November 25, 2013: Pew report ties in to many of our conversations

By Michael Regenstreif

Recently, much of the conversation in North American Jewish circles has been dominated by the Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews released at the beginning of October. Jewish federations throughout North America, including the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, and many other Jewish organizations, from local synagogues to the largest international bodies, have discussed the implications of the study and what to do about the trends it reports.

Indeed, the Pew study has been the No. 1 topic of late in much of the Jewish media.

It’s a primary focus of our report on page 3 about the Federation’s panel discussion about the Pew report, of Rabbi Howard Finkelstein’s From the Pulpit column on page 6, of a JTA report from the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America on page 17, of a JTA report of how Conservative synagogues are wrestling with an effect of growing rates of intermarriage on page 26; and is also mentioned in the article about the challenges faced by Ottawa’s synagogues on page 1, and in Ilana Belfer’s Emerging Gen column on page 3, Andrea Freedman’s publisher’s column on page 8 and Bram Bregman’s guest column on page 18.

Although the Pew report statistics apply specifically to U.S. Jews, there is much for Canadian Jews to learn from the trends. The conventional wisdom used to be that Canadian Jews were a generation behind our American cousins in societal trends. I’ve seen some Canadian commentators who agree with that, others who think we’ve already caught up.

Perhaps the Pew report statistic that has caused the greatest anxiety in Jewish circles is the one about Jews who identify as being Jewish, but as “Jews of no religion.”

The Pew report shows that the younger one is, the more likely they are to be a Jew of no religion. Overall, 22 per cent of adult U.S. Jews identify as such. Broken down by generation, we see that it ranges from just seven per cent of the greatest generation – the generation that fought in the Second World War – to 32 per cent of the millenials, those born after 1980. My own cohort, baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964, is at 19 per cent.

A bit of perspective: According to 2010 polling data, 42 per cent of Jewish Israelis identify themselves as “secular,” that is to say “Jews of no religion.” That’s almost double the findings for American Jews in the Pew report. Another 25 per cent of Jewish Israelis in the 2010 poll identified as “not very religious.”

There are many reasons for the growing trend of Jews claiming no religion and a lot of them go back to the development of liberal thought and modernity and to how we now live in North America as citizens who fully participate in all aspects of our wider society. Perhaps that’s subject fodder for future columns.

In many ways, the Pew report statistics tie in to conversations that have dominated Jewish circles for a long time on how to engage young adults – the emerging generation in their 20s and 30s – in Jewish life. It has been one of the primary focus areas of the Federation in recent years and certainly in the pages of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. Putting the Bulletin fully online – which we’re doing for the first time with this issue – is a major component of our strategy to engage the emerging generation, most of whom have abandoned printed newspapers in favour of the digital world.

Aspects of these conversations always remind me of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. In Montreal in the 1970s and ’80s, when I was a member of the emerging generation, I took part in similar discussions. And mine was hardly the first generation to have those discussions.

The same can be said about the changes we’re seeing in synagogue life in Ottawa. The models that worked a century ago had been abandoned or changed by the 1950s and ’60s. The solutions we find now will be different than they were then; and, years from now, new solutions will have to be found when today’s emerging generation is wondering how to engage their grandchildren in Jewish life.

November 11, 2013: The new Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is about to be revealed

By Michael Regenstreif

This is it. The final issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin to be published with the “old” design we’ve had for many years. Next issue – the November 25 community-wide Chanukah edition – will mark the debut of our new, fresh print design.

Virtually all newspapers go through a redesign process from time to time. Having read through back issues going back to 1937, I’ve been able to see how our look has been modernized and refreshed from era to era – both in look and content. The design we’re retiring with this issue was itself once new and fresh and was a big step forward from how the Bulletin looked 15 or so years ago.

But we’re ready for change, and we think you’re going to like the new look when you see it in a couple of weeks.

In addition to the new look, we’re also looking at more in-depth coverage and analysis of some of the important issues facing our community. One story we’re working on, for example, is a look at the issues and challenges currently being faced by Ottawa’s various synagogues.

We’re also completely redoing our website at ottawajewishbulletin.com. Until now, our site has typically included just a couple of articles and a long list of the headlines from the edition’s stories and columns.

The new ottawajewishbulletin.com will be a dynamic site that will include – for the first time – an online version of the complete print edition of the Bulletin. With an Internet connection, you’ll be able to read the paper on your computer or tablet, and we’ll feature additional content like important breaking news and regularly updated news stories and features from Israel and around the Jewish world – much more content than we’ve ever had room for in the print edition. You’ll want to check the site regularly for new stories.

The Bulletin will remain a forum for our Jewish community to engage on issues of interest and concern. As always, we’ll continue to welcome your letters and guest columns. This is your community newspaper, so let your voice be heard.

It’s been a long process. It all started about two years ago with discussions at the Jewish Federation of Ottawa’s Communications and Community Relations Committee. That led to the creation of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin Review Committee, which undertook a thorough review of the paper – including an extensive readers’ survey. It was the committee’s report and recommendation to the Federation Board, more than a year ago, which led to the award-winning team at David Berman Communications being commissioned to redesign the print edition and create our new website.

And, we’ve created new Facebook and Twitter accounts. Like us at facebook.com/ Ottawajewishbulletin or follow us at twitter. com/@JBulletin to stay up to date with the print and web editions of the Bulletin.

So, we’re ready to celebrate this milestone in Ottawa Jewish Bulletin history. Please join us on Tuesday, November 26, 7 pm, at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre for our launch event at the Federation’s members’ meeting. The team from David Berman Communications will give us a guided tour through the redesign and new website and you’ll hear some brief remarks and comments from columnists Jason Moscovitz, Barbara Crook, Mira Sucharov – and me.

Something else that hasn’t changed in many years at the Bulletin are our subscription rates despite constantly rising printing and mailing costs over the past decade or more. They will have to go up in 2014, but we are offering an opportunity to subscribe or extend your current subscription for up to two years at the old rate. Act soon, though, because the offer expires at the end of 2013.

See the ad on page 22.

Kashrut in Quebec

There is a JTA story on page 8 that asks whether resurging nationalism will lead to another exodus of Jews from Quebec. Tensions have risen recently in the wake of the minority Parti Québécois (PQ) provincial government’s proposing its Charter of Quebec Values.

Now, we’ve received a report that François Gendron, Quebec’s agriculture minister, is planning to introduce new regulations governing kosher and halal meat production. This would be over and above the regulations already enforced across Canada by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

This is worrisome because the PQ said in 2012 that the slaughter of animals for halal meat production “slams directly against Québécois values.”

Lawrence Bergman, the only Jewish member of Quebec’s National Assembly, pointed out that the PQ statement was ethnic bashing and that it was “odious, unacceptable and reeks of intolerance.”

October 28, 2013: From DP camp to the Supreme Court, Abella discusses her remarkable life

By Michael Regenstreif

The Soloway Jewish Community Centre (JCC) began a series of “community conversations,” October 17, with an extraordinary evening featuring the Honourable Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada, one of this country’s most accomplished and impressive individuals.

Guided by moderator Adam Dodek, a University of Ottawa law professor and a member of the Soloway JCC board of directors, Abella talked about her life, her family and her work with wit, humour and emotion, displaying an astonishing memory as she recalled people, incidents and cases – even the minute details of cases and case law (whether she was involved in them or not) – with ease.

Abella was born in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany in 1946. Her Polish Jewish parents had been married in 1939. Her father, Jacob Silberman, a lawyer, was liberated from Theresienstadt, while her mother, Fanny, had survived several Nazi camps and was liberated from Buchenwald. They were reunited after the war. In the DP camp, her father represented the legal interests of fellow residents.

When the family came to Canada as refugees and settled in Toronto in 1950, Silberman discovered he was ineligible to practise law because he was not a Canadian citizen. He became a successful insurance agent, but young Rosalie determined then she would grow up to become a lawyer. One of the most poignant and emotional moments of the evening came when she discussed the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the provision that only citizens could practise law in Canada. Wiping a tear away, she said she wished her father, who died in 1970, had still been alive to see that day.

Also a classical piano prodigy, she graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1964.

By then married to historian Irving Abella – who would later co-write the essential book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, and serve as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress – Abella graduated from the University of Toronto law school in 1970 and established a practice in civil and criminal law.

In 1976, at age 29, Abella was appointed a judge of the Ontario Family Court, where she broke ground as the first Jewish woman to become a judge in Canada, the youngest ever judge in Canada and the first pregnant judge in Canadian history.

Her later judicial appointments – among many other accomplishments – would include the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992 and the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.

Abella was the sole commissioner of the federal government’s 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment. In her report, she coined the term “employment equity” and conceived the equity strategy of removing barriers to employment faced by women, aboriginal peoples, visible minorities and the disabled. A Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 1989 added Abella’s recommendations to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – and those recommendations have also been subsequently adopted by the governments of several other countries.

The stories and anecdotes Abella told kept the full house enthralled. She was particularly inspired when she talked about her parents and how they built new lives for themselves in Canada after surviving the Holocaust. Relatively late in life – after she was widowed – Abella’s mother became a successful real estate agent in Toronto.

Abella said her parents, who lost their first child in the Holocaust, never allowed the tragic events they lived through cast a pall over their lives. The Silberman home, she said, was the happiest of anyone she knew growing up.

Abella said she feels very much a part of Ottawa’s Jewish community, noting that her grandchild attends the Soloway JCC’s Ganon Preschool. She also took great pride in mentioning that her two sons, Jacob, who was in the audience, and Zachary both grew up to become lawyers.