October 28, 2013: From DP camp to the Supreme Court, Abella discusses her remarkable life

By Michael Regenstreif

The Soloway Jewish Community Centre (JCC) began a series of “community conversations,” October 17, with an extraordinary evening featuring the Honourable Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada, one of this country’s most accomplished and impressive individuals.

Guided by moderator Adam Dodek, a University of Ottawa law professor and a member of the Soloway JCC board of directors, Abella talked about her life, her family and her work with wit, humour and emotion, displaying an astonishing memory as she recalled people, incidents and cases – even the minute details of cases and case law (whether she was involved in them or not) – with ease.

Abella was born in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany in 1946. Her Polish Jewish parents had been married in 1939. Her father, Jacob Silberman, a lawyer, was liberated from Theresienstadt, while her mother, Fanny, had survived several Nazi camps and was liberated from Buchenwald. They were reunited after the war. In the DP camp, her father represented the legal interests of fellow residents.

When the family came to Canada as refugees and settled in Toronto in 1950, Silberman discovered he was ineligible to practise law because he was not a Canadian citizen. He became a successful insurance agent, but young Rosalie determined then she would grow up to become a lawyer. One of the most poignant and emotional moments of the evening came when she discussed the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the provision that only citizens could practise law in Canada. Wiping a tear away, she said she wished her father, who died in 1970, had still been alive to see that day.

Also a classical piano prodigy, she graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1964.

By then married to historian Irving Abella – who would later co-write the essential book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, and serve as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress – Abella graduated from the University of Toronto law school in 1970 and established a practice in civil and criminal law.

In 1976, at age 29, Abella was appointed a judge of the Ontario Family Court, where she broke ground as the first Jewish woman to become a judge in Canada, the youngest ever judge in Canada and the first pregnant judge in Canadian history.

Her later judicial appointments – among many other accomplishments – would include the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992 and the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.

Abella was the sole commissioner of the federal government’s 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment. In her report, she coined the term “employment equity” and conceived the equity strategy of removing barriers to employment faced by women, aboriginal peoples, visible minorities and the disabled. A Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 1989 added Abella’s recommendations to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – and those recommendations have also been subsequently adopted by the governments of several other countries.

The stories and anecdotes Abella told kept the full house enthralled. She was particularly inspired when she talked about her parents and how they built new lives for themselves in Canada after surviving the Holocaust. Relatively late in life – after she was widowed – Abella’s mother became a successful real estate agent in Toronto.

Abella said her parents, who lost their first child in the Holocaust, never allowed the tragic events they lived through cast a pall over their lives. The Silberman home, she said, was the happiest of anyone she knew growing up.

Abella said she feels very much a part of Ottawa’s Jewish community, noting that her grandchild attends the Soloway JCC’s Ganon Preschool. She also took great pride in mentioning that her two sons, Jacob, who was in the audience, and Zachary both grew up to become lawyers.

October 14, 2013: Documentary offers an enthralling look at the Holy City

By Michael Regenstreif

The remarkable documentary film Jerusalem, now playing at the IMAX theatre at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, is a visually stunning and compelling portrait of the city. The movie gracefully captures and explains the central religious and historic importance of the city to Jews, to Christians and to Muslims.

Director Daniel Ferguson and his team negotiated unprecedented access from government and religious authorities to take their state-of-the-art cameras into the streets and markets, to the skies in what is normally a no-fly zone, and to holy sites such as the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Seeing the sights so vividly captured in ultra-high definition on the IMAX domed screen is simply breathtaking.

Almost all of the short film – it flies by in less than 45 minutes – takes place in the very small area of the Old City. Using the narration of British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and commentary by American archeologist Jodi Magness, the film summarizes and explains Jerusalem’s rich biblical-era history and the hows and whys of its centrality to each of the three monotheistic religions.

We see Jews praying at the Kotel, Christians re-enacting Jesus’ final journey along the Via Dolorosa on Good Friday, and Muslims at prayer at the Dome of the Rock. To experience the marketplace with its Arab merchants and backgammon players via the film is as vivid as it can be without actually being there.

At the heart of Jerusalem are the people and the very distinct communities who live there, and we meet them through three articulate teenage girls who have lived in Jerusalem all of their lives and whose families have deep roots in the city: Revital Zacharie, a Jewish Israeli; Nadia Tadros, a Christian; and Farah Ammouri, a Muslim Arab.

Each of the girls – who, on the surface, seem so much alike – offers a tour of her Jerusalem, her Old City. They take us to some of the same places and introduce us to their families, and to some of the traditions that define their lives. They talk passionately and poignantly, and one never gets the sense that their individual visions of Jerusalem would exclude the other two.

But the fact emerges that these three girls – each eminently likable – are strangers to each other.

Each of them understands the importance of Jerusalem to her own religious narrative, and to her own community, but none of them knows very much about why Jerusalem is so important to the others. Each of the three has spent her life walking the same streets and living so close to the others without the opportunity to meet.

It would seem the kind of exchanges we see in Ottawa, when Grade 6 students at the Ottawa Jewish Community School have fun and share educational experiences with their Muslim and Christian counterparts at Charles H. Hulse Public School, or when Temple Israel invites Christians and Muslims to an interfaith Sukkot celebration, don’t happen in Jerusalem.

As much as I loved, and was inspired, watching Jerusalem – I highly recommend it and plan to see it again while it’s here at the Museum over the next six months – I felt sad as the movie ended and one of the girls says, “I hope, one day, we can have the courage to meet the people who are living right next to us.”

After the lights came up at the press screening, I asked Daniel Ferguson if the three girls had a chance to meet and interact during the filming. He told me they were brought together at one point, but that each felt too bound up in the history of her own narrative to interact successfully with the others.

Perhaps, now that the film has been completed, they will have the chance to see it, to glimpse inside each other’s worlds – in such close proximity to their own – and begin to find out how much they have in common. That was Ferguson’s hope. And mine, too.