King David High School – Jewish Independent

Election views diverge

The Independent spoke with people in the Jewish community to gauge attitudes as the federal election approaches. What we found was a diversity of views and a lack of consensus.

An informal focus group of residents at the Weinberg Residence raised issues of out-of-pocket expenses for medical treatments and a lack of available doctors.

“You lose your doctor, you can’t get another one,” said one senior voter.

There was not great enthusiasm for any of the party leaders. One participant said she had lost respect for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau long before the recent brownface and blackface issue emerged.

“I was disappointed in him way back when he went to India and there was this whole thing of dressing up in Indian costumes. I felt it wasn’t very statesmanlike.”

“I feel that he’s had his chance and I don’t want to vote for him because he showed us what he can do. I don’t think he’s got what it takes,” said another voter.

“I expected nothing from Trudeau and I got it,” said another.

But there was no groundswell of support for Conservative leader Andrew Scheer.

“I’m disappointed,” said one. “I haven’t heard anything that’s promising.”

Some voters said NDP leader Jagmeet Singh comes across as sincere, but one said he has a lot of repair work to do with the Jewish community after his party’s positions against Israel in the past.

Elizabeth May, the Green leader, was viewed positively, but not seen as prime minister material.

“She’s very good at her subject, but I can’t envisage her really understanding what’s going on in the economy, in foreign affairs,” one resident said.

Among more than a dozen participants, the vast majority had a positive view of their incumbent MP, Jody Wilson-Raybould.

“I think she deserves better than she’s had,” said one person, while a Conservative supporter said she wishes Wilson-Raybould was running for her party, because she’d like to vote for her.

A show of hands indicated well more than half are undecided about who to vote for.

“Everybody’s confused,” said one, to laughter all around.

* * *

Alice Sundberg, director of operations and housing development for Tikva Housing Society, would like to see the federal government get back into funding nonprofit housing.

“We think that there is a really significant role for the federal government in making rental housing more affordable,” she said. Rather than subsidies to renters, which go into the pockets of landlords and don’t create new housing, she would like to see either capital grants to reduce mortgages for nonprofit or co-op housing, thus reducing the rental costs, or ongoing operating subsidies to organizations like hers that develop new housing.

“We don’t have enough supply,” said Sundberg. “Back in the ’90s, when the federal government withdrew from funding new affordable housing, it was really the beginning of our homelessness crisis.”

Housing is also a topic for Eldad Goldfarb, executive director of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The centre’s redevelopment will include at least 300 units of affordable rental housing. His team has spoken to many federal officials, including MPs, but, so far, he said, “No commitments, no confirmations, lots of good feedback and great understanding of the project, support for it, but nothing has translated into actual commitments, funding, promises, nothing of that sort.”

Support for the housing component might include financing from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, rather than grants, though he hopes for federal cash for the new JCC building. He credited the federal government for stepping up with funding for security infrastructure for communities at risk, but added there is always need for more.

* * *

The rise of hate-motivated rhetoric and violence leads some community leaders to call for more federal action and leadership.

“With the rise of antisemitism, racism and far-right extremism, particularly in the online space, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre would welcome a comprehensive strategy to tackle hate in all its forms,” said Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC.

Russ Klein, principal of King David High School, would like to hear party leaders and candidates address how they are demonstrating moral and ethical leadership that creates trust and inspires Canadians, especially young people.

“How will they work to ease a society which seems quick to feel fear and seems overly stressed and anxious?” asked Klein. “I want to know how they will support a kinder, more inclusive society that offers hope and opportunity for all but especially to young people and to the most vulnerable in our society. How will they work to maintain affordable housing, livable wages and allow people to manage a balanced lifestyle in cities like Vancouver, where young families cannot afford to live in their current community? We live in extremely concerning times globally and I want Canada to lead in decreasing world tensions – how will they do that?”

* * *

Similar broad topics arose among a handful of University of British Columbia students who met at Hillel House to discuss issues that are important to them. All agreed that there has not been enough discussion of foreign affairs and there is a lack of substantive difference between the parties on issues like immigration.

“I don’t see any candidate that has a clear foreign policy vision, even though I think Chrystia Freeland is, personally, a great minister of foreign affairs,” said Adam Yosef Dobrer, a third-year political science student who is volunteering on Zach Segal’s Conservative campaign in Vancouver Granville.

Dobrer also wants Canada to return to the Conservative policy of defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which he called the greatest obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“In the last four years, I found it very difficult to understand where Canada as a nation lies in foreign affairs,” said Nika Perel, a fourth-year psychology student from Ontario who plans to vote Conservative. She credited the previous Conservative government with more clarity on Israel and Palestine and on Russia and Ukraine. “Stephen Harper made it very clear that he took a position supporting Ukraine.”

Jake Reznik, a nursing student with an undergraduate degree in kinesiology who remains an undecided voter, said Canada is not adequately standing up to China over its treatment of the Muslim-minority Uygher population or its other human rights violations. He added: “There is a lot of influence that the Chinese government does have in Canada that goes under-recognized.”

Matt Perzow, an NDP supporter who plans to vote strategically for Joyce Murray, the Liberal candidate in Vancouver Quadra, to prevent a Conservative government, emphasized health care, including mental health services. Defending Canadian values like multiculturalism and care for the most vulnerable are also things he wants to see party leaders prioritize.

All the students agreed that supporting Israel is an important consideration in their vote, but also said it will not be the deciding factor.

“I wouldn’t vote for any party that I thought would jeopardize the future of the Jewish people, whether it’s in Canada, in Israel or in another place,” said Perzow. “I’m not voting for somebody because of that issue, but, if I thought that something compromised the well-being of the Jewish people, I wouldn’t support them.”

Dobrer, whose family migrated to Canada from Israel when he was an infant because of the Second Intifada, said he has a “very resonant emotional connection” to Israel “but I am a Canadian first.” He is concerned about some election candidates, including Green party MP Paul Manly, who Dobrer says has a “long and sordid history of antisemitism and 9/11 ‘trutherism’ and delving into conspiracy theories.” (After being elected in a by-election this year, Manly denied he supports 9/11 conspiracies after the CBC reported on statements he had made in 2007 and 2011.)

The students all agreed that the environment and climate change are top issues for them and their peers, but expressed nearly universal hopelessness that anything substantive would change.

“I have no doubt that it will not be addressed,” said Reznik. “I know personally I’m not going to be willing to sacrifice my own standard of living and, at the same time, I think it is tremendously insulting on my part to tell someone else that they can’t attain my standard of living that we have here.”

“A lot of people are standing up and screaming about things, but they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Perel.

A hint of hope came from Dobrer: “From the government, I’m very skeptical. But from young intellectual minds, from the not-for-profit sector, from the private sector, every day there is more and more innovation, technological advances and more intellectual capital devoted to dealing with climate change.”

King David set for expansion

Architects Acton Ostry, who designed the original building of King David High School, are back for the expansion. (image from KDHS)

Bucking a trend that is seeing Jewish day schools across North America struggling to maintain enrolment, Vancouver’s King David High School is about to launch an expansion that will grow the space by 40% to accommodate increasing demand from students.

The Diamond Foundation, which purchased the land on which the school sits and funded construction of the school, which opened in 2005, has committed $6.5 million for the expansion project. Building is expected to begin in spring 2020, with completion in time for the opening of school in September 2021.

The school was built for 10 classes – two cohorts in each of grades 8 to 12.

“The challenge is, unfortunately, they don’t come in even numbers,” said Russ Klein, King David’s head of school. “You have some years where you have huge groups and then you have years where you have lesser groups. The challenge of dealing with a third cohort in a grade is really, really challenging. It was really built for two classes per grade and, as soon as you add a third class in a grade, it changes the whole structure.

“For the last three years, we’ve been squeezing in,” he continued. The expansion will permit 13 or 14 classes, with the flexibility to accommodate bulges, like the large cohorts in the current Grade 8 and Grade 11 classes.

Originally envisioned for about 200 students, the school’s enrolment is now 236.

“Thankfully, when we talked to the Diamonds, they were totally on board with helping us get to where we want to be, to be the best school we can be for our community,” he said.

The project will add an additional 13,000 square feet to the school’s current 33,000 square feet. Architects Acton Ostry, who designed the original building, are back for the expansion.

The two-storey existing building is the maximum height allowed by the city, so the increased space will be accommodated by digging down. There is already an underground level featuring a parkade. That will be extended and an additional sub-basement dug beneath it. The land around the school will be excavated to allow natural light into the new sub-level spaces, with stairs and an accessible ramp leading to the outdoor activity area.

The lowest sub-basement level will include changing rooms for students, additional gender-neutral bathrooms, a computer technology room and storage, which is lacking in the existing school.

The basement level will feature a state-of-the-art music room with three rehearsal areas and a control room so that students can record music. Also on that level will be an office for the physical education staff.

Added to the existing main floor will be a drama space and film studio with a green screen, where students can work on movie-making, film-editing and drama programs. Also in the works is an “innovation lab,” still in the planning stage, which could include 3-D printers and other hands-on learning tools where students can co-create a range of projects and explore individual interests. The existing drama and music spaces will be converted into general classrooms, Klein said, “so we get the extra bang there as well.”

The top floor will accommodate more new classrooms and a teachers’ workroom. A number of small offices will also be integrated into the new design.

When completed, the school’s existing space and new areas will merge seamlessly, Klein said, as if part of the original structure.

Notably, despite the expansion to the east of the existing building, useable outdoor space will increase with the removal of a hill at the edge of the property and a reorganization of the playing courts.

The entire project will involve minimal disruption to students because most of the work will take place outside of the existing school. One area that will be affected is the loss of outdoor space for a school year. Aside from that, the most disruptive impacts should be some construction noise, said Klein.

The $6.5 million commitment from the Diamond Foundation covers all the brick-and-mortar components. As part of the commitment, the King David community is to raise an additional $765,000 for furnishings, technology and other “soft costs,” Klein said. Also part of the agreement is that the school increase its existing endowment, which stands at about $1 million, to $5 million over the next five years. The revenue from the endowment is intended to create a fund that ensures tuition affordability and accessibility regardless of family capacity.

Klein lauded the Diamonds’ visionary commitment to continuity.

“They are the greatest supporters of Jewish education in the city,” said the principal. “We are so in awe of what they’re doing and their willingness to do it and just step up and support the growth of the school, to demonstrate how proud they are of what the school has done and not just with their talk but with their actions and their leadership.”

The co-presidents of the King David board of directors, Jackie Cristall Morris and Neville Israel, noted that school enrolment has increased 70% in 10 years.

“The expansion will allow us to grow and to keep striving towards meeting our school vision of being a dynamic leader in empowering Jewish minds and engaging Jewish hearts for the modern world,” they wrote in a statement to the Independent. “We are incredibly grateful for the Diamond family’s support of King David since the school’s early days. Simply put, King David would not have existed without the support of the Diamonds both in building the school, providing us free use of the building and in supporting our Judaic studies program, which is now well regarded under the leadership of Rabbi Stephen Berger.”

The Diamond Foundation has been run by Gordon and Leslie Diamond and their daughters Jill Diamond and Lauri Glotman. Recently, Leslie Diamond said, the next generation of family – Glotman’s children Bram Glotman, Sadye Dixon and Carly Glotman – has joined the foundation.

Leslie Diamond acknowledges that she has been King David’s most avid proponent within the family foundation. “To me, it was very important there be a high school to carry on those traditions and to instil the purpose of keeping those traditions,” she said. “I think that kids going to King David will have a better chance of feeling their roots and not leaving them.”

The need for more space is a sign of the excellent health and strength of the community, she said.

“Even though we think that we’re small compared to Toronto and the east, we really are a strong community,” Diamond said. “The success of the school proves that. The fact that they’re growing by leaps and bounds means there is a need for a Jewish high school, which goes back to my thoughts in the very beginning.”

In addition to excellence in Judaic and general education and the range of additional curricular and extracurricular options, there is something that Diamond said King David offers that she sees as vitally important for young people. “There is this need of belonging, which you don’t get in a public school,” she said.

Interacting with genocide

A project of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, the national educational tour about the Holodomor began in 2015 and has reached about 30,000 Canadian high school students so far. (photo by Pat Johnson)

What constitutes a genocide? How many Ukrainians were murdered by Josef Stalin’s human-created famine in the 1930s? Would you stand up in a situation where lives were at risk – even if it meant you might become targeted?

These were some of the questions confronted by Grade 12 students of King David High School last week. A national educational tour about the Holodomor – the mass murder of Ukrainians by the Soviet regime – pulled into Vancouver, opening the eyes of young people to this chapter of history.

Beginning in 1932, the Soviet government under Stalin began a calculated, systematic famine in Ukraine, seizing all food sources, cutting off escapes for people fleeing starvation and implementing summary execution for the crime of stealing the smallest piece of sustenance. Farming was collectivized, creating catastrophic conditions. Political and intellectual elites were murdered.

Some details, including the number of Ukrainians killed, remain cloaked in uncertainty because, from the start, the Holodomor was deliberately hidden from the outside world through a comprehensive system of censorship and misinformation, as well as the complicity of media and other countries. Estimates of the number of dead range from seven million to 14 million.

Holodomor is a portmanteau made up of holod, starvation, and mor, death, meaning “death by starvation.”

photo - Last week, King David High School Grade 12 students and others participated in the educational tour — Last week, King David High School Grade 12 students and others participated in the educational tour. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

The Holodomor National Awareness Tour consists of a bus-sized repurposed former recreational vehicle. Rather than a static exhibition through which participants walk, the vehicle has been retrofitted with a 30-foot screen down one interior wall and 30 theatre-style seats down the other, with interactive tablets that invite students to study and discuss in small groups before reconvening to share what they’ve learned with the larger group. A project of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, the tour began in 2015 and has reached about 30,000 Canadian high school students so far.

The Holodomor was not an endeavour to kill an enemy, but an effort to restructure society, a form of social engineering at its most extreme. In September 1932, Stalin wrote to one of his lieutenants that Ukraine was restive. The Soviets perceived Ukrainians as being profoundly religious, individualistic, believers in private property and attached to their plots of land, making them unsuitable for building communism. Addressing these perceived flaws would require, according to Soviet leaders, an action so extreme that a word had not yet been invented to describe the intent.

The entire agricultural sector was upended by collectivization and resisters were murdered or sent to gulags, Soviet concentration camps. At first, remaining supplies of food sustained the Ukrainian people, but those reserves were soon depleted, while the Soviets extracted ever-increasing quotas of grain and Soviet wheat exports to the West grew. As the Holodomor proceeded, NKVD secret police were sent to search for and confiscate any remaining food sources. While those caught stealing or concealing food were executed, for millions more, fate was less sudden.

“Most of the victims died slowly, at home,” according to the narrator of one of the interactive films viewed by students. “Special NKVD units raided people’s homes to collect the dead bodies. They received 200 grams of bread for every dead body they delivered.”

Students examined the forces that allowed the Soviet Union to hide the reality from the world. For the Soviets’ part, there was censorship and the threat of retaliation for those who shared the truth. But their crimes were abetted by Western figures, including New York Times correspondent Walter Durante, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the USSR, even as he misrepresented the Holodomor. In one article, titled “Hungry, not starving,” Durante wrote that there is no actual starvation or death from starvation, though he acknowledged there was widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Leading journalism figures from the time are brought to life through reenactments. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, reflected on being raised in a socialist household and how he was enthusiastic about traveling to the Soviet Union to report on the utopia being created there. When he saw the reality, he evaded Soviet censors by sending his dispatches home via the British embassy’s consular pouch.

One of the heroic figures of the story is Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who risked his life to bring the truth from Ukraine. He convened a press conference in Berlin, on March 29, 1933. But the timing was terrible. The Soviets were about to launch a show trial against six U.K. citizens, accusing them of espionage in what would become known as the Metro-Vickers Affair.

In order to remain in the USSR and report on what promised to be a trial of global importance, journalists had to stay on good terms with the authorities.

“It would have been professional suicide to make an issue of the famine then,” one reenactor remarked. “So, none of us supported Jones.”

Lauren Shore is a student in King David’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 course. The class, created by teacher Anna-Mae Wiesenthal, is delivered during lunch hour and, while students receive credit, they take the course in addition to their full complement of other classes. A province-wide genocide studies elective course is part of the new B.C. curriculum and will be offered next year at schools that opt-in.

Shore, with a partner, did a project on the Holodomor.

“Since there is a lot of debate on whether it’s a genocide or not, and how it was planned, we decided to focus on that,” she said. “We were focusing on the different steps of genocide [and] people were debating whether it was a genocide or not, since it wasn’t necessarily planned as exactly as other genocides were. As we looked into it, we found that it was planned just as much as the other genocides, just in other, more subtle ways.”

Solly Khalifa, also in Grade 12, was impressed with the interactivity of the Holodomor tour.

“I was astonished at how innovative it is,” he said. “They really get everybody participating and it’s very interesting and an easy way to participate also.”

Classmate Noah McNamara saw parallels between the Holodomor and the Holocaust.

“All genocides are kind of similar, in that it’s a governing body that takes advantage of their power to push a goal,” he said. “In the Holocaust, [it was] the Aryan race that they wanted to push. In this case, it was communism that they wanted to push. I think it’s important for us now to be aware of aggressive governments and governments that are trying to radically push things, because that’s definitely a precursor to genocide.”

Ava Katz, who worked with Shore on their Holodomor project this year, noted that studies of the Holocaust enforce the dictum “never again.”

“But I feel like sometimes that’s overlooked with other genocides,” she said. “Not a lot of people will say that. But when you really study other genocides in-depth and see how severe they are, it’s important that we never let any of them happen again.”

The cross-country tour operates with a shoestring staff. Alexi Marchel leads students though the experience. Kevin Viaene drives the bus and supports the program.

Stressed out by technology

Elan Divon speaks at King David High School earlier this month. (photo from KDHS)

Elan Divon has found his passion and purpose in life – helping people to find their passion and to confidently fulfil a purpose that not only builds their own positive energy but also lets that energy spill out to improve the world in both small and potentially large ways.

On April 8, King David High School’s PAC hosted an evening that featured Divon, founder and chief executive officer of the Divon Academy, which, according to its website, “help[s] students and professionals stand out, and develop skills that are proven to boost their long-term success and well-being.”

He began by sharing the story of avoiding a deadly suicide bombing by sheer coincidence. Twenty years old, a soldier in the Israeli army, he had just returned home and was on a date at a café. The woman wanted ice cream instead, so they left; moments later, they heard three bombs go off, many people were killed, hundreds were injured, in the area they had just been. The experience jolted Divon onto a path of self-reflection and a search for spiritual meaning.

He went to study abroad, later quitting a Wall Street job and then studying archeology and anthropology at Brandeis University, followed by comparative religion at Harvard University.

“Since then,” reads his bio, he “has directed a peace camp for embattled Israeli and Palestinian teens; delivered countless personal development workshops to young professionals around the world, frequently presents before CEOs and business leaders; and, most recently, co-founded the Einstein Legacy Project to inspire the next generation of brilliant minds on the planet.”

Divon explained to the audience at KDHS that he feels he has found his purpose and can, therefore, live his purpose and make every moment count. He wants others to be able to do the same. He spoke about what he called a “stress epidemic” and identified five key aspects that inhibit personal growth and cause poor performance for students and adults alike.

The first factor is how much technology has invaded our ways of behaving and thinking. “Because of technology, people feel that everything needs to happen instantly,” he explained. With smartphones and constant access to the internet and apps, people find the answers they are looking for without really having to search, and they communicate with others without really having to interact.

“Our outer reality works very quickly but our inner reality takes time to develop,” he said about why this causes stress. Using the example of gestation, Divon explained how certain biological functions cannot be rushed – by technology or just because we shower them with attention. It takes time and experiences – both positive and negative – to build the necessary skills for human interaction and resilience, to be a well-rounded and confident person, he said.

The culture of comparison that dominates the internet is the second challenge. Before the advent of the internet, said Divon, a person might compare themselves to their sibling, a neighbour or the most impressive student at school. Today, we see carefully crafted virtual personae online from all over the world, and use those as a totally unrealistic benchmark for self-comparison, he said.

Next, Divon focused on the benefits that can be gained from discomfort. “Parents need to give their children space to solve their problems themselves,” he said, noting that, currently, teens can avoid uncomfortable situations by hiding behind their over-involved parents or their phones.

Social isolation – Divon’s fourth area of concern – can result from living a virtual life. Without direct personal contact, he said, people suffer all kinds of stress. Age-old ways of coping with painful situations or celebrating happy moments are eliminated by text communication. “Studies show that when good news is shared via text, it’s like it didn’t happen, even when the recipient of the text responds. Only through personal contact do people feel supported and connected,” explained Divon.

Finally, he said that overstimulation is damaging everyone. “We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom,” he said.

Divon outlined three ways to enhance happiness and purpose in life.

First, we need to have a proactive rather than a reactive mindset, he said. Using the establishment of the state of Israel as an example, Divon explained how the nascent state was able to turn a rocky beginning into a success. Rather than focus on the paucity of resources and abundance of hostile neighbours, those who established the modern state of Israel were optimistic and counted their blessings. “Being a victor over circumstances rather than a victim of circumstances is what sets people with a positive mindset apart from those with a negative one,” said Divon.

A positive mindset helps build the second key factor: relationships. A strong – real, not virtual – support group is a protection from stress, it helps most people find their jobs and determines and gives meaning to life, said Divon.

The third component to finding contentment and productivity is stress management. “Stress is resisting what is in a present moment,” Divon said. If stress is resistance and 95% of stress occurs in the mind, it is possible to eliminate or manage most of the stress we perceive in our lives, he explained. While the steps needed to manage stress are not easy, Divon said that, with practise, step-by-step, people of all ages can change their habits and develop more effective ways of coping.

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to adapt and change. Divon explained that, although there are many stressors and that technology is often our foe instead of our friend, we can all develop new pathways in our brain. We can enhance the quality of energy we possess and make ourselves and those around us happier.

Michelle Dodek is a freelance writer living in Vancouver, and the mother of a 12- and a 13-year-old.

Raising Jews with Israel literacy

Tal Grinfas-David of the Centre for Israel Education speaks with educators at Vancouver Talmud Torah last month. (photo from VTT)

Educators at Lower Mainland Jewish day schools had the opportunity to consider the relevance of Israel literacy last month, when Tal Grinfas-David, the Centre for Israel Education’s day school specialist, was in town the week of Feb. 18 to deliver a talk on the subject and work with local teachers and administrators. Her keynote speech, titled Teaching Modern Israel – Challenges and Opportunities, was part of a community professional development day.

The CIE, which is based in Atlanta, Ga., received a grant for a three-year initiative to work with nine Jewish day schools across North America and help them enhance their Israel education efforts. Vancouver Talmud Torah and King David High School are two of the nine schools and Grinfas-David spent a day coaching educators at each of them. She will return for the next two years to reinforce the changes CIE is promoting.

The issue, she said, is that, across North America, many graduates of Jewish day school education don’t have enough Israel literacy to grapple with the world, to justify a strong connection to Israel and to inform their Jewish identity.

“The concept we’re promoting is to turn Israel education into something all teachers can support, not just Jewish studies faculty,” she told the Independent. The desire is there, she added. “The Vancouver community is very supportive and wants to see Israel education boosted and incorporated into different subject areas. But it’s going to be a long-term process.”

photo - Tal Grinfas-David — Tal Grinfas-David *(photo from Centre for Israel Education)*

No stranger to education, Grinfas-David comes to her role with a PhD in curriculum and instruction and 25 years as an educator in Israel and the United States. Over the next three years, she will move between Jewish day schools in Denver, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Jersey and Vancouver, coaching their educational teams.

“We’re thrilled to have this grant to visit the individual sites and get to know the different schools’ cultures,” she said. “Each school is different and unique, with strengths and challenges, and this grant allows us to customize and tailor our offerings to specific communities.”

The goal of Israel literacy is to graduate Jewish students who understand the relevance of Israel in their lives and feel confident in their knowledge. They need this, she said, because understanding Judaism means understanding it’s not solely a religion.

“It’s also a belonging to a peoplehood, a nation with a Jewish homeland,” she said. “To understand modern Israel today, we have to see it as a continuation of our Jewish history.”

Grinfas-David said she would need three days to address all the ways that Israel literacy counts significantly in the life of a Jew.

“Israel impacts how Jews live in other countries, like the U.S. and Canada, where we are free. Students at our Jewish day schools have never experienced powerlessness or persecution, as they have the good fortune of being born here and now, with many freedoms. But that’s all the more reason to have them understand it was not always like this for Jews.

“Being part of a nation means there is an obligation to support your people, because of your fortune,” she continued. “There’s a calling to engage and to reflect on what Israel means for these students in their lives. Israel literacy is about having a repertoire of primary sources under your belt, so that when students leave the school setting and hear different narratives, they’ll be critical consumers of information, and they’ll know the facts they need. At CEI, our goal is to give them the ability and the opportunity to have the confidence to be critical consumers.”

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.

#MeToo and education

Lu Winters, academic and student wellness counselor at King David High School. (photo from Lu Winters)

In the fourth of a series of articles on sexual harassment and violence in the Jewish community, the Jewish Independent speaks with Lu Winters of King David High School, Elana Stein Hain of the Shalom Hartman Institute and Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom.

The first step in reducing bullying and other abuse in schools is to work with the students, said Lu Winters, academic and student wellness counselor at King David High School.

“I build connections with students in class,” she told the Independent. “And, with various groups in the school, I sometimes take them on trips. After the connection has been built, then the helping relationship can happen. It can happen one-on-one, in groups, in gender groups and through workshops.

“At King David, I’ve created a wellness program. Each grade receives a workshop, or two or three, depending on what’s going on during the year, on specific topics that I think are age-appropriate. I wish I could do every workshop for every single grade, but then the academic part of school would fall to the wayside.

“We run workshops on topics like LGBTQ awareness; healthy relationships with your body; self-esteem; stress and anxiety; drugs and alcohol; choices and values; and sexual health.”

Since the start of the #MeToo movement, Winters has seen some momentum. People have a lot to say about the movement, she said. “We haven’t had a specific workshop about it this year, but it’s on my radar for next year. During our sexual health education classes, we do address sexual harassment and consent, including talking about the roles of everyone involved, people’s faith, and making appropriate decisions for themselves at the right time … what to do if, G-d forbid, anything happens: who to talk to, what kind of support you can get.”

photo - Elana Stein Hain, scholar resident and director of faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute — Elana Stein Hain, scholar resident and director of faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute. *(photo from Elana Stein Hain)*

In the greater Jewish educational sphere, the Shalom Hartman Institute has produced a series of videos about related topics and examines how scripture has educated Jews on the subject over the years. Elana Stein Hain, scholar resident and director of faculty, has been leading the project.

“What we do is essentially develop curriculum around challenges facing the Jewish people,” Stein Hain told the Independent. “And I wouldn’t even say it’s about developing curriculum as much as developing conceptual frameworks for thinking about issues that arise. We’re an educational think tank. We ask ourselves what issues are now facing the Jewish people and consider how to develop educational material that deepens how we think about these issues. Then, we speak with change agents in the Jewish community about some ways of thinking.”

Stein Hain and her team began by looking for Torah teachings that address the topic of harassment directly. They came up with a three-part video series, which launched with a presentation that addressed the question of how, as a 21st-century teacher, you can educate people with our most sacred text and have the value proposition of our most sacred text being very important and continuing to give us the wisdom we seek, said Stein Hain. “And, also, we address the absence or relative absence of women’s voices and women as an audience.”

The next video talk was by Dr. Paul Nahme, a member of the institute’s Created Equal Team. He speaks on how definitions of manhood are dependent on cultural context.

“There’s this ‘boys will be boys’ kind of assumption and he says that, actually, there are places in Jewish tradition where that assumption had been challenged,” explained Stein Hain. “Young men were being trained to not be bravado macho, arrogant and assertive – to instead be trained to think about what it means to have doubts, to need someone else’s help. That was in contrast to what masculinity was understood to be.”

The last talk in the series was done by another member of the team, Dr. Arielle Levites, who discusses the portrayal of women in some Jewish traditional texts.

“It’s a deep folk story about women who try to move beyond their station or to move beyond the assumptions of them being portrayed as monsters,” said Stein Hain. “And she relates that to the … women who come forward with claims of sexual harassment or sexual violence who become seen as the offending party, getting questioned and vilified in certain ways.”

All of the videos can be accessed at hartman.org.il.

“The idea is really to get to the root of education,” said Stein Hain. “We are glad that people are going to do trainings on sexual harassment, on mandated reporting and on how to respond in the moment. We’d like to get to the root thought process of a culture that has come to this. And we want to learn how we can educate better, so we can have an adaptive change in the way people think, talk and act. Then, society and the Jewish community in particular can be built upon a different foundation.”

The educational realm within synagogues has also felt reverberations of the #MeToo movement, according to Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom.

photo - Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom — Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom. *(photo from Carey Brown)*

“I have seen an incredible amount of conversation among rabbis about this issue,” said Brown. “Some have been from within female rabbinic circles of women … some confronting it … things that people had kept within themselves for years or decades … and, now, gaining the courage to talk about it – everything from struggles to trying to understand the situation insofar as its professional implications for female rabbis … major discussions are being had on the topic at our annual conferences.

“Within the congregation, I haven’t had any individuals come to talk to me about personal experience,” she said. “But I have had a sense that women are feeling more free to bring up topics having to do with abuse, with safety, within the congregation, [at the] board level or [from a] staff perspective.”

A couple of months ago, the synagogue’s Men’s Club had a program on the #MeToo movement and sexual harassment in the workplace, including panel discussion on the topic in which Brown participated.

“I was really glad they took the initiative to have this program,” said Brown. “This didn’t come from the rabbis; it came from their leadership wanting to have an opportunity to talk about it. The conversation was really good and those who attended were very engaged and didn’t want to leave.”

Brown spoke about the Jewish perspective, discussing its tradition of values and ideas around sexual harassment, as well as her own personal experience with harassment.

“We talked a lot about consent,” said the rabbi. “A few different pieces of Talmud were discussed. We looked at this one that was about what happens if a man – one who counts money for a woman from his hand to her hand in order to look upon her – even if he has accumulated knowledge of Torah and good deeds like Moses, he will not be absolved from punishment.

“We talked about how, if someone even has a good reputation in the community, is known for their knowledge, good deeds and business … if they are abusive or using their power in a way that puts someone else in a position in which they are abused and powerless … our tradition says that, no, that is not OK.”

Abuse can be as simple as the way one person looks at another – if there is a misuse of power or position to objectify someone, Jewish tradition says that is not acceptable, stressed Brown.

“We talked about how we need to stand up when someone is being objectified, abused or put into a difficult situation,” she said. “That is part of our Jewish imperative – not to look away. It is part of what the Torah teaches us: that we can’t be indifferent and we must act.”

Over the years, Brown has had inappropriate comments directed at her. She said, “I’ve received comments like, ‘You don’t look like a rabbi’ or ‘If my rabbi looked like you, I’d have gone to shul a lot more when I was younger,’ or comments on my clothing and hair, and such.

“I mentioned at the event with the Men’s Club that my experience, both in Vancouver at Temple Sholom and in Boston, has been that the longer that I am the rabbi of a community, the stronger the relationships. And, I feel some of those things begin to fade away … within the regular, active population of the synagogue.

“It’s often when I’m in a new environment with people who don’t know me – at a shivah minyan, a wedding or something like that – my antennae go up. I’m very aware that it’s very likely I’ll get comments that are really inappropriate or that I have to psyche myself up a little bit to deal with.

“If I’m at a shivah minyan, I’m there to comfort the bereaved. I’m generally not going to confront in that situation,” she said. “I will take it with a grain of salt and maybe grumble about it to a friend. But, sometimes I’ll say, ‘That’s not appropriate.’ Sometimes, I’ll hear things like, ‘I’ve never kissed a rabbi before.’ And, I’ll say, ‘Well, we don’t need to kiss.’ I’ll push back a little bit to establish some boundaries.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Big numbers at KDHS

King David High School head of school Russ Klein. (photo by Pat Johnson)

King David High School has chosen to refund families who made a $1,000 deposit for next year but opted to send their kids to a different school. The decision ends a controversy that some parents said was a money grab.

Faced for the first time with more applicants than available positions, the school requested a non-refundable deposit of $1,000. Timing was a factor, as families were awaiting admission decisions from other private schools or space-limited specialty programs in the public system.

The idea, said KDHS head of school Russ Klein, was that families for whom King David was the first choice would pay and those for whom the school was not first choice might opt not to pay, thereby ensuring that those who most wanted in were admitted.

“It didn’t work out that way,” he said. “What we thought would happen, didn’t happen. They all just made the deposit.”

In the end, the school got what it wanted – full enrolment – and families ended up with their children in the schools of their choice.

After reflection on the process, Klein said, King David decided to refund the deposits to families who chose other schools.

“It wasn’t a cash grab,” he said. “We did it with good intentions.”

As it turned out, of the nine families offered the refund, four declined, choosing to make it a donation to the school, another donated half, two received the full refund and two others didn’t respond to the offer at all.

This year’s graduating class had 45 students, the second-largest ever. Next year’s class will be the biggest – between 55 and 60.

Klein said dealing with more applications than they have spots available was a learning opportunity.

“Now that we think we know how to handle this situation a little better, we’re hoping we get this, as we say, ‘good problem,’ where there are too many applicants again in the future,” he said. “The school next year will probably be at its biggest number ever.… We’ve just got nothing but good things to look forward to.”

A decade at KDHS

Russ Klein recently marked his 10th year as head of school at King David High School. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Russ Klein resisted becoming King David High School’s head of school. Ten years ago, he was a vice-principal in the Vancouver school district, an 18-year veteran of the public system. One of his colleagues – Ben Lubinizki, a teacher at Prince of Wales, where Klein was VP – was a King David parent and on the search committee for a new head of school.

Klein was on track to become a principal in Vancouver and, besides, after attending Vancouver Talmud Torah, becoming bar mitzvah at Beth Israel and volunteering on kibbutzim as a young adult, he hadn’t had much to do with the Jewish community. But Lubinizki was persistent and encouraged Klein to just drop by the school and check it out.

“I saw what things were like,” Klein recalled. “I saw the potential. I also saw lots of things that I thought they needed a little bit of guidance on at that point.”

It turned out that the Vancouver School Board thought a time at King David could be a good experience for Klein before he became a principal, so offered him a two-year leave of absence.

“I thought it was going to be a temporary position,” he said. He is now celebrating his 10th year at the school and, as he reflects on the past decade, he says the move not only altered his career path, it changed his life.

A year into the two-year “temporary” gig, the VSB called with a principalship for him.

“I had to think hard about it because, in a little over a year, I had quite fallen in love with this particular place,” he told the Independent during an interview in his office at King David. “I loved everything about it, from its size to the people I was working with, to the mission that it had.”

But, while job security in the public system is assured, he said, “In the private system you don’t have any.”

The King David board offered him a 10-and-a-half year contract and Klein now hopes to retire – eventually – from a role he loves.

“I think it’s worked out quite well,” he said.

In May, at a major celebration, KDHS will celebrate 13 years – its bar mitzvah year – in the current purpose-built building. The school’s history dates back to 1986, when it was founded as Maimonides High School. It was called Vancouver Jewish High School in 2000/01, then Vancouver Talmud Torah High School until 2004, when it was renamed King David. It has always been a Grade 8 to 12 school.

As head of school for a decade, Klein has seen plenty of change.

Almost all Grade 8 students now travel to Israel on an 11-day experience, spending most of the time in the Galilee, Vancouver’s partnership region. Some of the kids in Har Vagai school – King David’s partner school there – live on Kibbutz Shamir, where Klein volunteered a couple of decades ago. In Grade 9, the Israeli students come to Vancouver.

In recent years, KDHS has changed its Grade 9 trip, which used to go to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to an alternative trip to Los Angeles, where students visit the Museum of Tolerance and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The time difference – and the need to change planes – made the Washington trip difficult.

“We thought we could get more out of the trip,” said Klein. “L.A. is a much shorter, easier [trip], it’s less expensive. But it added another feature, which is that we have a shomer Shabbat weekend in Los Angeles.” (The trip didn’t happen this year as they are moving it to Grade 10.)

A group of King David students are also going to Guatemala to volunteer in a community where women and children from disadvantaged and often abusive backgrounds access support and skills.

In all these offerings, financial ability is never a factor in participation, Klein said.

In the classrooms, change also has been constant. New options have been added to electives, and the school has added advanced math and science programs as well as a Grade 10 outdoor experience program. King David students take all the core subjects public school students do, plus Judaics.

“In a typical Vancouver high school, most students will enrol in eight classes,” Klein explained. KDHS students take two more courses in various aspects of Jewish studies, including (in most cases) Hebrew language, Jewish history and “what we would call Jewish values: ethics, Torah, what does it mean to be Jewish?”

On top of an intense academic load, Klein said, “Our participation in athletics is outrageously high for a school of our size. Probably 70% of our kids are on one athletic team or another – or more.”

Challenges remain, Klein acknowledged. The school has pretty much met its student capacity and, while expansion seems unlikely in the near future, the redevelopment of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, a few steps west of the school, could present opportunities for a dedicated gym and shared use of space for classes, drama and music performances.

The changes in Klein’s career have been accompanied by changes in his personal life.

“As a person who didn’t have community, coming to a community that is so kind and caring has been absolutely amazing. It has been the best thing that could have happened from my point of view,” he said. “This has given meaning to my life, aside from the fact that, as a divorced person, I now have a very committed relationship with a former King David parent [Deborah Youngson] who is very traditional herself, which has brought more Jewish meaning to my life.”

Another change is also evident. He’s grown what he jokingly calls “the rabbinical beard,” which he says leads people to assume he is very wise.

“I do have a good chuckle every time I get an email that says ‘Dear Rabbi Russ.’”

Growing pains at KDHS

King David High School has a wait pool for its Grade 8 program. (photo from facebook.com/kdhsvancouver)

King David High School has more applicants for Grade 8 this fall than they have spaces available, and some parents are upset with the way the school is handling the matter.

On Jan. 28, parents of 52 potential Grade 8 students received a message that their children had been accepted – and that $1,000 was required by Jan. 31 to confirm acceptance.

“The normal course is that King David and the independent and mini schools all release about the same time their acceptance letters,” said a parent whose child was accepted. “They’ll send out the first acceptance letters and then parents will either accept or not and then they’ll send out the second set a day or two later. That way they don’t really have a wait list and the process is relatively painless and takes place over a few days.”

The parent requested anonymity for fear that speaking out could affect their child’s future at the school and the Independent agreed to withhold the name.

“What King David has done suddenly is say we’re moving our process up about a month and to hold that spot now you need another thousand dollars, nonrefundable,” the parent said. The $1,000 deposit is on top of a $500 application fee, which increased this year from $100. Many families apply to more than one school, some of them independent and some of them Vancouver School Board specialty schools, such as mini schools, international baccalaureate or outdoor education programs. Those schools mostly send out acceptance letters in February.

“If they want to fundraise, that’s one thing,” said the parent. “But this seems to be a negative option fundraising scheme. They didn’t tell the families that they were going to do this when they applied originally and gave their deposit of $500. They didn’t tell them they were going to change the rules.”

But Russ Klein, King David’s head of school, said the intention was to alleviate stress for the families with children who are not among the 52 who received acceptance letters. He contests the idea that the $1,000 is to “hold the position.”

“We are not thinking of it as holding,” he said. “We’re thinking of it as accepting.”

He recognizes that many families hedge their bets by applying to several schools.

“They are frustrated, which I can understand, because they’re going to need to pay a deposit. That’s where they’re using the language ‘hold the spot.’ But we have families out there who are on our wait pool who are desperate to get into King David because they are not applying anywhere else. They are very frustrated at some of their peers who are holding spots that they don’t want,” said Klein. “We’re not their first choice. They’d rather get into another school and we don’t judge that. We’d just like the students who would like to be here to get the opportunity to be here.”

The school is using the term “wait pool” as opposed to “wait list” because it does not reflect an order.

“What schools are really trying to do is pick the best cohort for their group,” he said. “If, for example, a male student leaves and you’re trying to balance by gender, then we would try to get another male student in.” A wait pool implies that learning needs, particular talents and other factors that applicants bring to the cohort are weighed, rather than ranking applicants numerically.

Klein acknowledged that the process is new and has been difficult, because the school has never had so many applicants, a factor due simply to the coincidence of a population bubble in the community. Looking at this year’s Grade 6 classes at Jewish elementary schools and in the community, he said, King David expects far fewer Grade 8 applications next year. This year’s Grade 8 cohort has just 35 students.

“This is our first time through this type of challenge and we are learning a lot,” he said. The school has 26 regular Grade 8 positions and 26 accelerated positions, in which Grade 8 students complete Math 8, Science 8, Math 9 and Science 9 in a single year.

The school isn’t releasing exact numbers of how many students are in the wait pool, saying only that it is “more than 10.”

In all, the school now has well over 200 students, said Klein, and, while that presents growing pains, he hopes the demand indicates to the community that the school is successful, and said KDHS may seek to expand in the future.

Don’t “helicopter parent”

King David High School students with Teaching for Tomorrow keynote speaker Julie Lythcott-Haims, who spoke on the topic How to Raise an Adult. (photo by Jocelyne Hallé)

Our kids are not bonsai trees that need to be clipped and sheared! That was the message Julie Lythcott-Haims delivered to a packed audience at Congregation Beth Israel in her May 17 talk, How to Raise an Adult.

The keynote speaker at King David High School’s Teaching for Tomorrow evening, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Lythcott-Haims was previously dean of freshmen at the University of Stanford for 10 years. There, she said, she saw a lot of “helicopter parenting.”

“My freshmen students seemed to be like drones in their own lives, driven by someone else and constantly tethered to home and parents by their phones, the world’s longest umbilical cord,” she reflected.

Lythcott-Haims described how parents would email asking for their children’s passwords so they could register them for classes, parents calling her “unhappy with the grade a professor gave their child” and parents wanting to know where their kids were at all times. “I would rail against this absurdity,” she said. “I’d give a speech to parents each year, telling them, ‘Trust your child, they have what it takes to thrive. Trust us at the university. And now, please leave!’”

A mother of teens herself, Lythcott-Haims realized that it’s impossible for parents to let go of their 18-year-old freshmen unless they started relinquishing their helicopter-parenting tendencies years earlier. “We love our children fiercely and we’re fearful about what the world has in store for them. But we make the mistake of thinking we must cloak them in our arms instead of preparing them to be strong out there. So, we end up being overprotective, over-directive and doing excessive handholding with our kids, being like a concierge in their lives. We treat our precious kids like bonsai trees – we plant them in a pot, but we won’t let them grow.”

Lythcott-Haims peppered her talk with anecdotes about her personal adventures parenting. She described her desire to give her kids independence and trying to balance that with the over-protectiveness of their friends’ parents. She and her husband chose a house in a particular neighbourhood, she admitted, because she wanted her kids in the “right” preschools and schools, so they would have better chances of getting into the “right” universities.

Along the way, she realized she was misguided. Her son did not tick the boxes required by the “right” universities. She saw that she was inadvertently pushing him so hard to succeed, she was losing him in the process, robbing him of happiness.

What’s at the root of this tendency to overparent? “Love and fear motivates our actions, but also ego,” Lythcott-Haims stated. “We fear being judged. Our measure of worth is saying what our kids are doing. We want to brag about them because it makes us feel we’ve succeeded as parents and in life.”

A hushed, sobered silence descended over the large synagogue auditorium as Lythcott-Haims delivered an emotional talk about her own parenting mistakes and what she learned.

“Our children are not investments, they’re humans and they deserve to know they’re loved – and not because they got a particular grade. For kids, their knees go unskinned if we catch them before they fall. When we hover over every bit of play, we get short-term wins, but the long-term cost is to their sense of self and their ability to self-advocate. They emerge chronologically as adults but they’re still kids inside.”

There are serious consequences to overparenting, she continued. “When we over-direct them and lift them to the outcomes we desire for them, it leads to higher rates of anxiety and depression. They emerge as university students who are failure-deprived and who want to have a parent tell them what to do, how to feel. Though they might look beautiful on paper, when something bad happens, they don’t have the internal sense of self that says, I’ll be OK.”

Lythcott-Haims’ message to parents was a warning to back off, particularly if they want their kids to enter the world as fierce warriors, “strong individuals who are loving of themselves and feel capable and able to keep going when things go wrong.”

Just before receiving a standing ovation, she said, “It takes humility to be a good parent. The ego has to come out of it.”

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.