February 20, 2012: Rabbi Plaut was a towering figure in Canadian Jewry

By Michael Regenstreif

Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, one of the towering figures of Reform Judaism, an influential writer and a major leader in Canada’s Jewish community over a period of many years, passed away on February 8 in Toronto at the age of 99 following a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease over the past decade.

Rabbi Plaut, born in 1912, grew up in Germany and received his doctorate in law from the University of Berlin in 1934. But Jews were banned from the practice of law in Nazi Germany, so he left Germany in 1935 as a refugee to the United States. He studied for the rabbinate at Hebrew Union College and was ordained in 1939.

He returned to Germany during the Second World War as a frontline chaplain in the U.S. Army and participated in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1945.

Rabbi Plaut held pulpits at Reform congregations in Chicago and St. Paul before coming to Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple in 1961 where he served as spiritual leader until 1978. After retiring from the pulpit, he served as senior scholar at Holy Blossom for more than two decades.

One of Rabbi Plaut’s major works was editing The Torah: A Modern Commentary, a monumental work that took 17 years from conception to publication in 1981, when it became the Reform movement’s standard text. A revised edition was issued in 2005.

As a Jewish community leader, Rabbi Plaut rose to the presidency of the Canadian Jewish Congress serving a three-year term from 1977 to 1980.

In the wider community, Rabbi Plaut was one of Canada’s leading human rights and refugee advocates.

“He was a defender of human and civil rights at a time when many didn’t even know its meaning. We stand on the shoulders of such men,” said Bernie Farber, former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, in a statement quoted by the Toronto Star.

The Star also noted that Rabbi Plaut “founded Toronto’s Urban Alliance for Race Relations, served as vice-chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and was appointed by the federal government to revise Canada’s refugee legislation in the 1980s. Among other honours, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada and received the Order of Ontario. He had been granted 19 honorary degrees from institutions around the world including the University of Toronto and York University.”

Rabbi Plaut wrote many other books in addition to his Torah commentary, including works of fiction, and was a widely published commentator in newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals – both in the Jewish and secular communities. I particularly remember Rabbi Plaut’s column, which ran in the Canadian Jewish News for more than 20 years until 2003. An anthology, Eight Decades: The Selected Writings of W. Gunther Plaut, was published in 2008.

I join in paying tribute to this remarkable leader of Canada’s Jewish community and in sending condolences to his family.

June 13, 2011: CJC leader runs for the Liberals in the Ontario election

By Michael Regenstreif

I saw Shimon Fogel recently and he told me the details of the long-anticipated merger of Canada’s major Jewish advocacy organizations – including the Canada-Israel Committee, of which he’s been the long-time CEO, and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) – would be announced sometime this month. (It’s even possible the announcement was made sometime in between my writing this column and your reading it.)

Fogel is to be CEO of the new organization – temporarily being called Newco – created by the merger.

One person who won’t be on Fogel’s senior staff, at least for the first four or five months, is Ottawa native Bernie Farber, who has worked at the CJC for 27 years and has been the CEO since 2005.

Late in May, Farber announced he’s taking a leave-of-absence to run on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s team as the Liberal candidate in the suburban Toronto riding of Thornhill, the Ontario riding with the highest proportion of Jewish residents. He’ll be looking to unseat Progressive Conservative MPP Peter Shurman – who is also Jewish – in the October 6 provincial election.

Shurman was elected to the Ontario Legislature in the 2007 election, when a cornerstone of the Progressive Conservative platform was extending public funding to faith-based day schools. Until then, and now, the only faith-based schools that receive public funding in Ontario are Roman Catholic. Most other provinces, including Quebec, have long had formulas for funding all faith-based day schools that meet provincial curriculum standards. The funding proposal was not popular with voters in 2007, and John Tory’s Tories were soundly defeated by McGuinty’s Liberals. Thornhill was probably one of the few Ontario ridings in which the issue actually helped elect a Tory.

Funding for day schools has been a major concern of the Jewish community in Ontario for decades.

At the Federation AGM, in her final address as Jewish Federation of Ottawa chair, Donna Dolansky noted that one of the major challenges for the Federation is establishing a firm financial footing for the Ottawa Jewish Community School. That the school – and virtually all Jewish day schools in Ontario – faces financial difficulties is largely attributable to the lack of public funding provided in most other provinces.

The Canadian Jewish Congress has always been a leader in the struggle for Jewish day school funding. In fact, Farber’s first CJC job in 1984 was lobbying the Ontario government on the school funding issue – and it’s been an issue of concern to him ever since.

And, Farber says, it’s not an issue he’ll give up on should he win the Thornhill seat. Whether as a government or opposition MPP, he plans to continue working on the issue, despite McGuinty’s unequivocal stance against non-Catholic faith-based day school funding.

“While the premier and I may disagree on this subject, I’ll have the opportunity to speak inside the tent and try to effect change,” he told the Canadian Jewish News.

Farber – who says he’ll return to a senior position in the reorganized Jewish advocacy organization, should he not win in Thornhill – might also have his work cut out for him on the school funding issue even if the Tories win the election.

Although funding for faith-based day schools was a major plank in the Progressive Conservative platform in 2007, there’s not a word about it in the 2011 election platform recently released by party leader Tim Hudak.

September 6, 2010: Whitton’s ‘historic significance’ is not worthy of honour

By Michael Regenstreif

It made headlines recently when it was announced that Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa from 1951 to 1956 and 1960 to 1964, had been nominated for official recognition as a Canadian of “national historic significance.”

Nominations are submitted to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, which investigates and recommends to the minister of the environment which nominees they consider worthy of recognition. The minister then accepts or rejects the board’s recommendation. To date, 648 Canadians have been so recognized.

Whitton’s name was put forward by the Ottawa Committee of the Famous 5 Foundation, an organization that encourages women to participate in politics and public service, because she was the first woman to serve as mayor of a major Canadian city.

Whitton’s nomination became news when it emerged that several major Jewish organizations oppose Whitton’s designation on the basis of her antisemitism and have asked Environment Minister Jim Prentice to reject it.

Long before she became mayor, Whitton was one of Canada’s most prominent social workers as director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare for more than 20 years and was instrumental in keeping Jewish refugee orphans out of Canada during the Second World War, thus sealing the fate of many in the Holocaust.

Whitton’s role in that shameful chapter of Canadian history is well documented in None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, and in Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada by my cousin Fraidie Martz. (The Jewish war orphans Martz wrote about in her book were only allowed into Canada beginning in 1947.)

In an op-ed published August 18 in the Ottawa Citizen, Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Mitchell Bellman, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, argue that Whitton’s actions, motivated by antisemitism, doomed hundreds of Jewish children to die in the Holocaust. That, they say, should make her ineligible for the historic designation. I agree.

Farber and Bellman also point to an incident that took place in 1964, when Whitton was mayor of Ottawa and refused to allow a half-million dollar donation (worth more than $3.5 million in 2010 dollars) from Jewish philanthropist Bertram Loeb to the Civic Hospital to build and equip a research facility.

In an editorial published March 3, 1964, the Ottawa Citizen attacked Whitton for her decision.

“Why did Miss Whitton do it? This is the question that must be puzzling many Ottawans today,” wrote the Citizen.

In a Globe and Mail obituary published when Loeb died in 2006, it was written that some “suspected that Ms. Whitton cringed at the thought of seeing a Jewish name on a city facility.”

Having now read the through the 1964 Ottawa Citizen coverage of the Whitton-Loeb story, that explanation makes sense to me.

Dave Mullington, the author of a forthcoming biography of Whitton, responded to Farber and Bellman with an op-ed in the Citizen refuting allegations of Whitton’s antisemitism with a short list of several interactions Whitton had with Jews or Jewish organizations, which, he wrote, “certainly show that she was not as bigoted as some would have us believe.”

Mullington’s defence of Whitton is ironic in light of a December 3, 1982 article he wrote as a Citizen reporter on assignment at Temple Israel for a presentation Abella and Troper made on Whitton and her role in ensuring that Canada not be a haven for Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Mullington reported, in great detail, on Abella and Troper’s research and unquestioningly quotes the authors as saying Whitton was “an outright racist.”