May 6, 2013: Loss of the Canadian Jewish News a severe blow to Canada’s Jewish community

By Michael Regenstreif

As noted in a brief report on page 17, the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) announced, April 22, that it would cease publication with its issue of June 20. It was a sad and most unwelcome announcement for those of us who practise Jewish community journalism, indeed, for the entire Canadian Jewish community, particularly those in Toronto and Montreal, Canada’s two largest Jewish communities – the markets the CJN primarily served.

The CJN published Toronto and Montreal editions. Each edition had its own local news stories, columnists and ads, and the two editions shared major stories, columnists and nationally targeted advertising.

As it happened, I had a phone conversation with Mordechai Ben-Dat, the CJN editor, at about 9:45 that morning. A few hours later, after the closure announcement was posted on the CJN website, I emailed Mordechai to say how shocked and saddened I was by the news; that I’d had no idea this was happening when we chatted earlier. In his response, he told me the CJN staff received the news at 10 am – a few minutes after we got off the phone.

I had a long history with the Canadian Jewish News. As a freelance reporter and feature writer for the CJN in Montreal from 1990 until my move here to work at the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin in 2007, I wrote countless articles for the CJN. Although I’d been writing for newspapers – primarily the Montreal Gazette – and magazines for many years, mostly as an arts journalist, and continued to do so after I started with the CJN, it was my entry into Jewish community journalism. I’ve continued to read every issue of the CJN since my move to Ottawa – the Montreal edition, which we receive at home, and the Toronto edition, which comes to the Bulletin office.

The CJN’s journalists are among my colleagues in the small field of Jewish community journalism – and some of them are friends – so this bad news hits close to home.

At first, there was some hope the CJN would survive as an online news site.

“If the CJN is to be a vibrant part of the future, it will only be as an enhanced and expanded digital edition. That is our hope. However, the CJN will disappear from your mailboxes and the newsstands,” wrote Donald Carr, the CJN’s board president, in the initial ‘message to our readers’ posted on the CJN website.

A second message, headlined “The CJN to close,” posted later in the day was more telling.

“The Canadian Jewish News will cease publishing in two months,” it read. “The board of directors arrived at the decision on Friday, April 19, having regard to the fact that there were still assets on hand with which to provide meaningful severance to the newspaper’s employees and to wind up operations properly.”

The CJN has about 50 employees plus freelance contributors and there’s been no mention that anyone would be retained to develop or staff an enhanced and expanded digital website. It just can’t be done without editors and writers to develop content and some sort of sales staff to make it economically viable.

Within a day or so of the CJN’s closure announcement, an online petition to save the CJN was launched. Although more than 1,500 electronic signatures were garnered in its first few days, its success is probably a very long shot.

Newspapers are an essential part of the glue that holds a community together. Jewish communities, in particular, have a rich tradition of community newspapers. The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, for example, has been part of this community’s fabric for more than 75 years. The communities served by the CJN will be much poorer without it.

The whole nature of newspaper and magazine publishing is changing very rapidly in this digital age. Although the Bulletin has a loyal subscriber base, evidence shows that many, particularly young adults, are turning away from print and toward their screens.

That’s why the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is currently in the process of redesigning and modernizing our print edition and preparing a new and dynamic Bulletin website as part of our strategy to carry us forward in a way that continues to serve our traditional readers and brings many new and younger readers onboard. We’re scheduled to re-launch the Bulletin with our Chanukah community-wide issue in November.

April 22, 2013: The former heads of Shin Bet speak in important Israeli film

By Michael Regenstreif

MP Irwin Cotler made the point during his March 28 speech at the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University Passover lunch that, had the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries accepted the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, all of the problems of refugees – both Arab refugees from Israel and an almost identical number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries – would have been avoided. There would have been two states for two people, avoiding subsequent wars, and all of the disputes over territory and settlements that grew out of the Six Day War of 1967, and persist to this day.

The importance of Cotler’s point hit home earlier this month while I watched The Gatekeepers, one of the two Israeli films nominated for an Oscar this past year in the feature documentary category, during its week-long Ottawa run at the Bytowne Cinema. The film is a series of interviews – interspersed with archival footage – with the six living former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. These are the directors who ran Shin Bet for all but two of the years between 1981 and 2011, charged with keeping Israel safe from Palestinian terrorists and from internal terror threats, such as the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish extremist intent on stopping the peace process.

Each of these Shin Bet directors – Avraham Shalom (1981-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1994), Carmi Gillon (1995- 1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), Avi Dichter (2000-2005) and Yuval Diskin (2005-2011) – answered directly to the Israeli prime minister of the day. Almost by definition, these are hardened, unsentimental men who needed to be unafraid of making extremely difficult life-and-death decisions, which often had far-reaching consequences.

Watching the film, it becomes increasingly obvious the Shin Bet directors share a consensus that the policies of occupation and Jewish settlements followed by Israel since 1967 have been a failure and a threat to Israel’s long-term survival as a Jewish and democratic state. These policies have forced all of Israel’s governments, whether led by left- or right-leaning prime ministers, to govern in a virtually permanent state of crisis management – a situation that has not served the country well.

The Shin Bet directors are surprisingly candid and open, even when talking about some of their most catastrophic failures, such as failing to prevent the assassination of Rabin or the summary execution in 1984 of two captured Palestinian terrorists, an event for which Shalom eventually lost his job and for which he was held in disdain by at least one of his successors, or when discussing the “collateral damage” of innocent people being killed when terrorist leaders have been targeted for assassination.

Near the end of the film, The Gatekeepers director Dror Moreh, who conducted the interviews off-screen, asks about the prediction made by Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, not long after the Six Day War, that attempting to govern the Palestinians would turn Israel into a “Shin Bet state”; a prediction for which Leibowitz, who died at age 91 in 1994, was reviled by many in Israel.

Diskin, the most recent of the Shin Bet directors, agreed sadly but absolutely, with Leibowitz’s prediction. Shalom, the earliest to serve as head of Shin Bet, said, perhaps even more sadly, that the occupation had made Israel “cruel.” The commitment to Israel of these former Shin Bet directors – three of whom later served in the Knesset and cabinet (Peri, elected this year under the Yesh Atid banner is now minister of science and technology) – is beyond question.

Whether they challenge your own views, or reinforce them, or some combination of both, their voices, forged with a level of experience we will never have, are important to listen to and understand. And although they seem disillusioned with the prospect of actually achieving peace, their stories and observations make its pursuit seem all the more vital.

The Gatekeepers is a very important film. Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to see it.

April 8, 2013: Obama visit points to a more hopeful Yom Ha’Atzmaut

By Michael Regenstreif

The big story in the Jewish world during our final production days for this edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin was the three-day visit to Israel by U.S. President Barack Obama. We have photos and news items from the first two days of the visit on pages 2, 12 and 17.

As I write on March 22, we have just received breaking news that Obama concluded his time in Israel by brokering a rapprochement between Israel and Turkey. Obama’s last 30 minutes in Israel were spent with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a trailer on the runway at Ben-Gurion Airport as they spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed an apology to the Turkish people for any error that may have led to the loss of life, and agreed to complete the agreement for compensation,” an official Israeli statement said about the incident on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish boat attempting to breach Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza on May 31, 2010. It was this incident that precipitated the break in relations between Israel and Turkey, which were once allies.

The Israeli statement noted that Netanyahu and Erdoğan agreed to restore normal relations, including returning their ambassadors to their posts.

Also on his final day, Obama paid solemn visits to Yad Vashem and to the graves of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Obama placed a stone on Rabin’s grave that he brought from the foot of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington.

At Yad Vashem, Obama spoke words that are so very relevant at this time of year as we mark Yom HaShoah on April 7-8 and Yom Ha’Atzmaut on April 15-16.

“Here we hope,” Obama said at Yad Vashem following a tour and after laying a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance.

“Because, after you walk through these halls, after you pass through the darkness, there is light – a glorious view of the Jerusalem forest, with the sun shining over the historic homeland of the Jewish people; a fulfillment of the prophecy: ‘You shall live again … upon your own soil,’” he said. “Here, on your ancient land, let it be said for all the world to hear: The State of Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust. But, with the survival of a strong Jewish State of Israel, such a Holocaust will never happen again.”

Throughout his visit, the American president reiterated his strong support for Israel and the unbreakable bonds that exist between the United States and Israel, and of the need for a two-state solution. Obama also spoke honestly to both Israelis and Palestinians about the imperative of coming to a peace agreement and of overcoming the reasons and rationales that have kept them from the negotiating table over the past four years.

In the end, the Obama trip was about hope, of tikvah, for the future. To that end, the resolution with Turkey is hugely significant.

Despite all of the cruel realities of the Middle East, this Yom Ha’Atzmaut does seem ever so slightly more hopeful than any in recent memory.