Features
Yvonne Singer, a Toronto artist who was saved by Wallenberg as an infant, is still on a voyage of self-discovery
By RON CSILLAG
As an artist herself, Yvonne Singer can well appreciate the esthetic merits of the open-air monument to Swedish Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg that was unveiled over the summer at Churchill Park in Hamilton, Ont.
Though she had not, as of this writing, personally viewed the installation, dubbed “Be:longings,” Singer spoke admiringly of the 10 bronze-cast suitcases dispersed along a gravel path adjacent to the Hamilton aviary. She knows Simon Frank, one of the project’s three creators, and is aware that suitcases have been a potent symbol of the Holocaust.
“I like the fact that the suitcases are scattered,” Singer, a well-established visual artist and teacher in Toronto, said in an interview over lemon tea in her sun-drenched kitchen. “I think the imagery and symbolism are very effective in conveying the idea of displacement and emigration.” The old-timey valises evoke not just Wallenberg, Singer noted, but all victims and survivors of that terror-stricken era.
The outdoor project is also “minimal, which I like. I don’t like public sculptures that scream at you or are clichéd.”
Singer connects to the installation on a whole other level. The 78-year-old resident of Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood is Wallenberg’s goddaughter. She was born on his bed.
It’s a Hollywood-worthy tale that evolved over time, in a series of eye-popping twists, turns and coincidences—all amid Singer’s own personal voyage of self-discovery.
The backstory is its own blockbuster: The non-Jewish scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial and banking family, Wallenberg, then just 32, was recruited by the U.S. War Refugee Board and dispatched to Budapest to assist and rescue as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied Hungarian capital as possible. He arrived in July 1944, just as the Nazis had shipped some 440,000 Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. They now set their sights on the Jews of Budapest.
Accorded diplomatic status, Wallenberg famously set off on a frenetic pace. He designed, printed and distributed thousands of the famous “Schutzpass”—an official-looking document that placed the holder under the protection of the neutral Swedish Crown. He also scoured the city for buildings to rent, finding 32, and crammed in as many souls as possible. The “safe houses” flew the yellow-and-blue Swedish flag and were declared protected by diplomatic immunity.
Known for his bluster and bravado, his greatest coup came when he persuaded Nazi commanders to call off the liquidation of Budapest’s Jewish ghetto, with its 70,000 inhabitants. The number of Jews Wallenberg is said to have rescued peaks at 100,000. In any event, he is credited with saving more Jewish lives during the war than any single government.
By January 1945, the Red Army was laying siege to Budapest, and Wallenberg was taken into custody, supposedly on suspicion of being a U.S. spy. He promptly vanished into the gulag. A Soviet report in 1956 stated he had died in July 1947 of a heart attack in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, but supposed eyewitness sightings and stories of contact with him from former inmates continued well into the 1970s.
In 2012, the diaries of a former head of the KGB, discovered in the walls of his Moscow home, stated there was “no doubt” that Wallenberg was “liquidated” in 1947.
But back to Singer.
On the night of Nov. 3, 1944, a desperate Tibor Vandor, who worked for Wallenberg as a courier and liaison to the underground, needed help for his wife, Agnes. She was in labour and had been turned away from Budapest’s hospitals, which barred Jews. Wallenberg allowed the couple to use his own room, while he slept in the corridor.
The next morning, he was called in to see a newborn girl. Asked by the grateful parents to name her, Wallenberg chose Nina Maria Ava (Nina was his half-sister’s name, Maria his mother’s). The couple changed the first name to Yvonne, and Wallenberg agreed to be the child’s godfather.
Singer knew nothing of this until she was 34 years old.
It was October 1979 when she read an article, reprinted from a U.S. newspaper, in the Toronto Star about Wallenberg’s plight. The story included a reference to Singer’s unusual birth taken from a Hungarian book on the Swedish hero written after the war. The baby with the Toronto connection, the parents, the godfather—were all there, mentioned by name.
When she read the piece, “I burst out crying,” she told the Star after contacting the paper. Her story spilled forth a week later in a large Saturday Star article headlined “Swedish hero saved my life: Metro woman.”
Singer is still struck by “the incredible coincidence of it all. Here I am in Toronto in 1979, reading the paper… it boggles the mind. I could have easily gone through life not knowing the story. Suddenly, I had a connection to this man, who sounds like he was fascinating.”
Her parents had not told her the story. And there was another missing piece of the puzzle: their Jewishness.
At war’s end, the Vandors went to Switzerland and Holland before settling in Montreal in 1949, where the parents shed their Jewish identities, doubtless seeking to forget. Tibor Vandor even became an elder in the United Church.
“I always pressed them for more information, and they always refused,” even following the revelations in the Toronto Star, Singer recalled. “They told me very, very little.” Her parents never revealed being Jews. Their silence encompassed “anything to do with the war. They were just not forthcoming.”
Singer graduated from McGill University and went on to teach English and French at local high schools. She converted to Judaism to marry her husband, Ron Singer, a theatre director and educator, in 1966. A few years later, a cousin in England recalled being a flower-girl at Yvonne’s parents’ wedding, which she said took place in a synagogue. The parents denied it but their daughter believed it.
Singer’s feelings of alienation as an immigrant child would evaporate on discovering that she had been born Jewish, whether the knowledge came from a cousin or the Toronto Star. “I felt like I’d come home, part of a history that goes back thousands of years. I no longer felt rootless.”
The Singers moved to Toronto in 1971, where Yvonne later began a prolific art career in various media and teaching visual arts at York University. Raising three daughters and a busy life meant there was little time to get involved in the Wallenberg file (though she was pleased when he became Canada’s first Honorary Citizen in 1985 and when Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating Wallenberg a decade ago).
It’s little surprise that Singer’s art has explored themes of identity, history and memory. The outsider status she felt in her early life “is what made me think about ways of expressing that, either through language or visual imagery. So you go to what you know when you’re an artist.”
In 2016, the Swedish government declared Wallenberg officially dead, but to Singer, that offered no finality. “From what I learned, the Swedish government is not exempt from blame for trying to get Wallenberg out. I cannot reconcile the fact that [Wallenberg’s family] could not exert any kind of leverage over the Russians to find out what happened to him.”
In Judaism, being a godparent carries little or no religious obligation. Singer considers the godfather connection to Wallenberg an honour, “but I’m also very sad that I never met him. I think he would have been a fascinating person to talk to. The story is just very, very tragic.”
The grandmother of nine sighed. Over the decades, the story for her was obviously very personal, “and I was still processing it. Maybe I’m still processing it, for a long, long time.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the Hamilton Jewish News. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Features
Three generations of Wernicks all chose to become rabbis
By GERRY POSNER Recently I was at a Shabbat service at Beth Tzedec Synagogue in Toronto and the day unfolded in some unexpected ways for me.
It began when I was asked to be a Gabbai for the service, that is to stand up at the table where the Torah is placed and to check the Torah reading to make sure there are no errors. I have done this before and it has always gone smoothly. I attribute that fact in large part to the Torah reading ability of the reader at Beth Synagogue. He is fast, fluent and flawless. Well, on this particular day after he had completed the first two portions, he began the shlishi or third aliyah. I could not find his reading anywhere. It was as if he had started somewhere fresh, but not where he was supposed to be. I looked at the other Gabbai and he did not seem to recognize what had happened either. So, I let it go. I had no idea where the Torah reader was. He then did another and still I was lost. He came to what was the 6th aliyah when a clergy member walked over to him and indicated to him that he had read the fourth and fifth aliyah, but that he had missed the third one. The Torah reader then said to me “this is what you are here for.” Now, it might have been one thing if I had missed it entirely. Alas, I saw the error, but let it go as I deferred to the Torah reader since he never makes a mistake. He ended up going back to do the third aliyah before continuing on. This was a very unusual event in the synagogue. I felt responsible in large part for this gaffe. A lesson learned.
The feeling of embarrassment was compounded by the fact that on this particular day the service was highlighted, at least for me, because of the rabbi delivering the sermon. This rabbi, Eugene Wernick, was none other than the father of my present rabbi, Steven Wernick of Beth Tzedec Synagogue. He was also the same rabbi who was the rabbi at Shaarey Zedek between 1979-1986 and who had officiated at my father’s funeral in 1981, also a few years later at my oldest son’s Bar Mitzvah in Winnipeg in 1984. As I listened to him speak, I was taken back to the 1980s, when Rabbi Gene was in the pulpit at Shaarey Zedek. Of course, he is older now than in his Shaarey Zedek days, but the power of his voice was unchanged. If anything, it’s even stronger. As in the past, his message was relevant to all of us and resonated well. Listening to him was a treat for me. Still, my regret in not calling out the mistake from the Torah reading was compounded by the fact that I messed up in front of my former rabbi, Eugene Wernick – never mind my present rabbi, Steven Werinck.
On this Shabbat morning, aside from all the other people present, there were not only the two Rabbis Wernick, but one Michelle Wernick was also there. Michelle, daughter of Rabbi Steven Wernick, is a first year student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is following in the family business – much like with the Rose rabbinical family in Winnipeg.
As it turned out, there was a Bat Mitzvah that day. And the Bat Mitzvah family had a very real Winnipeg connection as in the former Leah Potash, mother of the Bat Mitzvah girl, Emmie Bank and the daughter of Reuben and Gail Potash (Thau). It occurred to me that there might be a few Winnipeg people in the crowd. As I scanned the first few rows, I was not disappointed. Sitting there was none other than Chana Thau and her husband Michael Eleff. I managed to have a chat with Chana (even during the Musaf service). In the row right behind Chana and Michael was a face I had not seen in close to sixty years. I refer to Allan Berkal, the eldest son of the former rabbi and chazan at Shaarey Zedek, Louis Berkal. I still remember the first time I met Allan at Hebrew School in 1954 when his family moved to Winnipeg from Grand Forks, North Dakota. That was many maftirs ago. So this was another highlight moment for me.
Of course, there are other Winnipeggers who attend Beth Tzedec most Shabbats. I speak of Morley Goldberg and his wife, the former Marcia Billinkoff Schnoor. As well, Bernie Rubenstein and his wife, the former Sheila Levene were also present for this particular Shabbat. In all, this Shabbat had a particularly Winnipeg flavour to it. Truth be told, you do not have to go far in Toronto at any synagogue and the Winnipeg connections emerge.
Features
In Britain Too, Jews Are in Trouble
By HENRY SREBRNIK Antisemitic attacks in Britain have surged to levels unseen in decades, with Jewish schools under guard and synagogues routinely targeted. Jews suffered the highest rate of religious hate crimes in the year ending March 2025, according to interior ministry data. And it has only become worse.
Jewish Post and News readers know, of course, about the attack on Jewish worshippers at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester at Yom Kippur services on October 2, 2025. The attack killed Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, and left three others injured.
Greater Manchester Police Chief Sir Stephen Watson said fear within the Jewish community had risen sharply, with even young children asking for armed police protection to simply attend Hanukkah parties.
While the blame for the violence lies with the assailant, an immigrant from Syria, who was shot dead by police, the responsibility for the circumstances in which two Jews died and where a Jewish community that has contributed loyally to British society for centuries fears for its existence lies with the leaders of the British establishment.
The Labour government, many of whose supporters and elected representatives flirt with pro-Hamas positions, has fueled the flames with its denunciations of Israel’s war and recognition of a Palestinian state. Many younger people, their minds filled with postmodern “anticolonialist” left ideology, are eager recruits to the cause.
Ruth Deech is a British academic, bioethicist and politician who sits in the House of Lords. Ten years ago, she warned that some of the country’s top universities had become “no-go zones” for Jewish students. But, in the wake of the October 7 atrocities and ensuing war in Gaza, she believes the situation is much worse.
“The warfare on the streets is being continued in the universities,” Deech told the Times of Israel Dec. 25. “The universities on the whole are not facing up to it, and the University of London campuses are probably amongst the worst. None of the vice chancellors seem to be able to summon up the courage to deal with it,” Deech contends.
“They take refuge behind freedom of speech, without realizing that freedom of speech stops where hate language begins.” Deech is highly critical of Oxford, where she has spent much of her academic life. British universities must take stronger action to protect Jewish students and use every tool available to confront hate and division.
But the reaction by authorities has generally been one of appeasement. For years, police refused to enforce hate-crime laws. Universities tolerated mobs chanting for Israel’s destruction. Politicians equivocated in the name of “balance.”
For instance, in Birmingham, the West Midlands Police, which cover the city, classified as “high risk” a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Aston Villa on Nov. 6. The police cited “safety” as the reason for banishing fans of the Tel Aviv team, which now seems to be standard when unjustified bans are put in place.
As the Jewish Leadership Council noted on X, “It is perverse that away fans should be banned from a football match because West Midlands Police can’t guarantee their safety.” Prior to the event, masked men hung “Zios Not Welcome” signs in the windows of shops or restaurants. “Zio,” of course, is a not-so-coded word for Israelis and/or Jews.
Over the past two years, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the country’s main representative body for the Jewish community, has faced questions of their own about how to conduct debates on Israel. Last April, 36 of the board’s members signed an open letter, which was published in the Financial Times, protesting against “this most extremist of Israeli governments” and its failure to free the hostages held since October 7. “Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we fear for the future of the Israel we love,” the letter read.
Five members of the Board were suspended for instigating the letter. The Board’s Constitution Committee found that they had broken a code of conduct by creating the “misleading impression that this was an official document of the Board as a whole.” But for some, the letter represented a watershed moment where some of the conversations about Israel happening in private within the Jewish community could be had in public.
Board President Phil Rosenberg argued that there has long been healthy debate among the 300 deputies. His primary concern is the safety of British Jews but also how the community sees itself. “We have a whole range of activities to confront antisemitism,” he maintained. “But we also believe that the community needs not just to be seeing itself, and to be seen, through the prism of pain.
“It already wasn’t right that the only public commemoration of Jewish life in this country is Holocaust Memorial Day. And the only compulsory education is Holocaust education. Both of these things are incredibly important, but that’s not the whole experience of Jews.”
Given all this, a new political party divide is emerging among British Jews, with support rising fast for the left-wing Greens, now led by Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, and buoyed by younger and “anti-Zionist” Jews, while the older Orthodox turn to Nigel Farage’s upstart right wing Reform UK, as trust in the two main parties collapses.
Support for Labour and the Conservatives among British Jews had fallen to 58 per cent by July 2025 from nearly 84 per cent in 2020, according to a November 2025 report from the Institute of Jewish Policy Research (JPR), entitled “The End of Two-party Politics? Emerging Changes in the Political Preferences of British Jews.”
Labour has been typically favoured by more “secular” Jews while the Conservative party is traditionally preferred by more “observant” Jews. But for the first time in recent British Jewish history, support for the Labour and Conservative parties combined has fallen below 60 per cent.
“Reform UK is more likely to attract male, older, orthodox, and Zionist Jews; the Greens are more likely to attract younger, unaffiliated and anti-Zionist,” according to Dr. Jonathan Boyd, JPR’s executive director. The surge in Jewish support for Reform UK, a party whose rhetoric on immigration and nationalism would typically be expected to alienate minority communities, including Jews,” was described as “striking” by the JPR.
“Significant parts of the Jewish population may gravitate toward voices promising strength and clarity, regardless of ideological baggage” when mainstream parties were perceived as “weak or hostile,” the report added. “It may signal a structural shift in Jewish political identity.”
Three forces appear to be driving this fragmentation: the war in Gaza and its polarising effect on Jewish attitudes; rising antisemitism, culminating in the Heaton Park Synagogue terrorist attack; and a broader collapse of trust in mainstream parties.
“Together, these factors are pushing Jews toward parties that offer clarity — whether through populism or radical progressivism. If recent developments persist,” the report suggested, “British Jews are likely to become more politically polarised, prompting further internal community tensions.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
So, what’s the deal with the honey scene in ‘Marty Supreme?’
By Olivia Haynie December 29, 2025 This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
There are a lot of jarring scenes in Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s movie about a young Jew in the 1950s willing to do anything to secure his spot in table tennis history. There’s the one where Marty (Timothée Chalamet) gets spanked with a ping-pong paddle; there’s the one where a gas station explodes. And the one where Marty, naked in a bathtub, falls through the floor of a cheap motel. But the one that everybody online seems to be talking about is a flashback of an Auschwitz story told by Marty’s friend and fellow ping-ponger Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig, best known for his role as a Sonderkommando in Son of Saul).
Kletzki tells the unsympathetic ink tycoon Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) about how the Nazis, impressed by his table tennis skills, spared his life and recruited him to disarm bombs. One day, while grappling with a bomb in the woods, Kletzki stumbled across a honeycomb. He smeared the honey across his body and returned to the camp, where he let his fellow prisoners lick it off his body. The scene is a sensory nightmare, primarily shot in close-ups of wet tongues licking sticky honey off Kletzki’s hairy body. For some, it was also … funny?
Many have reported that the scene has been triggering a lot of laughter in their theaters. My audience in Wilmington, North Carolina, certainly had a good chuckle — with the exception of my mother, who instantly started sobbing. I sat in stunned silence, unsure at first what to make of the sharp turn the film had suddenly taken. One post on X that got nearly 6,000 likes admonished Safdie for his “insane Holocaust joke.” Many users replied that the scene was in no way meant to be funny, with one even calling it “the most sincere scene in the whole movie.”
For me, the scene shows the sheer desperation of those in the concentration camps, as well as the self-sacrifice that was essential to survival. And yet many have interpreted it as merely shock humor.
Laughter could be understood as an inevitable reaction to discomfort and shock at a scene that feels so out of place in what has, up to that point, been a pretty comedic film. The story is sandwiched between Marty’s humorous attempts to embarrass Rockwell and seduce his wife. Viewers may have mistaken the scene as a joke since the film’s opening credits sequence of sperm swimming through fallopian tubes gives the impression you will be watching a comedy interspersed with some tense ping-pong playing.
The reaction could also be part of what some in the movie theater industry are calling the “laugh epidemic.” In The New York Times, Marie Solis explored the inappropriate laughter in movie theaters that seems to be increasingly common. The rise of meme culture and the dissolution of clear genres (Marty Supreme could be categorized as somewhere between drama and comedy), she writes, have primed audiences to laugh at moments that may not have been meant to be funny.
The audience’s inability to process the honey scene as sincere may also be a sign of a society that has become more disconnected from the traumas of the past. It would not be the first time that people, unable to comprehend the horrors of the Holocaust, have instead derided the tales of abuse as pure fiction. But Kletzki’s story is based on the real experiences of Alojzy Ehrlich, a ping-pong player imprisoned at Auschwitz. The scene is not supposed to be humorous trauma porn — Safdie has called it a “beautiful story” about the “camaraderie” found within the camps. It also serves as an important reminder of all that Marty is fighting for.
The events of the film take place only seven years after the Holocaust, and the macabre honey imagery encapsulates the dehumanization the Jews experienced. Marty is motivated not just by a desire to prove himself as an athlete and rise above what his uncle and mother expect of him, but above what the world expects of him as a Jew. His drive to reclaim Jewish pride is further underscored when he brings back a piece of an Egyptian pyramid to his mother, telling her, “We built this.”
Without understanding this background, the honey scene will come off as out of place and ridiculous. And the lengths Marty is willing to go to to make something of himself cannot be fully appreciated. The film’s description on the review-app Letterboxd says Marty Supreme is about one man who “goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” But behind Marty is the story of a whole people who have gone through hell; they too are trying to find their way back.
Olivia Haynie is an editorial fellow at the Forward.
This story was originally published on the Forward.