December 11, 2017: The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin at 80

By Michael Regenstreif

This edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin – dated December 11, 2017 – is an important one. We celebrate Chanukah – the first candle will be lit this year on December 12 – and we have the final instalment of our Canada 150 series that has been running in every issue throughout Canada’s sesquicentennial year. The series has highlighted important contributions of 19 Jewish Canadians in such fields as politics, community leadership, the military, the arts, and more. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series.

But what excites me most about this issue is that we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. The Bulletin has now been telling the story of the Jewish community of Canada’s capital city for eight full decades.

While the actual anniversary of the first issue of the Bulletin was October 22, we wanted to hold the celebration for this final edition of 2017. Reporter Benita Baker, a long-time contributor to our newspaper, was commissioned to look at the history of the Bulletin and her comprehensive report begins on page 26. To illustrate the feature, I chose the front page of our first edition from 1937 and front pages from every subsequent decade from the year ending in 7. Looking at those front pages from across the decades shows how the Bulletin changed over the years with the eventual additions of photos, colour, computerized layout and refreshed designs to reflect changing times.

The Jewish Community Council of Ottawa/Vaad Ha’Ir (now the Jewish Federation of Ottawa) was founded in 1934. Just three years later, the Vaad began publishing the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, “a community newspaper, owned by the community, and maintained (we hope) by the community… a coordinating, unifying medium of expression through which our various movements and organizations will be enabled to promulgate their activities and objectives.”

Just as Ottawa’s Jewish community has grown and changed tremendously over these past 80 years, so, too, has our newspaper. Today’s community is much bigger, and much more religiously, sociologically and politically diverse than it was back then. And, as the community has developed and changed over the years, it has been reflected in the development of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

In 1937, Ottawa’s Jewish community was traditional, almost exclusively Orthodox, primarily of the merchant class, and concentrated downtown in the neighbourhoods of Lowertown and Sandy Hill. Now, our religious affiliations encompass the entire spectrum of Jewish religious movements and expression as well as all manner of professions, occupations and lifestyles – and the community is widely dispersed across the city and even across the river in the Gatineau and Chelsea areas.

But, despite all the changes in the community, and in the Bulletin, over the past 80 years, our newspaper has always remained faithful to the central mission of serving Ottawa’s Jewish community. And when we start work on our first issue of 2018 in January it will be with that mission in mind.

October 30, 2017: Attacks on Justin Trudeau over plaque error are unfounded

By Michael Regenstreif

The front page story in this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is Benita Baker’s report on the inauguration of the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Although we published an issue after the September 27 event, the nature of our deadline and production schedule – complicated at that time of year by High Holiday work breaks – prevented us from running the story in our October 9 edition.

However, the story was published at online even before that issue was mailed to subscribers. A sidebar to the article on page 2 (which was also posted online) notes that a plaque at the entrance to the monument commemorating the inauguration was removed and will be replaced because it failed to specifically mention that Jews were the principal victims of “the millions of men, women and children murdered during the Holocaust.”

After visiting the National Holocaust Monument, looking at its various sections – all of them so powerful – and reading the other plaques and panels explaining the Holocaust, and also Canada’s shameful response to Jewish refugees desperate to escape the genocide, no one can be left with any doubt about the Nazi regime’s intention to wipe out European Jewry.

Still, it was a serious error that the plaque at the entrance to the monument did not specifically mention that the intent of the perpetrators of the Holocaust was the mass murder of Jews.

But it was an error that all the parties involved in the monument, including the government of Canada and the National Holocaust Monument Development Council, quickly acknowledged, quickly accepted responsibility for, and quickly set in motion a process to correct. The plaque was removed and will be replaced with appropriate wording.

But that was not enough for some Opposition politicians and media pundits who sought to put responsibility for the error directly on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – as if the error was an expression of his personal feelings.

But, as Rabbi Daniel Friedman, the Edmonton-based chair of the National Holocaust Monument Development Council, explained in an op-ed published in the Ottawa Citizen and several other Canadian dailies, “On the big day, we suddenly realized that an egregious error had been made. In amongst the debates over wording and plaque positioning, somehow the one plaque that introduced the others – and made no sense outside the context of the plaques detailing the Nazi genocide of six million Jews along with homosexuals, the disabled and others – ended up mounted all on its own on a separate wall. Visitors to the site were rightly disturbed to encounter this major injustice to the memory of the six million Jews for whom the monument was built. All of the parties involved are deeply remorseful and we apologize unconditionally for the pain we have caused by this oversight.

“I want to thank the Trudeau government for acting expeditiously to amend the plaque as soon as the error was brought to its attention. Mistakes happen; most can be fixed quickly and decorously. Without questioning, the government did the right thing, which has been our experience with Trudeau’s government throughout.”

I agree with Rabbi Friedman.

I have personally heard the prime minister speak poignantly at Holocaust commemoration events and I have watched his sensitive interactions with elderly Holocaust survivors. And I have no doubt as to his knowledge of the Holocaust or his sincerity in talking about it. To suggest that he is personally at fault for this error, or that it was purposeful, is simply egregious.

I highly recommend a visit to the National Holocaust Monument. It is a profoundly moving experience. With winter quickly approaching, you’ll probably want to choose a nice autumn day to go as it is outdoors. I found that I needed to spend a good hour there when I visited, much of it in quiet contemplation.

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.