Segacs's World I Know

Archive for the ‘Jewish life’ Category

Today is the American Jewish community’s 350th “Arrival Day”, a cultural holiday celebrating the arrival of the first group of Jewish people to North America.

Jonathan’s Blogburst on the subject has a number of thought-provoking posts on the theme of the future of the Jewish community in America. So I figured that today would be a good opportunity to put a few of my own thoughts to paper (or to screen, as it were) on the subject of the Jewish community in Montreal. Most of what I will say in this post is not politically-correct. But if you want political correctness, go read a different blog.

I am a fourth-generation Montrealer, I consider myself thoroughly Canadian… but most definately not thoroughly (or even partially) Quebecoise. Sure, I live in Quebec, but Quebecois is less about location and more about culture… and the Quebecois culture has never been particularly welcoming to Jews – especially anglophone Jews.

From the overt antisemitism of Quebecois figures such as Lionel Groulx, to the WWII conscription crisis and identification of Quebec with fascism, the history of this province is rife with antisemitism. The people here will be extremely offended if you bring it up or call attention to what has become one of Quebec history’s dirty little secrets… as historian Esther Delisle found out the hard way.

Things are changing. Montreal is a truly multicultural city, and many of the barriers faced by Jews until midway through last century have disappeared. But Quebec society – especially outside Montreal – continues to be relatively closed compared to the rest of North America. As Jacques Parizeau’s comments on the evening of the 1995 referendum defeat told us, we will always be considered part of the “money and the ethnic vote” that most Quebecois nationalists feel keep costing them their dream of self-determination. Quebec continues to have the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Canada. This narrow-minded attitude creeps up now and again, as a reminder that, despite their outward facade, many Quebecois politicians and leaders have not truly overcome this antisemitism. The bottom line is, we will never be “pure laine” enough to truly fit in here. And there’s still a long way to go before that will truly change.

The Montreal Jewish community, too, is changing, though. More anglophone Jews are making the move down the 401 to Toronto, or to the United States, resulting in a shrinking, aging community. Partially compensating for this is the leaps-and-bounds growth of the francophone Sephardic Jewish community, which is young and dynamic and is changing the face of Montreal Jewry.

Antisemitism is coming from new directions now, too. Mirroring the worldwide trend, much of it is originating from the growing Arab and Muslim communities, especially on university campuses where the traditional student Left has adopted the Palestinian cause. Incidents such as last April’s UTT firebombing remind us that we must be ever vigilent.

Despite all of that, I love living here. This is a great community with lots to offer. I’m a proud Canadian and I love my country, and I’m a proud Montrealer and I love my city. We grumble about how small the community is and how everyone knows everyone else, but in a way, that too is kind of nice. With over 90,000 members, the community is certainly still large and vibrant, and is one of the least culturally-assimilated Jewish communities in all of North America (with the exception of the ultra-Orthodox). During community-wide events like the March to Jerusalem or the Yom Ha’atzmaut parades, we can really see the strength of the community, but its backbone are the people who volunteer tirelessly to keep things running and strong.

Happy arrival day to our US neighbours. Today, as all days, I’m very proud of my identity as a Canadian, Montrealer, and Jew.

That’s how much extra the Montreal Jewish Community has to raise this year to pay for extra security at local Jewish schools and campuses:

Sylvain Abitbol, president of Montreal’s Federation of Jewish Community Services, said the arson attack [at U.T.T.], “combined with the defacing of many of our cemeteries and the rise in anti-Semitism in the world, led us to decide to raise the security level at our schools.”

Security agents will patrol the community’s 22 schools and 40 campuses at a cost of three million dollars (2.3 million US). The Jewish community is raising money to pay for the extra security.

“I worry for Montreal, but it is obvious that there are worries at the national level and my colleagues in other cities are asking themselves the same questions,” Abitbol said. “They all are considering the same type of measures.”

Will the money be raised? Of course – and then some. It’s going to be the theme of this year’s annual Federation CJA campaign, and the community is sure to be generous.

But just because they will succeed in raising the money doesn’t make it right. That $3 million should be spent on pressing community needs, such as helping the poor, seniors, social programs, advocacy, and Israel support. Not on security guards to make sure that nobody tries again to blow up our elementary schools.

I find it sad that the community needs to foot the bill. I find it even sadder that schools need security guards in the first place. This isn’t the Canada I know and love.

A group of Jewish university students were attacked while touring Auschwitz by three French tourists:

Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.

“He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag,” testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).

After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. “One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn’t let go,” says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. “I was afraid. I couldn’t move and I didn’t know what he was going to do.

“I was shocked. Although I have met anti-Semitism many times, I never expected to meet it at Auschwitz, where so many of my relatives were killed,” she says she spoke to the assailants in French and that in addition to being “brutish and vulgar,” their sentiments “made absolutely no sense.”

That’s the thing about antisemitism. It “makes absolutely no sense”. But that hasn’t helped it disappear in the last 2000 years.

(Via Damian Penny, who astutely points out that we’re about to hear some lame excuses as to why this is “anti-Zionism, not antisemitism”).

Religious Jews will be allowed to build succahs, according to the Supreme Court of Canada, who ruled against their condo association that was trying to limit them from doing so:

In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the state can’t regulate personal religious beliefs.

“A claimant need not show some sort of objective religious obligation, requirement or precept to invoke freedom of religion,” Justice Franck Iacobucci wrote for the majority.

“It is the religious or spiritual essence of an action, not any mandatory or perceived-as-mandatory nature of its observance, that attracts protection.

“The state is in no position to be, nor should it become, the arbiter of religious dogma.”

B’nai Brith, which intervened in this case, had the following reaction:

Allan Adel, National Chair of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, reacting to the news, stated: “We are satisfied with the decision of the Supreme Court, which has applied a broad interpretation to the Charter guarantee of freedom of religion and believe it to be in the best interests of all Canadians. The Succah ruling is an important, groundbreaking case that champions the cause of religious freedom in Canada and will have important ramifications well beyond the immediate facts of the case.”

Personally, I agree. While not religious, I tend to think that anyone should have the right and freedom to practice a religious belief that doesn’t harm or infringe upon the rights of someone else. The condo association had no real reason to ban the succahs, and people want to build them on their own private property. There are a lot of fine lines and open questions when it comes to religious freedoms, but this ruling makes sense.

Ahead of Monday’s election, several Jewish organizations in Canada have published transcripts of interviews with Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Jack Layton (with Gilles Duceppe to follow). They have also summarized interviews with MP candidates from each party in the Toronto and Montreal areas, and a report on a candidates meeting in Vancouver:

The Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy Public Affairs Committee (CIJA-PAC), Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC), and the Quebec-Israel Committee (QIC) have conducted interviews with the party leaders and selected local candidates on a number of issues including Israel, antisemitism, terrorism and community security.

In general, I’m uncomfortable with anyone who purports to speak for an entire community. But to their credit, these groups have not so much as issued an endorsement; they have asked questions that they think might be of interest to many Canadian Jews, and posted the answers, leaving it up to readers to make up their own minds and draw their own conclusions (for the most part).

This is not going as far as the Canadian Islamic Congress, which has openly been calling on all Canadian Muslims to vote NDP – or strategically Liberal, has published such articles as the one entitled ten reasons not to vote Conservative, and has issued its now-infamous grading of Federal MPs, which seems to rank MPs mainly by their stance on Israel. I, for one, find it extremely insulting that the CIC assumes that Canadian Muslims are incapable of making up their own minds on the issues.

But whether Muslim, Jewish, or any other religion, none of us are party members in a parliament without free votes. No, we are all individual citizens, fully capable of evaluating the candidates and issues, and drawing our own conclusions. Bloc voting may sometimes work inside the House of Commons, but outside it, we are all more than just a label. Not all Jews must vote the same way, any more than all Muslims must vote the same way.

So with all those disclaimers, I’ve posted the transcripts anyway… read them and draw your own conclusions.

The opening remarks of Anne Bayefsky, addressing the U.N. Conference on Confronting Anti-Semitism, are sharp, direct, and provide a much-needed reality check:

I won’t post excerpts because I urge everyone to read the entire thing. (Via Meryl Yourish).

Lynn has some good news from Israel on the subject of religious marriages:

Former chief Sephardi rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron yesterday advocated dismantling the Orthodox rabbinate’s monopoly over marriages – the first time any leading rabbi associated with the rabbinical establishment has publicly urged such a step.

[ . . . ]

In his speech, Bakshi-Doron gave several reasons why he thought the rabbinate’s monopoly on marriages must end. First, he said, the law has become irrelevant, as growing numbers of Israelis are choosing to marry in civil ceremonies either abroad or in Israel (the state recognizes civil marriages conducted overseas, but not those conducted locally). Second, he said, the law encourages hatred of the rabbinate, since it is seen as the primary expression of religious coercion in Israel.

Israel has been trying to work out the meaning of “Jewish democracy” for decades. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, and other religious and secular leaders will speak out and work to change this law.

I must apologize. I posted for the five days leading up to today, but couldn’t find the time during the day to post on the actual day. Strange, isn’t it? I found the time to watch the hockey game, but not to write about the six million. What does that say about me?

But today was Yom Ha’Shoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. See Lynn and Imshin for some poignant reflections. And while you’re at it, pay a visit to the Yad Vashem website and see some of the exhibits currently showing in the museum.

Never Forget.

A Jerusalem Post editorial asks the question. The big question. Really, the only question: what has humanity learned from the Holocaust?

Jews have been tireless in using the Holocaust to teach about man’s inhumanity to man. Has it made a difference? Ask the 1.7 million Cambodians slaughtered between 1975-1979 by communist lunatics. Ask the over 800,000 Rwandans cut down by machetes — in a mere 100 days — in 1994.

Clearly, efforts to universalize the lessons of the Holocaust have utterly failed. Would a forced visit of Hutu killers through Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum saved a single Tutsi?

No one predisposed to genocide will be shamed into human decency by exposure to Schindler’s List. More than that: Even humanists who mourn Hitler’s Jewish victims have, in the blink of a relativist eye, condemned Israel for eliminating Ahmed Yassin, though he was single-mindedly committed to a new genocide.

[ . . . ]

We are loathe to equate today’s foes with the Nazis. But as Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer has argued, “Nazism, Stalinist communism, and radical Islam are different from each other, but they also have a certain similarity: All three aim, or aimed, at exclusive control over the world, all three oppose or opposed all expressions of democracy, and all three attacked Jews…” On this day, it is worth remembering that in Mein Kampf Hitler predicted terrorism and force would be victorious over reason.

The battle continues.

To that, we can add the Armenian Genocide, the hundreds of thousands (or more) killed in the Congo, the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, and the thousands of North Korean “political prisoners” being subjected to untold horrors in the Gulags. These are, sadly, only a few examples.

Was it realistic to say “Never Again” after the Holocaust? How could it be, when millions of years of human history teach us that the one thing human beings keep doing is finding new ways to instill horror and cruelty on one another? How could we think that the Holocaust would scare humanity straight, when it was only the “next step” in a long line of massacres, wars, and the wiping out of entire peoples?

There’s still an emotional connection to the Holocaust today. The events of 50 or 60 years ago are close enough in time that there are still survivors to tell their tales, to share their pain and to remind us. There are still memorials standing where the death camps once were. We can visit them, witness them.

But how long until the Holocaust becomes just another dry chapter in a history textbook, too remote in time for emotion? How long until future generations talk about it with the same detachment as they do the Crusades, or the Roman conquest?

Never.

Because maybe we haven’t learned. We haven’t figured out “Never Again” and perhaps we never will. But we have figured out Never Forget.

We haven’t forgotten the events of two or three thousand years ago. We’ve been observing holidays, retelling stories and prayers, tearing our clothing on Tisha B’Av and reciting the story of the Exodus on Passover. We weep over events of two thousand years ago with the same emotion as though they happened yesterday.

If there’s one thing us Jews have, it’s a very long collective memory. It unites us as a people as we remember the chapters of our shared history.

And if it hasn’t ensured a “Never Again”, then we have at least ensured that we will “Never Forget”. Maybe it’s a first step.

Proof that Internet and website campaigns can make a difference (via Israpundit):

When you search for the word “Jew” in Google, you no longer get an antisemitic hate site as the top result. Thanks to a web campaign to create links like Jew and Jew, those two sites are now ranked 1-2. The aforementioned hate site has dropped to third, plus when you click on it, you get a message saying the person’s account has been suspended.

Individual site owners may not feel like they have much power, but when everyone works together, things can change for the better. It’s encouraging.