September 17, 2018: The prime minister comes to visit

By Michael Regenstreif

The final production day for an issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is always a busy day. This final production day – Friday, September 7 – was the busiest I can remember. Normally, we go to press sometime between 1 and 3 pm, but today we held off so that we could cover the visit of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Jewish Community Campus for a pre-Rosh Hashanah event at the Bess and Moe Greenberg Family Hillel Lodge organized by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa.

Trudeau joined Lodge residents and Ottawa Jewish Community School Grade 3 students as they braided challahs to be donated to the Ottawa Kosher Food Bank and dipped apples in honey as they wished each other a sweet New Year. Trudeau’s 45-minute visit was at 2:30 pm. While many MPs and cabinet ministers have attended events on the Jewish Community Campus over the years, this was, significantly, the first visit ever by a sitting prime minister.

The day before his visit to the Campus, Trudeau told Canadian rabbis in a conference call that the government’s formal apology for the refusal to admit Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany on the MS St. Louis on June 7, 1939 would be made in the House of Commons on November 7 – just prior to the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Speaking of the prime minister, he is next scheduled to face the voters in a federal election on October 21, 2019.

On August 22, Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), wrote to Chief Electoral Officer of Canada Stéphane Perrault to point out that the scheduled federal election date falls on Shemini Atzeret “which serves as the concluding days of the annual High Holy Day period. Consequently, observant Jews will not avail themselves of the right to vote on that day.”

Since 2007, the Canada Elections Act has specified “the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election” be Canada’s fixed date for federal elections. Strategically, the CIJA letter did not ask for a change of the election date, but noting other Jewish religious days in the weeks leading to the scheduled date, asked that special attention be paid to the scheduling of advance polls “to ensure that Canadian Jews’ right to vote is included.”

Corbyn Update

Last issue, I commented on the situation being faced by the Jewish community in the United Kingdom regarding Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn – who may well be the U.K.’s next prime minister.

Corbyn has a long history of anti-Israel activity that has included embracing terrorists as “friends.” Increasingly, though, revelations of antisemitism in the party – and in Corbyn’s own history as an anti-Israel activist – have been revealed.

I won’t list all of Corbyn’s transgressions but one that surfaced since my last column was a 2010 speech in which he claimed that Israel controlled speeches made by MPs in the U.K.

MPs, Corbyn said, “all turned up [in parliament] with a pre-prepared script. I’m sure our friend Ron Prosor [then Israeli ambassador to the U.K.] wrote it.”

Also since that last column, important figures including former Labour Party prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the highly regarded former British chief rabbi, have expressed concerns about antisemitism in the party and about Corbyn in particular.

“When people hear the kind of language that has been coming out of Labour, that’s been brought to the surface among Jeremy Corbyn’s earlier speeches, they cannot but feel an existential threat.

“Jews have been in Britain since 1656 – I know of no other occasion in these 362 years when Jews, the majority of our community, are worrying, ‘Is this country safe to bring up our children?’” said Rabbi Sacks in a BBC interview on September 2.

Normally diplomatic, Rabbi Sacks noted that it was the first time in 30 years that he had spoken out about a political party.

We continue to watch the situation in the U.K. with grave concern.

November 24, 2014: New film explains connections between Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel

By Michael Regenstreif

One of the ugliest aspects of the movement to delegitimize the State of Israel is the denial of the deep historical and religious connections of Judaism and the Jewish people to the Holy Land – a denial that also seems to be at the root of the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, the nation-state of the Jewish people. The late Palestinian Authority (PA) president Yasser Arafat, for example, rejected the historical existence of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, a deceit that seems to remain as PA policy.

American filmmaker Gloria Greenfield has responded brilliantly to this effort at delegitimization with Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation, a documentary in which 36 talking heads – including academic, religious and legal experts – explain the ongoing centrality of the Land of Israel, and of Jerusalem, to Judaism and the Jewish people, the constant presence of Jewish people there from ancient biblical times to the present, and the legal case for the modern state.

Earlier this month, I attended the Canadian premiere of Body and Soul, presented by the Free Thinking Film Society at the Library and Archives Canada auditorium – an evening that also included a question-and-answer period with Greenfield and Rabbi Reuven Bulka.

Although there is little in Body and Soul that will surprise anyone who has studied Jewish history seriously, the commentaries are fascinating. Among those interviewed in the film are such religious experts as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, and Rabbi Jeffrey Woolf, an authority on the relationships between Judaism, Christianity and Islam; renowned academics, including historian Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University and Robert S. Wistrich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, probably the world’s leading expert on antisemitism; and legal experts, including MP Irwin Cotler, a former minister of justice of Canada, renowned Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, and Alan Baker, a former Israeli ambassador to Canada.

The evidence these and the other experts in the film cite – including religious texts, archeology and historical records – is compelling, and Greenfield has woven all of the various strands and commentaries together beautifully in the 65-minute presentation. This is a film I strongly encourage all in the community to see at the earliest opportunity. It seems to me this is a film that should be shown at schools, synagogues and community centres. It is also available on DVD. Visit www.bodyandsoulthemovie.com for more information about the film and to view the trailer.

Mazel Tov, Harvey Glatt!

As some know, I have long been active in the Canadian folk music scene. So, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I extend a hearty mazel tov to community member Harvey Glatt, who will receive the Unsung Hero Award at the 2014 Canadian Folk Music Awards ceremony on Saturday night, November 29. The annual event moves from city to city and region to region around the country and takes place this year at the Bronson Centre in Ottawa.

The Unsung Hero Award is presented in recognition of “the exceptional contribution of an individual, group or organization to any aspect of the Canadian folk music scene.”

That Ottawa, today, boasts one of the most active folk music scenes in Canada is, in many ways, due to Harvey’s pioneering efforts as a concert producer, artist manager, record store owner and radio station owner. For many decades, he, along with his wife Louise, has been one of Ottawa’s most important and influential patrons of the arts. Their patronage, I would add, is equally significant in the folk, classical and jazz worlds, and in the theatre scene, too.

There are three major awards of this type on the Canadian folk scene, and, with the Unsung Hero Award, Harvey will have received all three. Just last month, he received Folk Music Ontario’s Estelle Klein Award, which is presented annually for “significant contributions to Ontario’s folk music community,” and he was the 2010 recipient of the Ottawa Folk Festival’s Helen Verger Award, which is presented annually to “an individual who has made significant, sustained contributions to folk/roots music in Canada.”