December 7, 2009: Gabriel controversy overshadows the tremendous success of Choices

By Michael Regenstreif

One of the stories on the front page of this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is Cynthia Nyman Engel’s report on the keynote speech Brigitte Gabriel delivered, November 5, at the third annual Choices event presented by the Women’s Campaign of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa.

Drawing on her personal story, as well as contemporary events, particularly 9/11, Gabriel forcefully attacked the radical Islamist movement. The problem, though, was that she couched her attacks in ways that led some in the audience to conclude that she was attacking all Muslims and Arabs. Others didn’t think so. Two different women in attendance have told me that, when Gabriel attacked Muslims and Arabs, “everyone knew she didn’t mean all Muslims and Arabs, she meant radical Muslims and Arabs.”

Bulletin columnist Mira Sucharov was one of the women in attendance who took exception to the way Gabriel depicted Muslims and Arabs and Mira devotes her Values, Ethics, Community column to a discussion of Gabriel and to her suggestions about criteria that should be used in selecting speakers.

There was also a group of women at the Choices event who were inspired by Gabriel. In a letter to the Bulletin, Susan Weisman points to an online petition that was launched in support of Gabriel.

What’s being overshadowed in the controversy that erupted over Gabriel is the Choices event itself. In the three years since it was conceived by committee chair Jennifer Kardash, Choices has quickly become the Federation Annual Campaign’s most successful program for recruiting new, previously unaffiliated donors to the Jewish community of Ottawa. This year alone, 106 new donors became involved in the community via Choices.

The success of Choices as an event, and particularly as an event that involves so many people previously unaffiliated with the community, needs to be celebrated. Jennifer, the committee members, and the table captains who do so much to recruit women to the event – and, thus, to the community – are to be congratulated for the excellent work that they do.

In a column earlier this year, I pointed out that the new chair and vice-chair of the Federation were both women, that all three of the community’s major award recipients were women, and even that a significant majority of the volunteers honoured on the occasion of the Federation’s 75th anniversary were women. Women have become a driving force in the Jewish community of Ottawa. The success of the annual Choices event is another indication of that.

As illustrated by the Gabriel controversy – there is a wide diversity of opinion in the community on any number of issues. If you feel strongly about an issue of concern, if you disagree with an opinion expressed by one of our columnists or with a featured speaker at an event we cover, we welcome your letters to the editor. Your opinions are important and we want to hear from you.

Gil Levine

Gilbert Levine, a legendary figure in the Canadian labour movement, passed away, November 16, at age 85, just days after he was diagnosed with leukemia.

In 2007, when I moved to Ottawa to work at the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, Gil was the first Bulletin reader to call and welcome me to the city. Not long after, he came and met me for lunch at the Soloway JCC and I enjoyed the first of several fascinating, stimulating discussions I would have with him about the labour movement, Canadian, Israeli and Jewish community politics, and our shared passion for folk music. Gil added me to his personal email list and I got a steady stream of articles from various publications that he wanted to share with his friends, and an equally steady stream of Jewish jokes.

As I came to find out over the past couple of years, Gil was a mensch of the highest degree and a leading voice of conscience in the Canadian, Ottawa and Jewish communities. I’d like to express my sincere condolences to Gil’s wife, Helen, and their family.

November 16, 2009: How can anyone hate so much as to desecrate a cemetery?

By Michael Regenstreif

Hardly a month goes by, it seems, in which we don’t hear about a Jewish cemetery, somewhere or other, being desecrated. A few weeks ago, it was the Jewish Memorial Gardens near Greely, often called the Osgoode Cemetery or “Ottawa’s new Jewish cemetery,” which was horribly violated.

Sometime on the night of October 21, or in the early hours of October 22, Nazi swastikas and obscene, antisemitic slogans were spray-painted on the walls at the entrance to the cemetery and on eight headstones. The Ottawa Police Service Hate Crimes Unit is investigating the incident. It was the first such attack on the cemetery, but it followed a pair of similar attacks, two years ago, at the Bank Street Cemetery.

There are some people who get some kind of perverse pleasure from committing cemetery vandalism, who steal into a graveyard in the dead of night and do things like overturn headstones. But that kind of simple vandalism – as shameful as it is, and which occasionally happens at all kinds of cemeteries – is not what happened last month at the Jewish Memorial Gardens.

What happened at Jewish Memorial Gardens was a heinous act of hatred.

Who could possibly hate so much that they would commit such an act?

Were swastikas painted on the cemetery walls and on Jewish headstones because the perpetrators were extreme right-wing neo-Nazis who believe that Hitler was right?

Or, were they painted by extreme leftists who compare Israel to Nazi Germany and then manifest their hatred for the Jewish state with hatred for Jews?

I suppose it doesn’t matter if the act was committed from an extreme-right or an extreme-left perspective. It’s like arguing about whether Hitler or Stalin was a more effective mass murderer. Ultimately, totalitarianists of the right and of the left are not that different – in their actions, or in their antisemitism. How else can we possibly explain the support for the repressive Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by some on the extreme left, particularly the anti-Zionist left?

Or, could it even be that the attack on our Jewish cemetery was committed by someone whose hatred knows no ideology other than ignorance?

Unless the police are successful in apprehending whoever committed the act – unfortunately, crimes like this often go unsolved – we’ll probably never know why the perpetrator(s) could hate so much to do such a thing.

However, the fact that there are people in our society who hate so much they would commit such an act, or, for that matter, any kind of a hate crime against any ethnic, religious, racial, sexual or linguistic group, is a failure of our society.

On the front page of this issue of the Bulletin, Benita Baker reports on a recent workshop the Shoah Committee of Ottawa held for public and Catholic school teachers. The aim of the workshop was to help teachers find ways to teach their students both about the Holocaust, and about the paramount importance of tolerance and compassion in our multicultural society.

One of the teachers leading the workshop was Patrick Mascoe, a Grade 6 teacher at Charles H. Hulse Public School – a school with a predominately Muslim population – who has become well known in recent years for his innovative programs in the areas of Holocaust education and inter-community dialogue and friendship.

Benita’s article mentions that Mascoe is teaching his students about the Holocaust despite the fact that his school board’s curriculum does not mandate teaching about the Holocaust until Grade 10. According to Mascoe, “Students must learn that protecting human rights and taking a stand against racism and other expressions of hatred and discrimination are essential components of responsible citizenship.”

Maybe Grade 10 is too late to begin teaching that. Certainly, Mascoe’s successes in the classroom have proven that Grade 6 is not too early. I’ve seen and talked to Mascoe’s students on their Mitzvah Day visits to Hillel Academy, and I’d be willing to bet that no student who has ever spent a year in his Grade 6 class will ever commit a hate crime.

The desecration at Jewish Memorial Gardens took place the day before former Bulletin editor Barry Fishman was buried there. The cemetery staff and volunteers, its landscape contractor and monument suppliers are all to be commended for the speed and efficiency with which they banded together to remove the hateful words and symbols and restore the cemetery to its rightful state before mourners arrived for the interment.