 5600 in the Jewish calendar.

Not to be undone, followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the rival Chassidic sect, made aliyah in even greater numbers, settling in Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem. By 1800, the Jewish population of Palestine had expanded to 6,000, accounting for roughly two percent of the population.

Petrovsky-Shtern recounts the impact of this aliyah on those who remained behind in the shtetl. In some respects, reverberations of the migration continue to be felt almost 200 years later.

The pioneers in Palestine faced unimaginable challenges: poverty, illnesses, natural disasters, famine and discriminatory Ottoman Empire laws. In order to survive, the Jews of Palestine developed a sophisticated network of rabbinic fundraisers who went from shtetl to shtetl, giving sermons, selling books and sparking the imagination with stories about the Holy Land, including tales about inscriptions on the tombs of the prophets.

The rabbinic messengers assured shtetl Jews that supporting Jews in the Holy Land was comparable to fulfilling the commandment of settling in the Holy Land themselves. The rabbis, who kept meticulous records, told donors that prayers were chanted on their behalf at the Cave of Machpelah, the gravesite of Abraham, Isaac,

Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

The authorities tried to stop the flow of funds to Palestine. They suspected that the Jews, who they blamed for the death of Jesus, were sending money to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. They believed that the fundraising was reinforcing Jewish separateness, undermining assimilation, increasing fanaticism and possibly hindering Jews’ ability to pay local taxes.

Also, as the years passed, raising funds for the Jews in Palestine was viewed as aiding an enemy of the state. By the 1800s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned and territory that included many of the shtetls became part of the Russian Empire, which had hostile relations with the Ottoman rulers.

Yet, Jewish communities still managed to raise money, especially in the years from 1810 to 1830. Aiding the Jews of Palestine became one of the highest priorities for Eastern Europe’s Jews, comparable only to the commandment of ransoming prisoners, Petrovsky-Shtern says.

The communal leadership of dozens of shtetls in the provinces of Volhynia and Podolia imposed a tax to help establish a synagogue in Jerusalem and maintain Chassidic groups. Charity boxes were on many dining tables and store counters. As well, sacks of earth from the Holy Land and ritual objects produced by the Jews of Palestine found their way into everyday life of the shtetl. Unpublished manuscripts by Holy Land rabbis and mystics were much sought-after reading, passing from hand-to-hand in the shtetl.

In a tale that echoes across two centuries, Petrovsky-Shtern recounts the role of the legendary charity boxes that are now found in many Jewish homes in North America. He writes that Jewish women in the shtetl of Kremenets, and possibly surrounding towns, turned the “commandment” to help the Jews of Palestine into an intrinsic part of the blessings over candles before Shabbat: right before the blessing, they put some money aside in a wooden charity box or tin mug to support the Holy Land communities.

By the time of the devastating earthquake in Safed in 1837, whatever hurt Palestine was felt just as strongly in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The relationship between the shtetl and the Jews of Palestine appears to have many similarities with contemporary links between Israel and the Diaspora.

Petrovsky-Shtern provides a wealth of information about many different aspects of daily life, woven between lively vignettes to illustrate the comfortable standard of living enjoyed by many shtetls before their precipitous disintegration.

Unfortunately, the book is too easy to put down. Petrovsky-Shtern’s encyclopedic descriptions of the shtetl provide solid background for an academic understanding of the shtetl, but the pace is uneven. Interesting stories, such as the account of the relationship to the Holy Land, are interspersed with lengthy reports of dry historical records.

As Petrovsky-Shtern wanders back and forth across the years and jumps from shtetl to shtetl, the locations and dates turn into boring lengthy lists of trivia. Despite the endless string of names of real people, the reader does not come to know anyone in the shtetl. The facts may be on Petrovsky-Shtern’s side, but Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem tell much more memorable stories.

Robert Matas, a Vancouver-based writer, is a former journalist with the Globe and Mail. This review was originally published on the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library website and is reprinted here with permission. To reserve this book or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman library.

Saving community’s stories

Calof family festive meal, spring 1942. This is but one of the thousands of photos that have been collected and preserved by the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia. (photo by Cyril Leonoff; JWB fonds, JMABC L.13866)

The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia (JMABC) has launched a new campaign called Sustainers of the Archives. The B.C. Jewish Community Archives contains an unmatched collection of material documenting the more than 150-year history of Jewish life in the province, from family mementos to the founding documents of major organizations.

Housed in a secure, climate-controlled 3,000-square-foot facility in Richmond, the collection includes 750 oral history audio and video recordings, extensive photographic collections, as well as art and artifacts. This invaluable community asset is managed by a full-time professional archivist, and access to the material in the archives is available to researchers and other interested parties through the offices of the JMABC.

The purpose of the Sustainers campaign is to invite members of the public to become friends of the archives by making an ongoing financial commitment. These funds will help the JMABC preserve the archives for future generations, as well as help the JMABC achieve its mandate: to tell the story of Jewish life in British Columbia. To become a Friend of the Archives, visit jewishmuseum.ca/become-a-sustainer. For more information, visit jewishmuseum.ca or contact the museum at 604-257-5199.

Two degrees of separation

An old audio reel that writer Shula Klinger found in a suitcase of her late father’s mementoes features a revealing interview with Viennese author Edith de Born. (photo by Shula Klinger)

When my father died in 2014, I was given an old suitcase containing his mementoes. There were photos, much of his early writing and an audio reel in a box. All it said on the box was, “Interview with Edith de Born.” I had never seen this tape before and had no idea who de Born was. I also didn’t know why my father would have had the reel because, to the best of my knowledge, he had never worked in radio.

A quick Google search told me that de Born was a novelist, born in Vienna when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the Second World War, she and her banker husband both worked for the Resistance. An obituary of another writer on theguardian.com mentions her as a “now-forgotten Austro-Hungarian novelist,” a gauntlet of a phrase if ever I read one. The next website I visited was a bookseller with secondhand copies of de Born’s books. The Price of Three Cézannes and The House in Vienna arrived a few weeks later.

Like de Born, my father’s family lived in Vienna in the early 20th century, in the final days of the Habsburg Empire. But what was behind my father’s desire to interview her? I took the reel to a digital studio and had the material transferred to a CD, hoping to find some answers.

The first time I listened to it, I thought I was listening to my father’s voice but couldn’t be sure. The recording was clean, without any extraneous noises, but still, technology distorts the human voice and it didn’t really sound like my dad. This man’s English was excellent and he spoke quickly, but his vowel sounds weren’t quite right, weren’t quite what I remember. His phrases lacked the colloquial idioms you’d hear in a native speaker.

A few minutes in, I was sure this was indeed my father. The recording was made not long after he had moved to England. His first language was (I think) Yiddish, followed by Arabic and Hebrew, English and French. Was my memory playing tricks or was this simply evidence of what my friends had observed in the 1970s – that my dad “had an accent”?

I listened carefully to the rest of the interview. Mostly my father asks de Born about her writing habits, literary preferences and the authors she has met. He wants to know if she keeps notes in a little book, whether her characters are based on people she knows. She answers no, no, no again and again. He seems to be looking for tips on how to be a novelist. He gets nothing.

The conversation is stilted but my father doesn’t seem dissatisfied with the author’s brief answers. Are these the questions of a novice reporter, just learning the tricks of his trade? Or is he working to a personal agenda, trying to glean something useful for himself?

I get a partial answer when de Born speaks of the authors she has met. Evelyn Waugh, she says. And Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing she describes as “divine.” Knowing that Nabokov emigrated to the United States, my father asks, “Did he have an accent?” An odd thing to focus on, one might think, when you’re discussing a world-renowned novelist.

But there’s my answer. I may have grown up oblivious to my father’s accent, but he certainly wasn’t. Like all immigrants, he was aware that it marked him out as different. In a country where one’s identity is defined by the class system, this put him outside regular society. It told others that he was different, and he was just as conscious that, to fit in and be accepted into middle class, professional life in England, one had to be more than educated, more than capable – one had to sound English, to sound as though you belonged. With tanned skin, curly hair and – as he well knew – an abrasive manner, he did his best to tone down the chutzpah and mimic the mannerisms and diction of those around him. But not before he met de Born.

I managed to date the recording to 1960 or 1961 by looking at the publication date of the book de Born is writing when she meets my father. At that time, my father had not seen most of his family for years. Was the conversation a way for him to maintain a connection to his own heritage? Or was he simply looking for professional guidance? De Born could have been the perfect mentor – if only she had agreed. It is clear, however, from her guarded answers that she is not looking to nurture an emerging new talent.

There is, however, a short conversation about her memories of Austria. For the most part, she refuses to discuss her past, but she does talk briefly about her father, a Viennese nobleman. When the emperor Franz Josef died in 1916, her father walked in the funeral procession through the streets of Vienna. She describes her fondness for her father, and speaks warmly of his influence on her life.

Fascinated to learn that there were only two degrees of separation between me and a person who had attended an emperor’s funeral, I decided to look up some of the events she described. I soon found the Pathé News archive. Turns out they have thousands of files online. Here, I found a silent movie of the 1916 procession.

Twenty-six seconds in, I was startled to see something that didn’t fit. In the midst of all the smartly dressed adult aristocrats, prancing black horses and royal footmen, there is a tall, dignified looking man. This man is holding the hand of a little girl. She must be 4 or 5 and she’s holding a teddy bear in her other hand. They turn in front of the camera for a second before they are obscured by the heads of royal guards. She reappears fleetingly, later on, and then she’s gone. Could this be de Born, the woman whose voice I hear in conversation with my father when he was still a young Israeli immigrant?

De Born’s work is not in vogue now but this is – I believe – a tremendous shame. An astute observer of human nature, her dialogue is incisive and the inner lives of her characters richly explored. The world of Viennese aristocrats is opulent but restricted, the women stifled by their positions in society. Even as the characters cling to old traditions, singing of a Habsburg emperor whose fate will be tied to Austria’s for all eternity, de Born’s narrator feels that her world is an anachronism: “No waxwork exhibition could possibly reproduce the atmosphere of a vanished epoch so uncannily as did those creatures who continued to move with old-fashioned grace in their own meaningless world,” she writes.

Soon after, she describes a very different scene, being “in the midst of people who spoke my language, but with whom I could not feel in harmony. ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer …’ chanted, yelled, screamed hysterically.” Little by little, de Born introduces ever more troubling elements, gradually building on a sense of a looming catastrophe – for Austrian nobility, for Europe at large and for Jews in particular. It may be set in polite society, but The House in Vienna is an exquisitely tense and emotional read. It is no wonder my father chose de Born as his interviewee. I have not found her described as a Jewish author, but – to me at least – her photograph on the dust jacket tells me everything I need to know.

As a daughter listening to her father’s voice after his death, the reel of tape is a gift and, like the work of his interviewee, it is a little eerie. It feels like eavesdropping. I don’t know if my father meant me to have it – or even find it – but I loved hearing his chuckle as he talked about something that he cared about, so deeply, as the young man I didn’t know. It’s a great way to remember him and his accent – full of life and Israeli/European inflections – hints at how he must have felt as a newcomer in England, all those years ago.

And, of course, it’s not a particularly smooth interview. At one point, the author laughs, somewhat revealingly, “Now we’re getting somewhere!” in her own gently accented English. Up to that point, my father’s questions have mostly been dead-ends. This question, however, was different, and the pace of the conversation quickens, the tone is light, almost cheeky. Hearing him make a genuine connection with another human being – something I rarely saw myself – was pure gold. It’s an infinitesimally small hunk of gold, but when you lose a complex and extremely guarded parent that you tried throughout your life – and failed – to connect with in this way, it can feel like winning the lottery.

Shula Klinger is an author, illustrator and journalist living in North Vancouver. Find out more at niftyscissors.com.

Scribe 2015/16 launch

(photos by Cynthia Ramsay)

On May 15, the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia launched the latest issue of its annual journal, The Scribe. This year’s edition follows the history of Jewish clothiers in the province, so the museum kicked things off with a fashion show curated by local fashion historian, Ivan Sayers, featuring clothing from the 1940s through to the 1970s. Some of the pieces exhibited were made or sold by clothiers included in the journal, which can be purchased for $20 from [email protected] or 604-257-5199. To see more of the fashion show photos, click here.

Jerusalem in photographs

The Dome of the Rock in the snow, 1940s. (photo by Moshe (Nicolas) Schwartz / Schwartz Collection, Bitmuna)

photo - Watermelons, undated — Watermelons, undated. *(photo by Elia Kahvedjian)*

Jerusalem is one of the most photographed places in the world. The Camera Man: Women and Men Photograph Jerusalem 1900-1950 exhibition at the Tower of David Museum highlights the unique and complex human and cultural heritage of the city. It also offers, for the first time, a comprehensive look at the photographic work in Jerusalem of Christians, Jews and Muslims between the years 1900 and 1950.

photo - Arab fighters on the walls of the Tower of David — Arab fighters on the walls of the Tower of David. *(photo by Chalil Rissas / The Central Zionist Archives)*

The 34 photographers chosen to be exhibited in The Camera Man lived and worked in Jerusalem during the first half of the 20th century. The photographers come from all different backgrounds – European, Armenian and local, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, men and women. Many photographers recorded the Jerusalem residents of different communities; some were hired by institutions and organizations to photograph various historical events that occurred in the city and some were artists who sought to honor the unique faces of Jerusalem.

What makes this exhibition different from others is that much of the photography that has been displayed before from this time period looks at the young “strong Zionist,” the developing state of Israel, the rural local villages, the posed “Orient,” the “new Tel Aviv.” This exhibition – which includes many photographs that have never been seen before – examines Jerusalem and its colorful mosaic of people, from everyday life to historic events.

photo - The ice cream seller with his bird, 1940s — The ice cream seller with his bird, 1940s. *(photo by Hanna Safieh / Rafi Safieh Collection)*

“The juxtaposition of different viewpoints and spheres of activity, placing works by prominent photographers alongside less well-known names, reveals a hitherto untold chapter in the history of photography in the country and in Jerusalem’s own history,” writes exhibit curator Dr. Shimon Lev.

In the mid-19th century, when Europe began to take an interest in the Orient, Jerusalem witnessed an influx of travelers from England, France and, later, from America. At the same time, a new invention was spreading through Europe – the camera – and the newcomers carted their unwieldy photographic equipment with them. The sight of the squalid city was a bitter disappointment to them and clashed with an imagined idea of the Holy City that had prompted their journey to Jerusalem.

The dissonance between the Jerusalem cherished by the heart and the Jerusalem revealed to the eye, between the heavenly and the earthly Jerusalem, and between the ideal and the mundane Jerusalem, still occupies photographers today. Although cameras are now conveniently small and light and exposure times are shorter, today’s photographer still tries to capture his own personal version of Jerusalem, even if it is only a digital self-portrait in front of the Tower of David.

photo - Jordanian soldier at the destruction of the Hurva Synagogue, 1948 — Jordanian soldier at the destruction of the Hurva Synagogue, 1948. *(photo by Ali Zaarour / Zaarour Family Collection)*

In The Camera Man, there are photographs showing action in the streets of Jerusalem from 1948, as well as portraits taken by local photographers who opened up their own photographic stores, most of them along Jaffa Road near Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David. The stores were called photographic houses or photo studios, although the driving spirit between the revival of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), suggested the term ‘“light-painting houses” in Hebrew.

The photographs comprising The Camera Man were collected from private and public archives. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes selected photos from the exhibit, several of which are published for the first time, as well as articles by Lev, Dr. Lavi Shai and artist Meir Appelfeld.

The Camera Man is on display until Dec. 10. For more information, visit tod.org.il/en/exhibition/the-photographers.

– Courtesy of

A loveless family saga

A powerful family saga, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016) by Sarit Yishai-Levi is brutally honest. It starts with the narrator, Gabriela, talking about her childhood in 1950s Jerusalem. Her relationship with her mother, Luna, is strained at best; more accurately, a mutual aversion. Luna is a dismal mother and a horrid wife, a cold, spiteful woman. Disliking her immensely, I wanted to know what happened to Gabriela, but the book didn’t go in that direction.

Instead of moving the action forward, the author goes back in time, almost to the banishment of the Jews from Spain. From there, she follows several generations of the Ermosas, a family of merchants in Jerusalem. The story that emerges is an anatomy of animus, a fictional dissertation on the topic of what happens to people who deny love – because they all deny it.

Rafael doesn’t love his wife Mercada. He married her at the behest of his mother, an obedient Jewish son doing his duty, while his heart belonged to another for all of his life. He doesn’t allow himself even to acknowledge his torn soul, but his unloving marriage poisons the family for generations to come. Some describe it as a curse, and Mercada becomes a bitter, hateful woman.

When Mercada and Rafael’s sunny-natured son Gabriel falls in love with a woman not approved by his family, his mother punishes him by marrying him off to the worst bride she can find. She ruthlessly ruins her son’s life and never regrets it.

The curse passes on to Rosa, Gabriel’s wife and one of the few nice characters in the book. Rosa is not beautiful or educated. Poor and orphaned when she was young, she took care of her younger brother from the age of 10. She is kind, with a heart full of emotions she doesn’t know how to express. She would have loved Gabriel, if he were even a little bit willing, a tad more tolerant of her faults, but instead, Gabriel despises her. No matter how hard Rosa tries, Gabriel doesn’t accept her, and his antipathy fills his life with venom and sadness.

Of course, their daughter Luna, born of such a union, doesn’t know how to love at all. The most beautiful woman in Jerusalem, the beauty queen of the title, Luna is frigid and uncaring. She adores clothing and makeup but the only person she truly loves is herself. Repulsed by her husband’s touch, she hates his sexual advances. She doesn’t even try to understand his pains or his interests, and her treatment of their young daughter is cruel. She is a horrible character but, for some reason, the author dedicates most of the book to her. Perhaps she was exploring Luna as the embodiment of self-absorption, but there is little or no pleasure in reading these ruminations.

Only in the last fifth of the book does the story return to Gabriela, showing how hard it was for her to break the curse, to learn to love. Forgiveness, like love, is something the Ermosa family lacked, too, and it takes Gabriela years of self-hatred to even grasp the concept.

Overall, none of the major players in the tale is likable, and it’s difficult to understand their stubborn resistance to love. This difficulty colored my perception of the novel as a whole, and I didn’t enjoy the jumps back and forth in time either. They made the story feel like a jigsaw puzzle, and even when I assembled the entire picture, the squiggly lines between the tiles were blurry.

Fortunately, the Ermosa family drama unfolded on the background of Israeli history, and the historical aspect of this book was fascinating. The Turkish rule of Palestine and the British Mandate, the Zionist movement and the Declaration of Independence, the war of 1948 and the siege of Jerusalem by the Arabs – the Ermosa family lived through it all.

They lived through the Holocaust, never even noticing it. While Jews died by the millions in Europe, the Ermosas’ petty concerns focused on their small shop and their unloving spouses. While the Etzel (aka the Irgun) unleashed bloody terror on the British, with constant bombings and shootings, the Ermosas only cared about their personal safety and their neighbors’ approval.

Some of the younger generation, Luna’s sisters in particular, try to participate, but never Luna or her parents. Gabriel forbids his daughters anything nontraditional, and filial obedience was mandatory in this family of narrow-minded people who didn’t know how to love.

The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem was originally published in 2013 in Hebrew. The English version was translated by Anthony Berris.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

The move from 11th to 41st

The Jewish Community Centre at 41st Avenue and Oak Street, November 1962. (photo from JWB fonds, JMABC L.11512)

It’s hard to believe that, in the 1950s, the Oakridge area was considered a ways out of town. In going through the minutes of the Jewish Community Council of Vancouver from 1954, one can see the initial attempts by the council to find a new Jewish community centre building – which at the time was on Oak Street at 11th Avenue – that would be as conveniently located. They considered exchanging space with the Peretz School, which was on Broadway, and buying the land on which Vancouver Talmud Torah stood, on Oak at 26th. However, they soon started examining the prospect of buying land from Canadian Pacific Railway, south of 41st. The following snippets of meeting minutes from 1954-1962 allow readers to fast forward through the development process and the establishment of the JCC where it is currently located.

Shuls, past to present

Left to right: Nico Slobinsky of Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Pacific Region; His Excellency Balint Odor; Ezra Shanken of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver; and Andre Molnar, Hungarian honorary consul. (photo from Beth Israel)

On Oct. 15, Congregation Beth Israel hosted an exhibition of Eastern European synagogues, sponsored by the Hungarian government. In his welcoming address at the opening, His Excellency Balint Odor, Hungarian ambassador, explained that Hungary is currently heading up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

“IHRA is very relevant today in fighting spiraling antisemitism across Europe and around the world,” he said. “The mandate of IHRA is to combat all forms of racism, hate incitement and antisemitism, as well as promoting Holocaust education. This year, IHRA has focused a great deal of effort on illustrating the depth of Jewish culture in the region, in particular the synagogue.”

photo - The synagogue in Baja, Hungary — The synagogue in Baja, Hungary. *(photo from exhibit catalogue by Rudolf Klein)*

The traveling exhibit showcases renovated synagogues throughout East-Central Europe, from 1782-1944, some of which are still in use. Unlike in Germany and Austria, where the majority of synagogues were destroyed, many survived in Eastern Europe. From the 1970s onward, local municipalities restored and renovated synagogues. This work escalated following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the influx of foreign financial support.

The panels show a variety of different styles, ranging from cottage shuls to “palatial” synagogues. The richness and diversity of these places of worship are reminders of how vibrant Jewish life was in Europe prior to the Shoah.

The role of the presidency of IHRA offers Hungary the opportunity to confront its history and look back at the role the Hungarian state played in the genocide. Close to half a million Hungarian Jews perished during the Holocaust. Most of these people died in 1944 following the occupation of Hungary. At that time, every third victim in Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew. Today, the Hungarian Jewish community is the largest in East-Central Europe. Most Hungarian Jews live in the capital, Budapest, which has some 20 working synagogues.

As Rabbi David Bluman said in his welcome of the ambassador: “The synagogues we see in this exhibit are not just the past, they are also the present for those who worship in them, and will be the future for European Jewry. This is very relevant for us here in our beautiful new synagogue – our present, our future.“

The exhibit was at Beth Israel from Oct. 15-20.