Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes

Wiseman, Laura

Lipinsky, Jack

English

Conservative Jewish Education in Toronto: An Interview with Dr. Aaron M. Nussbaum, Founding Director of United Synagogue Day School

CJS Editors

258
Canadian Jewish Heritage Material Repositories / 
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Canadian Jewish Heritage Material Repositories /
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259Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 38, 2024
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, Vancouver 
6184 Ash Street, Vancouver, BC V5Z 3G9 
Archivist: Alysa Routtenberg  
Phone: (604) 638-7286 | Museum: (604) 257-5199 | Fax: (604) 257-5198  
archives@jewishmuseum.ca | http://www.jewishmuseum.ca/info/archives_collections/ 
 
VANCOUVER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE, Vancouver 
50 - 950 W 41st Ave Vancouver, BC V5Z 2N7  
Executive Director: Nina Krieger | Archivist: Chase Nelson.  
Phone: (604) 264- 0499 | Fax: (604) 264-0497   
info@vhec.org, shylaseller@vhec.org | http://vhec.org
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN ALBERTA, Calgary 
1607-90th Ave. S.W., Calgary, Alberta T2V 4V7 
Archivist: Roberta Kerr | Program Coordinator/Office Manager: Katie Baker  
Phone: (403) 444-3171 | Fax: (403) 253-7915  
jhssa@shaw.ca | www.jhssa.org
JEWISH ARCHIVES & HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF EDMONTON 
& NORTHERN ALBERTA (JAHSENA), Edmonton 
10220-156 St., Suite 200, Edmonton, AB T5P 2R1 
Archivist: Carly Heffner  
Phone: (780) 489-2809 | Fax: (780) 481-1854  
jahsena@shaw.ca | http://www.jahsena.ca/jahsena_001.htm
JEWISH HERITAGE CENTRE OF WESTERN CANADA, Winnipeg 
C116 - 123 Doncaster Street, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3N 2B2 
Archivist: Andrew Morrison 
Phone: (204) 477-7460 (ext. 7461) | Fax: (204) 477-7465 
jhc@jhcwc.org | http://www.jhcwc.mb.ca/
ONTARIO JEWISH ARCHIVES, Toronto 
4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario, M2R 3V2 
Archives Director: Dara Solomon | Managing Director: Donna Bernardo-Ceriz  
Phone: (416) 635-2883 (ext. 187) | Fax: (416) 635-1408  
oja1@ujafed.org | www.ontariojewisharchives.org/
OTTAWA JEWISH ARCHIVES 
21 Nadolny Sachs Private, Ottawa, ON K2A 1R9 
Archivist: Teigan Goldsmith  
Phone: (613) 798-4696 (ext. 60) | Fax: (613) 798-4695 
archives@jewishottawa.com | http://www.jewishottawa.org/page.html?ArticleID=33986 
 
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, Ottawa 
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4 
Archives search: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/arch 
Reference questions by phone: 1-866-578-7777 and by email: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/assis-
tance-request-form
ALEX DWORKIN CANADIAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, Montreal 
Suite 211, 7050 Avenue Victoria (corner Jean Talon West), Montreal, Que., H4P 2P1 
Archives Director: Janice Rosen  
Phone: (514) 931-7531  
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260
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JEWISH PUBLIC LIBRARY ARCHIVES, Montreal 
1 carré Cummings Square, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine Rd., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3W 1M6 
Archives Director: Maya Pasternak 
Phone: (514) 345-2627 (ext. 015) 
archives@jplmontreal.org | http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org 
  
THE MONTREAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM ARCHIVES 
1 Carré Cummings Square, (5151, Côte Ste–Catherine Road) Montréal, Québec H3W 1M6 
Phone: (514) 345-2605 | Fax: (514) 344-2651   
info@mhmc.ca | www.mhmc.ca
SAINT JOHN JEWISH HISTORICAL MUSEUM ARCHIVES 
91 Leinster Street, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L 1J2 
Curator/Archivist: Katherine Biggs-Craft   
Phone: (506) 633-1833 | Fax: (506) 642-9926 
sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca | http://jewishmuseumsj.com           


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Ravvin, Norman

125Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
Norman Ravvin
City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, 
Poland, October 2023
126
Norman Ravvin / City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023
If you have not been to Łódź you cannot imagine its texture, the strange uniqueness 
of its streetscape. Walking, one has the sense of a written-over past, or pasts, with 
rough edges sticking through from departed versions of the city, in a way that is 
unlike North American, European, even other Polish cities. What is the character of 
this unfinishedness, this sense of different cities being in view all at once? Something 
of the late nineteenth, early twentieth-century streetscape remains: one can sense its 
integrity, and how the boomtown developed a look, a tenement style, a street grid, all 
in a rush in the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You find 
this city in the facades of buildings on major streets—take a walk along Jaracza then 
onto Wschodnia up to Północna, and certainly along Piotrkowska, the long through-
street that ends at the octagonal, now fully under reconstruction “Freedom” square. 
Set into this city are postwar Soviet-style structures, which appear in the extant pre-
World War Two cityscape. These communist-era styles are varied. There are early 
Stalinist structures, big blocks with some decorative flourishes, sometimes with an 
adapted version of the traditional carriageway leading to an interior courtyard. But 
then there are the routinized, sometimes colourfully painted, rectangular buildings 
found in all Polish cities, without any decorative markings at all, their facades as flat 
and utilitarian as a Soviet-era packing box. 
A prewar sukkah in Łódź.
All photos by Norman Ravvin
127Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
The walker catches glimpses of past lives and city infrastructure by entering back 
courtyards, which are hidden by the facades that buildings show to the street. Tene-
ment courtyards reveal a pre-World War Two Polish footprint, where one sees both 
gentrification and ruin, detritus, graffitied walls and a potpourri of every possibility 
of brick and fresco and storage shed, which have met with the ups and downs of 
postwar years. Sometimes, hidden in these places, are tell-tale artifacts of Jewish eco-
nomic and social life, timber caravansaries and double-height sukkah structures left 
behind by their owners when they were forced from their homes by the Germans.
In different states of completion, all over the city, there is renewal. This often comes 
with a sign acknowledging European Union funding. The focus is on the streets 
themselves, on new tramway lines, set into intricate granite and stone beds, with 
attention to wide slate and cobblestone sidewalks and curbing, iron grates around 
trees, buried spotlights, and beds of neatly planted wild roses that divide the roadway 
from pedestrians and cyclists. It may be the EU bucks that make the difference, but 
Łódź’s redesign strategies please the eye and the foot.
Alongside the array of improvements, you see the utter failure of businesses (one 
wonders about the lives of people who owned these) that did not survive the drawn-
out process of street repair and the epidemic years. On block after block of aged 
buildings, some with repainted fronts, others with the tell-tale deterioration of de-
cades on their stucco surfaces, one finds the new stuff under foot, and boarded, 
graffiti-marked and derelict storefronts alongside. 
Workers’ tenements on Ogrodowa.
128
Norman Ravvin / City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023
There is something unsettling about this in-the-midstness, while other aspects of 
city life—viable businesses, the dwellings on upper floors, go dark. I wonder as I 
walk: where did the proprietor of this florist, that pharmacy, this fryzjer go when 
their efforts flopped in view of endless infrastructure repair? And then there are 
pieces of the streetscape that are entirely opened up, where old buildings have been 
removed and construction crews are in the process of clearing the site, leaving sec-
tions of Łódź littered with mounds of red brick and other remnants of pulled down 
buildings. (Here I cannot convey the variety of new developments that are a part of 
the city’s characteristic streetscape, some of them remarkable examples of reuse of 
the city’s manufacturing infrastructure).
One way to experience all this without a visit is to watch the Polish film Ida, which 
won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2015. The film’s main character leaves a convent 
in the countryside to visit a relative in what the film presents as early sixties Łódź. 
Ida rides a tram and watches the streets pass, some reflected and doubled in the glass 
of the tram window. When the director, Pawel Pawlikowski, sent his location scouts 
out to plan these scenes there were plenty of locations where communist Łódź, still 
marked by prewar Łódź, were on display in ways that would require little set dress-
ing. Maybe a wary Pole can spot continuity errors in Pawlikowski’s work, but for the 
rest of us it’s a time capsule; the city in 2012 or 2013 is easily transported via silvery, 
pewter, and black and white footage into the past.
Walking in the city, what did I pass on Ulica Dowborczyków as I made my way to 
the conference devoted to the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb but the apartment 
building where one of Ida’s characters “lives.” Wanda Grus is ground down by her 
work in corrupt courtrooms, and she shares a grisly wartime Jewish past with her 
niece Ida. I discovered that the building provided the film set for Grus’s house from 
a plaque attached to its front fence. If you look at stills and clips from Ida it is easy 
to find scenes where the main characters enter the throughway that leads upstairs 
and into the building’s rear courtyard. I wondered about the building’s age. It didn’t 
look prewar, nor was it built in a suitably utilitarian, communist style. It had an in-
discriminate character, which I consider to be inhabited by the afterlife of the movie. 
It evoked not the historical contexts I describe above—not the early twentieth-cen-
tury boomtown, not the postwar communist experiment in failed social change, not 
even post-Wall Poland. No. It was the cinematic would-be imagined Łódź of the 
early sixties that came at me, ghostly, on Ulica Dowborczyków. So it was with Chava 
Rosenfarb, who worked on her major novel of the city, Der boim fun lebn (The Tree 
of Life), in faraway Montreal, imagining the Łódź of her youth, its cloth barons, its 
Jewish slums, the work floors of cotton manufacture that predated her experience in 
Montreal sweatshops. 
129Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
Travel, writing, cinematic viewing and reading, these are the alchemical methods by 
which one steps back into any version of Łódź you might choose to inhabit. 
II
The last thing I saw of our conference, “Chava Rosenfarb and Jewish Female Writers 
of the Twentieth Century,” was on the Internet, in online news in Gazeta Wyborcza. 
There I found a report that an “arcade” in central Łódź had been renamed “Pasaż 
Chavy Rosenfarb.” This was the last interaction between the conference-goers and 
the city itself, including descendants of Rosenfarb and their families. In the posted 
press photos the family and a few other intrepid conference goers pose with locals 
to acknowledge the blue and red street sign bearing the new name. The photos are 
cropped so one can’t tell exactly where the new “passage” is, just off Piotrokows-
ka, near to one of the renovated manufacturing complexes where Łódź’s redbrick 
nineteenth-century infrastructure is repurposed for twenty-first century business, 
socializing, and cultural facilities. The Rosenfarb “passage” is located at the heart of 
the new Łódź, where young people and those with means go to enjoy the city. This 
is a juxtaposition with some irony. Chava Rosenfarb was born in Łódź and spent her 
youth and adolescence in the city as part of a working-class family a generation 
removed from its village antecedents. Buildings associated with her youth still stand 
but they are in faraway, less touristic neighbourhoods than that of Piotrkowska. She 
attended a Bundist Yiddish day school where her idealistic teachers made an im-
pact on her imaginative life, and then a Polish-language high school, with its more 
The Rosenfarb family tenement, 
where Chava lived in her youth.
130
Norman Ravvin / City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023
cosmopolitan approach to language and culture. All this was disrupted by the Ger-
man occupation of the city on September 8, 1939, and Rosenfarb’s literary output, 
best exemplified by her novel Der boim fun lebn, depicts her prewar life and the Ho-
locaust calamity that interrupted it, first in the Łódź Ghetto and then at Auschwitz 
and other German camps that transformed the nature of central Poland. 
The international conference devoted to Rosenfarb took place in October 2023, suit-
ably close to Bałuty, the neighbourhood where the Germans corralled some 164,000 
Łódź Jews, and not far from the large Jewish cemetery that remains largely intact, a 
mate to the similarly overwhelming and beautiful Okopowa cemetery not far from 
the centre of Warsaw.
Conference-goers represented a variety of Rosenfarbists, some who have been ded-
icated to her for years and others, younger, who have come to her work as part of 
recent interest in Yiddish culture and literature. There were Poles among the people 
who gave papers, as well as Montrealers, young scholars and writers from Sweden, 
London, New York, California, Toronto, and elsewhere. Some focus their energies 
on translating Rosenfarb, helping to move her writing into a variety of European 
languages, while furthering, too, the substantial amount of her work that has ap-
A repurposed factory not far from 
the Rosenfarb family tenement.
131Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
peared over the years in English. Translation is remaking Chava Rosenfarb in our 
time. Especially in Poland, and particularly in Łódź, Rosenfarb has reappeared, like a 
returning traveler, as a writer of the Polish city where she grew up, a woman whose 
work is being newly woven into the fabric of the city’s culture, its view of itself, its 
ongoing efforts to address the city’s important Jewish past that is largely unseen in 
daily life. The resurgence of Rosenfarb presents an interesting possibility of Jewish-
ness reasserting itself in new ways.
A divide was apparent among the conference-goers with regard to these kinds of 
projects, signaling disagreement about their motivation and potential for success. I 
tend to view such things with open eyes, with a visitor’s willingness to take things 
as they come, unwarily. But there is good reason at times to use a colder eye to look 
on things like the much loved bronze street-side statues of the Jewish poet Julian 
Tuwim and the Jewish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, to recognize that they represent 
a certain kind of Jewish Pole or Polish Jew, an artistic figure so fully accepted by the 
global cultural canon that placing them on the main drag may not be the act of rec-
onciliation that the open-eyed among us receive it as. Of course, a good guide will 
lead you to the grave of Tuwim’s mother in the Jewish cemetery and tell you of her 
terrible murder by Germans in Otwock and of the son’s efforts to have her buried 
properly in Łódź after the war. But this brings the awfulness of German Nazis in 
wartime into the picture, and they are fortunately no longer walking the byways of 
Piotrkowska in the city they renamed Litzmannstadt. 
The Julian Tuwim Monument 
amidst a media scrum.
132
Norman Ravvin / City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023
Placing the Rosenfarb “passage” near the repurposed section off Piotrkowska called 
the “Off Center,” a set of refurbished buildings, has its own charge and challenge; 
what one thinks of such things depends upon whether one is a Canadian novelist, an 
American academic, a Polish translator of Jewish women writers, or simply a tourist 
without memory concerns, who is in search of a good Polish lager. In the photo-
graphs taken at the unveiling of the Rosenfarb “passage” we see Rosenfarb’s daughter 
Goldie Morgentaler, who has been an active translator and supporter of her mother’s 
work all her adult life. An academic herself, Morgentaler has maintained two par-
allel streams of activity in her professional life. At the University of Lethbridge in 
southern Alberta she taught Dickens alongside American authors until her recent 
retirement. While her mother was alive and after she maintained a steady stream of 
translating projects, creating networks of reception in Canada and abroad that con-
tinue to bear fruit today. The latest of these is the Łódź conference itself, mounted by 
the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, an impressive outfit in a modernist building 
with its own landscape of commemorative objects on suburban grounds, as well as 
by the University of Łódź. The opening of the conference included statements of 
welcome from local politicians, and this had a certain sweetness to it—at least for 
the open-eyed among us—because it was only a few days prior to the conference’s 
opening that the awful Law and Justice party, whose nationalist activities raised one 
cynical and destructive policy after the next with regard to national memory, was 
tossed out in an election that many Poles viewed as the most important one since the 
end of the communist era. 
The Rosenfarbists then, along with their colleagues who gave papers on related au-
thors and movements—from Cynthia Ozick to Adele Wiseman, to Esther Kreitman 
and Rokhl Korn— came to do their work in close proximity to great and important 
change in Poland.
One of the issues that conference attendees may have taken home with them is the 
question: What will become of Rosenfarb and her work in Poland in the future? 
Reading her in Polish is something I cannot experience—I know her Tree of Life in 
Morgentaler’s English translation and have grappled, too, with it and other work, 
including Rosenfarb’s short stories, poems, and essays, in the original Yiddish. As her 
works become a part of the reception of her birthplace, in Polish readers’ hands they 
become something new. 
133Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
It has been the Edelman Center’s ongoing project to bring Rosenfarb out in Polish 
translation. The conference included something related to this—a musical setting of 
some of Rosenfarb’s earliest poems, written in Yiddish in the ghetto, taken from her 
on the ramp at Auschwitz, and reconstituted by memory after the war. The frag-
ments of poetry the vocalist sang over a pulsing, at times strident, at times meditative 
musical setting, divided the room. Here the open- and cold-eyed listeners chose 
their own view of new forms of reception of Rosenfarb. Led by the music’s composer, 
with an electric guitar hung over his shoulder at the level where one might swing 
a scythe, the female vocalist, a clarinetist, keyboardist, and accordionist produced a 
kind of art theatre, a soundtrack for a sad and beautiful eastern European world out 
of often repeated words, among them wolność, the Polish translation of the Yiddish 
freiheit (freedom), that is the central motif in the early poem “Dort oif yener zeit.” 
This is a ghetto poem whose English translation is titled “Freedom.” Like the Ros-
enfarb passage off Piotrkowska, and a variety of provocative murals that have been 
placed around the city to commemorate Rosenfarb and her work (one is called “Tree 
of Life” after the novel), the music created its own painful atmosphere reminiscent of 
such Polish figures as Tadeusz Konwicki and Bruno Schulz. It was itself evocative of 
The Izrael Poznański Palace 
reflected in street art.
134
Norman Ravvin / City, Writer, Conference: 
A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023
the Polish moment, of efforts at reconciliation, of return to the past, to its vanished 
Jewish literary life and personalities. 
For the cold-eyed in the conference audience there was something disconnected and 
alien in the performance, in its response to Rosenfarb’s ghetto poetry. I didn’t feel 
this way, but I understood this way of responding after talking to people who did. 
If one were to make a documentary film that would capture the outcomes of “Chava 
Rosenfarb and Jewish Female Writers of the Twentieth Century,” the greatest and 
most pressing challenge would be to convey this range of emotions, responses, and 
judgements regarding the outcome of a revival of interest in Rosenfarb in Poland, and 
especially in Łódź. These issues may not reverberate strongly in Montreal, New York, 
or Stockholm, but those of us who attended the conference bring these issues home. 
They lurk in the photographs we took, in things we’ll tell friends and family, and, one 
would hope, in what we write or make in response to what we saw and heard. 
Plac Wolności under repair at the top of Ulica Piotrkowska.
Łódź is a sad and beautiful place. This is my view and would not be shared by ev-
eryone I spent time with in the city. It’s a true palimpsest, a thing written over by 
calamitous history and also one created originally by a particularly Polish kind of 
multiculturalism, once fed by its Polish, Jewish, German, and Russian influences. To 
the visitor it is a puzzle to be pieced together. Increasingly, Chava Rosenfarb is a part 
of that puzzle. It will take some time to recognize what shape her part in the puzzle 
will take on Piotrkowska, with the Edelman activists, and in the minds of translators, 
visitors and readers.


City, Writer, Conference: A Chava Rosenfarb Conference in Łódź, Poland, October 2023

163Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
Canadian Jewish Heritage Material Repositories /
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Canadian Jewish Heritage Material Repositories / 
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JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, Vancouver 
6184 Ash Street, Vancouver, BC V5Z 3G9 
Archivist: Alysa Routtenberg  
Phone: (604) 638-7286 | Museum: (604) 257-5199 | Fax: (604) 257-5198  
archives@jewishmuseum.ca | http://www.jewishmuseum.ca/info/archives_collections/ 
 
VANCOUVER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE, Vancouver 
50 - 950 W 41st Ave Vancouver, BC V5Z 2N7  
Executive Director: Nina Krieger | Archivist: Chase Nelson.  
Phone: (604) 264- 0499 | Fax: (604) 264-0497   
info@vhec.org, shylaseller@vhec.org | http://vhec.org
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN ALBERTA, Calgary 
1607-90th Ave. S.W., Calgary, Alberta T2V 4V7 
Archivist: Roberta Kerr | Program Coordinator/Office Manager: Katie Baker  
Phone: (403) 444-3171 | Fax: (403) 253-7915  
jhssa@shaw.ca | www.jhssa.org
JEWISH ARCHIVES & HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF EDMONTON 
& NORTHERN ALBERTA (JAHSENA), Edmonton 
10220-156 St., Suite 200, Edmonton, AB T5P 2R1 
Archivist: Carly Heffner  
Phone: (780) 489-2809 | Fax: (780) 481-1854  
jahsena@shaw.ca | http://www.jahsena.ca/jahsena_001.htm
JEWISH HERITAGE CENTRE OF WESTERN CANADA, Winnipeg 
C116 - 123 Doncaster Street, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3N 2B2 
Archivist: Andrew Morrison 
Phone: (204) 477-7460 (ext. 7461) | Fax: (204) 477-7465 
jhc@jhcwc.org | http://www.jhcwc.mb.ca/
ONTARIO JEWISH ARCHIVES, Toronto 
4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario, M2R 3V2 
Archives Director: Dara Solomon | Managing Director: Donna Bernardo-Ceriz  
Phone: (416) 635-2883 (ext. 187) | Fax: (416) 635-1408  
oja1@ujafed.org | www.ontariojewisharchives.org/
OTTAWA JEWISH ARCHIVES 
21 Nadolny Sachs Private, Ottawa, ON K2A 1R9 
Archivist: Teigan Goldsmith  
Phone: (613) 798-4696 (ext. 60) | Fax: (613) 798-4695 
archives@jewishottawa.com | http://www.jewishottawa.org/page.html?ArticleID=33986 
 
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, Ottawa 
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4 
Archives search: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/arch 
Reference questions by phone: 1-866-578-7777 and by email: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/assis-
tance-request-form
ALEX DWORKIN CANADIAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, Montreal 
Suite 211, 7050 Avenue Victoria (corner Jean Talon West), Montreal, Que., H4P 2P1 
Archives Director: Janice Rosen  
Phone: (514) 931-7531  
archives@cjarchives.ca | http://www.cjarchives.ca
165Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 39, 2024
JEWISH PUBLIC LIBRARY ARCHIVES, Montreal 
1 carré Cummings Square, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine Rd., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3W 1M6 
Archives Director: Maya Pasternak 
Phone: (514) 345-2627 (ext. 015) 
archives@jplmontreal.org | http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org 
  
THE MONTREAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM ARCHIVES 
1 Carré Cummings Square, (5151, Côte Ste–Catherine Road) Montréal, Québec H3W 1M6 
Phone: (514) 345-2605 | Fax: (514) 344-2651   
info@mhmc.ca | www.mhmc.ca
SAINT JOHN JEWISH HISTORICAL MUSEUM ARCHIVES 
91 Leinster Street, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L 1J2 
Curator/Archivist: Katherine Biggs-Craft   
Phone: (506) 633-1833 | Fax: (506) 642-9926 
sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca | http://jewishmuseumsj.com           


227Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 26, 2018
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ALEX DWORKIN CANADIAN JEWISH ARCHIVES /
ARCHIVES JUIVES CANADIENNES ALEX DWORKIN, Montreal 
1590 Avenue Docteur Penfield, Montreal, QC, H3G 1C5 
Archives Director: Janice Rosen
Tel: 514-931-7531 ext. 2 | archives@cjarchives.ca | http://www.cjarchives.ca
ARON MUSEUM, TEMPLE EMANU-EL-BETH-SHOLOM, Montreal  
4100 Sherbrooke Street West, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1A5 
Tel: 514-937-3575| http://www.templemontreal.ca 
BETH TZEDEC REUBEN AND HELENE DENNIS MUSEUM, Toronto 
1700 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, M5P 3K3 
Curator: Dorion Liebgott
Tel: 416-781-3511 | museum@beth-tzedec.org | http://www.beth-tzedec.org/museum/
EDWARD BRONFMAN MUSEUM, CONGREGATION SHAAR HASHOMAYIM, Montreal 
450 Kensington Avenue, Westmount, QC, H3Y 3A2  
Curators: Elaine Hershenfield and Deanna Mendelson 
Tel: 514-937-9471 | admin@theshaar.org | http://www.shaarhashomayim.org/museum
JEWISH ARCHIVES AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF EDMONTON
AND NORTHERN ALBERTA (JAHSENA), Edmonton 
10220-156 St., Suite 200, Edmonton, AB, T5P 2R1 
Archivist: Colleen Paull
Tel: 780-489-2809 | jahsena@shaw.ca | http://www.jahsena.ca/jahsena_001.htm
JEWISH GENERAL HOSPITAL ARCHIVES / ARCHIVES DE L’HOPITAL GÉNÉRAL JUIF, Montreal
3755 Chemin de la Côte Ste-Catherine Rd., A-200, Montreal, Qc, H3T 1E2
Archivist: Linda Lei
Tel: 514-340-822, ext. 3277 | legacy@jgh.mcgill.ca | http://www.jgh.ca/en/archives
JEWISH HERITAGE CENTRE OF WESTERN CANADA, Winnipeg 
C116 - 123 Doncaster Street, Winnipeg, MB, R3N 2B2 
Archivist: Andrew Morrison
Tel: 204-477-7460 ext. 7461 | jhc@jhcwc.org | http://www.jhcwc.mb.ca/
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN ALBERTA, Calgary 
1607-90th Ave. S.W., Calgary, AB, T2V 4V7 
Archives Director: Agi Romer Segal
Tel: 403-444-3171 | jhssa@shaw.ca | http://jhssa.org/
JEWISH MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES OF BC, Vancouver 
6184 Ash Street, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 3G9 
Archivist: Alysa Routtenberg
Tel: 604-638-7286 | Museum: 604-257-5199 | archives@jewishmuseum.ca | http://www.jewishmuseum.ca
JEWISH PUBLIC LIBRARY ARCHIVES / ARCHIVES DE LA BIBLIOTÈQUE PUBLIQUE JUIVE, Montreal 
1 carré Cummings Square, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine Rd., Montreal, QC, H3W 1M6 
Archivist: Jessica Zimmerman | Archivist Emeritus: Eiran Harris
Tel: 514-345-2627, extensions 3015, 3000 | archives@jplmontreal.org | http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA / BIBLIOTHÈQUE ET ARCHIVES CANADA, Ottawa 
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4 
Archives search: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/arch 
Reference questions by phone: 1-866-578-7777 (toll-free in Canada and US) 
Reference questions by email: http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/assistance-request-form
229Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 26, 2018
MONTREAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM ARCHIVES /
ARCHIVES DU MUSÉE DE L’HOLOCAUSTE DE MONTRÉAL, Montreal 
1 Carré Cummings Square, 5151, Côte Ste-Catherine Road, Montreal, QC, H3W 1M6 
Tel: 514-345-2605 | info@museeholocauste.ca |  http://www.museeholocauste.ca
MUSEUM OF JEWISH MONTREAL / MUSÉE DU MONTRÉAL JUIF, Montreal 
4040 St. Laurent #R01, Montreal, QC, H2W 1Y8 
Director /Directeur: Zev Moses
Tel: 514-840-9300 | info@imjm.ca | http://mimj.ca
ONTARIO JEWISH ARCHIVES, Toronto 
4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, M2R 3V2 
Archives Director: Dara Solomon
Tel: 416-635-2883 ext. 187 | oja1@ujafed.org | www.ontariojewisharchives.org 
OTTAWA JEWISH ARCHIVES, Ottawa 
21 Nadolny Sachs Private, Ottawa, ON, K2A 1R9 
Tel: 613-798-4696 ext. 260 | archives@jewishottawa.com | http://www.jewishottawa.org 
 
SAINT JOHN JEWISH HISTORICAL MUSEUM ARCHIVES, Saint John 
91 Leinster Street, Saint John, NB, E2L 1J2 
Curator/Archivist: Katherine Biggs-Cra! 
Tel: 506-633-1833 | sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca | http://jewishmuseumsj.com


Fox , Sandra

Review: Rebecca Margolis, Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission

Lambert, Josh

Review: Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values

Gaffen, Fred

13Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 35, 2023
Letter to the Editor
This letter to the editor is in response to Mark Celinscak’s excellent article, “The Ho-
locaust and the Canadian War Museum Controversy”, Vol. 26, 2018 which I came across 
recently online.  I had earlier read his book Distance from the Belsen Heap:  Allied Forc-
es and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 2015.  The purpose of this letter 
is also to elucidate or possibly add information that might offer additional insight into 
events leading to the Holocaust gallery uproar in 1988 at the Canadian War Museum.
The War Museum had been starved for funds since its opening in 1967.  Governments 
and the bureaucracy allowed neglect to such an extent that wood had to be recycled 
for displays.  Necessary photocopying had to be taken to sympathetic bureaucrats 
at National Defence.  The original version was to be a Holocaust Gallery primarily 
but also include a display on the contributions of Jewish Canadian servicemen and 
women.  In exchange for this display space, money would be raised from the Jewish 
community for this exhibition and the expected large surplus from donations would 
be used to pay for refurbishing the entire war museum.  There had been an Anne 
Frank travelling exhibit in 1993 which had increased visitation.  Several leaders of 
the Friends of the Canadian War Museum had strongly opposed providing space at 
the museum on the grounds it had nothing to do with the purpose of the museum, 
which was to tell the story of Canada’s military history.  A CWM consultative or 
advisory committee with representatives from the Legion, Veterans Affairs, Nation-
al Defence as well as prominent Canadian military historians, had been allowed to 
stop meeting as it was not deemed essential and cutting it was a way to save money. 
Members of the Ottawa Jewish community warned staff a military museum and a 
Holocaust gallery should be kept apart, not together.
One of those leading the charge to “save” the war museum was the distinguished 
Canadian Veteran “Cliff Chadderton”, Director of War Amputations of Canada, who 
oversaw a coalition of other veterans’ groups.  Chadderton had gained considerable 
experience denouncing the CBC mini-series “The Valour and the Horror” produced 
by the McKenna brothers.  The newspapers and military magazines such as Scott 
Taylor’s Esprit de Corps soon became replete with denunciations from veterans and 
those whose family members had fought on behalf of this country or had some con-
nection with Canada’s military past.  The political heat became white hot.
The Senate subcommittee Veterans Affairs held hearings and called witnesses to tes-
tify live on CPAC (Parliamentary channel) as to what had transpired.  It was surpris-
ingly learned that the gallery had grown in size from 2,000 to 6,000 feet to become 
the largest exhibition gallery.  Other stories deserving recognition in the displays 
would have to be put aside.  This justifiably angered those whose stories had been 
omitted for lack of space.
14 Letter to the editor
The late Professor Desmond Morton had described the Holocaust Gallery as a pro-
posed “gallery of horrors”.  He feared it would attract those mainly wanting to see a 
horror show.  Early in the discussions, there had been a proposal that the Holocaust 
Gallery have a separate entrance at the rear or on the side of the building where 
supposedly visitors could purchase separate tickets.  Someone wisely advised that 
having visitors to the military history areas going through the front door and others 
entering the Holocaust Gallery through the back door might not be a good idea.
Professor Martin Celinscak in his book, Distance from the Belsen Heap:  Allied Forc-
es and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 2015, has carefully documented 
the presence and experiences of hundreds of Canadians who were among the camp’s 
liberators.  Professor Celinscak deserves credit for researching and pointing out the 
early presence of members of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion as well as Cana-
dian members of the Special Air Service (SAS) in the British Army who liberated 
Belsen.  Among the British forces liberating Belsen were also Canadians servicing in 
CANLOAN, Canadian officers on loan to the British Army.
Many Canadian service personnel, such as Cliff Chadderton, had fought in North-
West Europe but only relatively small number of Canadians were directly involved 
in liberating camps like Bergen Belsen.  As this was not strictly a military operation, 
it was not mentioned or included in the Official Histories.  Thus, during the Senate 
hearings, veterans could claim honestly that to their best knowledge it was not a part 
of Canadian military history.
One of the key lessons from this unsuccessful project which gained national expo-
sure was the failure of museum leaders to judge or gauge Canadian public sentiment 
and veterans’ reactions.  Herodotus in his “History of the Greek and Persian Wars” 
depicted it as a battle for freedom.  He wrote that veterans from the Greek side 
would fight to maintain that depiction as to what had happened.  Canadian veterans 
were no exception as witnessed by their outrage over a bomber panel in the new 
Canadian War Museum.
Some twenty-five years have passed since the Holocaust Gallery controversy.  A 
good number of the veterans involved are now deceased.  A new generation has 
emerged with different perspectives and attitudes.  The Holocaust Gallery contro-
versy demonstrated that a thin veneer of civility exists in Canadian society that can 
be very easily fractured.
Although Professor Celinscak was able to find over a thousand Canadians in the 
military who encountered Belsen, the need to mention the Holocaust in some form 
in a display at the Canadian War Museum ought not to have been based strictly on 
the number of Canadian service personnel who were there.  There ought to be some 
15Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 35, 2023
Endnotes
1 
See Mark Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen 
Heap, p. 25.
insight as to the causes of the Second World War, including Nazi ideology and the 
consequences of that ideology which was implemented, leading to the terrible deaths 
of many millions.  The Canadian military and the Second World War is about more 
than just every military engagement included in wartime Canadian Official Histo-
ries.  Museum visitors deserve some insight as to why Canada went to war as well as 
what this country was fighting for. 1
There seems to be some puzzlement as to the positive reaction in Britain to a Holo-
caust Gallery established at the Imperial War Museum as compared to Canada and 
its proposed gallery at the Canadian War Museum.  I would argue that Britain and 
Canada have quite different histories, particularly social and military history.  The 
Imperial War Museum was not neglected to the same extent as the Canadian War 
Museum.  Different parts of the country also have different views of their history.  A 
Museum of Human Rights was acceptable and welcome in Winnipeg.  The Battle of 
the Plains of Abraham is not viewed in the same light throughout Canada.  Similar-
ly, the War of 1812 is not looked at the same in Canada and the United States.  Had 
Distance from the Belsen Heap been published in 1998, it would not have changed 
the minds of veterans, public opinion, or opposition to the proposed gallery.  The 
book is, however, a welcome addition offering a substantive, documented scholarly 
historical account that would have helped quell the charge that there was absolutely 
no Canadian military connection with the liberation of Belsen.
Fred Gaffen
Historian (Ret’d)
Bibliography
Canada Senate, “Proceedings of the Subcom-
mittee on Veterans Affairs”, Issue 3-Evi-
dence-Afternoon meeting (2 February 1998).
Celinscak, Mark.  Distance from the Belsen 
Heap:  Allied Forces and the Liberation of a 
Nazi Concentration Camp, Toronto:  University 
of Toronto Press, 2015.


Letter to the editor

224 Contributors / Collaborateurs
Contributors / Contributeurs
225Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 24, 2016
Pierre Anctil is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a full professor at the 
department of history of the University of Ottawa, where he teaches contemporary 
Canadian history and Canadian Jewish history. He has written at length on the histo-
ry of the Jewish community of Montréal and on the current debates on cultural plu-
ralism in Québec. He is the author of a literary biography of Montreal Yiddish poet 
Jacob-Isaac Segal, entitled Jacob-Isaac Segal (1896-1954), un poète yiddish de Montréal 
et son milieu (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012). He recently published a study of an-
ti-Semitism in the Montréal daily Le Devoir entitled: ‘À chacun ses Juifs’. 60 éditoriaux 
pour comprendre la position du Devoir à l’égard des Juifs 1910-1947 (Septentrion, 2014). 
His latest publication is: Les Juifs de Québec, 400 ans d’histoire (Presses de l’Université 
du Québec, 2015).
Katherine Biggs-Craft has been the curator of the Saint John Jewish Historical Mu-
seum since 1998. She holds degrees in History from the University of New Brunswick.
Antoine Burgard is a PhD candidate in History at Université Lumière Lyon 2 
(France) and Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada), co-advised by Yolande 
Cohen and Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen. Recipient of the Fondation Auschwitz – 
Bourse de recherche 2012 and of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies (Concor-
dia University) Yaacov Zipper Award 2014, he is a 2015-2016 fellow of the Fondation 
pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (FMS). He has been published in Bulletin d’Histoire 
Politique and Globe. Études Québécoises.
Melissa Caza has been an archivist at the Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein 
Family Heritage Centre since 2010. She holds an Honours BA in History from the 
University of Waterloo, and both a BEd and a MISt from the University of Toronto.
Jason Chalmers is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Alberta. His research focuses on the relationship between genocide, settler 
colonialism, and public commemoration. Jason’s dissertation explores how genocide 
narratives reproduce and resist national mythology, and focuses on three sites of Ca-
nadian memory: the National Holocaust Monument, the Truth and Reconciliation 
Commission, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Justin Comartin is currently an elementary school teacher with the Conseil scolaire 
catholique Providence (CSC Providence). He was the recipient of the Jacob Freedman 
Memorial Award from the Ottawa Jewish Historical Society in 2009 and received the 
Gaston Héon Graduate Scholarship in History from the University of Ottawa in 2012. 
He completed his MA thesis entitled Humanitarian Ambitions - International Barriers: 
Canadian Governmental Response to the Plight of the Jewish Refugees (1933-1945) in 2013. 
His areas of interest include: Canadian Immigration History, Commemoration and 
Memory, and Canadian participation in the World Wars.  
226 Contributors / Collaborateurs
Norman Erwin earned his PhD in history from the University of Waterloo and 
specializes in the Holocaust’s impact on Canadian Jewish political discourse. His 
current research focuses on North American Jewish responses to the rise of Arab 
nationalism during the Cold War.
Simon-Pierre Lacasse complète une maitrise en histoire à l’Université d’Ottawa 
vers l’été 2016 sous la direction de Pierre Anctil. Sa thèse se penche sur le parcours 
d’un groupe hassidique de la région montréalaise — les Tasher — alors qu’ils in-
tègrent le Québec durant la période subséquente à la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. 
Il s’intéresse particulièrement aux rapports entre les communautés hassidiques, la 
plus grande communauté juive et la collectivité francophone du Québec dans leur 
dimension historique. Il s’engage actuellement dans des études doctorales à l’Uni-
versité d’Ottawa.
Rebecca Margolis is associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s Vered Jew-
ish Canadian Studies Program. Her research interests deal with the transmission of 
Yiddish language and culture before and after the Holocaust. She is the author of 
Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945 (McGill-Queen’s 
University Press, 2011).
Lillooet Nördlinger McDonnell is a historian and writer and lives in Brooklyn, 
NY. She is specialized in Jewish integration, assimilation, and fringe Jewish commu-
nities.
Janice Rosen has been the Archives Director since 1989 of the Alex Dworkin Cana-
dian Jewish Archives, formerly known as the Canadian Jewish Congress CC National 
Archives. Her publications include various surveys of Canadian Jewish archival re-
sources and repositories for the Canadian Jewish Studies Journal. She is a co-creator 
of the Canadian Jewish Heritage Network, a database-driven website showcasing 
the holdings of several partner Archives and Museums.
Sheena Trimble, docteure en histoire contemporaine, a soutenu sa thèse à l’Uni-
versité d’Angers, France, en octobre 2015 : « Femmes et politiques d’immigration au 
Canada (1945-1967) : au-delà des assignations de genre ». Ses recherches portent sur 
l’influence que les actions de femmes, conçues ou perçues comme politiques ou non, 
peuvent avoir sur les politiques de l’immigration.


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Letter to the editor

Collaborateurs

Front Matter

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