October 5, 2009: Steady growth predicted for Ottawa’s Jewish community

By Michael Regenstreif

Since 1981, Ottawa’s Jewish population has been growing at rates far greater than Canada as a whole, and an analysis and projection by UIA Federations Canada (UIAFC) – the national body linking Canada’s Jewish federations – predicts the growth of Ottawa’s Jewish community will continue to far outpace the national average, which will be reflected in the Canadian censuses to be conducted in 2011 and 2021.

Linda Kislowicz, CEO, and Andrea Freedman, national director of planning and development of UIAFC, were in Ottawa, September 22, to present the Ottawa-oriented findings of the UIA National Task Force on Jewish Demographics to a gathering of lay leaders and senior staff of Ottawa’s various Jewish agencies and organizations. Kislowicz and Freedman were on a national tour speaking to such gatherings organized by the various Jewish federations across the country.

As Kislowicz explained, the data was based on past censuses and the projections were based on assumptions the conditions and trends – birth and death rates, immigration, migration within Canada, etc. – that led to the changes between the 1991 and 2001 censuses will continue to be relevant between 2001 and 2011 and again between 2011 and 2021.

Kislowicz said the task force believes in the accuracy of the projections, but cautioned that a multitude of social, political, economic and other factors could come into play, which could have an effect on what the censuses of 2011 and 2021 actually reveal. She added that it’s not so much the precise numbers that are important in the projections for the future, but rather the trends they show.

In 1981, the Jewish population of the Ottawa area was 9,355. It increased to 11,605 by 1991 and 13,450 in 2001. The task force predicts the Ottawa Jewish population will reach 16,230 in 2011 and then 19,279 in 2021. The projected growth of the community in the 40-year period from 1981 to 2021 will be more than 106 per cent. The task force projects the Jewish population of the entire country will have increased to 394,300 in 2021 from 313,865 in 1981, an increase of about 25 per cent in the same 40-year period.

There are a number of projections in the study that will have important implications for the community as we plan for the future – including necessary planning for greater numbers of children, youth and senior citizens. The study’s projections show steady, incremental growth in the numbers of children and youth and dramatic growth in the number of seniors in the coming years.

The growth in the number of children suggests that the capacity of the Jewish educational system in Ottawa will need to increase to meet the needs of families in the community. The study projects that the number of children aged 14 and under will rise to 3,336 in 2011 and 3,982 in 2021 from 2,690 in 2001.

Already, the Federation has placed a high priority on the Jewish educational system in Ottawa and has been working with the two schools on the amalgamation of Hillel Academy and Yitzhak Rabin High School to create an institution of the highest standard covering kindergarten through Grade 12.

With a goal of attracting an increased proportion of the community’s children to Jewish day school, and with increasing numbers of children in the community, there is potential for tremendous growth in our Jewish educational system over the coming decade.

The most dramatic growth the study projects in Ottawa’s Jewish community is in the number of seniors.

There were 795 Jews aged 65 to 74 living in Ottawa in 2001. The Jewish population in that age group is expected to have more than doubled by 2011 to 1,746 and to have almost doubled again by 2021 to 3,351.

These increases suggest the need for expanded programming aimed at an age group that remains active and engaged. They also suggest a tremendous potential for the engagement of volunteers who have reached retirement age, but are still eager to stay active and contribute to the community.

The study projects there will be 720 members of Ottawa’s Jewish community aged over 75 in 2011. This is actually a slight decrease from the 790 shown in the 2001 census. However, that number is expected to almost double between 2011 and 2021 to reach 1,324. Clearly, there will need to be long-range planning for the needs of increasing numbers of older seniors in the coming decades.

September 21, 2009: The tiff over Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival

By Michael Regenstreif

This column was written just as the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), scheduled for September 10 to 19, was getting underway. One of the world’s premiere film festivals, TIFF introduced a new series this year, City to City, with a goal of showcasing and celebrating a vital filmmaking scene in a different international city each year.

Given its success as a filmmaking centre, its vibrant and diverse cosmopolitan nature, and the fact that it is now celebrating its centennial year, Tel Aviv was chosen to be the first locale to fall under TIFF’s City to City spotlight and 10 movies made in Tel Aviv were scheduled to be shown during the festival. Reading their descriptions, they all sound interesting. I hope that I get to see them sometime.

Of course, when it comes to anything to do with Israel in a public forum, there just has to be some sort of invented controversy.

On August 27, John Greyson, a well-known director of gay-themed films and a professor of film studies at York University in Toronto, wrote to the TIFF program directors to announce he was withdrawing his documentary short, Covered, from the festival in protest over the choice of Tel Aviv for TIFF’s City to City spotlight.

In his letter, Greyson quoted author Naomi Klein describing Tel Aviv as “a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” and said that celebrating Tel Aviv in 2009 was “akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestlés infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991.”

Greyson demanded to know why all of the Tel Aviv films were made by Israeli Jews.

“Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live?” he asked.

By now, you too may be scratching your head wondering how Greyson knows about Palestinian refugees displaced from Tel Aviv who now live in Gaza and Toronto when Tel Aviv was built on what were empty sand dunes a century ago.

Greyson is a leader of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), and Covered, the film he pulled from the festival, is about homophobic violence aimed at a gay film festival in Sarajevo.

The whole concept of “queers against Israeli apartheid” strikes me as very strange considering that Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which LGBTQ persons can live openly and freely out of the closet, while Israel is almost certainly the only country in the Middle East in which Greyson could show a film like Covered. There are no gay film festivals in Hamas’ Gaza. But there are in Tel Aviv.

Ironically, one of the Tel Aviv films that Greyson is protesting is The Bubble, a 2006 movie in Hebrew and Arabic about a gay love relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab.

Greyson and an ad hoc committee of likeminded anti-Israel activists, including Naomi Klein, who emerged as their spokesperson in the Globe and Mail and on her blog, published a document called Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation denouncing the TIFF spotlight on Tel Aviv – as if Tel Aviv was under occupation – in which they essentially repeat the same accusations in Greyson’s letter withdrawing his film.

Last issue in this space, I talked about how attempts to suppress the offensive Israel Apartheid Week poster or the keeping of the offensive, fringe British MP George Galloway out of Canada resulted in the exposure of the poster and Galloway to many times more people than there would otherwise have been.

Writing this column just before the film festival’s opening night, I’ll predict that all of the publicity generated by Greyson, Klein and company will only have served to assure full houses of moviegoers for the 10 films from Tel Aviv.

September 7, 2009: The Bulletin – Ottawa’s source for Jewish news and lively columns

By Michael Regenstreif

Shana Tova!

Although Erev Rosh Hashanah falls 11 days after the September 7 publication date for this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, this is our community-wide Rosh Hashanah edition of the newspaper.

As the final issue for the Jewish year 5769, we have articles that look back at some of the major news stories in our community, and in Israel. We also have our usual array of news stories, articles from community organizations and agencies about their activities, many centring around the upcoming High Holidays, features on interesting people in the community and lively columns covering a gamut of beats from Canadian politics to world affairs, values and ethical issues, book and music reviews, food and humour.

Two new monthly columns we’ve introduced recently are Did You Know?, in which Benita Baker covers notable achievements, milestones and comings and goings of people in the community, and World Affairs, Oliver Javanpour’s informed critiques of issues on the world stage.

I mentioned this is a “community-wide” issue of the Bulletin. We do two – sometimes three – community-wide issues each year, which are distributed to many more people than the rest of our 19 issues per year. If you’re not one of our regular subscribers, I hope you’ll become one. The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is the best way to keep up with what’s going on in Ottawa’s vibrant Jewish community.

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Like any newspaper, we strive to stay as current as possible with our content. However, we’re not a daily and need to work with deadlines that are many days ahead of publication; so, occasionally, developing stories change between deadline day and publication. For example, the Israel year in review article that appears on pages 1 and 2 notes that “as the Jewish year drew to a close, there was still no sign of reaching the freeze-for-normalization deal the Americans were seeking as a prelude to serious peacemaking.”

That article, which has, or will, run in many Jewish newspapers around the world, was prepared by JTA, the Jewish news wire service, in early-August. Since then, there have been indications from the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem and the Obama administration in the United States that such a deal may be in the offing. There have even been a couple of signs from the Palestinian Authority that they understand and accept that their road to peace and statehood lies in negotiation and responsible governance.

So, it’s possible that, by the time you read this, or perhaps sometime soon after, some sort of preliminary agreement leading to serious peacemaking will be announced. It would, should it come to pass, be most welcome news.

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Another JTA article, on page 14, analyzes the controversy that erupted after a Swedish newspaper published a pair of totally unsubstantiated and seemingly ridiculous articles claiming Israel returns the bodies of dead Palestinians to their families after harvesting them for body parts.

With absolutely no substantiation, the Swedish newspaper editor should have consigned the articles to the waste basket under his or her desk. But, as explained in the JTA analysis, the reactions of certain Israeli and Swedish politicians have turned what could have been an easy refutation – if, indeed, such absurdity even merits refuting – into an issue of free speech and freedom of the press.

That reminds me of several incidents that unfolded here over the past year. In February, the administrations at both Carleton University and the University of Ottawa banned an offensive Israel Apartheid Week poster that directly suggested Israel targeted Palestinian children during the war in Gaza.

Had the posters not been banned, they would have been seen by few people beyond the campuses. Instead, the banning of the posters became the story and virtually everyone who reads mainstream newspapers or watches television news saw them. And it gave anti-Israel activists yet another platform as they press a free speech complaint forward at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Similarly, when the Canadian government denied fringe British MP (and Iranian regime propagandist) George Galloway entry into Canada for four speaking engagements that would have played to, maybe, a couple of thousand people in total, they gave Galloway a platform to spout his views on every newscast and interview program in the country. Instead of a few thousand of his fellow travellers, Galloway was seen and heard by millions.

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Again, Shana Tova from all of us at the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. May this New Year be one of peace, health and prosperity for all.