October 6, 2014: Survey shows Ottawa’s Jewish community is aging

By Michael Regenstreif

Linda Kislowicz, CEO of Jewish Federations of Canada – UIA (JFC-UIA), was in Ottawa, September 17, to address a members meeting of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa at which she presented an initial demographic analysis of the 2011 National Household Survey as it pertains to Ottawa’s Jewish community.

The voluntary National Household Survey replaced the obligatory long-form Canadian Census that was conducted every 10 years, most recently in 2001. Because the 2011 survey used a different methodology – which many social scientists believe is less reliable – the data may not be as accurate as what we used to get from the long-form census.

Still, Kislowicz noted, the data from the survey is reliable enough that it can be interpreted with relative confidence and the results paint a fascinating picture that help us to understand some of the problems we face as a community and challenges we’ll have to meet in years to come.

Some results were surprising. After decades of double-digit percentage growth that far outstripped the overall growth of Canada’s national Jewish community, Ottawa’s Jewish community grew by just 2.8 per cent from 2001 to 2011 (compared to national growth of 4.7 per cent). As of 2011, the Jewish population of Ottawa was estimated to be 14,005 people, up from 13,630 in 2001.

And, while the size of the community grew, one of the most important demographic groups declined as the number of children aged 14 and younger fell to 2,255 in 2011 from 2,725 in 2001. There were almost 500 fewer children in the community in 2011 than a decade earlier.

In part, this helps to explain the trend of declining enrolment at Ottawa’s Jewish day and supplementary schools in recent years. While our schools and the community have already taken many innovative steps to ensure the long-term viability and educational enhancement of our Jewish schools, we will need to continue to be innovative and creative to bring ever greater proportions of our children to Jewish day and supplementary schools.

The real growth in Ottawa’s Jewish community – and it was as significant as the decline in the number of children – was among the middle-aged, those between 45 and 64, and among seniors, aged 65 and over.

The good news in those numbers is that middle-aged adults – the baby-boom generation – are at the peak of their earning years and, for many, their children are grown and independent. Therefore, many in this age group are well-positioned to help the community through increased charitable giving and by having more time to devote to volunteerism.

And that trend continues into the senior age group. With more and more of us remaining vigorous and healthy as we get older, the volunteer corps – upon which the community relies – becomes stronger and even more vital.

But, clearly, ours is an aging community and that trend is likely to continue. This indicates a need to focus greater attention in programming and services on older members of the community as we move forward.

One of the most interesting areas of the survey pertains to intermarriage. Ottawa’s intermarriage rate was at 39.9 per cent in 2011, up from 32 per cent in 2001. More strikingly, the intermarriage rate for couples under age 30 was 53.8 per cent. The survey also indicates that, while 28.6 per cent of young children in intermarried families are being raised Jewishly, 52.5 per cent are being raised with no religious affiliation.

This shows there is much potential for outreach to ensure the unaffiliated feel welcome in the Jewish community – and that there will be potential for enrolment growth in our Jewish schools as the unaffiliated begin to feel there is a place for them in the community.

It should also be noted that, as of 2011, Jews made up only 1.2 per cent of Ottawa’s overall population. Ethnically, this compares to the city’s growing Arab community, which comprised 4.4 per cent of the city’s population.

Finally, while any rate of poverty is unacceptable and needs to be addressed, there is a relatively low rate of poverty in Ottawa’s Jewish community at just 8.9 per cent. This is the lowest rate of poverty for all Canadian Jewish communities and compares favourably to the 13.5 per cent poverty rate overall in Ottawa.

Kislowicz’s presentation was based on the first findings of the 2011 National Household Survey. There will be more to come.

September 22, 2014: ‘Story of Isaac’ – A new understanding of an old Leonard Cohen song

By Michael Regenstreif

Leonard Cohen, the great singer-songwriter, poet and novelist from Montreal, turns 80 this week. A decade ago (three years before I moved to Ottawa to work at the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin), I was asked to write a feature for the Canadian Jewish News celebrating Cohen’s 70th birthday and highlighting some of the Jewish themes in his work.

One of the works I highlighted was “Story of Isaac,” a song from the 1960s, which was inspired by the biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son to God. The song is written in the first-person from Isaac’s perspective and ultimately, I noted, Cohen turns the song into a rabbinic-style morality lesson on the ethics of one generation sacrificing the lives of the next.

One of the things that has always drawn me to Cohen’s songs is that so many of them reveal even more meaning and nuance over time and repeated listening. I suspect that particular aspect of Cohen’s work is rooted in his boyhood study with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein – known as the Sar ha Dikdook, the Prince of the Grammarians, a prominent Talmudic scholar in both Eastern Europe and North America.

Written at the time the anti-Vietnam War movement was at its zenith, “Story of Isaac” was widely interpreted to be an anti-war song.

However, listening to the song now, just after Israel’s war with Hamas and the other terrorist groups in Gaza, I am again discovering more to be discerned from Cohen’s words.

“You who build these altars now/To sacrifice these children/You must not do it anymore,” he sings in one passage. This is the key passage I was referring to in the 2004 article about one generation sacrificing the lives of the next. This is the passage that gives the song its anti-war message.

But, now, in these words, I see a message about Gaza’s Islamist terrorists launching their barrages of rockets at Israel knowing full well that Israel will ultimately defend itself and that a consequence will be the sacrifice of innocent Palestinian children. But that was the goal of those terrorists: to score some sort of symbolic victory through the deaths of innocent children.

And no matter how hard Israel tried to prevent such deaths – and not to excuse certain incidents, such as the four children killed playing soccer on the Gaza beach, which Israel acknowledges should never have happened – they were inevitable in a war being fought against an enemy that deliberately hides its military targets in homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad claim to be religiously motivated. But what they did was build altars to sacrifice their children. This is in direct contradiction to the lesson from the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac – God does not want the wanton sacrifice of children.

I was struck by another passage in “Story of Isaac” in light of the Gaza conflict.

“And if you call me brother now/ Forgive me if I inquire/‘Just according to whose plan?’/When it all comes down to dust/I will kill you if I must/ I will help you if I can.”

Isaac’s biblical half-brother was Ishmael, regarded as the patriarch of the Arab people and the direct ancestor of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Seen in that light, Cohen, singing as Isaac, the Jewish patriarch, seems to be speaking prophetically, telling the descendants of Ishmael: “I will kill you if I must,” meaning that Isaac’s descendants, the Children of Israel, if forced to, will act defensively in such manners as Operation Protective Edge with its consequences; and “I will help you if I can,” meaning what will flow from a peace between the two peoples descended from Abraham.

As I mentioned, Cohen wrote “Story of Isaac” at the time of the Vietnam War, and the song has been widely interpreted in the context of the anti-war movement of that era. But he also wrote the song not too long after the Six Day War of 1967. Listening now, I think it is really the Arab-Israeli conflict he was singing about. “I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can,” the choice, war or peace, is there for the children of Isaac’s brother to make.

September 8, 2014: Fire trucks and ambulances were a reminder that we all need to be vigilant

By Michael Regenstreif

 The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin office is in the Joseph and Rose Ages Family Building – the location of the Soloway Jewish Community Centre (SJCC) – on the Jewish Community Campus. I try to arrive an hour or so early several times per week so that I can swim in the SJCC’s terrific indoor pool. (How lucky am I to have such facilities downstairs from my offi ce?)

Today – I’m writing on August 29 just before this issue goes to press – was one of those mornings I came early to swim. But, as I arrived at about 8 am, I saw several fire trucks and ambulances from the Ottawa Fire Services’ Hazardous Material Unit pulling into the parking lot.

Those of us who work in Jewish facilities have a heightened awareness of security. “While there is no indication of an increased threat in Ottawa,” as Jewish Federation of Ottawa President and CEO Andrea Freedman wrote in a message to the community this week about security issues, we are aware of the increased incidents of antisemitism that occurred around the world this summer during Israel’s war with Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza. And the horrible and senseless murders by a neo-Nazi outside a JCC in Kansas this past April remain a vivid memory.

So, when I saw the ambulances and fire trucks pull up beside Hillel Lodge, I assumed there must have been some sort of threat or emergency there.

But my minded quickly started to ease when I didn’t see the first responders acting with any sense of urgency – and I also quickly realized there were no police cars on the scene. Surely, in the event of an emergency, the police would be there.

Before I could walk over to see what was what, the fire trucks and ambulances pulled out of the parking lot, turned onto Broadview Avenue and parked again in the Ottawa Jewish Community School parking lot near the SJCC’s outdoor pool.

“Was there a problem at the school?” I wondered.

It turned out the firefighters and paramedics from the Hazardous Materials Unit were at the SJCC to spend the morning working with the teenagers taking an SJCC training course for potential lifeguards.

So, while, thankfully, the first responders were not on the Jewish Community Campus for an emergency situation, seeing them arrive before I knew the reason they were there was a powerful reminder that we should all be vigilant as we go about our business – whether on the Jewish Community Campus or anywhere.

Operation Protective Edge

With the seeming end of Operation Protective Edge, one can only hope that Palestinians will come to understand that the road to a future for their children lies in building a constructive society and state, not in attempting to destroy Israel. Terrorism only leads to more hate, more destruction and more death. Two states for two people – no matter how hard it is to achieve – remains the way forward.

August 25, 2014: Israel’s war with Hamas also plays out in the media, online and in the streets

By Michael Regenstreif

In the book review on page 38, I write about Nora Gold’s fine new book, Fields of Exile. Set 14 years ago as the Second Intifada was breaking out, the main theme of the novel is the effect on a Jewish graduate student at a Toronto-area university of campaigns meant to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel – campaigns that too often cross the thin line into what is now referred to as the “new antisemitism.”

Despite the fact that Judith, the book’s protagonist, is a committed liberal who had just returned to Canada after a decade in Israel where she had been active in the peace and civil rights movements and in Jewish-Arab dialogue efforts, to the anti-Zionists among her professors and fellow students, she was just a Zionist.

To those who would demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel, a Zionist is a Zionist. A liberal Zionist working for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and for fully realized civil rights and equality for Israeli Arabs is no different from an extremist who would annex the West Bank and Gaza while offering no rights to the Palestinians living there.

Fields of Exile proved to be timely reading this summer as war raged between Israel and Hamas and the other terrorist groups in Gaza – groups that have subjected Israelis to unrelenting rocket fire aimed almost exclusively at civilians and who have poured so much of their resources into building an extensive network of cross-border tunnels to be used to commit acts of terrorism.

While Israel has been fighting the Gaza-based terrorists, battles have also raged in the media, in social media and in public demonstrations. The kind of marginalization and antisemitism experienced by Judith in Fields of Exile, and by pro-Israel university students around the time of campus events like the so-called Israel Apartheid Week, have also been experienced by many of us who have Facebook or Twitter feeds or who follow the news – especially by reading articles online at sites with un-moderated comments.

This summer, Europe has witnessed levels of widespread antisemitism unheard of in the post-Holocaust era and too many disturbing reports of antisemitism have surfaced close to home in places like Calgary where a small group of pro-Israel demonstrators were assaulted, in Toronto where antisemitic rhetoric was spouted at a Al-Quds Day rally at Queen’s Park, and even here in Ottawa where the Hamas flag was proudly carried at an anti-Israel march past Parliament Hill.

Make no mistake, waving the flag of a terrorist organization whose charter explicitly calls for the killing of Jews is a profoundly antisemitic act.

I’ve read several articles and blogs this summer by people who have seen their social media feeds disintegrate into confrontations – sometimes ugly confrontations – over the conflict. I’ve seen it on my own Facebook feed where I have unfriended a couple of people after they’ve posted articles or written comments that I perceive as having crossed the line into antisemitism.

Like Judith in Fields of Exile, I see myself as a liberal person committed to peace, to universal civil rights and to the two-state solution, which I believe is the key to both Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state and to the future prosperity of the Palestinian people.

It is because I am a liberal that I support Israel – seemingly the only bastion of liberalism in the Middle East – and am profoundly disappointed to see anyone who claims to be committed to peace and civil rights finding common cause with groups with Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which have no interest in anything to do with peace, civil rights, or justice.

Those marching alongside the Hamas flag, or cheering at the Al-Quds rally, or even posting a stream of one-sided articles on Facebook that blame Israel alone for all of the ills in the Middle East, are not really advocating for peace or civil rights.

As I write on August 15, there is a cease-fire in effect and rumours that a long-term truce is close. I pray that it will have come by the time you read these words.