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.

February 6, 2012: Core community issues like Jewish education need to be addressed by every succeeding generation

By Michael Regenstreif

Last year in this space in our May 30 issue, I mentioned my attendance at the follow-up session to April’s openOttawa symposium, the initiative aimed at engaging Ottawa’s young Jewish adults with the community and providing assistance to the 20- to 35-year-old demographic group in their quest to find new ways to express themselves Jewishly that are relevant to them.

I mentioned that I couldn’t help but be reminded of how similar the discussion was – minus, perhaps, the Facebook, Twitter and website references – to discussions I was party to in Montreal during the 1970s and ‘80s when I was in that age group. I also noted that mine was hardly the first generation to have had such discussions.

Expressions like “the more things change, the more they stay the same” and “everything old is new again” become clichés because there’s a ring of truth to them.

I was reminded of that when I read the editorial, “Educating The Next Man’s Children,” which appeared in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin 71 years ago this week in the issue of February 7, 1941.

The piece is about the importance of Jewish education to Jewish continuity and is an appeal to parents in Ottawa’s Jewish community to send their children to Jewish schools. Variations on the thinking expressed in that editorial more than seven decades ago are at the heart of the arguments on behalf of Jewish education in Ottawa made by today’s educators and community leaders.

Jewish education and ensuring the present and future viability of both day schools and supplementary schools are a high priority for the Jewish Federation of Ottawa in the face of declining enrolment over a period of many years. Witness both the Federation Report by Steven Kimmel and the From the Pulpit column by Rabbi Howard Finkelstein on the opposite page.

Ottawa’s Jewish schools of 71 years ago faced some of the same challenges faced by today’s schools. Some of the grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s Jewish school students – and potential students – were likely objects of that 1941 appeal. I suspect today’s students will see similar appeals aimed at their grandchildren and great-grandchildren many decades from now.

Revitalizing and redefining Jewish life has always been the job of each succeeding generation and part of that process has been ensuring that Jewish education remains both relevant to contemporary times and true to its traditions. The community leaders and Jewish educators understood that in 1941; today’s community leaders and Jewish educators understand that even more.

January 23, 2012: Jewish LGBT community marks several milestones

By Michael Regenstreif

There is a letter in this issue’s Mailbag (page 8) from Rabbi Mordechai Bulua of Montreal objecting to Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s being referred to as an Orthodox rabbi, despite, as he notes, Rabbi Greenberg’s Orthodox ordination.

Rabbi Greenberg, who was featured in several Bulletin articles and columns recently because he spent several days in Ottawa as scholar-in-residence at Agudath Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue, made headlines throughout the Jewish world – including the JTA story we carried and to which Rabbi Bulua was responding – in November when he officiated at what was described in the article as a “same-sex wedding,” but which Rabbi Greenberg called a “same-sex commitment ceremony” in an article he wrote for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York (A Place for Gays in Orthodoxy, January 13).

Whether it was a “wedding” or a “commitment ceremony” may be a matter of semantics, but the JTA report, echoed in other news stories, said, “It is believed to be the first time that an ordained Orthodox rabbi has officiated at a same-sex marriage in North America.”

It should probably be noted, in case there was any doubt, that the same-sex ceremony in question did not take place in an Orthodox synagogue. The Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. describes itself as “non-denominational, non-membership, non-traditional.”

In response to the news that Rabbi Greenberg had performed the ceremony, a group of 100 Orthodox rabbis released an unequivocal statement rejecting the possibility of an Orthodox-sanctioned gay marriage.

“By definition, a union that is not sanctioned by Torah law is not an Orthodox wedding, and by definition a person who conducts such a ceremony is not an Orthodox rabbi,” the rabbis wrote.

Their opinion is reflected in Rabbi Bulula’s letter to the Bulletin.

The rabbis also emphatically state, “The public should not be misled into thinking that Orthodox Jewish views on this issue can change, are changing, or might someday change. The Rabbinical Council of America recently declared that ‘the Torah, which forbids homosexual activity, sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony.’ This is the only statement on this matter that can reflect Orthodox Judaism. Any claims or statements to the contrary are inaccurate and false.”

In his Forward article, written in response to the rabbis’ statement, Rabbi Greenberg argues for “a generous sense of the possible” in the interpretation and application of Halacha on the matters under discussion. And, acknowledging that he doesn’t “expect any other Orthodox rabbi to conduct a commitment ceremony,” he also argues for the acceptance of gays in Orthodox life.

While Rabbi Greenberg would seem to be a quixotic figure on the periphery of the Orthodox world, the Jewish LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community is becoming increasingly mainstreamed and continues to mark milestones in other denominations and in the big tent of the Jewish world-at-large.

This month, Shaarey Zedek Synagogue in Winnipeg became the first Conservative shul in Canada to host a same-sex marriage – with the synagogue’s associate rabbi officiating.

And Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, the large Reform congregation in Montreal, has announced that, beginning July 1, its new senior rabbi will be Ottawa-born Rabbi Lisa J. Grushcow, who will move to Montreal from New York with her partner, Rabbi Andrea Myers, and their two daughters.

Meanwhile, the Gaycities.com website – sponsored by American Airlines – recently announced the results of its annual Best Gay City poll for 2011. The over-whelming winner was Tel Aviv with 43 per cent of the vote. New York City placed second with 14 per cent and Toronto was third at 7 per cent.