thecjnmagazine Passover 2021 | Nisan 5781
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Editor’s Note H
ere we go again. This time last year, as we hastily set about rearranging Seder plans for a pandemic Passover, most of us probably expected it to be a one-time occurrence, a short-term inconvenience at worst. I know I did. And yet, as the Pesach celebration arrives once again, it’s hard not to feel like we’re right back where we started in a lot of ways. By now, I think we realize that life, for the time being at least, is much more of a work in progress than we might have planned or wished for. Even if this Passover does not entirely amount to what you or I envisioned one year ago, though, we might take solace -maybe even find a rare burst of mental energy amid the doldrums of the stay-at-home orders -- in the fact that Judaism itself is a work in progress. You can probably think of examples of change and progress from your own Jewish life, I see it as the underlying principle behind Rabbi Tarfon’s famous line from Ethics of the Fathers, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” That’s one of the reasons why, in non-pandemic times, we get together this time of year -- to retell the origin stories of our people, apply their lessons to ourselves in
the here and how, and teach them to our children so that they and their children can do the same decades from now. The interplay between our history, our future and ourselves is indeed the work of progress. It’s the reason why we rarely have trouble finding new ways to wring meaning out of those time-worn lines in the Haggadah – because we’ve changed, or the world around us has, or both. I’d like to think this Canadian Jewish News magazine you are reading is a work-in-progress, too. It follows in the best traditions of The CJN – as both a journalistic and communal publication – while also moving that legacy forward in ways we hope will connect and reflect new audiences, young and old, across Canada. That is our mission going forward, as we aim to build a sustainable model for community journalism across Canada. Thank you for this opportunity to offer a glimpse into the future of The CJN. I hope you enjoy, and look forward to reading your feedback at ygoldstein@thecjn.ca. Chag Sameach,
What’s inside 08 Kay vs Kay B ARB AR A AND JON AT H AN K AY
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Only connect: spirituality, religion, and everything in between R ALP H BENMERGUI
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Zoom Judaism LIL A S ARIC K
28 Vilnius July 1941 G AR Y B AR W IN
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Le retour des Marranes au sein du peuple juif une quête longue et ardue ELI A S LE V Y
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Battle-Axes JUDY B ATALION
40 Yiddish Corner GERR Y K ANE
yoni
42 Q&A with Jacques Gauthier RON C SILL AG
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46 Confronting COVID DR. ORI T FREEDM AN DR. DEBBIE S C HWARC Z S ARI K AMEN
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Seder (The Passover Meal) (Der Oster-Abend) by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1889.
Doors closed, minds open BY RABBI REUVEN P. BULK A
A
s difficult as it is to fathom a second consecutive Pesach under quarantine, the reality is that our people’s first Pesach, celebrated in Egypt, was also observed under quarantine. The Israelites, too, were under strict orders not to leave their homes on that memorable Passover.
Imagine what could have occurred had the Israelites been allowed to roam free on that first Pesach evening. It is quite likely that they would have unleashed their bottled-up anger on those who had destroyed their lives. And who could have blamed them? Who would have blamed them?
It was a very limited quarantine -- only for one night -- and it is not exactly clear what the reason for that isolation was. Indeed, everything that happened on that fateful night did not necessitate a quarantine. Why isolate at all? True, we are told that it was to protect the Israelites from the engulfing plague visited upon the Egyptians that night, however it is hard to accept that as the full explanation, since the Israelites could have been protected without the quarantine.
But the instruction from God, via Moses, was clear: Stay home. No revenge, no retribution, no letting the anger spill out.
Perhaps the quarantine was imposed to protect the Israelites not from the Egyptians but from themselves. It is easy to project that there was no small amount of anger, even rage, harboured by the Israelites toward the Egyptians at the time. After all, these were the people who had beaten them to a pulp, had dehumanized them, had destroyed their lives.
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Shutting off the door to vengeance left the Israelites with no other choice but to turn inward and contemplate what had happened to them, and what was now changing before their eyes. Battered and beaten slaves were now free to embrace a life of responsibility to God. This was an opportunity to ask, “Where do we go from here?” not to look backwards but to march forward. It was a most profound lesson in restraint, in positivity, in living responsively. Yes, the first Passover was spent in quarantine. And what a positive quarantine it was -- planting the seeds for our future. Obviously, the reason for our contemporary
quarantine is so drastically different. There is no enemy out to get us, and there’s no threat directed at our people. But there is a challenge: The challenge of how we celebrate Passover meaningfully. For this we can go back to our great and swift efforts last year, when the Pesach quarantine came upon us quite suddenly. Not only did we manage, but as per the reports of so many families, we actually made that Pesach a most meaningful experience. And this year we are better prepared Aside from the usual retelling of the Exodus story, which is central to Passover, we can contemplate the lessons learned from the quarantine -- what really is important, what truly is meaningful, what infuses our life with purpose. These are crucial ideas to contemplate, so that when the quarantine finally ends, we will be better positioned to embark upon life with renewed vigour and focus. Warmest wishes to you all for Pesach and beyond. n Rabbi Reuven P. Bulka is the Rabbi Emeritus at Congregation Machzikei Hadas in Ottawa.
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Kay vs Kay For many Jews, last Passover was an early indication of the tremendous changes to come in our family dynamics. All of a sudden, one of our traditional times of gathering — the Pesach Seder — was significantly downsized. Families stayed home, and some people even experienced a solitary holiday for the first time. The pandemic has clearly changed the way our families operate and interact. The celebrations that typically bring us together — weddings, holidays, a Shabbat meal — have almost exclusively moved online (in Canada, at least), and lockdown measures continue to keep extended families from even the briefest of visits.
The CJN asked our favourite mother-son team, Barbara and Jonathan Kay, to reflect on how the pandemic has changed families.
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Barbara: On Dec. 21, I opened my computer and a Google calendar notice popped up, reminding me of my flight to Tel Aviv that day. It gave me quite a pang to see it. For of course, my husband and I were not going to be on that flight to Tel Aviv or to anywhere else for the foreseeable future. I had made the reservations almost exactly a year ago. This was a trip I had been dreaming about for a long time; my whole family together in Israel, the first of what I hoped would be many in their lifetime for my five granddaughters. My Montreal daughter and I had engaged a small company in Israel that specialized in family trips of this kind — often planned to coincide
with a bar or bat mitzvah. The company takes care of every detail, right down to dinner reservations. My idea of travel heaven. We discussed and finalized an optimal itinerary that would combine important historical sites with child-friendly attractions like the Bullet Factory and the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. We were to be eleven people in all. We’d have our own luxury mini-bus with a full-time driver/guide, who would fill the driving time with history and archeology lessons. I don’t get to see Jon’s three daughters as often as I’d like. And when I do, the time we spend together — apart from two of the girls’ bat mitzvahs — is not “Jewish time.”
It bothers me that nearly all my Jewish time with grandchildren happens to be spent with the Montreal girls. I had a lot of emotional energy invested in this long-anticipated trip. My two Montreal granddaughters attended day school to the end of Grade 6. They have been eager to go to Israel for years. I knew they would be excited and could relate to everything they would see there. It would be a very different experience for my Toronto girls. I’m realistic about the fact that as Jon has never had any interest in Jewish observance or holidays, I would be crazy to assume that his daughters would feel much attachment to their heritage.
View of the Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel.
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Yeshiva students study Talmud in Jerusalem.
I’ve never had an especially strong connection to Jewish life because I was always somewhat anti-social, and I was too restless and antsy for Jewish school. But I did develop some connection to the academic, historical and Zionistic aspects of Judaism later in life, which I’ve sometimes explored through my journalism and books. And it’s made me think that if I were born in another Jewish era (and I wasn’t too busy getting chased by Cossacks and such), I might have made a half-decent shtetl bookworm. This is an inclination that’s become more pronounced in me as I’ve aged. And over the last year or so, I’ve felt a guilty delight (almost verging on survivor’s guilt) in the fact that I have ‘enjoyed’ this pandemic.
On the one hand, we have the ideal of the highly communal, socially supportive, and festive Jewish community that prays, mourns and celebrates together. And then on the other hand, you have the ideal of the studious Jew who masters the scripture and Talmudic law, and lives a somewhat solitary life. JONATHAN KAY -
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Israel has a history of casting magic spells on secular Jews. I can’t pretend I wasn’t hoping it would happen to my Toronto girls. At 16 and 14, the older girls are the perfect age for that to happen. It was a bitter pill to cancel that trip. Will we go next year? I hope so, but can’t be sure. Jonathan: Like all religions, Judaism features different kinds of culturally idealized forms of observance. (I will get to the whole Israel trip thing in a paragraph or three. Please bear with me.) So on the one hand, we have the ideal of the highly communal, socially supportive, and festive Jewish community that prays, mourns and celebrates together. And then on the other hand, you have the ideal of the studious Jew who masters the scripture and Talmudic law, and lives a somewhat solitary life. One of the effects of the pandemic has been to make the first kind of idealized Jewish life impossible, while creating a sort of distraction-free paradise for introverted yeshiva nerds.
I feel terrible for saying it, but it’s true. I’m able to spend my time reading, writing and playing games over the Internet with similarly minded friends all over the world. I realize people are dying and losing their businesses, so I don’t want to be flippant about this. But personally, I could go on like this for years. Maybe forever. And in this vein, I will make the guilty admission that, although I was sorry to not go to Israel to celebrate my niece’s (your granddaughter’s) bat mitzvah, the small, short, socially distanced affair we instead had in Montreal was pretty much my ideal Jewish ritual celebration: It was brief (maybe 30 minutes), thinly attended (just 25 people, as per Quebec regulations at the time — all of whom I knew, so no tedious schmoozing expectations), and we were able to eat at home instead of nibble on an egg sandwich buffet. Plus, the rabbi gave what I thought was an excellent little speech about Jacob and Isaac, and the instructions that father gave to son about Jewish continuity, which I thought was very thought-provoking. That was very much my kind of Jewish thing.
But I get it that this is not what other people want out of religion — which is a feeling of connection with a larger group, a community. In fact, a recognition of this need is baked explicitly into the creed of Reconstructionist Judaism (which our family was affiliated with for several decades in Montreal until you decided you’d had enough of the vegan wokeness that had taken over that shul, but I digress). And this is something I have thought about as I have followed the course of the pandemic, including in my study of so-called “super-spreader” events, a number of which take place in synagogues and other religious congregations. (Jewish communities in New York City and upstate New York have been especially hard hit.) In many cases, these communities attract scorn, on the belief that the congregants are merely ignorant, or that they believe God will protect them from the disease. Maybe that’s true for some of these people. But for most of them, I’m guessing, they simply have made the calculation that religiously mediated group social communion is so important to them, that they will risk a serious disease. It’s not a choice I would make, but I understand it.
And while many of my friends are getting satisfaction from Zoom pre-services, I have no interest in them. Going to shul for me has to be the actual shul, with an actual kiddush afterward. - BARBARA KAY
As for Israel, I’m hoping we can go next year (or maybe even later this year, as the whole country seems to be on track to universal vaccination in a matter of a month or two). I’m curious what my kids will think about that country. I feel like they have several options for rebelling against me. One path might see them casting off my rootless apatheism by taking up with Israeli boyfriends, and going off to pick soybeans on a moshav for a few years. I must say that I’d prefer that to some of the other alternatives.
Barbara: I am trying very hard to picture you as a “shtetl bookworm,” as you put it, and am having difficulty summoning the image, because it seems you really have no idea how yeshiva bochers spend their time. They are not left alone to spend their days dreaming over books of their choice. In fact, the typical religious young man is rarely alone. They study what they are told for many hours at a time, and usually — if it is Talmud — in pairs, so they can develop their skill in debate. Much of their time is spent in communal prayer and communal festinating. You would hate such a life, as individualism is the very thing strict Orthodoxy is designed to weed out. Studying Talmud would drive you around the bend, in any case. You have no idea how much of the Talmud is devoted to nitpicking over how much time you have to wait after eating meat before you can eat dairy, or the rules for women’s use of the mikveh after menstruation and so forth. I can see you demanding to get on to the intellectual fun of “An eye for an eye” and everyone looking at you with horror for stepping out of line.
And at the very least, it would give me a chance to visit the Holy Land, and march them around Jerusalem while reading them choice nuggets from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography. It’s a wonderful book, by the way. And I never would have had a chance to re-read it but not for this pandemic.
I have great sympathy for your inherent anti-sociability, and I must say I think you compensate for it very well by having cultivated a virtual social presence on social media with your humour and offbeat interests. All your followers love your conversation-starters. It’s an online mini-party when you get on a roll. You have the fun of social inter-
action while holed up in your cozy den. You are what is known in the parlance as a “shy exhibitionist.” I’m somewhere in between, which means I have also been embarrassingly sanguine about the lockdowns and very happy to spend most of the day pottering in my study, with the odd phone call to close friends and family. But Zoom doesn’t do it for me Jewishly speaking. On the one hand, Zoom has made it possible for our extended family to hold Passover seders that include people like your family, who never come to Montreal for Pesach, and remote Hanukkah candle-lighting, and I appreciate that. Certainly better than nothing. But Rosh Hashanah was a complete bust for me. Every year, as you know, we have our major holiday dinners with our cousins, the Feldmans, and I just adore them. The warmth, the humour, the great food, just the being together — nothing can replace that. And while many of my friends are getting satisfaction from Zoom pre-services, I have no interest in them. Going to shul for me has to be the actual shul, with an actual kiddush afterward. Not that I went every week, but often enough to miss it and feel a certain flat-lining in that area of my life. I agree that Noa’s bat mitzvah was terrific. It was intimate and relaxed and purely joyful. I had assumed Noa would be disappointed that none of her friends were there, but in fact she was perfectly happy. What made it special was that your family made the effort to be there (and even broke a few COVID rules to do it). At our brunch after the service at shul, I was thrilled to see Noa bursting with happiness at having her cousins with her to celebrate and open gifts. It was a good lesson for the girls: of course a big party would have been exciting, but really in the end, it’s your family that makes or breaks these special rites of passage, and they are the only people that are essential. On the whole, I have to say it was one of my all-time favourite family “Jewish times.” Partly, Jon, because I knew you were actually enjoying yourself.
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Bat mitzvah celebration. Kay family archive photo
There are, as you note, all kinds of way for children to rebel against their parents. And some, as you note, are more attractive to the parental imagination than others. Very dear friends of ours were rigorously secular and didn’t give their children any Jewish education whatsoever. The eldest son married an Orthodox woman, they went all in on ultra-Orthodoxy, and their three children, miraculously, all live deeply religious lives too. Our friends attended their grandson’s wedding in one of those New York enclaves, where super-spreading is the order of the day. The son, his wife, and his in-laws all got COVID. Better your girls should go to Israel and maybe decide to attend Ben Gurion U. Jonathan: I must say that your description of yeshiva bochers is very disillusioning. Ironically though, I have actually been to an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in New York City. If you will permit the digression: This
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I agree that Noa’s bat mitzvah was terrific. It was intimate and relaxed and purely joyful. I had assumed Noa would be disappointed that none of her friends were there, but in fact she was perfectly happy. - BARBARA KAY
was a year ago, and I was researching an investigative piece on sexual abuse in a Jewish school in Toronto. There were links back to a New York teacher, and this is what brought me to the yeshiva, to ask the presiding rabbi some tough questions. I assumed he’d be tight-lipped, and that I’d have to go undercover in some sort of reverse Yentl situation. But it was the opposite: The guy was a complete chatterbox and was totally candid with me. I was there in his office for two hours and then — get this — he told me he wanted to continue the conversation with me while he walked to his dentist appointment, which was about 20 blocks away on the Upper West Side. And so I had to follow him through the streets taking notes on his exhaustive answers to my questions. In fact, it was his complete candour that convinced me that there was no story because everything must clearly all be out in the open.
Everything you say about COVID’s suffocating effects on extended family and religious life would no doubt set heads nodding not only among Jews, but also Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians who all have missed their big holiday meet-ups with cousins and grandparents (unless you’re the Ontario finance minister, apparently, in which case it was party time in St. Barts. But again, I digress). But while extended family meet-ups have surely suffered, I have also noted an offsetting increase in closeness among nuclear families. My own family is much closer now that it was a year ago. We used to only eat about two or three dinners together per week. But in the last 10 months, we have eaten dinner together every single night except for maybe two or three days. They say that it’s important for families to eat dinner together, and I had always dismissed that as a cliché, But I now know that it’s true. As you know, I am not religiously observant. But for many families that do, say, observe the Sabbath, I’m guessing that there is a less rushed quality to Friday night meals and prayers, with more home-made foods because suddenly everyone has time for cooking and baking. This is going to sound corny, but the pandemic really has taught me what is quote-unquote important in life. Tonight, my big outing was teaching my eldest daughter to drive stick-shift in a Costco parking lot. A year ago, I’m not sure I would have had time for this sort of thing, as our schedules were cluttered with social obligations (my schedule less than most, but still). But nothing I could have done with friends or professional contacts could have beat the night we had. Until she is an old lady, she will remember where she was when she learned this skill. Of course, within 10 years, everyone will drive electric, so this skill will be useless. But still. Barbara: Jon, I love when you preface a statement with the words “It may sound corny, but…” because I know that what is coming is going to warm the cockles of my maternal heart. Certainly what you say here did exactly that.
One of the hardest things an opinionated mother has to learn is to resist the urge to give excellent parenting advice to one’s children when they are in the process of shaping their parental style themselves. When your children were younger and you and Jen were in the most critical years of career-building, you both worked long hours outside the house and couldn’t be home until after the kids had eaten. It couldn’t be helped, but I wished it were otherwise. Your COVID-induced discovery that family dinnertimes are the key to unbreakable and continuous connection of a kind that amplifies every family member’s sense of inner peace and confidence is very gratifying to witness. Obviously observant Jews have no need to “discover” this truth. One of the great things about Shabbat dinners — and they remain vivid in my memory as that fixed social lodestar one steers by for the rest of the week — is that the pleasure taken at them makes it clear that less formal repetitions every other day of the week are the way to go. COVID has obviously had different impacts on different generations. For you, although I think it is terribly sad that the kids have missed out so much in their schooling and sports and social lives, family togetherness has made the final tally of pluses and minuses come out plus. For oldies like me, it’s more minus than plus, as family togetherness is what we long for and miss. I am incredibly lucky at my age to have work I can do at home (in fact always did) and the structure it brings. Many of my friends are struggling. For single oldies, it is nearly all minus.
Everything you say about COVID-19’s suffocating effects on extended family and religious life would no doubt set heads nodding not only among Jews, but also Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians who all have missed their big holiday meet-ups with cousins and grandparents. - JONATHAN KAY
And yet, I am amazed at how resilient my friends are. Thanks to Zoom, there has been an explosion of Jewish-themed educational opportunities: courses online, study groups, webinars with famous Jewish thinkers and writers, lectures sponsored by our synagogue that have increased in number as the cost has plummeted. Every day my inbox is filled with invitations to join one or another tantalizing remote experience.
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As for myself, I always enjoyed giving talks, but hated the travel involved. Zoom has made that part of my job easy and enjoyable. A few months ago, I had the privilege of moderating a webinar with Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky — me in Montreal, them in Israel — with hundreds of attendees. It was exciting and a real privilege to interview them about their new jointly written memoir of Sharansky’s life in politics, Never Alone. When COVID is over, these new traditions of remote learning and connection will remain. Jewish families will deploy both to achieve individualized optimal Jewish community. Some day I will be reunited with my Montreal children and grandchildren around the Shabbat and holiday table, but from time to time we will include Jon and his family, and I trust he will find some pleasure in the new tradition. And God willing, we will have that delayed family trip to Israel in the coming year. Speaking of Israel, to bring us full circle to the Israel trip that wasn’t, I am mindful of what a historic year it has been there. COVID, of course, but more important, the Abraham Accords. Which brings us to Donald Trump. Nobody has divided the Jewish world like this former American president. Even conservative Jews here mostly consider him an abomination, a monster, a narcissist who strains the word’s meaning to its limits and beyond. But in Israel it’s quite another story, and I cannot discount that in weighing his legacy. Trump midwifed a miracle many of us never thought we would see in our lifetimes. Both COVID and Trump give new depth of meaning and anguish to the age-old question, “Was it/he good or bad for the Jews?” Jonathan: I find it hard to credit Trump with anything. But I will say that making peace is like falling in love or hitting a perfect baseline forehand. If you try too hard to win a Nobel Prize and be everyone’s hero, you will probably fail — because all sides will regard your hunger for recognition as a form of desperation. In an odd way, Trump’s sociopathic indifference to the suffering of
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President Donald J. Trump walks with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, along the Colonnade of the White House on their way to sign the Abraham Accords at ceremonies on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour).
others (See, e.g., “COVID, Americans Dead From”) was an asset at the bargaining table because no one could possibly imagine that he was seeking a pat on the head from a bunch of Scandinavian worthies. Moreover, everyone also knew that his attention span is way too limited to sustain the marathon negotiations that American administrations have engaged in since the mid-20th century (mostly for naught, but sometimes achieving real breakthroughs). That said, I don’t think anyone should imagine that the Palestinian situation has been resolved in any permanent way simply because the Palestinians concluded (rightly) that they’d be wasting their time with Trump. Trump solved nothing in the long run (though, to his credit. I don’t think he made
this problem worse). And nor will Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu go down as anything more than a cynical survivor. But ever the optimist, I am always willing to expect the best of people. Indeed, just imagine if Netanyahu, ever the cagey political survivor, decided to use this oncein-a-century pandemic crisis to remake his reputation, and by saving the lives of Arabs no less. Menachem Begin fought for the Irgun — yet, three decades later, smiled as he shook hands with Anwar Sadat on Sept. 17, 1978 (a day before my tenth birthday, trivia fans). Perhaps Netanyahu will channel some of Trump’s self-serving showmanship and send life-saving Netanyahu Needles to Gaza and Ramallah. Surely, stranger things have happened. n
Only connect: spirituality, religion, and everything in between BY RALPH BENMERGUI
I
t’s a thing. SBNR. It’s growing in popularity, emptying the pews and cushioned seats in many a synagogue, temple and church across Canada. Some look upon SBNR as a lazy default position, others see it as a clear line between faith by rote and active spirituality. Perhaps you’ve heard people say it, perhaps you’ve even said it yourself: “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
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The two, spirituality and religion, are not mutually exclusive. According to a Pew research study conducted in the United States, many who claim to be SBNR say that they observe a traditional religion, if at a lower level of participation. That may be because they see the traditions as worth keeping. Just think of the prevalence of “High Holiday Jews,” who dust off their Sat-
urday best twice a year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (and keep paying their annual membership fees to show support and secure a burial plot). In my worldview, spirituality is a relationship issue -- our relationship to ourselves, with each other and the awe and wonder of creation. When we think of the relationship
to ourselves we can look to practices like the Yom Kippur viddui (confession) where we gently knock on our chest and reflect on our susceptibility to less honourable traits, like lying, cruel speech and greed. On the less judge-y side, it is cultivating stillness so we can become more present, and in that presence connect with our true selves, or the divine spark as it were.
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When it comes to our relationship with others I default to the wisdom of the great theologian Martin Buber and his masterwork, I and Thou. There are two types of relationships: “I and Thou,” and “I and It.”
“You know, Ralph, the thing is I don’t get anything out of praying, I don’t believe in God either.” I was confused. “But you come to shul every Saturday!” I replied. “Oh, I don’t come for that,” he smiled. “I come for Kiddush.”
Let’s start with the “It” form. We’ve all been to that party (and hope to once again) where we can’t help but notice that a person we are talking to is barely paying attention to us. Maybe you catch them looking over your shoulder in hopes of finding someone of more use than you in pursuing their own agenda -- a more connected person, a more attractive person. Now, I admit I have been at both ends of that interchange, passed over in favour of someone else, but also objectifying the person in front of me, evaluating their utility as it affects my ambitions. “I and It.” The flip side of the equation is “I and Thou.” We can reach out with our hearts at the very exact same time as we listen to someone else. In the field of spiritual counselling we call that “holy listening.” A chance to be truly curious, as opposed to waiting our turn and demanding to be right. Further, we have the opportunity to connect to what is all around us. Just Google an image from the Hubble Space Telescope and you’ll know what I’m talking about: The natural world, the constantly evolving web of creation in which we play a small part, the unimaginable brilliance of the cosmos. If the SBNR approach is more than a placeholder in our lives, it can be quite beautiful to be present in our universe. Rabbi Jordan Cohen of Temple Anshe Sholom in Hamilton, Ont., has changed his view on in his relationship to the spiritual-but-not-religious people he interacts with. “My attitude toward those who define themselves as ‘spiritual not religious’ has evolved over the years,” he told me. “Formerly, I welcomed spiritual not religious folk almost as a category of their own. It was like spiritual not religious was a religion, minus the building fund. I felt positive that these good souls were at least on some kind of a spiritual path.
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“But now I am not so sure. I think ‘spiritual, not religious’ reflects a very naïve understanding of the depths of religion in its mature sense. I find most who identify in that way are bright people, but not deeply learned about adult religiosity. Or they are so wounded by the abuses of bad religion that they cannot even consider that there is positive soul-affirming good religion. “For me, what ‘spiritual not religious’ lacks are the elements of community and communal experience. From a Jewish perspective, we are all free to cultivate our own spiritual journey. But we also have the brit – the Covenant – as expressed through the Torah and mitzvot, which binds us collectively as a people with our God. As Jews.” The way I see it, spirituality can be a type of holy rocket fuel -- volatile and sporadic, but intense. Religion is more a fitness program. The Sabbath stands out as a prime example of this dichotomy. For those that observe, Friday night and Saturday are not merely novel things to have in their lives -they are a need. They are touchstones on a weekly basis that ask that to stop doing and just be. These “rules” comprise a spiritual workout regimen; missing class is not an option if you want to actually get in shape. Like anything, so the argument goes, you get out what you put into it. Torah study can engage us in parables, storytelling, metaphor, ethical direction. And religion can help us move from unfathomable universal concepts to grounding rituals that focus the mind and heart. Once, when I was facilitating a spiritual companionship group at a Toronto synagogue, one of the participants came up to me afterward and said, “You know, Ralph, the thing is I don’t get anything out of praying, I don’t believe in God either.” I was confused. “But you come to shul every Saturday!” I replied. “Oh, I don’t come for that,” he smiled. “I come for Kiddush.” He wasn’t being glib. He loved being in the community, watching children grow, people get married -- even people passing had its special place. They had shared not just bread, but life.
Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, by Maurycy Gottlieb.
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Martin Buber and Rabbi Binyamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldman) in Palestine in the 1920s.
The pews are emptying because for many the experience of faith has been hollowed out, and all that is left is the empty husk of repetitious words that have no meaning. If you stopped 90 per cent of congregants in mid-prayer and asked them what they are saying, let alone why they are saying it, I bet they, like me, wouldn’t have a clue. As my mother would say, “you do it to get it right, to make sure we keep doing it or we disappear.” Perhaps that is good enough for many. It’s never satisfied me. For others, it’s about rejecting a God that we are to praise as the King of Kings, The Lord of Lords. Patriarchal and oppressive language plucked from King James England and plopped in front of us as we stand uncomfortably to revere some monarchial figure that rules by fiat. We pray often without joy, without knowing the person sitting two rows down. With can-
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tors who sing for us and rabbis who know more than we will ever know about the three-letter root of each holy word. Rabbis who can debate how many angels sit on the head of a pin, but cannot touch the soul of a woman whose husband just up and left. But not all have given up on meaningful and modern worship. Just look up “Jewish Innovation” and you will see that many people – in Canada, too -- yearn for an experiential Judaism. Rabbi Shefa Gold, Aviva Chernick, Rabbi Sherril Gilbert in Montreal, Or Shalom Synagogue in Vancouver, Paula Baruch in Hamilton leading meditation in the Jewish tradition, and many more. They and many others are speaking to a whole new generation that wants to feel and sing together, as much as they want to learn together. Religion is a living organism, and it changes constantly. I believe we need it -- for the restoration of our humility, for the discipline
and understanding that comes from realizing that we ourselves are not God, that we are lost in a sea of material lust. For the one day of being, the Sabbath, and the wisdom of so many who can see beyond the vagaries of this short life and yearn for deeper meaning. Not once in a while, but on an ongoing basis. Without that humility and the rituals that help give shape to our deepest highs and lows we often rely simply on good intentions and a great walk in the woods. I have found that many people yearn for much more. They hope for connection beyond just human life and to the miracle that is the universal and pulsing heart of creation. To belong. Not to exclude, but to conquer our feeling of separateness. n Ralph Benmergui hosts the podcast Not That Kind of Rabbi, and is an ordained spiritual director.
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Zoom Judaism Reinventing a religion that’s been around for 3,000 years
BY LIL A SARICK
W
hen Eileen Jadd’s mother died last summer, the funeral was recorded for her cousins in the United States who were not able to attend. Jadd was comforted by friends who made virtual shivah visits and now she recites the mourner’s Kaddish daily in an online minyan. A year ago, none of this would have been imaginable, but the pandemic has uprooted nearly every aspect of Jewish life. As people retreated to the safety of their homes and lockdowns were mandated by governments, many prayer services and programs moved out of synagogues and community centres and onto computers and phones.
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“On Shabbat, I go to three services; this way I get to hear three sermons and I get to hear from three different rabbis. That is something I’m really enjoying… All these things would not be available to me in regular times,” said Jadd, who, as a Toronto bereavement educator, is something of an expert on the subject. “If Zoom wasn’t a thing… truthfully I might not be going as frequently. You can turn off your picture and still daven at 7:30 in the morning in sweatpants.” It is not too far-fetched to suggest that we’re living through what some rabbis are
calling a “Yavneh moment,” referring to the town where the Jewish leadership fled after the destruction of the Second Temple and developed the rabbinic Judaism we have today. Questions such as, “can 10 pixelated faces on Zoom constitute a minyan?” and “how to replicate online the shmoozing joy of a Shabbat morning Kiddush?” pose subjects with which Jewish institutions are grappling, much as the ancient sages had to re-imagine a religion where animal sacrifices were no longer possible. “I am reinventing a religion that’s been around for 3,000 years, every single day. I’m a very innovative rabbi and I think many
of my colleagues are. It’s exhausting,” said Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom in Vancouver. “Nothing that I have in my shelf or in my computer files before this can I really use again. Everything has to be reformulated to teach online or to do it in a virtual environment.” Temple Sholom, like many non-Orthodox synagogues, has moved its services online. Connecting with congregants is challenging, Rabbi Moskovitz said. “If I walked into the social hall after services, I could talk with 20 or 30 people just to check in and see what’s going on. (Now) I have to do that one by one, you can’t do that on a Zoom call, it takes a lot more to get to people.” He worries that he’s not able to make new relationships. “We’ve had a number of people join our congregation since COVID began and I don’t know these families. …I used to go to people’s homes or sit with them at the oneg after services and that’s not happening (now).” The temple has helped seniors make the transition to online services, even paying for high-speed Internet in some cases. But children’s programming has been less successful. The young families who made “Tot Shabbat” a vibrant part of services at the temple, have not moved online. Part-time religious school education has been decimated, as families opted out of signing their kids up for even more online learning. In Toronto, enrolment in part-time schools has fallen by 50 to 60 per cent. In Vancouver, it’s much the same, Rabbi Moskovitz said. “Even though we are doing really heroic stuff to teach online, that is not what religious school can and should be,” he said. “Hebrew school’s hard enough but at least you’re there with your friends, but if you can’t even play gaga or do Israeli dancing…it may not fly.” Even at Orthodox synagogues, which have remained in-person when possible, there’s not much socializing. At Forest Hill Jewish Centre in Toronto, where current provincial rules allow just 10 people inside for prayer
services, Rabbi Elie Karfunkel hands the few men in attendance a cup of cholent as they leave on Shabbat morning. But there’s no time for chatting. Very few people have come to the synagogue since COVID started, he said. Some are understandably worried about their health. But those who saw the synagogue as more than just a place to pray – also as a place to socialize – have also stayed away. “You work the whole week, you want to go to shul, daven, hear something interesting by the rabbi and see people and connect, and they don’t have that,” Rabbi Karfunkel said. “It’s very hard.” Despite the difficulties, some aspects of Jewish life are booming in ways they never had before. At Beth Tzedec Congregation, a large Conservative synagogue in midtown Toronto, attendance at the daily virtual minyan is up, said Rabbi Steve Wernick, in part because there has been a lot of human loss and people are saying Kaddish. Like many non-Orthodox synagogues, Beth Tzedec uses a combination of Zoom and livestreaming to broadcast its daily and Shabbat services.
This is not the first time Judaism has been confronted with a plague. Rabbi Wernick pointed to numerous discussions in traditional texts about how Jews should respond to a pandemic, including whether people leaning out their windows in a courtyard can constitute a minyan.
“But what’s been interesting, when people have completed their obligation to say Kaddish, they stay with the minyan because they find the community to be very meaningful, especially in a time in which people are desperate for connection. There have been a number of people who have joined the minyan because they’re lonely.” This is not the first time Judaism has been confronted with a plague. Rabbi Wernick pointed to numerous discussions in traditional texts about how Jews should respond to a pandemic, including whether people leaning out their windows in a courtyard can constitute a minyan.
Shofar blowing in the synagogue on Yom Kippur.
“Our ancestors have always been innovative in times of crisis,” he said. “We have this technology that allows us to replicate windows in a courtyard where we can see everybody and hear each other. It seems like a change, but it’s not, the only thing that’s changed is the technology.”
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Clergy have worked hard to give the minyan a personal touch, arriving on Zoom early to greet new arrivals and organizing monthly meetings in which participants can chat. The minyan has attracted people who would normally find it too far or inconvenient to attend in person, and even a few who don’t identify as Conservative.
The pandemic has accelerated a trend Rabbi Finegold had observed: People are looking for a diversity of Jewish ideas and are becoming less likely to rely on big synagogues and other traditional institutions.
Moishe Goldstein prayed with an outdoor Orthodox minyan when it was warmer but didn’t feel comfortable when prayer services moved inside. Instead, he’s a regular at Beth Tzedec’s afternoon weekday services. “I find it warm and very spiritual,” he said. “I find it important to go to Beth Tzedec’s Zoom and to tell people that I do. We had a minyan of 59 people. That’s incredible.” In the Orthodox world, lectures and Jewish study have gone online, but not prayer, with rabbis arguing that a gathering of 10 men on Zoom does not meet the requirements of a daily minyan, while the use of technology is prohibited on Shabbat. “I think the decision not to recognize Zoom minyanim is such a terrible, terrible decision,” said Goldstein, who is retired. “It’s a huge kiddush HaShem (sanctification of God) because you enlarge the ambit of Judaism.” But it’s not just services that have flourished online. So have any number of events and classes that once depended on people showing up in person. While educators and clergy worry that they are now forced to compete with a wealth of Jewish offerings from around the world, the opposite is also true: Visitors can drop in on what would have been strictly local classes. At the Miles Nadal JCC in downtown Toronto, Cara Gold, manager of downtown Jewish life, has seen enrolment from across North America in the centre’s Hebrew and Yiddish classes. But what’s even more astonishing to her is the success of “Lishma,” an educational program for people in their 20s and 30s whose secret sauce is a structured time for socializing as well as learning.
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“We have more than a full registration (for the 2021 winter semester). It blows my mind. It’s 10 months into COVID, Zoom burnout is real, especially our community being people under 40, many of them are in school or they’re working and they’re choosing to spend their Wednesday evenings on Zoom with us learning,” Gold said. While some classes have been opened up to the larger Jewish world, Lishma has deliberately been kept local. “We’ve been experimenting with how to create the space for that casual shmoozing that is hard to create in an online format,” Gold explained. “We try to have at least one breakout room and activity so people can still learn each others’ names and meet.” Some programs have transitioned almost seamlessly, Gold noted. A daily activity group for youth with disabilities still meets, but online. A program for interfaith families and individuals that started about six months before the pandemic under the title of “Jewish &”, is thriving. The Jewish & Instagram has over 1,000 followers. Moving online hasn’t worked as well for people who were marginalized or struggling before COVID, she added. A free Friday night service and dinner that attracted 50 to 60 people in “financial difficulties” who weren’t connected to the Jewish community has not been running. Some programs for seniors and the LGBTQ community have also seen drop-offs in attendance, sometimes because the events just aren’t as satisfying when there is no in-person connection, she said. Rabbi Avi Finegold, founder of the Jewish Learning Lab in Montreal, says the transition to online has been difficult for adult education. “It’s not just about taking a class and putting it on Zoom,” he said. In some cases, Zoom, has proven to be a terrible way to teach. “I’ve noticed some people are just sort of there, treating it like a podcast. It’s on in the background and that’s it.” Noticing that, he is turning more of his classes into podcasts, available when a learner has the time and attention. (Rabbi
Finegold is also co-hosting a podcast with The CJN, called “Bonjour Chai”). But what’s missing, as everyone in lockdown can attest to, is the sense of personal connection. Rabbi Finegold added a What’s App group to a parenting class that he teaches for people with little Jewish education, called “Jew It Yourself.” “There’s constant discussion, everybody is always checking in with each other, getting a tip for how to do this for Shabbat…. That has formed a community across the group,” he said. The pandemic has accelerated a trend Rabbi Finegold had observed: People are looking for a diversity of Jewish ideas and are becoming less likely to rely on big synagogues and other traditional institutions. “Not being able to go to services, reminded a lot of people who went to services, or who were in charge of services, that services weren’t relevant,” he said. But if COVID has forced institutions to re-assess their offerings, it’s also presented Judaism with
But it’s not just services that have flourished online. So have any number of events and classes that once depended on people showing up in person… Visitors can drop in on what would have been strictly local classes.
a “moment of great opportunity” to critically examine what has not been working, Rabbi Finegold has noticed. What happened in Yavneh wasn’t just one moment, but a period during which competing models of Judaism were being developed, he argued. “There’s a lot of people trying different things out there right now…We’re going to see the best is ultimately going to rise.” The changes can already be seen in events like weddings and funerals, he noted. Before COVID, they might have been awkwardly streamed by someone holding up a phone in the front row; now they are professionally recorded so distant family can participate. Having a computer and a Zoom link at a shivah house for virtual visits has been normalized. With a family bat mitzvah coming up in September, Rabbi Finegold has some questions: “Am I hoping we have learned the lessons that we don’t need big parties, because clearly for a year people have had bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings that were a lot more modest?
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Are we at the point where we’re going to make it as modest as we can while still maintaining a real celebration? I hope so.” Rabbi Moskovitz agrees that this is a transformative time in Jewish life. While going virtual has given Jews the ability to sample the diversity of the Jewish world, he is also concerned that some smaller synagogues may not survive. “What does it mean to belong to a synagogue if you’re ‘a couple of times a year Jew’ and you’re not going to religious school or committee meetings or regular Shabbat services?” he asked. “If you can get that online, why do you need a shul in your community? That’s worrisome.” Meanwhile, the convenience of praying from home has boosted attendance at Rabbi Moskovitz’s Vancouver temple by about 50 to 70 per cent, he estimates. The temple is looking to hire its first cantor and has
invited hazzans from diverse backgrounds – Sephardi and Ashkenazi, men and women, traditional and guitar-playing, to lead virtual services. “Now that we’re exposed to things we haven’t been before, we’ve become aspirational as a congregation. We want to have that calibre of music,” he said. The Orthodox world hasn’t been immune to change either. With the rise of private minyans in backyards, where prayer services are also much shorter, Rabbi Karfunkel wonders if people will come back to synagogue. “I think big shuls with diverse people are great, but I wonder whether the backyard minyan is here to stay.” And if people do return to larger and longer services, he wonders whether men who were empowered to be the leaders in their small minyans will be content to take a back seat in a formal synagogue setting. The pandemic has also shown him the power of the online world, lessons that Chabad mastered years ago, he pointed out. This winter, his synagogue hosted a
lecture series featuring a prominent New York-based rabbi, something that would have been unaffordable, unless it was done virtually. The six-week series attracted 100 people every night, rather than the five to 20 it normally would, partly because no one had to find a babysitter or go out on a winter’s night, Rabbi Karfunkel said. For institutions that have made the shift online, it seems there’s no going back. Temple Sholom is investing in technology to improve the experience for people tuning in from home, even when they are able to meet in person. Beth Tzedec will also maintain a hybrid model, combining in-person and online prayer, even after COVID, Rabbi Wernick said. “What happens on the other side may be different than what happened prior to it, but I think that’s OK,” he said. “We’ve been heading toward a moment of renewal of Jewish life in the 21st century anyway, this has just pushed us perhaps a little farther and faster than we had imagined.” n
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Vilnius July 1941 BY GARY BARWIN
The Great Synagogue of Vilna (Vilnius) in 1934.
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I did lots of research for this novel including interviewing my Great-uncle Isaak to whom the book is dedicated. When he was a small boy and the Nazis invaded Lithuania in the summer of 1941, his father stayed behind to bring his sister back from summer camp and entrusted Isaak to his aunt. Together, Isaak and his Aunt Chiena would walk out of Lithuania into the U.S.S.R. Somewhere along the way, a truck load of retreating Russian soldiers offered to take the boy and drive him to safety. That was the last Isaak saw of his father and sister and the world as it had been in Lithuania. My own grandfather, Percy Zelikow, discovered Isaak decades later in Chicago. I found this to be a very powerful story and it worked its way into the novel in a number of ways.
Gary Barwin Adela Talbot photo
In the following excerpt, my protagonist, Motl and his larger-than-life-but-not-larger-than-stereotype mother, Gitl, are escaping from Vilnius (“Vilna” in Yiddish.) Motl lives life not by fantasizing that he is a Torah scholar or a fish vendor, but rather that he is a cowboy. He’s read many westerns, particularly the very popular Karl May novels which were also Hitler’s favourite books. The novel makes the connection between American “manifest destiny” and the genocide of Indigenous people and Nazi Lebensraum and the Holocaust. Hitler himself made this connection. Motl and Gitl are in a cart pulled by their swayback horse, Theodor Herzl. Why Herzl? Because I couldn’t resist. Also, it seems that whichever way they try to direct Herzl, he heads off in his own direction. They imagine he is heading toward Zion. There’s also a trick with bread in this excerpt. When I was an undergrad, I roomed with an old couple, the Radzinskys, Holocaust survivors from Poland. The old man, a baker, told me how he had baked money and other items into whole loaves of bread so that people could bring these things with them and escape detection at checkpoints. What did I hope to say in this novel? To start with: We humans, we’re a terrible, wonderful and complicated species. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, hateful and kind. - GB
Now we talk of leaving. In those days, the world having given up most of its spin, heavy as it was with dust and ash and the bloodsoaked boots of war, Motl told me he would often dream he was a person of size, horse-wide, chesterfield-rumped, full as the pink bosoms of a cow, grown great from happy satisfaction and an intimate familiarity with cherry pie. Why? Because it would mean his story would have been one of ease and bounty. Of bounce. “But to tell you the truth,” he’d say, “I was impotent and scrawny as a crack in the dried-up earth or a witch’s crooked finger accusing the world. “Still,” he’d add, “I commend my heart for continuing to pump through those times. And while I could have rode out to where the sky was but a clot of buzzards in the pitiless heat, hankering in a circle for my weak nerves to expire so’s they could pick the historical flesh from my unfortunate spine, while I could have rod there and laid upon the inflexible earth of Lithuania, waiting for my story to be done and the satisfactions allotted my wispy soul to be spent and evaporated, I did not so lay for my heart continued its drumming, and it I did not wish to disappoint.” And so instead, after he’d scuttled from the barber’s, he scurried to the clapboard house he shared with his mother in Vilnius. His mother. Gitl the Destroyer. The source of an entire genre of jokes. If she gave you two sweaters, a red and a blue, and you came to the table wearing the red, she’d say, “It’s so cold in here you need a sweater, big man?” She was that thing beyond old, not a witch exactly, but a bristly gnarl of sheer stubbornness. Time and the world could not be allowed to think they could get the better of her. Not without her putting up two twisted dukes and fighting back. “Also,” Motl said, “I needed her. It wasn’t as if I was going correct myself. At least, not properly.” When he arrived home, the door was bolted from the inside. “Mama,” he said, knocking at the door. “Mama.” “Who’s that?” “It’s me. Who else calls you Mama?” “Maybe it’s a trick. How do I know it’s you?” “Ask my opinion. When I’m wrong, you’ll know it’s me.” She opened the door and looked up into the face of her only son. “This you call a shave?” “Mama, there’s no time. The Nazis are heading this way. We must leave.” “Looking like that?” Gitl could not conceive of leaving before Motl had a proper supper. And a decent night’s sleep. And a proper breakfast. Would there be food in the outside world? Would there be sleep?
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And so they left as the dawn moon was setting in the cloudless sky, shadows crawling along the curving Vilnius streets, their hoss’s hooves clopping on the cobbles as they travelled under archways, over the bridge and across the Neris. Motl and his mother, setting out for the lonesome hinterland of Lithuania and the uncertain southeastern border. The streets silent but for the wind and, through the windows, old men on their backs in bed, open-mouthed and sighing, not knowing enough to hold their breath while history came to town. Motl and his mama had hidden their possessions under the straw of their little cart, hitched up their hoss and left in the pale dark. So long, little home where discouraging words were not exactly seldom heard. “Gee up,” Motl had said, and shaken the reins. And so his quest had begun. What they carried: Two silver Shabbos candlesticks, once Motl ’s great-grand- mother’s, in their shroud of wax. His late father’s prayer book, worn soft as a glove from the touch of his hand. Did Motl believe the words it said? Had his father? “Depends how much I need to,” his father had said. What else? A knife. Matches. A bottle of schnapps. When finished, they could use it for water. In the meantime, it was a valuable salve for contusions, both inside and out. In Motl’s pocket, some lint, a bent screw and a single clandestine book, the western Di Virginianer by Owen Wister, recently sent from America by Frank, his Cleveland cousin. His mother had wrapped herself in shawls and, beneath them, her own mother’s good white tablecloth. There were some apples and some oats to feed the pony. His father had called their first hoss Rasputin, because it seemed inextinguishable. Turned out it was as extinguishable as he was. Motl acquired another after they both were gone. Four days after trying out several bronco names—Silver, Trigger, Coco, Loco, Buttermilk, Blackjack and Champion—he named it Theodor Herzl, because, old paint that it was, it was rarely willing to go in the direction asked, but instead insisted on a path of its own choosing, which Motl imagined might be toward Zion. They carried several loaves his mother had baked because, as she said, if they catch us and we have to die, then at least we won’t die hungry.
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They brought no money. Why provide for the kerchief-faced Lithuanian varmints who would hold up the familial caravan only to shake shiny bits from its sacks? Don’t fill your pockets with salmon when you’re walking between bears. Besides, the saddle- skinned heroes of his westerns never carried money. “And to be honest,” Motl said, “I had no money. Both my heart and wallet were empty.” He’d decided they’d travel toward the border with Poland, then on to Minsk, in Byelorussia. The Germans had not yet invaded. And the Russians? When it’s a choice between a devil and a scoundrel, you choose the one who is not killing you yet. Then, when he’d found a safe place to stow his mother, he’d head for Zimmerwald, to the glacier, to new life. *** They turned south, clopping over the cobbles behind their old pony, wending their way between others who were also in the streets, leaving, or wandering, unsure what to do. Behind them, rising above the city, the Hill of Three Crosses. A giant could sashay across Vilnius, using churches for stepping stones, not ever touching ground, but that selfsame brute could also spit his chaw most any direction and slather a rabbi brochaing in prayer at any of a hundred synagogues of this Jerusalem of the North. At least, for now. They’d just passed the baroque frou-frou of the Church of St. Casimir when his mother held up her parsnip-root hand. “Stop,” she said. “Take me back.” “But the Germans,” he began. “Soup,” she said. “I left the soup on the stove.” There were few as bullheaded as Gitl when she got a notion. “Motl,” she said. “Now.” Between their lives and the soup, she favoured the soup. “Haw,” Motl said to Herzl, and steered him into an alley to turn around. The great Zionist nag stopped and stuck his big face in the leavings around Abe the Grocer’s door. Then, a gunshot. Herzl bolted. All they could do was hang on as the cart buffeted against the alley walls. Motl wrenched the reins, but the hackles in Herzl ’s horse brain were urging his bones to outrun his skin.
Run, the hackles said. A horse is safest at full speed. And so Herzl galloped along the alley until they burst out onto the wide road. And sent a Nazi soldier flying, Einsatzgruppen over Schutzstaffel. Then Herzl stopped. Gitl looked over the side of the cart at the soldier. He lay on his back, gazing senselessly at the sky, apparently not quite certain what had occurred. Her dried-apple face, furrowed like the bellows of a mummified accordion, loomed into view. “Bread?” she said, holding out a loaf. Knee by knee, the soldier got up, brushing and rearranging, patting himself down, taking inventory, assuring himself of the tangible presence of his own body. Ja. It was there and missing no pieces. He found his hat a few feet away, his rifle beneath him. Blood dripped from a nostril. He wiped it with his buttonless sleeve. He returned his hat to his head, righting his rifle, which he held like a baby. Then he remembered the story and his face hardened. Blue eyes like two rifle sights. He was a young man, fresh-faced and innocent. Apparently, having been stripped of his lederhosen, mountainside and goat, he’d fallen into the crucible of war and couldn’t tell his alp from his valley. “Heil Hitler,” he snapped and, with predictable choreography, thrust a hand upward in salute and clicked his boots together. He was preparing to Anschluss the living Österreich out of both of them. “Bread,” Gitl said again, and pushed a loaf toward him. He stepped back, avoiding it like a knife. “Mama,” Motl said, pulling on her arm. “Officer,” he said. “Mama and me are regretfully sorry for this mishap. Our hoss, you see . . .”But then in one deft motion his mother tore the bread in two. The German raised his eyebrows and smiled. He was a boy again. Greedy. The inside of the loaf was stuffed with a thick stack of paper money.
“Bread,” Gitl said, and handed both halves to the soldier. “Go,” the soldier said, “schnell!” and waved them away. Motl flicked the reins. “Gee,” and they continued down the wide road, joining with others hurrying to the famous Gate of Dawn. His mother’s bread was like so many other delicacies: It’s the ingredients that count. Once, there were 10 gates surrounding the city, but now only the Gate of Dawn remained, a sacred portal to the south. Once, Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, an infinitely younger and infinitely more Catholic mother than Gitl, came to the rescue of her people. Swedes had captured the city and the Virgin Mary, golden-beamed radiator of divine mercy, arranged for a few metaphysical Godstrings to be pulled to crush the invaders. Nothing like dropping the heavy iron Gate of Dawn to spatchcock some Swedish soldiers on its sharp ends to make a point. “Mama,” Motl said as they trotted in the direction of the Gate. “What about the soup?” “Go faster,” she said. “Soon that Kraut will discover it’s only a few rubles on either side of a stack of old scrap paper.” Excerpted from Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy by Gary Barwin. Copyright @ 2021 Gary Barwin. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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Le retour des Marranes au sein du peuple juif une quête longue et ardue PAR ELIAS LEV Y
Les Marranes par Moshé Maimon, 1893.
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lusieurs milliers de descendants des Juifs contraints de se convertir au christianisme au XVe siècle durant la sombre période de l’Inquisition en Espagne et au Portugal, mais qui ont continué à pratiquer la religion juive en catimini, souhaitent ardemment renouer avec les racines identitaires de leurs aïeux. Un bon nombre d’entre eux caressent même le vœu de se convertir au judaïsme et de faire leur Aliya.
D’après des études scientifiques menées ces dernières années, environ 25% des habitants de plusieurs pays d’Amérique centrale et du Sud, notamment du Mexique et du Brésil, sont issus de familles de « conversos », souligne en entrevue Salomon Buzaglo, directeur de l’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme —Institute for Sefardi and Anousim Studies— établi à Netanya, en Israël.
« Anousim » est le terme hébraïque signifiant « violer », précise-t-il. « On a violé l’identité d’origine des Juifs sépharades ayant subi dans leur chair les affres de l’ignominieuse politique de la « pureté du sang » que les rois catholiques de la péninsule ibérique leur ont imposée. Tout en épousant contre leur gré la foi chrétienne, un bon nombre d’entre eux ont préservé secrètement les principaux rites de la religion juive. En Europe, on continue à les désigner avec le terme « Marranos ». En Amérique latine, on prèfère les appeler les « nouveaux chrétiens ». Ce terme me paraît plus approprié dans la mesure où dans l’Espagne et le Portugal médiévaux, on a vu émerger des communautés de « nouveaux chrétiens » qui tout en adoptant à contrecœur la religion du Christ sont demeurés fidèles à la loi mosaïque à l’intérieur de leur foyer. Les instigateurs de l’Inquisition veillaient au grain : s’assurer qu’il n’y ait pas des hérétiques pratiquant sournoisement le judaïsme. » Fondé en 2011 par Salomon Buzaglo et affilié au Collège universitaire de Netanya, l’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme s’est fixé des objectifs ambitieux sur les plans académique et généalogique. « L’institut étudie exhaustivement le phénomène des Marranes qui a resurgi dans le monde occidental depuis quelques décennies, explique Salomon Buzaglo. Après avoir vu leurs grands-parents et parents, supposément « chrétiens », perpétuer discrètement certains rites inhérents à la tradition juive, les descendants de ces derniers se sont mis en quête de leurs racines identitaires originelles. Un nombre grandissant d’entre eux commencent à sortir de l’ombre et à revendiquer avec fierté l’héritage juif dont ils ont été dépossédés. » L’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme encourage les Marranes à retrouver leurs racines juives et aide ceux d’entre eux qui veulent s’établir en Israël.
« Nous pensons que c’est une chance pour Israël de retrouver ces frères égarés qui ont perpétué la mémoire juive avec fidélité au fil des siècles », dit Salomon Buzaglo. Né à Tanger (Maroc), dans une famille sépharade de souche hispanique, bachelier du réputé Lycée français Regnault de cette cité lumineuse nichée au Nord du royaume chérifien, Salomon Buzaglo a fait son Aliya en 1972, à l’âge de 17 ans. Rien ne le prédestinait à se passionner un jour pour l’histoire des Marranes. Diplômé en géologie marine, discipline qu’il a pratiquée pendant six ans au sein de la marine israélienne, il a mené durant plusieurs années des recherches sur les fonds marins en étroite collaboration avec l’Institut d’océanographie de Haïfa. Il a poursuivi ensuite sa carrière dans le domaine du high-tech, où il a lancé avec succès trois start-up (entreprises en démarrage). Il y a une douzaine d’années, un cousin qui vit en Angleterre le contacta pour lui faire part d’un problème familial épineux : son fils voulait épouser une jeune fille brésilienne résolument convaincue d’être d’ascendance juive. Il fallait absolument dénouer cette intrigue généalogique car porteur du patronyme Cohen, son fils ne pouvait se marier à la synagogue même si sa bien-aimée se convertissait au judaïsme. Il fallait donc attester la judéité de celle-ci.
«Nous pensons que c’est une chance pour Israël de retrouver ces frères égarés qui ont perpétué la mémoire juive avec fidélité au fil des siècles». - SALOMON BUZAGLO
Pendant deux ans, Salomon Buzaglo mena des recherches intensives avec le concours de plusieurs organisations juives spécialisées dans la reconstitution d’arbres généalogiques. Des recherches qui l’ont passionné. Il a découvert alors les diverses facettes de l’identité des Marranes. « Cette histoire a eu une fin heureuse. Après avoir contacté plusieurs Rabbins orthodoxes en Israël et le Grand Rabbin d’Angleterre, on a réussi à inscrire dans la Ketouba que la mariée « revenait au judaïsme ». Ce mariage a pu être célébré en Angleterre par un Rabbin orthodoxe.
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Je me suis rendu compte à ce moment-là que le phénomène du marranisme n’était pas ponctuel mais qu’il prenait de plus en plus d’ampleur en Occident. C’est ce qui m’a motivé à créer l’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme. Le Collège universitaire de Netanya a ouvert grandement ses portes à mon projet iconoclaste », raconte-t-il avec entrain. Ces dernières années, les responsables de l’institut ont multiplié leurs interventions auprès des membres de la Knesset et des dirigeants de l’Agence juive et du ministère des Diasporas pour les sensibiliser au phénomène du marranisme. Leur activisme a porté ses fruits. Il y a quatre ans, une commission parlementaire chargée d’étudier cette complexe question a été créée à la Knesset. « Les Marranes souhaitant se convertir au judaïsme et faire leur Aliya sont de plus en plus nombreux. Les communautés juives de la Diaspora ne savent pas quelle attitude adopter à leur égard, constate Salomon Buzaglo. Se considérant « issus d’une communauté juive », certains Marranes sont persuadés qu’ils peuvent esquiver l’étape fort exigeante de la conversion au judaïsme. D’autres, au contraire, sont prêts à amorcer un processus de conversion supervisé par des instances rabbiniques orthodoxes afin de réintégrer pleinement le peuple juif. » Le hic : en Amérique centrale et du Sud, les rabbinats orthodoxes ont mis le holà sur les conversions et en Israël, le Grand Rabbinat, qui a la mainmise sur ce dossier des plus sensibles, est farouchement opposé à la conversion des Marranes. « Cependant, plusieurs Rabbins israéliens orthodoxes estiment au contraire que le processus de conversion d’un Marrane ayant des racines juives doit être plus indulgent que celui auquel est soumis un non-Juif parce que les « « conversos » transportent la semence d’Israël », c’est l’expression employée par ces derniers.
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C’est la position courageuse défendue avec opiniâtreté par le Rabbin orthodoxe Haïm Amselem », explique Salomon Buzaglo. Depuis le début des années 90, des communautés marranes ont vu le jour dans plusieurs pays, notamment en Amérique centrale et du Sud : Brésil, Mexique, Équateur, Pérou, Panama, République dominicaine. Les plus importantes sont au Brésil. En Espagne, en Italie et au Portugal des petites communautés structurées ont essaimé aussi. Aujourd’hui, les tests génétiques, dont le degré de fiabilité est élevé, constituent un outil fondamental dans la quête identitaire des Marranes. « Désormais, les tests génétiques apportent des réponses concrètes, et souvent inattendues, aux Marranes s’escrimant à corroborer leur judéité. Les recherches que nous menons dans notre institut sont essentiellement généalogiques, mais elles sont combinées avec des recherches génétiques. Ce qui est de plus en plus marquant aujourd’hui, surtout au Brésil, c’est la multiplication de communautés purement marranes », note Salomon Buzaglo. Appuyer les Marranes souhaitant renouer pleinement avec leur judéité, ça devrait être une « grande priorité » pour les au-
torités gouvernementales et rabbiniques israéliennes, estime Salomon Buzaglo. « Pour moi, les Marranes désireux de reconstruire leur vie en Eretz Israël ne sont ni plus ni moins que les futurs olim d’une nouvelle vague d’Aliya des Juifs de la diaspora. Dès 1992, l’ancien Grand Rabbin sépharade d’Israël, le Rav feu Mordechai Eliyahou, éminent décisionnaire halakhique, préconisait une plus grande ouverture à l’endroit des Marranes aspirant à retourner au sein du peuple juif. Malheureusement, la position de l’actuel Grand Rabbinat d’Israël dans ce dossier délicat est toujours aussi inflexible et dogmatique. Pourtant, l’accueil et l’intégration des communautés marranes en Israël serait indéniablement un grand atout pour notre pays aussi bien sur le plan social que sur le plan démographique. Le retour du peuple juif sur sa terre nous relie plus que jamais au destin de nos frères dispersés ou égarés. C’est la base de notre noble combat. » L’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme offre des cours sur l’histoire des marranes et organise des colloques consacrés aux communautés marranes éparpillées dans les quatre coins du monde. Les dirigeants de ces communautés sont invités en Israël pour participer à ces forums académiques et s’adresser au public israélien. n
L’Institut de recherche du monde sépharade et du marranisme du Collège universitaire de Netanya est situé au 1 University St. Kyriat Yitzhak Rabin, Netanya, Israël. Tél. : 972-9-8607446. Pour plus d’informations, visiter le site Web: sefardianousim.org.il
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Battle-Axes BY JUDY BATALION
I had been searching for strong Jewish women
I
n my 20s, in the early 2000s, I lived in London, working as an art historian by day and a comedian by night. In both spheres, my Jewish identity became an issue. Underhanded, jokey remarks about my Semitic appearance and mannerisms were common from academics, gallerists, audiences, fellow performers, and producers alike. Gradually, I began to understand that it was jarring to the Brits that I wore my Jewishness so openly, so casually. I grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Canada and then attended college in the northeast United States. In neither place was my background unusual; I didn’t have separate private and public personas. But in England, to be so “out” with my otherness, well, this seemed brash and caused discomfort. Shocked once I figured this out, I felt paralyzed by self-consciousness. I was not sure how to handle it: Ignore? Joke back? Be cautious? Overreact? Underreact? Go undercover and assume a dual identity? Flee?
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I turned to art and research to help resolve this question and penned a performance piece about Jewish female identity and the emotional legacy of trauma as it passed over generations. My role model for Jewish
female bravado was Hannah Senesh, one of the few female resisters in the Second World War not lost to history. As a child, I attended a secular Jewish school—its philosophies rooted in Polish Jewish
Vladka Meed’s false identification card, issued in the name of Stanisława Wąchalska, 1943. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin [Miedzyrzecki] Meed)
A partisan dugout in the Rudniki forest, photograph taken in 1993. (Courtesy of Rivka Augenfeld)
movements—where we studied Hebrew poetry and Yiddish novels. In my fifth-grade Yiddish class, we read about Hannah and how, as a 22-year-old in Palestine, she joined the British paratroopers fighting the Nazis and returned to Europe to help the resistance. She didn’t succeed at her mission but did succeed in inspiring courage. At her execution, she refused a blindfold, insisting on staring at the bullet straight on. Hannah faced the truth, lived and died for her convictions, and took pride in openly being just who she was. That spring of 2007, I was at London’s British Library, looking for information on Senesh, seeking nuanced discussions about her character. It turned out there weren’t many books about her, so I ordered any that mentioned her name. One of them happened to be in Yiddish. I almost put it back.
Before that, 170 pages were filled with stories of other women—dozens of unknown young Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, mainly from inside the Polish ghettos.
Instead, I picked up Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), published in New York in 1946, and flipped through the pages. In this 185-page anthology, Hannah was mentioned only in the last chapter. Before that, 170 pages were filled with stories of other women—dozens of unknown young Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, mainly from inside the Polish ghettos. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey, and pastry, and, with stealth, shot and killed them. They carried out espionage missions for Moscow, distributed fake IDs and underground flyers, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children; they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s electric supply.
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They dressed up as non-Jews, worked as maids on the Aryan side of town, and helped Jews escape the ghettos through canals and chimneys, by digging holes in walls and crawling across rooftops. They bribed executioners, wrote underground radio bulletins, upheld group morale, negotiated with Polish landowners, tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with weapons, initiated a group of anti-Nazi Nazis, and, of course, took care of most of the underground’s admin.
I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree.
Margolit Lichtensztejn. Sleeping Girl, crayon on paper, by Gela Seksztajn. (Courtesy of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland)
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Despite years of Jewish education, I’d never read accounts like these, astonishing in their details of the quotidian and extraordinary work of woman’s combat. I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree. These writings didn’t just amaze me, they touched me personally, upending my understanding of my own history. I come from a family of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. My bubbe Zelda (namesake to my eldest daughter) did not fight in the resistance; her successful but tragic escape story shaped my understanding of survival. She—who did not look Jewish, with her high cheekbones and pinched nose—fled occupied Warsaw, swam across rivers, hid in a convent, flirted with a Nazi who turned a blind eye, and was transported in a truck carrying oranges eastward, finally stealing across the Russian border, where her life was saved, ironically, by being forced into Siberian work camps. My bubbe was strong as an ox, but she’d lost her parents and three of her four sisters, all of whom had remained in Warsaw. She’d relay this dreadful story to me every single afternoon as she babysat me after school, tears and fury in her eyes. My Montreal Jewish community was composed largely of Holocaust survivor families; both my family and neighbours’ families were full of similar stories of pain and suffering. My genes were stamped—even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest—by trauma. I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear. But here, in Freuen in di Ghettos, was a different version of the women-in-war story. I was jolted by these tales of agency. These were women who acted with ferocity and
fortitude—even violently—smuggling, gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, and engaging in combat; they were proud of their fire. The writers were not asking for pity but were celebrating active valour and intrepidness. Women, often starving and tortured, were brave and brazen. Several of them had the chance to escape yet did not; some even chose to return and battle. My bubbe was my hero, but what if she’d decided to risk her life by staying and fighting? I was haunted by the question: What would I do in a similar situation? Fight or flight? *** Jewish lore is filled with tales of underdog victory: David and Goliath, the Israelite slaves who tantalized Pharaoh, the Maccabee brothers who defeated the Greek Empire. This is not that story. The Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively miniscule victories in terms of military success, Nazi casualties, and the number of Jews saved. But their resistance effort was larger and more organized than I ever could have imagined, and colossal compared with the Holocaust narrative I’d grown up with. Jewish armed underground groups operated in more than 90 eastern European ghettos. “Small acts” and uprisings took place in Warsaw as well as in Będzin, Vilna, Białystok, Kraków, Lvov, Częstochowa, Sosnowiec, and Tarnów. Armed Jewish resistance broke out in at least five major concentration camps and death camps—including Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor—as well as in 18 forced-labor camps. Thirty thousand Jews joined forest partisan detachments. Jewish networks financially supported 12,000 fellow Jews-in-hiding in Warsaw. All this alongside endless examples of daily acts of defiance. Why, I kept asking myself, had I never heard these stories? Why had I not heard about the hundreds, even thousands, of Jewish women who were involved in every aspect of this rebellion, often at its helm? Why was Freuen an obscure title instead of a classic on Holocaust reading lists?
Needless to say, Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Poland was not a radical woman-only feminist mission. Men were fighters, leaders, and battle commanders. But because of their gender and their ability to camouflage their Jewishness, women were uniquely suited to some crucial and life-threatening tasks; in particular, as couriers. As described by fighter Chaika Grossman, “The Jewish girls were the nerve-centres of the movement.” n
Left to right: Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak, and Zelda Treger. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. 2921/209)
As I came to learn, many factors, both personal and political, have guided the development of the narrative of the Holocaust. Our collective memory has been shaped by an overarching resistance to resistance. Silence is a means of swaying perceptions and shifting power, and has functioned in different ways in Poland, Israel, and North America over the decades. Silence is also a technique for coping and living. Even when storytellers have gone against the grain and presented resistance stories, there has been little focus on women. In the odd cases where writers have included women in their tales, they are often portrayed within stereotypical narrative tropes. In the compelling 2001 TV movie Uprising, about the Warsaw ghetto,
From the book THE LIGHT OF DAYS: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion. Copyright © 2020 by Judy Batalion. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post and many other publications. Prior to her writing career, she was an academic and is fluent in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Born and raised in Montreal, she now lives in New York with her husband and children.
female fighters are present but classically misrepresented. Women leaders were made minor characters; “girlfriends of” the protagonists. The sole female lead is Tosia Altman, and though the film does show her fearlessly smuggling weapons, she is depicted as a beautiful, shy girl who took care of her sick father and passively got swept up into a resistance role, all wide eyed and meek. In reality, Tosia was a leader of The Young Guard youth movement well before the war; her biographer emphasizes her reputation for being a feisty “glam girl” and “hussy.” By rewriting her backstory, the film not only distorts her character but also erases the whole world of Jewish female education, training, and work that created her.
Judy Batalion
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Dedication ceremony of the Embassy of the United States in Jerusalem.
װאלן׃ אַמעריקע האָט זיך ערשט אָּפגעשאָקלט ַ פֿון פֿיר יאָר לעבן מיט די ֿפאַנטאַזיעס ,ליגן און טוענישן פֿון זײער מלך־בּכיּפה– דאָנאַלד טראָמּפ. דעמאָקראַטיע האָט זיך ַא טרײַסל געטאָן און אין די ּפרעזידענטישע װאַלן האָט אַמעריקע אַרונטערגעװאָרפֿן די הערש ַאפֿט פֿון טראָמּפן. ביז הײַנט צו טאָג אַנערקענט נישט טראָמּפ װאָס עס איז געשען .ער האַלט אַז מען האָט געגנבעט מיליאָנען שטיצע צעטלעך פֿון אים און געענדערט דעם װאַל רעזולטאַט .די נאַצי מיליצן גלױבן אים און שטײַען מיט זײערע ביקסן אין די גאסן פֿון די שטעט און שטעטלעך פֿון װײַס אַמעריקע .און װאַרטן נאָך אַמאָל ֿפאַר זײַן װאָרט אובערצונעמען די מאַכט .אַמעריקע איז הײַנט ,אין דעם טענאָר פֿון איר ּפאָליטיקַ ,א לאַנד צעשּפאָלטן צװישן שװאַרץ און װײַסַ ,א װאַקסנדיקן ֿפאַשיזם און די װאָס האַלטן שטאַרק זײער דעמאָקראַטישע טראַדיציע. אימּפיטשמענט׃ יאָ דאָס װאָרט עקזיסטירט אין יידיש .איר װעט עס געפֿינען אין דעם "אַרומנעמיק ענגליש־יידיש װערטערבוך ".טראָמּפ ,װי איר װײסט איז צװײ מאָל דורכגעגאַנען דעם ּפראָצעס פֿון אימּפיטשמענט– ַא משּפט געבראַכט פֿון דערװײלטע געזעץ געבער .טראָמּפ איז דער ערשטער ּפרעזידענט אין דער אַמעריקאַנער געשיכטע צו טראָגן דעם ּפסק־װאָרט "אימּפיטשמענט" ֿפאַר ַא צװײט מאָל. ביז הײַנט צו טאָג לאַכט ער זיך אָּפ פֿון דעם און זאָגט אַז ער קאָנטראָלירט די מערהײַט פֿון װײַסע װײלער און ער װעט װײטער זײַן ּפרעזידענט װײַל אַמעריקע װיל אַזױ .דער געדאַנק שרעקט מיך.
ּפליטים׃ נאָכצוגײן ַא בולװאַןַ ,א קולט פֿיגור ,װי היטלער ,מוסאָליני ,אָדער סטאַלין ,שטעלט יידן אין גע ֿפאַרַ .אפֿילו ַא דור יידישע קינדער געבױרן אין קאַנאַדע אָדער אַמעריקע ֿפאַרשטײען װאָס ס'מײנט צו זײַן ַא ּפליט .זײערע באָבעס און זײדעס זײַנען געװען ּפליטים; געלאָפֿן פֿון מלחמה און נאַציאָנאַליסטישער ראַסן האַס .זײ װײסן װאָס עס גײט אָן אין אַמעריקע .זײ װײסן אַז טראָמּפס אַרמײ שרײַט אַז מע טאָר נישט אַרײַנלאָזן מער שװאַרצע ,ברױנע ,מוסולמענער און אַנדערע אָּפגעריסענע מענטשן װאָס שטײען ב ַײ די גרענעצן. אַמעריקע איז ֿפאַר אַמעריקאַנער .זײנען יי ִדן אין זײער רעכענונג? לאָמיר האָפֿן אַז טראָמּפס װידער אױפֿבלי ליגט נאָר אין זײַן ֿפאַנטאַזיע. קולט׃ טראָמּפס בולװאַנישע שטיק האָבן שיער אומגעבראַכט אַמעריקע און צעטרײסלט די װעלט. זשורנאַליסטן האָבן יעדן טאָג אָּפגעדרוקט די ליגנס װאָס ער האָט געלײגט אױף די טעלערס פֿון זײַנע נאָכ ֿפאָלגער .זײ האָבן די ליגנס קולטיש אַרונטערגעשלונגען און געבעטן מַער װײַל זײ האָבן געגלױבט אַז טראָמּפ ,זײער װעג-װײַזער ,זײער נביא, װיל אַזױ .די זעלבע גוטע מענטשן האָבן געּפראַװעט אַן אױפֿשטאַנד קעגן די רעגירונג אָרגאַנען און פֿיזיש אַטאַקירט דאָס װײַסע הױז װײַל זײ האָבן געגלױבט טראָמּפן אַז די נײַע רעגירונג איז ניט לעגיטים – נישט ּכשר.
פֿיל יידן האָבן געזאָגט אַז דער בולװאַן טוט גוט ֿפאַר יידן װײַל ער האָט אַנערקענט ירושלים װי די קרױנשטאָט פֿון אַרץ־ישראל .זאָג איך "הוראַ". אָבער װאָס נאָך .פֿון אַמעריקע ,װּו מיליאָנען יידן לעבן ,האָט ער געמאַכט ַא ּתל; עקאָנאָמיש, מאָראַלישּ ,פאָליטיש. דער מערהײַט פֿון יידישן קיבוץ האָט נישט געפֿעלט טראָמּפס בולװאַנישע שטיק און האָט נישט געשטימט ֿפאַר אים .מען האָט ֿפאַרשטאַנען אַז מיט ַא נאַרַ ,א בולװאַן ,קען מען ניט אַרײַן אין גן־עדן.
דער טװיטער מיר לעבן אין אַן אינ ֿפאָרמאַציע ציװיליזאַציע .און דער טװיטער איז אײנע פֿון די דיגיטאַלע מעטאָדן װאָס מען נוצט צו ֿפאַרבינדן אונדז מיט דער װעלט. און דער מײַסטער פֿון טװיטער נוץ איז געװען דאָנאַלד טראָמּפ .די טראַדיציאָנעלע ּפאָליטיקער האָבן אָּפגעלאַכט זײַן נוץ פֿון אַז ַא קינדער שּפיל. אָבער װאָס זײ האָבן נישט ֿפאַרשטאַנען איז טװיטער האָט אים געגעבן ַא ביליקן מעטאָד צו רעדן ּפערזענלעך צו יעדן װײלער :אָן קײַן לעגאַלער באַגרענעץ .זײַנע ליגנס האָבן נישט געמאַכט קײַן אונטערשײד .ער האָט געגעבן זײַנע נאָכגײער װאָס זײ האָבן געװאָלט הערן און זײ האָבן געגלױבט און זײַנע געדאַנקן װײַטער צעשּפרײט אױף זײערע אײגענע טװיטערס און שיער ּפאַראַלאַזירט דעם גאַנג פֿון דעמאָקראַטישער ּפאָליטיקn .
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װי קומט מען ַאריבער קרומע װעגן און קרומע װערטער?
מײַן װעלט דרײט זיך מיט יידישע װערטער װאָס ,װי ַא קאַלײַדעסקאָּפ ,שּפיגלען אָּפ קרומע און גלײַכע געדאַנקען װאָס לױפֿן מיר אַרום אין זינען .אױ ֿפ דער קרומער זײט גאַס זאָרג איך זיך נאָך אַלץ װעגן דעם ּתל װאָס דער געװעזענער אַמעריקאַנער ּפרעזידענט –טראָמּפ– האָט איבערגעלאָזט אין אַמעריקע. װי טראָמּפס מיאוסע טוענישן װעלן זיך אױסשּפילן אין זײַן ּפערזענלעכן לעבן און די ּפאָליטיק פֿון אַמעריקע און דער גאָרער װעלט– איז נאָך נישט אַבסאָלוט קלאָר .מיר װאַרטן נאָך ֿפאַרן חשבון. אױף דער גלײַכער זײַט גאַס ברענגען מיר מײַנע געדאַנקען צו ַא גאַנצע ר ַײ װערטער װאָס איך האַלט װירקן הײַנט אונדזער יידישער שּפראַך ,און יי ִדישער אַנדערשקײַט .צװישן די װערטער געפֿינט מען אימּפיטשמענט ,דיגיטאַל ,מגפֿה ,גלוסט ,די פֿרײד פֿון יידיש ,װײַסע באָבעס טונקל־הױטיקע אײניקלעך ,בולװאַן און ּפליטים. ַא גרינגער ענטפֿער צו די פֿראַגעס װאָס איך שטעל אין קעּפל פֿון אונדזער אַרטיקל פֿעלט מיר װײַל די װעגן זײַנען גלײַך און קרום און די װערטער האָבן אױך מײנונגען װאָס זײַנען גלײַך און קרום .װאָס ֿפאַרלאַנג איך פֿון אײַך? איך װיל אַז איר זאָלט קומען מיט מיר אין מײַן עקסּפלאָראַציע פֿון די טעמעס װאָס די װערטער אַנטװיקלען .די מײנונגען זײַנען אַװדאי מײַנע אָבער איך האָף אַז זײ װעלן אײַך אינטערעסירן .אױב נישט גיב איך אײַך דערלױבעניש צּו לאַכן פֿון מײַן נאַיװעטעט אָדער מיר צו שיקן ַא בליץ־ּפאָסט מיט ַא בעסערן אינהאַלט.
BY GERRY K ANE
בולװאן׃ לאָמיר דאָ האַנדלען מיט ַא יידיש װאָרט ַ װאָס דער אַוצר פֿון דער יידישער שּפראַך גיט איבער בלעטל נאָך בלעטל צו אױפֿקלערן דעם קאָסט צו מענטשן װאָס װילן אָנגײן מיט ַא לײַטיש לעבן אָבער װערן ֿפאַרבלאָנדזשעט װײַל זײ שאַרן זיך צו נאָענט צו ַא בולװאַן.
Graphic Art by Dmitri Posudin /Pixabay.
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ַא בולװאַן ,און דאָ איז מײַן עקזאַמּפלאַר דאָנאַלד טראָמּפ ,איז ַא גראָבער יננגַ ..א ּפוסטער...אַן עגאָיסט ...אײנער ֿפאַר װעמען ס'איז גרינגער צו זאָגן ליגן װי אָטעמען .דאָנאַלד טראָמּפ ,דער געװעזענער אַמעריקאַנער ּפרעזידענט .װי אומאײדל ער איז געװען מוז מען צוגעבן אַז ער איז אױך געװען זײער קלוג .פֿיר יאָר איז ער געשטאַנען אױף דער בינע פֿון דער װעלט װי ַא ּכישוף מאַכער .מיליאָנען האָבן געגלױבט אַז ער האָט נאָר געבראַכט גוט דעם אמתן אַמעריקע; דעם װײסן אַמעריקע .און די מיליאָנען גײען אים נאָך נאָך הײַנט .מיט זײַן דערלױבעניש זײַנען די נײע נאַציס אַרױסגעשּפרונגען פֿון די װײַסע נאַציאָנאַליסטישע זומּפן און מאַרשירט מיט געשרײ אַז זײ װילן אַן אַמעריקע אָן יידן.
View of the Old City of Jerusalem.
He Asked a Simple Question: Who Owns Jerusalem, Legally? BY RON CSILL AG
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t runs more than 1,300 pages, contains 3,200 footnotes, weighs 10 pounds, and took 20 years to write. Jacques Gauthier’s doctoral thesis is remarkable for another reason besides sheer heft: It proves – irrefutably, says its author – that Israel and the Jewish people were given title in international law to all territories covered by the Mandate for Palestine west of the Jordan River.
Gauthier, a Toronto-based international lawyer (and non-Jew), stresses that his focus is not political solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What he pursued were hard legal truths, and he’s won many friends around the world for his conclusions.
He was only 22 when he graduated from law school, and deciding that he was too young to begin practising law, decamped to Geneva to pursue graduate studies in international law. He completed everything except his PhD thesis but promised to return to it one day.
wants to be an expert, this is not the best subject because it’s never-ending. It’s so wide, so deep. So, at times I was discouraged. But with the support of my family and by grace, I was able to complete the task. Are your findings limited to the Old City?
Called to the bar in 1976, Gauthier established a practice in Toronto in 1984, specializing in international, commercial and corporate law, inheritance law, human rights and language rights. But he never forgot about his thesis, and set to work on it in the late 1980s after concluding that the historical and legal foundations of sovereignty over Jerusalem needed to be examined in detail. He asked a simple question: “To whom does Jerusalem belong legally?” His answer has been lauded as the most comprehensive publication ever about the sovereignty of the Old City of Jerusalem, and in 2007, Gauthier was finally awarded his degree by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at the University of Geneva. Why did you choose the subject of who owns Jerusalem and did you ever regret it? I wasn’t initially going to focus on the status of Jerusalem. I was looking for a meaningful subject from the perspective of international law; a current issue, and one with a lot of different dimensions from a legal point of view. There are so many legal aspects to the question of Jerusalem from an international law point of view. I couldn’t have found a better subject. Yes, I regretted, initially, choosing the subject. If you’re going to get to a well-founded answer, there’s so much you need to know historically. It was necessary to look at the various claims, whether it was Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, or Arab. It was necessary to go back and look at the history. And I could have written a thousand pages on the Jewish connections to Jerusalem alone. It was overwhelming at times. If one
Initially, my interest was Jerusalem, and it is important to understand why the subject evolved from the City of Jerusalem to sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem. The more I studied, the more I read, the more I visited Jerusalem – and I was there many times – the more I realized that the ultimate bone of contention is the Old City. Why? Look at maps of ancient Jerusalem starting in the first century or before. After it was reconstructed by the Romans, the shape of the city was, in essence, the shape of the Old City today. For instance, if you look at the (era of) Crusader Jerusalem, it was essentially the same. And if you look at pictures or lithographs of Jerusalem from the end of the 19th century, you will see that essentially, Jerusalem is the Old City. So, the Jerusalem that is sought after, coveted, desired – the symbol for the Jewish people, for Judaism, for Christians, Arabs, for Islam in times past, and currently, is the Old City of Jerusalem. It is where most of the holy sites are located. The most contentious of all sites within the walls of the Old City is the Temple Mount. Although it is without doubt a holy site for Muslims (and) Arabs, it is the holiest site in Judaism. Nothing is more delicate and controversial. If you resolve every other question between the Palestinians and Israelis and you don’t resolve the question of the Old City, then you have resolved nothing. You cite many international covenants and conferences from the late 1800s to the years following the First World War, but it’s the San Remo Conference of 1920 which you say set out the legal
foundations for Jewish title to Israel. Was San Remo the defining moment? Absolutely. The purpose of that conference was to do deal with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and deliberate on the competing territorial claims to these territories. Crucial decisions had been made in 1919 in respect to Germany and other defeated nations (at post-First World War peace talks) in Paris. The powers of disposition regarding crucial issues were assumed by five of the Allied Powers: The United States, U.K., France, Italy, and Japan. They decided what would be incorporated into the various peace treaties (ending the First World War). As far as the Ottoman territories were concerned, they heard the submissions of the Arab delegation, led by King Faisal, in Paris on Feb. 6, 1919. Lawrence of Arabia was there, too. Also during the Paris Conference, they heard the submissions from the Jewish delegation on Feb. 27, 1919, led by Chaim Weizmann. And then in San Remo, the principal Allied Powers made binding decisions after deliberating for two full days. On April 25, 1920, they decided to take the policy of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 (which favoured the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine) and incorporate it into international law. Although (the British in November 1917) didn’t have title to Palestine to grant and didn’t have possession of Palestine, in San Remo, these five nations did. They decided what should go into the treaty with the Turks, and fully adopted the policy of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Although they agreed on a basic configuration of Palestine, on the basis of a map relied on by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, they agreed that the final boundaries would be determined later. But they reached an agreement in San Remo on what had to be included in the Palestine to be given to the Jewish people for a national home.
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So, yes, it was a defining moment. If you look at the initial draft of the preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, which came out of San Remo, it states, “Whereas the Turks have given title to the Principal Powers, we, the Principal Powers, decide that that land – the Palestine territory – should go to the Jews because” – and this was the cornerstone – “we choose to recognize the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Palestine.”
The more I studied, the more I read, the more I visited Jerusalem – and I was there many times – the more I realized that the ultimate bone of contention is the Old City.
What’s important is that they didn’t create the historical connection. The foundation and basis of what they recognized were there for centuries, and they chose to accept the connection and give the right to the Jewish people. Pursuant to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Jewish people are the beneficiaries of a “sacred trust of civilization,” and they are given the right to “reconstitute” what they used to have. When we look at areas of the West Bank today – and the world says to the Jews, “you’ve got to leave this territory, you can’t have settlements there” – (that) contravenes the spirit and the letter of the decisions made at the San Remo Conference of 1920 and the Mandate for Palestine of 1922. You have called your findings “irrefutable.” That sounds very confident. We’re now restricting our discussion to western Palestine, to what is west of the Jordan River, because the Israelis entered into a peace treaty with Jordan (in 1994). Whatever legitimate claims (Israel) may have had before in respect to the territories covered by the Mandate for Palestine east of the Jordan River were surrendered when they signed a peace treaty with Jordan, recognizing the title of the Jordanians to everything east of the Jordan River. We’re now talking about only west Palestine. As far as that territory is concerned, my conclusion is that the territorial entitle-
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ments were given to the Jewish people worldwide. Something extraordinary happened. Never before was there a people who were not actual inhabitants of territory designated as the beneficiaries of such a mandate. So, the beneficiaries are the Jewish people worldwide, who were deemed to be virtually residents of that territory. It’s unique. I have absolutely no doubt that the title was given to the Jewish people. And now, we have to focus on the territorial remnant: What’s left of Palestine, meaning everything west of the Jordan River. Have any governments or international bodies accepted your findings? The first government – and it took a while – that is now using my findings, to some extent, is Israel. That wasn’t the case a number of years ago, when I met senior officials in the departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs. Their position then was, “you may be right and we’re so impressed by all the work you’ve done, but this is now carved in stone. Everybody thinks we are thieves, that we’ve stolen the land, that it’s theirs, and we can’t change that.” Regrettably, if the UN passes a hundred resolutions (saying the same thing) – which are not binding under the UN Charter – people start to think that’s the law. But it’s not. The government of Israel organized two conferences with me as the keynote speaker. And I can tell you that many officials are now relying on some of my arguments when they weren’t before. If you go back to 2007, when I started to speak in many places around the world, and I talked about the San Remo Conference, probably 99 per cent of people in the audience had never heard of the conference before. It’s not the case anymore. The other government is the United States, as it was constituted (under former president Donald Trump). That government gave recognition not to sovereignty, but to the legality of Jewish communities and
Jews, as they were in Transjordan. We see that happened in Gaza a few years ago. How many Jewish communities are thriving in Gaza? There are no Jews left. In the territories to be controlled by the Palestinians in the future, Jews will have no rights since they’re not supposed to be there. How do you think Jewish identity is linked to your findings? The best answer I can give you is the meeting I had in 2009 with Natan Sharansky in Jerusalem. I gave him a copy of my thesis. And he gave me a book about Jewish identity. He wrote something in that book which deeply, deeply blessed me. He said, “Thank you for your contribution to the enhancement of the Jewish identity.” It’s relevant because the world is taking the position that this recognition of historical connection between the Jews and this Palestine at the start of the 20th century never existed. They don’t want to recognize the centuries and centuries of presence, of communities, of religious pilgrimages. It goes to the core of the Jewish identity. But if you say, “Jews have been connected for thousands of years, and the world’s nations have recognized it, and the rights given to the Jewish people in San Remo are based on this recognition,” of course, that’s relevant to identity. The alternative is to say that (Israelis) are occupiers, thieves, trespassers and criminal offenders. If you accept that, of course it impacts the identity of the Jews very significantly. Ancient alley in Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know? settlements in Judea and Samaria – the West Bank. I can’t go into all the details, but it was the result of a lot of interactions and the reconsideration of the legal issues and arguments, including reliance on my findings. I’ve never seen something so outrageous as to suggest that if there was a Palestinian state, or if there’s a degree of autonomy, these lands should be emptied of
And I can tell you, without going into a lot of details, that many officials are using my arguments when they weren’t before.
My experience in life is that it’s never too late to present the truth about the entitlements of the Jewish people in international law. So, it is my obligation, and I will continue to do that as long as I can. Bottom line: Let’s keep presenting the truthful narrative because it’ll make a difference in due course. Light dispels darkness, truth will dispel falsehood. n
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Confronting COVID While many of us have been able to work from home, health-care workers haven’t had that luxury. They have donned masks and gowns and been on the frontlines of fighting COVID. The CJN asked three medical professionals to reflect on their personal experiences during this most challenging year.
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H
ow do I describe my experience as an oncologist for the past 10 months?
In my past 10 years as a physician, this is nothing like I would ever have imagined. We hear in the media about the devastation of COVID for those who have the disease; how some people inexplicably become extremely ill, while some have no symptoms at all, and some continue to experience symptoms months after their diagnosis. We hear about burnout among health-care workers, including cleaning staff, PSWs, nurses, physicians etc., working under extreme pressure in an overloaded health-care system. But we hear less about the impact to all of the other patients, those who are not suffering from COVID itself, but from the devastation to the health-care system that COVID is causing. Pre-COVID, I encouraged all of my patients to bring a family member with them at every visit for support. Now, I start off the conversation asking if they would like to have someone on the phone, because visitors are not allowed. I can’t emphasize enough how difficult this is for people who are alone, scared and receiving treatment for cancer. Every hospital has lists of “essential” and “less-essential” cancer treatments, so that if suddenly a large proportion of staff is sick, or medical supplies are affected by the pandemic, we can still treat those who need it the most. We do everything we can not to have to use those lists. Families are worried about having help in the home, due to the risk of COVID, so they take on more of the burden of caring for their loved ones. Increasing numbers of patients are presenting with later-stage cancers, because they are worried about going to their doctor or to the hospital.
What I think about most are choices – how some people, right now, have no choice. The patients I work with every day have almost no choices. If they are living with cancer, they have no choice but to be as careful as possible to keep from contracting COVID. They have no choice about having a visitor with them in the hospital. If they are sick and admitted to hospital, under almost all circumstances they can’t see any member of their family. If they pass away, their family has almost no in-person support; many family members cannot travel in for the funeral, and numbers at the funeral are limited. Meanwhile, some people are behaving as though they have every choice. They are travelling to the United States,Mexico or Costa Rica with their family on vacation. They are refusing to wear masks “for medical reasons” in stores. They are socializing inside with members outside of their own family because it’s just a few people.
What I think about most are choices – how some people, right now, have no choice. The patients I work with every day have almost no choices. - DR. ORIT FREEDMAN
The impact of those with choices: not wearing masks, socializing and travelling, directly affects everyone else. When our COVID numbers were lower, we could allow visitors in hospitals. We could treat patients without worrying that their surgery might be delayed due to a lack of ICU beds. I implore those people fortunate enough to have choices, to examine the impact of their choices on others. I look forward to the day when I can go back to a “regular” practice, when I can see my patients’ whole faces (without a mask) and meet their families in person. n Dr. Orit Freedman is a medical oncologist working in Scarborough and Durham Region, Ont.
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C
OVID. A word that had not even been a part of my vocabulary before the start of 2020. Yet, one year later, COVID is so deeply woven in my day-to-day life, so much so that I can hardly even remember a time without it. Due to COVID, my days are filled with navigating being a family physician in a new era of telemedicine, treating patients in my emergency room in a new way, and of course navigating my home life which includes my husband’s job as a teacher and our children’s “new normal” in school. For me, the global pandemic began with an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety. As news of the pandemic spread and we learned of the dire situation in Italy where doctors were being forced to prioritize ventilators, and health-care workers were falling ill from a mysterious virus, I felt tremendous fear. I feared this great unknown, its looming presence just over the horizon, and how it would, inevitably, change all of our lives.
This past year has been incredibly difficult for most. My own year has been marked by a whirlwind of emotions, ranging from fear, fatigue, being overwhelmed, feeling immense sadness and also relief. I have witnessed patients wheeled into the emergency room, caught in their most vulnerable state, sick and alone. Serving as a patient’s only lifeline as they suffer is a colossal responsibility that I do not take lightly. While my mind works overtime, working through diagnoses and treatment plans, I am cognizant of the emotional state of the patient in front of me. Sitting on a stretcher, gasping for breath or in tremendous pain, surrounded by strangers with hidden faces dressed in gowns, gloves, masks and visors, without a familiar face to offer support in a time of need, is terrifying.
In my home, we organized our affairs, we adjusted our life insurance plans, unsure of what the future would hold for us as I, along with my colleagues, was being positioned as a “frontline worker.” In the hospital, we scurried anxiously, preparing our small emergency room for a potential monumental flood of patients. We collected our armour, our precious personal protective equipment (PPE). We learned how to don and doff it so as not to contaminate ourselves, how to remove our masks so as to reuse them should we run out of PPE. We reorganized hospital wards, shuffling around and discharging as many patients as we could and instructed the general public to avoid the hospital if at all possible. I spoke up on various media outlets, advocating, educating and encouraging the general public to stay home in order to save lives as our whole world came to a-never-before-seen standstill. And then we waited with bated breath. One year later, I don’t think that any of us expected to still be waiting, locked- down and under a curfew. We really could never have imagined what our future would hold.
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COVID has stripped the essential family support system from our patients in the emergency room as they no longer have the ability to be accompanied by their family members. Alone, patients are at their most vulnerable, and being not only witness to, but also an important component of this vulnerability, has left an indelible mark on me, both as a physician and as a human. It is a stark reminder that we are all at the mercy of our health and that, despite our race or economic class, we are all equally exposed and vulnerable at our core. Of course, one cannot ignore the onslaught of critically-ill patients, some remarkably young and previously healthy who have entered our hospital doors. There has also been a dramatic uptick in suicide attempts and mental health disease owing to the loneliness, economic hardship and helplessness that the pandemic has brought upon us. While leaving a shift has always required a certain amount of mental decompression, the shifts are often even more emotional these days. Reflecting upon this past year, I feel fortunate to be in a position where I feel both gratitude and pride. While I am proud of the work that I do, I feel even more grateful to be a member of a medical community which has brought us to the point where an effective vaccine has been introduced, delivered, and is currently being distributed, all in the span of less than one year.
One year later, I don’t think that any of us expected to still be waiting, locked down and under a curfew. We really could never have imagined what our future would hold. This past year has been incredibly difficult for most. - DR. DEBBIE SCHWARCZ
While we are still very much caught in the midst of this pandemic, the light at the end of the tunnel glimmers. I look forward to the day when we can reflect on this entire period of time, teasing out the positives while addressing the negatives if only to emphasize the importance of gratitude. Our inherent fragility and vulnerability have been exposed, hopefully leading to a greater appreciation for life, our connections with each other and the world around us. n Debbie Schwarcz is a family and emergency medicine physician in Montreal.
One of the many beneficiaries of Rabbi Henry Hoschander’s fundraising efforts was the Zion Orphanage. Founded by Rabbi Blumenthal in 1899, it is the longest running orphanage for Jewish children in the world today, providing 24/7 care for more than 180 children, and proud to count some of Israel’s brightest and best among their alumni: Knesset members, business leaders, and renowned professionals. Thanks to the efforts of the Rabbi Hoschander and the generosity of his congregants and supporters, many Zion Orphanage boys benefited greatly from Canadian Jewish sponsorships and are now married and raising their own families. Your gift has an everlasting impact, enabling each Zion boy reach his highest potential. Please join us in giving every boy his fair chance. May the soul of Rabbi Henry Hoschander, of blessed memory, continuously gain from the enormous impact he made during his 90 years in this world. www.zionorphanage.com
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Mid-March 2020: I begin to understand that any of my almost 200 co-workers in the long-term care home where I work could be bringing the novel coronavirus into our poorly ventilated close quarters. I love a lot of them, but suddenly I trust none of them. It’s not personal, but not all personal support workers and housekeepers are on the same wavelength – that carrying on a normal life suddenly equates to carelessness.
The total COVID death count as I write this, at the end of January, is over 30. Each person was a beautiful senior soul that I came to know for years, and cared for as if they were both my grandparents and my children, depending on how progressed their dementia was. While it’s part of the job to face mortality, it’s disheartening to hear others be dismissive because the number is lower than in other homes.
End of March: Nightmare confirmed. COVID has been found on the floor I became responsible for just three weeks earlier. Immediately, I am asked to leave my family home. I get my hands on a precious N95 mask and wear it for 14 days straight, simply taking a Lysol wipe to it at day’s end out of desperation.
Society is collectively grieving the loss of a million things, but it’s just recently hitting me how overcome with mass grief I am. I have witnessed so many dying individuals whom I was attached to, and have not been afforded the time or space to properly mourn, as we just had to keep going.
Mid-April: COVID has ravaged almost half the unit. We are still allotted a mere one gown at the beginning of shift. We take it upon ourselves to change in between residents, and wear garbage bags instead. The staffing crisis is real; so many go on leaves of absence out of fear, so the rest of us are killing our bodies with overtime. I power through anywhere between eight to 17 hours, go nowhere but (in early days) to my sketchy hotel and then eventually to my one-bedroom apartment, stare at the ceiling; repeat. With no guidance, I need to co-ordinate getting more oxygen concentrators in here, as we normally only have one emergency tank per floor, yet folks are silently desaturating. I need to impossibly accept that this virus will simply wipe out some who cannot be saved. I need to pronounce those deaths because doctors aren’t coming. We need to bag deceased bodies because funeral homes won’t come inside. I feel the weight almost exclusively on my shoulders as the only RN showing up for this floor. This is unsustainable but I’m in denial, and somehow it persists for over two months. Anxiety comes into my life, uninvited. I am not scared to get COVID, but everything revolves around the (God forbid) scenario of me spreading it at work or in my personal life.
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I am so proud of my staff’s commitment, yet the media have sensationalized long-term care and ruined the public’s perception. - SARI KAMEN
In early summer, I suspect some friends and family may be bending the truth about their comfort levels, because they don’t know how to tell me they are afraid to be around me, given where I work. I am so proud of my staff’s commitment, yet the media have sensationalized long-term care and ruined the public’s perception. I long for people to know how diligent I am about my precautions. Fast forward to end of December: We are obliged to get a swab up the nose weekly. But in the interim one week, a staff member dressed as Santa Claus unknowingly spread COVID instead of cheer, resulting in a second outbreak. The PPE (personal protective equipment) is plentiful this time. We have universal masking and shielding, so those never leave our faces. We are gowning and gloving for every individual encounter, which is a minimum 42 times a shift for me. It’s gruelling and tedious, but necessary. Despite our best efforts, this beast is louder than the first round.
I spend so many hours trying to optimize these residents’ quality of life, and that’s personally meaningful, yet I can’t even see my own bubby. I would say hugs are essential, but how much longer must I stay away from my own family who would offer those hugs? I admit I’ve been sad, sometimes numb and now jaded, but I’d be doing a disservice to myself to repress that. I’m left wondering if all my restraint and sacrifice has been worth it, as I try to stay afloat in this sea of emotion. In the end, I conclude that it’s a waste to feel nothing at all. I wasn’t meant to be anywhere else, and while it’s felt like many aspects of life have been on hold, I deeply appreciate life’s fragility and waking up each day. Resilience counts for something. If I’m ever short on perspective, I pull a snapshot from my mental playbook of inspirational words spoken by Holocaust survivors over the years. Our present is totally unparalleled to the horrors of their past, and while they may hurt, they still choose happiness and to take nothing for granted. This too shall pass. n Sari Kamen is a registered nurse in a longterm care home in Toronto.
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thecjnmagazine Passover 2021 | Nisan 5781