Susan Tendler

Action and prevention

Rabbi Susan Tendler, left, Lonnie Belfer and Lynne Fader were panelists at a dialogue on antisemitism in Richmond Jan. 26. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Communities need to be more proactive and less reactive toward antisemitism – to focus less on what to do after an anti-Jewish hate crime occurs and to prevent them from happening in the first place.

That was one of the recommendations at a meeting on antisemitism convened by Richmond Multicultural Community Services Jan. 26. Panelists were Rabbi Susan Tendler of Beth Tikvah Congregation, Lynne Fader, co-executive director of the Kehila Society of Richmond, and Lonnie Belfer, a program manager in skills training for employment programs, experience and disability support services.

Panelists and participants noted that expressions of concern by officials in the community are not always backed up by actions.

“In the days in particular after Oct. 7, it meant a lot to many of us that the RCMP was there,” said Tendler. However, during one instance when police were called, the response time proved not as immediate as the police had assured the congregation it would be.

Likewise, legislation and other steps “look really great on paper,” she said. The City of Richmond adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism and the provincial government is making Holocaust education mandatory in secondary schools across the province. But these are not silver bullets to the problem, she said.

“In the four-and-a-half years that I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed a change that’s scary to see,” said Tendler.

She tells clergy from other religions that Jewish congregations pay for private security and they acknowledge that such an expenditure would gut some of their budgets.

“The province has tried to offer some more grants and make them accessible to ensure that we all do feel safe but, again, it’s a shame that that’s the situation in which we all live,” she said.

Fader’s father was a cab driver in East Vancouver and taught his kids to “never roll over and never stay quiet,” she said.

She recalled minor and more significant incidents of antisemitism across her career and was critical of elected officials who are visible for PR opportunities but absent when substantive action is needed.

“I do hold our politicians accountable because in my opinion they’ve done nothing and they’ve allowed hatred in all our communities to grow because they are more worried about photo opportunities,” she said.

Fader endorses restorative justice, which was the approach taken when some young people were caught after spray-painting swastikas on Beth Tikvah’s building. The perpetrators were brought to meet a family in the congregation and to hear the family’s Holocaust survival experiences.

“There are huge systemic issues, not just in Richmond, not just in BC, not just in Canada, but globally, on antisemitism, racism and all the rest,” Belfer said. “That needs to be addressed.”

However, he is hopeful.

“There are issues, but there are wonderful people in this community who are doing wonderful things,” he said. “It’s unfortunate when I look around the room that I see so few non-Jewish people in the room because we know the problem. We face the antisemitism.”

Breakout groups developed tangible steps the community could take to address antisemitism and enhance multicultural well-being. These included having the City of Richmond hold a multicultural day at which cultural communities provide food and entertainment, and taking the show on the road, bringing cultural communities out of their own congregations and community centres and meeting in less familiar territory.

Community-building grants are available from the city, said one participant, “but there are too many hoops to jump through to get them.”

Doors Open Richmond is an annual program where religious and cultural groups welcome non-members to their facilities, but participants said Jewish institutions are challenged both by the fact that the event takes place on Saturdays as well as Sundays, and because security concerns largely preclude Jewish participation.

One participant stressed that approaches to antisemitism are generally reactive.

“You’ve had hate speech thrown at you, what do you do?” he asked. “The question isn’t what do you do after, it’s how do you prevent it from happening? There needs to be more forward motion in how to stop it from occurring versus what you do after you’ve been beaten up on the street.”

Alan Hill, inclusion coordinator at Richmond Multicultural Community Services, facilitated the event, which took place at City Centre Community Centre. He explained that the panel was part of a larger series funded by Heritage Canada to build bridges and connections. Other events have focused on Indigenous leaders, Ukrainian refugee groups, youth groups, the Filipino community, Islamophobia, gender perspectives, the experiences of women, and a Black History Month event. A symposium on anti-Asian hate is coming up. In March, all groups will come together to review experiences and consider next steps.

Holding faith at rallies

UBC student Zara Nybo, a non-Jewish ally, holds a poster of Rom Braslavski, as she speaks of his heroism before he was taken hostage to Gaza on Oct. 7. (photo by Pat Johnson)

As negotiations continued in Doha, Qatar, for the release of Israeli hostages, the weekly rallies in support of those held, their families and all Israelis continued Sunday, Aug. 18, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“As a university professor and as a Jew, I have been forced to witness the frontlines of a propaganda war to dehumanize and demonize Jews and to delegitimize the nation of Israel,” said Prof. Steven Plotkin, a University of British Columbia physicist.

The Hamas strategy is one of “asymmetric warfare,” he said, in which they bait Israel Defence Forces with attacks and hostage-takings, then use their own Palestinian civilians as human shields, knowing that the casualty numbers and horrible images will evoke sympathy in the West.

“And we’ve seen it,” he said. “The encampment and the protests at UBC quickly turned from advocating for the human rights of Palestinians to a call for the end of Israel.”

On campus, the messages he saw included the now familiar “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” but others on the same theme, including “We don’t want your two states! Take us back to ’48” and “Resistance is justified when you are occupied.” Another common refrain, he said, is “‘Globalize the intifada.’ That means bring terrorism everywhere, including here in Canada.”

“Long live Oct. 7” was yet another slogan the professor saw on his campus.

“Let that sink in,” he said.

When reports of extensive sexual abuse by Hamas and other Palestinians who broke through the border on Oct. 7 became known, he said, “I saw posters at UBC that announced a discussion group for ‘the lies that Zionists spread about the sexual abuse that didn’t occur on Oct. 7.’”

Plotkin reflected back to the days after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City, when people put up posters of their lost loved ones.

“Could you imagine what kind of person would think to tear one of those down? No one would have dreamed of it,” he said. “And now we’re seeing a world whose moral compass has completely lost its direction.”

Posters of Israeli hostages are routinely torn down at UBC, elsewhere in Vancouver and around the world. Plotkin shared a psychological hypothesis for why this desecration is so rampant.

In the identity-centred worldview of many activists, Plotkin said, morality is determined by one’s position in the hierarchy of oppression.

“The less powerful are pardoned, the more powerful must be guilty,” he said. Because Hamas is less powerful than Israel, Israel must be guilty, despite the evidence of Hamas murdering, raping and abducting Israeli civilians.

“A hostage poster, however, throws a wrench into that framework because it forces them to cope with the idea that the people that they thought were oppressed could actually be in the wrong,” Plotkin said. “Their whole simplistic worldview of the blameless oppressed and the evil oppressor is undermined by the ugly facts contained in the posters. A hostage poster induces a cognitive dissonance and, rather than question their own worldview, it’s easier for them to see it as pro-Israel propaganda designed to elicit their sympathy for the Jews in Israel, the bad guys, and so they feel compelled to tear the poster down.”

Eyal Daniel, a Burnaby high school teacher who specializes in Holocaust and genocide studies and who is president of the Holocaust and Antisemitism Educators’ Association, spoke about how his group was denied recognition by the BC Teachers’ Federation.

Representing close to 150 educators, the group applied to become one of the BCTF’s provincial specialist associations.

“Our application was rejected without any given reason,” he said. “Currently, there are no educational resources about the Holocaust and antisemitism for teachers in the province.”

Conversely, Daniel said, the province’s 50,000 teachers are bombarded by their union with materials promoting the elimination of the state of Israel.

The provincial government has mandated that Grade 10 students must receive Holocaust education beginning in 2025 and it is said to be working on curriculum materials.

Despite the lack of recognition from the BCTF, Daniel’s group will continue to work “as if we had been approved,” he said.

“Therefore, these days, we are in the process of constructing a new website, developing useful, meaningful professional development opportunities for teachers, assessing and developing appropriate educational materials and working with the minister of education on the upcoming Grade 10 Holocaust education curriculum framework,” he said.

Daniel spoke of his family’s recent visit to Israel, where they visited the site of the Nova music festival.

“Stepping out of the car into the desert heat, we were immediately surrounded by the haunting silence,” he said, “but, yet, 364 voices called out from the ground: Where is the humanity? The Nova memorial site is a barren killing field where humanity ceased to exist.”

Rabbi Susan Tendler of Congregation Beth Tikvah, in Richmond, spoke of the need for dialogue.

“In civic discourse … we’re yelling more than we’re listening,” she said. “So many of us will talk about the need to listen to one another but instead we’re just angry and have an inability to actually talk to one another.”

She asked people to see the humanity of others as a starting point to dialogue.

“To be a Jew means to respect and understand that every single human being was created in the image of God,” she said. “Let us continue to work for peace in the region that so, so sorely needs healing.”

Zara Nybo, a fourth-year student at UBC, is an ally to the Jewish community, president of the Israel on Campus club, and an Emerson Fellow with the international advocacy group StandWithUs. She shared recollections of a training conference in Los Angeles from which she and scores of other campus activists recently returned. At an LA rally for the hostages, she heard profoundly moving testimonies from family members of those still held in Gaza.

“Most people around me, men, women, had tears streaming down their face,” said Nybo. “We were all holding each other in collective grief.”

The mother of Rom Braslavski spoke of how her son had been a security guard at the Nova music festival and took it upon himself to hide the bodies of murdered women, both so they would not be taken to Gaza and so that they would not be posthumously raped or mutilated, as he had seen other female bodies desecrated. Braslavski was taken hostage in Gaza.

As Nybo and her fellow students prepare for the new academic year, she emphasized the training they have undergone and the determination with which they will return to campus.

“I will tell you we are committed to this fight,” she said.

Richard Lowy, who has provided vocal and guitar inspiration at almost every rally for months, spoke of the hope that a resolution will come through negotiation.

Event organizer Daphna Kedem recounted the rally in Tel Aviv the evening before and expressed hope that the hostages will be released soon and that the weekly rallies she has organized for 10 months will cease to be necessary.

Rabbis’ emotional journey

Left to right: Rabbis Susan Tendler, Hannah Dresner, Philip Bregman, Carey Brown, Andrew Rosenblatt, Jonathan Infeld, Philip Gibbs and Dan Moskovitz in Israel last month. (photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)

Eight Vancouver-area rabbis recently visited Israel where, among many other things, they handed out cards and letters prepared by Jewish day school students and members of Vancouver’s Jewish community to soldiers and other Israelis. The response, according to one of the rabbis, was overwhelming.

“I saw soldiers taking these cards and then dropping down to the sidewalk and crying,” said Rabbi Philip Bregman. “Holding them to their chest as if this was a sacred piece of text and just saying, ‘Thank you. To know that we are not forgotten….’”

photo - The rabbis’ mission included the delivery of thank you cards to Israeli soldiers — The rabbis’ mission included the delivery of thank you cards to Israeli soldiers. (photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)

Bregman, rabbi emeritus at the Reform Temple Sholom, was almost overcome with emotion while recounting the experience, which he shared in a community-wide online presentation Dec. 17. The event included seven of the eight rabbis who participated in the whirlwind mission, which saw them on the ground for a mere 60 hours. Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt of the Orthodox Congregation Schara Tzedeck was part of the mission but did not participate in the panel because he extended his time in Israel.

According to Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, who emceed the event, the Vancouver mission was unique in Canada and possibly in North America for bringing together rabbis from across the religious spectrum. The close connection of most local rabbis, facilitated by the longstanding Rabbinical Association of Vancouver (RAV), set a foundation for the mission, which took place in the second week of December.

The eight rabbis transported 21 enormous duffel bags, filled with gear like socks, gloves, toques and underwear, mostly for military reservists.

photos - The rabbis delivered warm clothing, including socks, to Israeli soldiers — The rabbis delivered warm clothing, including socks, to Israeli soldiers. *(photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)*

Shanken, who visited Israel days earlier with Federation representatives and five Canadian members of Parliament, said nothing prepared him for what he encountered there. Bregman echoed Shanken’s perspective.

“It’s one thing to have that as an intellectual understanding,” said Bregman, “It’s another thing when you are actually there to witness the absolute pain and trauma. People have asked me how was the trip. I say it was brutal.”

The reception they received from Israelis was profound, several of the rabbis noted.

“I’ve been to Israel dozens of times,” Bregman said. “People are [always] happy to see us. Nothing like this.”

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, senior rabbi at Temple Sholom, said the mission was to bear witness and also was a response to what rabbis were hearing from congregants about the centrality of Israel in their lives. He told the Independent that he was able to connect with two philanthropists in Los Angeles who funded the mission. Rabbi Carey Brown, associate rabbi at Temple Sholom, and Rabbi Susan Tendler, rabbi at the Conservative Beth Tikvah Congregation, in Richmond, handled logistics, with input from the group.

The unity of Israelis was among the most striking impressions, said Brown.

“It’s so all-encompassing of the society right now … the sense that everyone’s in this together,” she said. The unity amid diversity was especially striking, she noted, when the rabbis visited the central location in Tel Aviv known as “Hostage Square.”

Brown said Israelis asked about antisemitism in Canada and seemed confounded by the fact that there is not more empathy worldwide for the trauma their country has experienced.

Tendler reflected on how Israelis were stunned and touched by the fact that a group of Canadians had come to show solidarity.

The rabbis were able to experience a microcosm of Israeli society without leaving their hotel. At the Dan Panorama Tel Aviv, where they stayed, they were among only a few paying guests. The hotel was filled with refugees from the south and north of the country who are being indefinitely put up in the city.

Several rabbis spoke of incidental connections in which they discovered not six degrees of separation between themselves and people they ran into, but one or two.

Rabbi Jonathan Infeld of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel, who is chair of RAV, told of being approached by members of a family staying at their hotel who heard they were from Vancouver. They asked if the rabbi knew a particular family and he replied that he not only knew them but that a member of that family had just married into his own.

Likewise, Tendler ran into people who went to the same summer camp she did and the rabbis found many other close connections.

“The idea [is] that we are spread out but, at the heart of it all, we honestly really are one very small, connected people,” said Tendler. “We are one family, one community and that was the most important, amazing thing of all.”

Close connections or not, the rabbis were welcomed with open arms. Rabbi Philip Gibbs of West Vancouver’s Conservative Congregation Har El told of how he was walking past a home and glanced up to see a family lighting Hanukkah candles. They insisted he come in and mark the occasion with them.

Gibbs also noted that the political divisions that had riven the society before Oct. 7 have not disappeared, but that the entire population appears to have dedicated themselves to what is most important now.

The rabbis met with scholars, including Israeli foreign ministry experts and many ordinary Israelis, including Arab Israelis, as well as the writer Yossi Klein Halevi, who told them that many Israelis feel let down by their government, intelligence officials and military leadership.

The rabbis traveled to the site of the music festival where 364 people were murdered, more than 40 hostages kidnapped and many more injured on Oct. 7. They saw scores of bullet-riddled and exploded vehicles. All of them will be drained of fuel and other fluids before being buried because they contain fragments of human remains that ZAKA, Israel’s volunteer rescue, extraction and identification agency, could not completely remove from the vehicles.

Rabbi Hannah Dresner of the Jewish Renewal-affiliated Or Shalom Synagogue was not the only rabbi to compare the mission with a shiva visit.

“I was just so amazed at the care that was being given, that each of these vehicles was now being siphoned of any remaining flammable materials so that each one of them could be buried according to our halachah,” Dresner said, “so that none of the human remains would be just discarded as junk. I found that overwhelmingly powerful.”

Relatedly, the group visited an exhibit at Expo Tel Aviv, which recreates the music festival site and features unclaimed property from the site, including the historically resonant sight of hundreds of pairs of shoes.

photo - The visiting rabbis went to an exhibit at Expo Tel Aviv, which featured unclaimed property from the music festival site where hundreds were murdered — The visiting rabbis went to an exhibit at Expo Tel Aviv, which featured unclaimed property from the music festival site where hundreds were murdered. *(photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)*

The rabbis visited Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 100 people were murdered, and saw the devastation and destruction, some of it not from Oct. 7 but from days after, when explosives planted on that day detonated. It was also at this kibbutz that the Israel Defence Forces found a copy of the Hamas playbook for the atrocities.

“It sounded as if it could have been written by Eichmann or Hitler,” said Bregman. “[The intent] was not only to destroy the body but to destroy the mind, the soul, the psychology, the emotional and spiritual aspect of every Jew.”

The plan included strategies for setting fire to homes in order to force residents out of safe rooms, then specified the order in which family members were to be murdered – parents in front of their children.

photo - As part of their mission to Israel, Vancouver rabbis visited kibbutzim that were attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7 — As part of their mission to Israel, Vancouver rabbis visited kibbutzim that were attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7. (photo from facebook.com/jewishvancouver)

While the trip may have had the spirit of a shiva visit, the mood of the Israelis, Dresner said, was “can-do resourcefulness.”

“It’s felt to me over the past couple of years that Israelis have been kind of depressed,” she said, referring to divisive political conflicts. “But they are full force embracing their ingenuity and turning the energy of the resistance movement into this amazing volunteer corps to supply really whatever is needed to whatever sector.”

Groups that had coalesced to protest proposed judicial reforms pivoted to emergency response, she said, ensuring that soldiers and displaced civilians have basic needs met and then creating customized pallets of everything from tricycles to board games, bedding and washing machines, for families who will be away from their homes for extended periods.

The rabbis also went to Kibbutz Yavneh and paid their respects at the grave of Ben Mizrachi, the 22-year-old Vancouver man and former army medic who died at the music festival while trying to save the lives of others. They had a private meeting with Yaron and Jackie Kaploun, parents of Canadian-Israeli Adi Vital-Kaploun, who was murdered in front of her sons, an infant and a 4-year-old.

On the final evening of their visit, the rabbis hosted a Hanukkah party for displaced residents of Kiryat Shmona, the northern Israeli town that is in the Vancouver Jewish community’s partnership region.

At the party, Temple Sholom’s Rabbi Brown spoke with a woman whose two sons are in Gaza fighting for the IDF.

“I told her that we do the prayer for tzahal, for the IDF, in our services in our shul,” Brown said, “and she was so surprised and touched, and she said, ‘Keep praying, keep praying.’”

Accessibility seems improved

(image from flickr / Province of British Columbia)

Last November, the American advocacy organization Respect Ability announced some good news. New research it had conducted in 2021 suggested that disability awareness and inclusion was improving in Jewish communities across North America and Israel. According to its most recent survey, more synagogues, Jewish community centres, schools and private institutions are designing programs that consider the needs of people with disabilities. And more individuals are able to find Jewish organizations that support individuals with invisible disabilities like autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders.

Respect Ability’s goal for the survey was to determine the health of disability rights in diverse Jewish communities, particularly in countries where there were laws against employment and housing discrimination. Its last survey had been in 2018, and researchers wanted to know whether accessibility and acceptance had improved in the past three years.

There were just over 2,000 respondents in total, primarily from Canada, the United States and Israel. The overall message was that inclusion and accommodation was expanding. Accessibility for wheelchairs and improved opportunities for individuals with sight or hearing challenges were on the rise, as were outreach efforts for individuals with disabilities in general.

What is more, the number of faith organizations hiring rabbis and staff who had disabilities and, therefore, understood firsthand the challenges of a physical or cognitive disability, had increased by more than 73%. More than half (57%) of the survey-takers also said that the organizations had made public commitments to support diversity.

But the survey also identified a key obstacle: many community leaders wanted to help expand opportunities for inclusion, but “didn’t know how.” Roughly one-fifth of all respondents said that expanding opportunities in their faith communities was limited by leaders’ lack of knowledge or experience in making settings more accessible. This meant, in some cases, that members with invisible disabilities like autism or ADHD didn’t have access to resources or were turned away from programs and activities.

Most of the responses to the survey came from Respect Ability’s home base: U.S. states like California and New York, where laws and advocacy initiatives are different from those in Canada. Only about 7% of the responses came from Canada, where disability rights are protected by the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The survey also did not reveal how much, or if any, of the Canadian data came from the Vancouver area. So, are the survey’s findings reflective of diversity inclusion here?

The last three years have been challenging for many, but particularly for organizations that rely on in-person community participation. The 2020 shutdown of schools, synagogues and community centres due to COVID forced many organizations in the Vancouver area to suspend programs that offered disability-inclusive services. Still, the Jewish Independent found that a number of organizations were able to develop creative ways to maintain their inclusive classes and programs.

Trying to inspire inclusion

In 2018, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver launched its Inspiring Inclusion grant program to assist community organizations in designing or improving inclusive programs. The grant competition was created as part of its 2020 Strategic Priorities, and it offered up to $2,500 to organizations that developed a new program or idea that would expand disability inclusion.

Four one-year grants, which were awarded in 2020, went to Vancouver and Richmond applicants. Each offered a unique way for engagement, ranging from new educational strategies that catered to individual learning approaches to special equipment that helped expand creative participation in the classroom.

The Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Family Yoga Fundamentals program was designed to appeal to a variety of abilities and offered options for in-person family participation. It later gave rise to a virtual format that attendees could link up with from home. According to the JCC’s adult programs coordinator, Lisa Cohen Quay, Family Yoga Fundamentals integrates adaptable exercises that are non-stigmatizing and fit a variety of abilities. Quay said the program has also been shown to help with pandemic stress and loneliness.

Richmond Jewish Day School turned to music as a way to inspire inclusion. According to principal Sabrina Bhojani, the grant provided funding for specially adapted Orff percussion instruments, or xylophones that could be used by students with special needs. “Music education is an integral component of both our B.C. and Hebrew curriculum at RJDS,” Bhojani said. “Weaving music into [the] curriculum is a meaningful way to help our students develop their Jewish identity and better understand their culture.”

Congregation Beth Tikvah used the funding to help develop Kavod. According to Rabbi Susan Tendler, the program aims to ensure that the synagogue’s services and activities are open to everyone, “regardless of personal physical, financial, or accessibility limitations.” Kavod’s development is ongoing.

Congregation Beth Israel received a grant to create new Hebrew school programming. Beth Israel’s director of youth engagement, Rabbi David Bluman, said the funding helped make the Hebrew reading program more inclusive to children with learning challenges. “We always strive to be [as inclusive] as we can,” he said, adding that many of Beth Israel’s youth programs are adaptable to students’ abilities, such as the use of “shadow” companions who function as a “big brother or big sister” for a child during activities and lessons. The shadow program can be used for age levels. “We want our teens to be as independent as possible,” Bluman said.

B’nai mitzvah programs

Both Beth Israel and Temple Sholom tailor their b’nai mitzvah programs to meet the specific abilities of the child. Temple Sholom School’s principal, Jen Jaffe, said about 10% of the student body have varying needs.

“All b’nai mitzvah-aged children are given the opportunity to have a b’nai mitzvah, and the clergy works with each family to make sure expectations and goals are feasible and met. Each child is given the chance to shine regardless of any disabilities,” Jaffe said. The school also trains madrachim, or helper students, to support students with invisible disabilities.

Beth Israel is also known for its inclusive b’nai mitzvah program, which is led by ba’allat tefilla Debby Fenson. She said the program is designed to ensure that a child, irrespective of ability, can participate in the service: “I think that the expectation is that every child should be called up to [the bimah]. It’s not about how well they read the Torah, it’s about welcoming them into the community.”

Fenson said the community has celebrated more than one b’nai mitzvah in which a child’s medical challenges needed to be considered. In one case, the child, who was nonverbal, was aided by his mother in saying the Shema. “There was clear understanding on his part,” Fenson said. “His mother helped him in forming the words and saying along with him. He was welcomed into the community.”

Leadership by inclusion

Respect Ability’s survey of North American and Israeli Jewish communities highlighted two factors that are often important to creating inclusiveness: the top-down commitment to diversity and a leader’s personal experience. All of the above synagogues, schools and community services – as well as others – benefit from clear initiatives that attract families with accessibility needs and see inclusion as an expanding mission. In some cases, they also benefit from leadership that is open about their own health challenges as well.

Beth Israel Rabbi Jonathan Infeld said he is aware that his willingness to talk openly about his own challenges can help create a supportive environment for others. Infeld was born with a congenital heart defect.

“Unfortunately, I have firsthand experience with health issues that I am happy to share with people about, certainly because I want to be transparent about who I am as a human being…. I would hope, had I been born with a whole heart and not a hole in it, that I would still have a whole heart,” he said, noting that when we’re forced to reflect on our own abilities and limitations, it can inspire empathy for others faced with similar challenges.

One area that was not addressed in the survey was accessible housing, which helps expand disability inclusion. Tikva Housing Society’s very first housing project in 2008 contained accessible units. The organization’s third inclusive property, Dogwood Gardens, opens this year in the West End. This will be the subject of a future story in the Jewish Independent.

Jan Lee is an award-winning editorial writer whose articles and op-eds have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism and Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as a number of business, environmental and travel publications. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.

Lessons from the pandemic

Zoom presentations became a regular affair at Beth Israel during the pandemic. Inset: JFS director of programs and community partnerships Cindy McMillan provides an overview of the new Jewish Food Bank. (screenshot from BI & JFS)

As Vancouver-area synagogues cautiously edge their way toward reinstituting in-person religious services, many rabbis are doing a rethink about the impact that the past 17 months of closure has had on their congregations.

Finding a way to maintain a community connection for thousands of Jewish families became an imperative for all of the synagogues early on in the pandemic. Not surprisingly, for many, the answer became cutting-edge technology. But careful brainstorming and halachic deliberations remained at the heart of how each congregation addressed these urgent needs.

“We immediately realized that services per se were not going to work over electronic medium,” Congregation Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt told the Independent.

He said Orthodox rabbis across the world were already discussing halachah (Jewish law) in light of the pandemic when the province of British Columbia announced the shutdown in March of last year. “We realized that we weren’t going to offer any services,” he said. “We can’t have a minyan online.”

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t offer support. Schara Tzedeck’s answer to that need was only one of many innovative approaches that would come up. For example, to help congregants who had lost family members, the Orthodox shul devised a new ritual, as the reciting of the Mourner’s Kaddish requires a minyan (10 men or 10 men and women, depending on the level of orthodoxy, gathered together in one physical location).

“What we did is immediately [start a Zoom] study session in lieu of Kaddish. [The Mourner’s] Kaddish is based on this idea of doing a mitzvah act, which is meritorious for the sake of your loved one, so we substituted the study of Torah for the saying of Kaddish,” he explained.

For many other communities, such as the Conservative synagogue Congregation Beth Israel, the deliberations over how to apply halachah in unique moments such as these were just as intense. For these instances, said BI’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld, rabbis saw another imperative.

“This is what is called she’at had’chak, or a time of pressure,” Infeld said. “It’s a special time, it’s a unique time, and so we adapted to the time period.”

The concept allows a reliance on less authoritative opinions in urgent situations. So, for example, with respect to reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, Infeld said, “We felt that, especially in this time period, people would need that emotional connection, or would need that emotional comfort of saying Mourner’s Kaddish when they were in mourning, and so we have not considered this [internet gathering to be] a minyan, except for Mourner’s Kaddish,” Infeld said. He noted that the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, which reviews halachic decisions for the Conservative movement, has adopted the same position.

Rabbi Shlomo Gabay, who leads the Orthodox Sephardi synagogue Congregation Beth Hamidrash, said that although his congregation would not hold Mourner’s Kaddish online, venues like Zoom played a vital role in allowing the congregation to meet during shivah, the first seven days of mourning. Like a traditional shivah, which takes place in the mourner’s home, often with a small number of visitors, an online shivah gave community members a chance to attend and extend support as well.

“That was actually an especially meaningful [opportunity],” Gabay said. “The mourners, one after another, told me that, first of all, you don’t often get the opportunity to have so many people in the room, all together, listening.”

For members of the Bayit Orthodox congregation in Richmond, an online shivah meant family on the other side of the country could attend as well. “What was most interesting, of course, was the people from all across the world,” remarked Rabbi Levi Varnai. “You can have people who are family, friends, cousins, from many places in the world, potentially.”

screenshot - Temple Sholom uses a variety of online media to provide inclusive content for those members who can’t attend in person. Pictured here are Rabbi Dan Moskovitz and Rabbi Carey Brown — Temple Sholom uses a variety of online media to provide inclusive content for those members who can’t attend in person. Pictured here are Rabbi Dan Moskovitz and Rabbi Carey Brown. *(screenshot from Temple Sholom)*

Vancouver’s Reform Congregation Temple Sholom also came to value the potential of blending online media with traditional venues. Rabbi Dan Moskovitz said the congregation had been streaming its services and classes as much as a decade before the pandemic arrived. But lifecycle events, he said, demanded a more personal approach, one that would still allow families to actually participate in reading from the Torah scroll, while not violating the restrictions on large public attendance.

“The big change is that we brought Torah to everybody’s home,” he said. Literally. Moskovitz or his associate, Rabbi Carey Brown, would deliver the scroll in a large, specially fitted container, along with a prayer book, instructions and other necessary accoutrements.

“We had a document camera so, when we streamed, you could look down on the Torah as it was being read on screen. Those were very special moments on a front porch when I would deliver Torah, socially distanced with a mask on, early on in the pandemic,” he said. “I had a mask and I had rubber gloves and they had a mask, and you put something down and you walked away. We got a little more comfortable with service transmission later on.”

International classes

Switching to online media also has broadened the opportunities for classes and social connections. Infeld said Beth Israel moved quickly to develop a roster of classes as soon as it knew that there would be a shutdown.

“We realized right away that we can’t shut down. We may need to close the physical building, but the congregation isn’t the building. The congregation is the soul [of Beth Israel]. We exist with or without the building,” he said. “And we realized that for us to make it through this time period in a strong way, and to emerge even stronger from it, we would have to increase our programming.”

He said the synagogue’s weekly Zoom and Learn program has been among its most popular, hosting experts from around the world and garnering up to 100 or more viewers each event. The synagogue also hosts a mussar (Jewish ethics) class that is regularly attended. “We never had a daily study session,” Infeld said. “Now we [do].”

For Chabad centres in the Vancouver area, virtual programming has been a cornerstone of success for years and they have expanded their reach, even during the pandemic. “We have had more classes and more lectures than ever before, with greater attendance,” said Rabbi Yechiel Baitelman, who runs Chabad Richmond.

Zoom and other online mediums mean that the centres don’t have to fly in presenters if they want to offer an event. Like other synagogues, Chabad Richmond can now connect their audiences directly with experts from anywhere in the world.

“We can’t go back”

All of the synagogues that were contacted for this story acknowledged that online media services had played an important role in keeping their communities connected. And most felt that they will continue to use virtual meeting spaces and online streaming after the pandemic has ended.

“As our biggest barrier to Friday night participation was the fact that many families were trying to also fit in a Shabbat dinner with small children, the convenience of the Friday livestream is worth including in the future,” said Rabbi Philip Gibbs, who runs the North Shore Conservative synagogue Congregation Har El.

“We’re scoping bids to instal a Zoom room in our classroom space so that we can essentially run a blended environment,” Rosenblatt said. “We anticipate, when restrictions are lifted, some people will still want to participate by Zoom and some people will want to be in person.”

However, some congregations remain undecided as to whether Zoom will remain a constant in their services and programming.

Rabbi Susan Tendler said that the virtual meeting place didn’t necessarily mesh with all aspects of Congregation Beth Tikvah’s Conservative service, such as its tradition of forming small groups (chavurot) during services. “We are talking about what that will look like in the future,” she said, “yet realize that we must keep this door open.”

So is Burquest Jewish Community Association in Coquitlam, which is looking at hybrid services to support those who can’t attend in person. “But these activities will probably not be a major focus for us going forward,” said board member Dov Lank.

For Or Shalom, a Jewish Renewal congregation, developing ways to bolster classes, meditation retreats and other programs online was encouraging. Rabbi Hannah Dresner acknowledged that, if there were another shutdown, the congregation would be able to “make use of the many innovations we’ve conceived and lean into our mastery of virtual delivery.”

For a number of congregations, virtual services like Zoom appear to offer an answer to an age-old question: how to build a broader Jewish community in a world that remains uncertain at times and often aloof.

The Bayit’s leader, Rabbi Varnai, suggests it’s a matter of perspective. He said finding that answer starts with understanding what a bayit (home) – in this case, a Jewish house of worship – is meant to be.

The Bayit, he said, is “a place for gathering community members and for coming together. The question, how can we still be there for each other, causes us to realize that we can’t go back to as before.” After all, he said, “community service is about caring for each other.”

Jan Lee’s articles, op-eds and blog posts have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism, Times of Israel and Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as a number of business, environmental and travel publications. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.

Listening and learning

Juneteenth webinar panelists (clockwise from top left) Heather Miller, Dr. Tameika Minor, Rafi Forbush and Kendell Pinkney. (photos from internet)

The United Synagogues of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) held a webinar entitled Juneteenth Through the Eyes of Jews of Colour: Sharing Stories and Perspectives on June 17, the same day the United States declared Juneteenth (June 19) a federal holiday. Slaves were freed from Texas, the last Confederate state with institutionalized slavery, on June 19, 1865.

The objectives of the evening were to establish better dialogue, to create a space to honour the Jewish and Black communities, to learn about the challenges people of colour have in the Jewish community, and to find the means by which people of colour can feel welcome in the Jewish community. Marques Hollie, a theatre artist, storyteller and musician, led the evening with a rendition of the post-Civil War song “Oh Freedom.”

“Our people crossed the Red Sea. People of colour are still in Egypt. For Black people, freedom has not come fast enough and not in a straight line,” said Ruth Messinger, a former politician and head of the American Jewish World Service, in opening remarks that preceded the introduction of the panel discussion.

The four panelists were Heather Miller, Dr. Tameika Minor, Kendell Pinkney and Rafi Forbush. Rabbi Ari Lucas of Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, N.J., moderated the event. Lucas encouraged the audience to listen before asking questions.

“In a lot of ways, I feel like I came out as a Black person last year,” said Miller, president of the Jewish Centre in Brooklyn and a future rabbi. “In the Jewish spaces I have been in, people have tried not to see my colour. The stakes are different for us than the majority of people in this Zoom room. I was afraid this would just be a moment for everyone else and that the world would go back to not seeing this stuff again after the pandemic. I was afraid of being left exposed without a community.”

Minor, a professor in clinical mental health counseling and rehabilitation counseling at Rutgers University, said she would like to see Juneteenth become a day of reflection and not just celebration. “Reflection of where we have come from and how far we have to go,” she said. “It’s not a day we should sit back and not look at the wealth gap, mass incarceration and police brutality. Now it is a federal holiday, and yet so many states are banning critical race theory in schools.”

“For me, the question isn’t what does Juneteenth mean to me now but what might it mean to us moving forward,” said Pinkney, a Brooklyn-based theatre writer, Jewish-life consultant and rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “The Jewish people are so, so good at crafting stories, creating rituals. What rituals might be created 20 years from now around Juneteenth? Which stories and voices will we finally open our ears to?”

He added, “I like to think of it more as a promise of what might be and what we might become as a Jewish community.”

Rounding out the panel was Forbush, youth director at Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights (St. Paul) and founder of the Multiracial Jewish Association of Minnesota, which focuses on creating space for Jews of colour to connect to one another, through the community, education and advocacy.

“If you had told me that our community would be having this conversation at the beginning of the pandemic, I would have laughed at you,” said Forbush. “There is a bright light in our community starting to see outside of ourselves. If we are a people and not a race, then we owe it to each other to get to know who we are. The idea here is, extend the tent and not move it to exclude somebody else.”

Like Pinkney, Forbush spoke of the potential the holiday holds for the future and the sense of inclusion it can bring to the entire community. He pointed out that young Jews of colour often feel excluded.

Throughout the webinar, the panelists touched on various points of exclusion they feel as part of a community – of not believing they are entirely heard and of the microaggressions that occur in Jewish spaces, such as being quizzed on aspects of Jewish life or being viewed as staff and not a member of the community. Understandably, these are the sorts of issues that drive Jews of colour away from synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

The hope was expressed that Jews of colour could achieve more positions of leadership within Jewish organizations. There was also a sense that the community as a whole is not achieving its full potential without engaging more actively and openly with Jews of colour.

“This year, as we expand upon the understandings of diversity and inclusion, we have, despite COVID, actively widened the doors to our tent so to speak,” said Rabbi Susan Tendler of Richmond’s Congregation Beth Tikvah, which has been promoting the recent USCJ webinars on reaching out to interracial families and building a larger sense of inclusion for all Jews.

“We have actively listened and considered with compassion the feelings of people who may want to enter and yet find barriers to feeling authentically accepted within the larger Jewish community,” she told theIndependent. “United Synagogue’s program on Juneteenth is one example of many in which we have taken the opportunity to listen and learn.”

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Beth Tikvah welcomes rabbi

Rabbi Susan Tendler, her husband Ross Sadoff and their daughters Sofia and Daniella moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Richmond, where Tendler is the new spiritual leader of Beth Tikvah Congregation. (photo from Rabbi Susan Tendler)

Moving to a new city and starting a demanding and highly visible new job would be a challenge in the best of times. For Rabbi Susan Tendler, the recently arrived spiritual leader at Richmond’s Beth Tikvah Congregation, and her family of four, it was a little more complicated.

Not only has the COVID pandemic added complexity to every detail, the family was moving from the United States. This meant that, once they made it to British Columbia after a long, though enjoyable, drive across the continent, during which they took in some national parks and historical sites, they had to go into two weeks of quarantine in their new home.

The lemons of COVID were turned to lemonade by the reaction of the Beth Tikvah community. Tendler calls their reception “extraordinarily unbelievable.”

They arrived at the house, which had been equipped with bedding, toiletries, kitchenware and small appliances, a stocked pantry and refrigerator, and almost everything the new arrivals could want.

“People would from a distance greet us and somebody brought us dinner every single night that week. And people checked on us and would just drop off some milk or whatever we needed for the next week,” she said. While her husband, Ross Sadoff, returned to the States to collect their other vehicle, the rabbi and her daughters, 10-year-old Hannah Sofia and Daniella, who is 8, settled into quarantine.

“My girls and I sat in kind of a tent in our driveway,” she said, while congregants brought socially distanced greetings. “They drove by, honked at us and welcomed us. They had signs and balloons to make us feel welcome. The community, honestly, has gone above and beyond and really demonstrates what a caring community could be and just really made us feel welcome.”

The family moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., where Tendler had been rabbi for eight years at the Conservative B’nai Zion Congregation. She also served on the faculty of Camp Ramah Darom, in the foothills of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

She grew up in Virginia and previously held positions in congregations there and in North Carolina. Her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia is in religious studies with concentrations on Islam and Judaism. At the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, she received her rabbinical ordination and her master’s of education in informal Jewish education. She also completed a two-year rabbinic track at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She describes herself as “an ardent Zionist.”

Coming to Canada generally and Beth Tikvah specifically seems bashert. Tendler and Sadoff met at a wedding at the Richmond shul. In fact, that was one of three coincidental meetings that happened before Tendler decided maybe she should consider them an omen.

“I started thinking, wow, maybe I should pay attention to this,” she said. “Why do I keep running into him?”

She had first met Sadoff in New York, when she was en route to Israel and he was rooming with a friend of hers. On a different trip to Israel, for a cousin’s bar mitzvah, the pair met again. The Beth Tikvah meetup was third time lucky.

Relocating to Canada was not in the cards until recently, but it was something like a long-held dream.

“My husband used to say to me years ago, hey, do you think we can move to Canada?” Tendler recalled. “I’d say, Ross, I’m a female rabbi. The chance of that, at this point in time, is very slight. A decade ago, there were many fewer female rabbis in Canada.”

In fact, Tendler is the first female pulpit rabbi in a Conservative shul in British Columbia.

A few factors account for the family’s attraction to Metro Vancouver. For one thing, they wanted a Jewish day school, which Chattanooga has not had for a number of years.

“We are very excited about RJDS [Richmond Jewish Day School] because we think it will offer the flexibility that our kids will greatly benefit from,” she said.

The family loved Chattanooga, but even at one of the most diverse public schools in town, not being Christian was sometimes an issue.

“In some ways, we felt like we were undermining our family values,” said Tendler in the context of raising their kids. “We just wanted them to fully embrace and love who we were raising them to be and the values we were raising them to honour and realizing that, in some ways, we were undermining them constantly.”

A lockdown that took place after false alarms of a threat at the kids’ school made Tendler and her husband ponder school security and the prevalence of gun violence in their country.

“We say things are going to be different but nothing changes,” she said. “I went to Washington, D.C., after the shooting in [Parkland] Florida and we say things are going to change but nothing changes. At some point, you have to do something different. The lobbies are too strong and we can’t even talk in the States about gun safety. It’s all like, you’re taking away my rights. Well, what about public safety?”

Possibly above all, the family just thought that British Columbia would feel like home.

“I think that, in many ways, my family moved here for holistic health reasons,” she said. “We just wanted a place that felt healthier and was more aligned with our values.”

Even comparatively small things like an efficient recycling program make Tendler feel kinship with her new hometown. “It’s a small thing but, in general, I just feel that our values and what we want to teach our children are more in line with Canada, at least with British Columbia and Vancouver, with open-mindedness and, I would say, respect for other people.”

While the transition to their new hometown was complicated, they made the best of it. During the transcontinental road trip, they stopped at sites like the St. Louis Arch, the Badlands, Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore.

“We took some little hikes and saw bison and prairie dogs,” said Tendler. “It was fun.”