July 24, 2017: Hannah Moscovitch’s poignant story of Jewish refugees

By Michael Regenstreif

The Canada Scene Festival at the National Arts Centre (NAC) has been a highlight of this summer in Ottawa. Celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday, the festival presented a wide selection of first-class music, theatre, dance and visual arts productions by Canadians from across the country.

As a music lover, I attended some wonderful Canada Scene concerts at the NAC. But the absolute highlight, for me, was the magnificent production of “Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story,” a musical theatre piece created by playwright Hannah Moscovitch, who grew up in Ottawa, singer-songwriter Ben Caplan and director Christian Barry of the Halifax-based 2b theatre company.

As the show opens, we meet Caplan as The Wanderer, the play’s narrator, a constant presence who sings the songs (most of which Caplan co-wrote with director Barry), tells stories, jokes with the audience, dances, and even puts on a tallit to perform a wedding. Caplan, bearded like an Old-World Chasid, is larger than life on stage playing The Wanderer with seemingly wild abandon – like a cross between Tevye and Tom Waits. While Caplan is definitely the star and always on stage, he also fades into the background when necessary.

“Old Stock” tells the story of Moscovitch’s great-grandparents, Chaim and Chaya, Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic pogroms. Fresh off the boat in 1908, Chaim, 19, who had lost his family in a pogrom, and Chaya, already a widow at 24, meet briefly in a line to see the doctor at Pier 2 in Halifax (the forerunner to Pier 21), the entry point to Canada for immigrants and refugees from Europe at the time. Chaim was sent to the line because he had a rash and typhus had to be ruled out before he could be admitted into the country. Chaya was there because of a cough that, she insisted, was not tuberculosis.

The story picks up again in Montreal. Chaim, who was smitten with the cynical Chaya at first meeting, arranges a match with her through her father, and we see their hard life unfold in early-20th century Montreal. Although “Old Stock” is often very funny, it is a refugees’ story filled with great tragedy (and, ultimately, joy).

In addition to Caplan, there are four other musicians on stage including clarinetist Chris Weatherstone, violinist Mary Fay Coady, Graham Scott on accordion and keyboard, and Ottawa-based drummer Jamie Kronick. The songs and music – encompassing klezmer, folk, cabaret, rock, and even free jazz styles – are central to the play and are brilliantly performed by Caplan, who adds his banjo and guitar playing to several of the numbers, and the band.

As key musicians, Weatherstone and Coady sit with the band while playing music. But they also stand up and move to the centre of the set as the central characters of Chaim (Weatherstone) and Chaya (Coady). Their constant transitions from musicians to actors are seamless – thanks, no doubt, to Barry’s direction.

Based on the lives of Hannah Moscovitch’s paternal great-grandparents, “Old Stock” is a specifically Jewish story that many of us can relate to. My own grandparents arrived in Canada from Eastern Europe in that same era. It is also a universal story which will resonate with the successive waves of refugees and immigrants (and their children and grandchildren) who have continued to arrive in Canada over the 109 years since Chaim and Chaya Moscovitch got off the boat in Halifax.

The production was brilliantly staged and the play – which made me both laugh and cry – reminded me to appreciate the sacrifices and hard lives of my own ancestors.

The four-performance run of “Old Stock” at the NAC’s Azrieli Studio was all too brief. Chatting with Caplan at the opening night reception, I told him that I hoped the show would return to Ottawa for a longer run. He said discussions were underway to, hopefully, make that happen. I’m certainly anxious to see it again.

A warning though, “Old Stock” has mature themes and is not suitable for young children or those offended by profane language and/or frank references to sexuality.

June 26, 2017: My bar mitzvah year was historic

By Michael Regenstreif

I celebrated my bar mitzvah on April 22, 1967 on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat just before Passover. It’s hard to believe that a half-century has passed since I became a 13-year-old Jewish man.

My bar mitzvah year was historic. Every community, every school and every organization, it seemed, was in the midst of some significant project to mark Canada’s centennial. Expo 67, the biggest centennial project of them all, began its six-month run just a few days after my bar mitzvah.

As a Jewish community, we were happy to celebrate Canada’s milestone, and to virtually see the world at Expo. But our eyes were also on Israel, then just 19 years past its War of Independence. Another war seemed increasingly inevitable as Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, expelled the United Nations peacekeeping forces from Sinai and Gaza, and massed its troops near the Israeli border.

About six weeks after my bar mitzvah, on June 5, 1967, the war broke out. We feared for the very survival of the tiny country, the world’s only Jewish state. But, what would soon come to be known as the Six-Day War was over on June 10.

Israel had defeated the military forces of the surrounding Arab countries while capturing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan. Israel had secured its greatest ever military victory in its shortest ever war.

Israel and the Jewish Diaspora rejoiced particularly in the reunification of Jerusalem. The capital city had been divided since 1948 when the War of Independence ended with Israel in control of western Jerusalem and Jordan in control of eastern Jerusalem.

Eastern Jerusalem includes the Old City where sites like the Western Wall – a place holy to Jews for millennia – are located; a place which became forbidden to Jews. The Western Wall, or Kotel, was in the same city as the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but Jews were forbidden to go there for the first 19 years of modern statehood.

As mentioned, we rejoiced in Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and, particularly, in the reunification of Jerusalem. If ever there was an underdog of a country, surely it was Israel – surrounded by hostile Arab countries with massively larger territories, populations and militaries. That Israel prevailed in the war seemed like a miracle.

By 1967, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was four years into his retirement and widely regarded as the country’s elder statesman. Ben-Gurion, too, rejoiced in the reunification of Jerusalem, and felt Israel should retain the Golan Heights for strategic reasons, but said the rest of the captured territories should be given back. He understood there were would be unintended consequences to the military victory.

“If I could choose between peace and all the territories which we conquered last year, I would prefer peace,” Ben-Gurion said in a 1968 interview (footage from which is included in the documentary film, “Ben-Gurion: Epilogue”).

Israel eventually signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and returned the Sinai to Egypt. But, by the time of those treaties, Egypt had relinquished any claim to Gaza and Jordan had relinquished any claims to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem – leaving those areas to be settled in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Fifty years after the Six-Day War, Israel and the Palestinians have yet to reach the agreement they need to end the conflict with a two-state solution that ensures Israel the Jewish and democratic future it needs and ensures the Palestinians will be able to meet their own national aspirations.

While hopes of peace with the Palestinians have been raised and have fallen many times, recently, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman – who, as foreign minister when I met him a few years ago in Ottawa, was an uncompromising hardliner – recently said an agreement with the Palestinians is “far closer” than it has ever been before.

Asked why, Liberman credited the arrival of U.S. President Donald Trump on the scene and the realization by Arab countries “that their problem is not Israel. Israel can be a solution to the problem.

Can Liberman be right? We’ll see.

May 22, 2017: Thank you, Brenda, for everything you’ve done for the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin

By Michael Regenstreif

There are unsung heroes in almost any organization or workplace – people who work behind the scenes, outside of the spotlight, and whose effectiveness is vital to the success of the operation.

The week this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin goes to press has been an emotional one for us at the Bulletin as this is the final edition of the paper that has been laid out by our own unsung hero: Brenda Van Vliet, our production manager since January 1995.

Brenda has been on the job at the Bulletin for more than 22 years. For every issue, she has created the pages, laid out the ads on the pages (and, often, created the ads), and laid out the columns and articles – always making sure, somehow, that everything fits on the page the way it is supposed to.

She has taken the stories, photos and columns sent to her by the editor and prepared them for publication – always checking copy for any errors that may have slipped by. She has printed long-sheets of every page for proofreading and constantly updated mini versions of the newspaper that are continually referenced, and she’s uploaded the page files to Performance, the company in Smiths Falls that prints the Bulletin, always keeping in contact with the printers to ensure there are no technical errors in the files.

Some of the steps I’ve described are complicated processes. You can’t, for example, just throw a photograph on the page – they have to be converted to the right formatting for newsprint reproduction. And sometimes – particularly when we’re dealing with developing stories – changes and corrections have to be made to stories or columns right up until the last minute.

Brenda has done all of this, and much more, through 427 editions – and several design changes – of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, with constant grace and true devotion to the newspaper and to her colleagues.

I’m the third Bulletin editor with whom she has worked. She was hired by editor Myra Aronson in 1995 and continued with the late Barry Fishman and then myself.

On my first day on the job, almost 10 years ago, Barry told me how important Brenda had been to his own success as editor. And, from that day, I have relied on Brenda’s expertise, assistance, “corporate memory” and genuine friendship.

Thank you, Brenda, for everything you’ve done for the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. Have a great retirement! Working with you has been a very special experience. We’re going to miss you.

And, Thank You, Francie

I’m also going to miss working with Francie Greenspoon, the senior director of communications and community relations at the Jewish Federation of Ottawa since 2004, who is also retiring at the same time as Brenda.

Francie’s office was right next to mine and we often worked closely together over the years in making sure that important stories got told in the pages of our Jewish community newspaper.

Francie was of invaluable assistance to me when I arrived from Montreal in 2007 to work at the Bulletin – in guiding me through learning about Ottawa’s Jewish community and about the organizations, agencies, schools, congregations and people who make the community what it is.

From helping me identify someone in a photograph I didn’t recognize, to letting me know about important stories that should be covered, to being someone to bounce ideas off and discuss the issues of the day in the news, to being an advocate for the paper within Federation and the community, Francie has been a great colleague to work with.

And all I’ve mentioned here is Francie’s interaction with the Bulletin. Her work with Federation is a much bigger story.

Thank you, too, Francie, for so much. You will be missed. Best wishes for a great retirement!