Russ Klein – 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.

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.