Local News
A taste of Limmud 2020
By MYRON LOVE
Limmud Winnipeg celebrated its tenth anniversary on the weekend of February 29/March 1 with quite possibly its best attendance to date. Close to 400 members of our community had more than three dozen sessions to choose from, with presenters from across Canada, New York and Israel joining local speakers and facilitators in providing a smorgasbord of topics both secular and religious, cultural and culinary.
As usual, this writer indulged in a representative sampling of what was on the menu, balancing local and Israeli issues with some religious study as well as delving into Jewish history. And, while each session could make for an entire feature on its own, space considerations leave me to focus on the highlights.
So let us begin the journey.
The first session that I attended was a presentation by former Winnipegger Jack Frohlich, who made a aliyah in 1989 and who, for the past 18 years, has been teaching conversion classes under the auspices of the National Centre for Conversion. He also works closely with the Beta Israel (Ethiopian) community.
Frohlich delivered two presentations – the first discussing the challenges facing Ethiopian Israelis and the second talking about the controversial issue of conversion in Israel. There is much misinformation concerning conversion in Israel, Frohlich pointed out.
My own understanding was that Reform and Conservative conversions are not recognized in Israel and – much to my surprise, there have been Orthodox conversions in North America that also aren’t recognized in Israel. The reality is that the only conversions officially recognized in Israel are those which are approved by the Dayanim (rabbi/judges) associated with the National Centre for Conversion.
As Frohlich noted, even a conversion by a rabbi in solidly Haredi Bnai Brak would not be recognized.
He pointed out that while Reform and Conservative conversions may not be recognized or the converts considered Jewish, they are still welcomed under the Law of Return with all the benefits that come with it.
Then there is the occasional report that converts have to vow to observe all the Mitzvot both during the conversion process and forever after on pain of having the conversion rescinded. Not true, Frohlich said. Once one is accepted into the Jewish community, the individual can life his or her life the same way those who are born Jewish do.
“Becoming a Jew is a two-sided coin,” he said. “It is a two-for-one deal. You are adopting a new religion and you become part of the Jewish People.”
While the original Law of Return applied only to Halachic Jews born of a Jewish mother, he noted, in 1970, the government expanded the Law of Return to include anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent – even though the individual would not be considered Jewish per se.
Of the Russian immigrants who came to Israel in the 1990s, Frohlich pointed out, about 50% were not halachically Jewish.
He reported that Israel registers about 2,500 conversions a year with most of the converts being women. “Weddings often follow,” he said.
Quite a number of Filipinos (Filipinas?) and Arab Moslems are among the converts, he noted.
And the government and the rabbinate continue to make the conversion process easier, he added. In recent years, all fees have been removed and a more flexible approach has been adopted for the learning process.
“Most students are pleasantly surprised by their ulpan/educational experiences,” Frohlich said.
He reported that about 80% of conversion applicants are approved the first time they appear before the Bet Din with the remainder often approved following a few more months of studying.
From Israel, we travel back to Winnipeg to hear the story of Shimon Segal. The 33-year-old criminal lawyer began life with the deck stacked against him. He has succeeded in life through his own inner strength and the love and support of David and Glenda Segal and their sons, Devin and Ryan.
Segal was born into a strictly Orthodox – but dysfunctional family. Over his first few years, he was imbued with Orthodox practice and tradition and a strong Jewish identity. The middle of three children, he recalls a lot of arguing in the home.
He began his schooling in the Hebrew Bilingual program at Centennial School in the North End. After Grade 2, he recalled, the family moved south, where his parents became less and less observant and opened a grow-op in their home. “The house was always moldy and dirty,” he remembered.
While attending Brock Corydon’s Hebrew Bilingual program, he made some friends among his classmates -, in particular, Devin Segal.
The Jewish Child and Family Service first stepped into the family situation when he was seven. He noted that his mother was abusive and his father disinterested.
When he was ten, his parents split and he found himself back in the North End in a group home where he was the only Jewish kid. “I was living a double life,” he recalled. “I was taking the bus to Brock Corydon every day. At the group home, I started smoking cigarettes and marijuana and wearing gang clothes to try to fit in. I would show up at school smelling of cigarettes. I didn’t fit in anywhere. While I remained close to my friends at Brock Corydon, most of their parents didn’t approve of their sons hanging out with me.”
The exception was David Segal. “My dad (David Segal) began to be involved in my life when I was ten,” Shimon said. “He took an interest in me. He would take me fishing sometimes. There was no sense of judgment. I relaxed when I was with him.”
For a short time, Segal was housed with foster parents Barry and the late Marsha Weber, to whom he is also grateful. The Webers took in foster children for short periods of time.)
At the age of 12, he was returned to his birth mother for a time. That didn’t work out. He spent some time in the Manitoba Youth Centre and with a Christian foster family who sent him to a bible camp. “They were only in it for the money,” he said of those foster parents.
“I began spending more and more time with the Segals,” Shimon said.
After several excruciating weeks with the Christian family, he was returned to his birth father who, after a short time, locked him out of the house.
That was when his life really took a turn for the worse. He ended up living on the street in Tuxedo. “I tried Osborne Village, but it felt too dangerous,” he recalled. “In Tuxedo, I felt safer. I slept wherever I could – partially-built buildings, a friend’s mother’s station wagon, even in the Assiniboine Forest for a time.”
It wasn’t long after that David and Glenda Segal invited him to move in with them permanently and become a member of the family. “David and Glenda became my dad and mom and Devin and Ryan my new brothers.”
He added that he has kept in touch with his own birth siblings – a brother and sister- and that the Segal family has included them in family gatherings.
The love and support from his new family, Shimon said, enabled him to rekindle his inner Jewishness and feel part of the Jewish community again.
Over the last ten years, Segal has been able to earn a law degree. He has married and become a father. And he has given back to the community and, through his legal work, other vulnerable people.
“Thanks to the Segal Family, I have been able to live a normal life,” he said.
“What the Segal Family did for Shimon was amazing,” said Randee Pollock, the Jewish Child and Family Service’s Adoption, Fostercare and Rescue Co-ordinator. “Our goal is to keep families together – but that is not always possible where there are mental health or addiction issues or perhaps there has been a death in the family.”
She reports that the JCFS currently has 15 Jewish children in care with nine foster homes and three places of safety available to house them. “We are always in need of more Jewish families who are willing to open their homes to children in our community who are in need of shelter,” she noted.
From Winnipeg, we again pack our bags for our third port of call as we follow Rabbi Mark Glickman, the spiritual leader of Reform Congregation Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary, as he travels the world in search of the lost story of the Cairo Genizah.
Glickman is the author of “Sacred Treasure – the Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic”. (He also delivered a talk at Limmud in 2016 about his follow-up book, “Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish books”.)
Glickman’s research took him to archives at Cambridge University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York – the world’s two largest repositories of Genizah documents – and, accompanied by his son, Jacob, to the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which was the original repository of the Genizah.
So, you might be wondering what a “genizah” is? As Glickman pointed out, we are a People of the Book. Under Jewish Law, it is not allowed to throw out sacred books. The proper way to dispose of them is burial in a Jewish cemetery. But they have to be stored somewhere until they can be buried. In my own synagogue, the genizah – or storage space – is a cupboard downstairs. For many centuries in the old Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, it was a space – a hole in the wall in the women’s section upstairs.
The current Ben Ezra Synagogue, Glickman reported, was built in the 11th century on the banks of the Nile, replacing an earlier shul which was destroyed by flooding. In the Middle Ages, he noted, Egypt was home to a large and influential Jewish community one of whose most prominent members was the great Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon (aka Maimonidies aka the Rambam).
There are a number of Western characters associated with the discovery of the treasure trove of documents that were stored in the Ben Ezra genizah. The first outsider to appear on the scene was one Simon Von Geldern, a German Jewish adventurer and Orientalist who moved in Bedouin circles. He visited the Genizah, but took nothing from it.
Then there came a Rabbi Jacob Saphir, a dealer in Jewish documents in Jerusalem, who heard about the Genizah from Van Geldern, dropped in, and brought back about 1,000 documents for sale. Next was Abraham Firkovitch, a member of the breakaway Karaite sect – who came in search of documents of historical interest to the Karaite community.
In the 1880s, Elkan Nathan Adler, a prominent member of England’s Jewish community – and son and brother of Chief Rabbis of England, visited and left with more than 6,000 documents (as possibly a Torah cover).
The scholarly interest in the Genizah, Glickman noted, began in 1996 when Rabbi Solomon Schechter – then teaching at Cambridge University, had an encounter with an unusual colleague. Twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson were Semitic scholars and travellers who had recently returned from an expedition to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. Among the documents they brought back was one in a language that the two multi linguists didn’t recognize. They asked Schechter if he could help. He recognized it as a tractate for the book Ben Sira, a book of wisdom that had not been included in the Talmudic canon. The book at that time was only known from a Greek translation.
“The last person to have seen that book in the original Hebrew was Saadia Gaon over 1000 years before,” Glickman noted. “The document was from the Ben Ezra Genizah. Schechter – very excited by this find – quickly arranged to visit the genizah and subsequently transferred close to 200,000 documents to Cambridge for translation and study.”
The documents – 300,000 in total – consisted not only of religious material but also letters, business records, medical prescriptions and the other detritus of every day life. Among the documents that Glickman highlighted was the oldest piece of Jewish sheet music (composed by an Italian Catholic priest who had converted to Judaism), an early Hebrew reading primer and the last letter that Maimonides received from his beloved younger brother, David, before the businessman was lost at sea en route to India.
Over the past 20 years, Glickman reported that advances in computer technology have made translating the documents and connected fragments much easier. He noted that the Freidberg Genizah Project was established in 1999 as a non-profit international humanities venture established by philanthropist Albert Friedberg of Toronto to promote and facilitate research of the material discovered in the Cairo Genizah. Under the aegis of the project, all of the genizah materials are in the process on being inventoried and put online.
Glickman completed his presentation with a video of himself peering into the now empty genizah.
And we conclude with a little Torah study led by Rabbi Yosef Benarroch, spiritual leader of the Adas Yeshurun Herzlia Congregation. His question: Does being religious make you a better person?
In contemplating the question, Rabbi Benarroch first turned to the story of creation, noting that while the Lord commented after each of the first five days of creation that work was “good”, He does not say the same about His creation of mankind. Rather, the Torah says that the Lord “created Man in his image”.
So what does that mean? Benarroch quoted Torah and referred to several rabbanim – including Rabbi Akiva, Rambam and the late modern sages, Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel – as well as talmudic commentaries and their interpretations. One suggestion that Benarroch made is that of all G-d’s creations, man is the only one that can also create.
And while G-d doesn’t have an “image” in the way that man does, He does have attributes that can well be emulated – being slow to anger and quick to forgive, compassionate, gracious and merciful – attributes that are part of a prayer shul goers sing on Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot before taking out the Torah and at Selichot in the days leading up to the High Holidays.
So, while engaging in regular religious practice itself doesn’t determine good or bad behavior, Rabbi Benarroch concluded, attempting to model your life after the qualities exhibited by the Lord – in His image – will, without a doubt make one a better person.
Local News
Interviews with the curator of the Nakba exhibit and the CEO of the Human Rights Museum
By BERNIE BELLAN On June 26, I was invited to attend the Canadian Museum for Human Right to see the Nakba exhibit prior to its being opened to the public. While I was there I was given the opportunity to interview the curator for the exhibit, Isabelle Masson, along with CMHR CEO Isha Khan. What follows are the transcripts of those interviews (edited only to remove pause words like “uh” and phrases the were repeated). The first interview was with Isabelle Masson:
Jewish Post: Several representatives of Winnipeg Jewish community organization say that they weren’t fairly consulted on this exhibit. How do you respond to that?
Masson: We came to this project with an awareness that Palestinian voices are often marginalized, even silenced, and an awareness that Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism have an impact on whose voice is heard and whose suffering is recognized. And so we intentionally chose to centre Palestinian voices with this exhibition.
JP: But to the point that many Jewish representatives of organizations and people within the community at large feel that the Jewish community should have been consulted on an issue that had such a direct impact on the Jewish community – did you not feel an obligation to consult with the Jewish community?
Masson: I think the best person to talk further about this issue is our CEO, Isha.
JP: In terms of the exhibit itself, I must say it really stresses the suffering that Palestinians have endured. But, in looking at other refugee situations around the world, the Palestinian situation seems to me to be unique in that there has never been an effort to resettle Palestinians within the countries to which they were forced to flee.
Do you not think that separates their situation (from other refugee situations) and, in some ways, it has made their situation worse than it could have been?
Masson: Well, the exhibit not only centres that experience of forced displacement and disposition as a longstanding experience across five generation that you know is tied to human rights violations that are ongoing today, but it also I want to point out, you know, foregrounds beauty, foregrounds resilience, foregrounds the maintenance of identity and belonging across time and across that experience. So there’s also these elements about this exhibition because it was also about humanizing Palestinians – about people with families with stories, with creativity – and coming back to some of the videos what interviewees say, right, we hope that Palestinians can be seen as fully human and hope that they can see Palestinians as having human rights and this this story today in this gallery is is a story about human rights.
JP: If I can focus on one particular aspect of the exhibit that I read this morning when I was sent the preview, it referred to what happened between the years 2000 and 2005 as a Palestinian uprising. But the Israeli term would be the Intifada which for them meant large-scale attacks – terrorist bombings by some Palestinians. Did you not think it necessary to include that in a larger context?
Masson: Well, we use uprising because it’s the most more accessible term in the exhibition and we, you know, we’re focusing really here on an artwork by artists – Palestinian American artist Reggie Cook and with an artwork that was trying to translate the experience of of occupation into what is created. So that’s the context in which we talk about that.
JP: But to ignore what happened during the uprising seems to me to leave out a major part of the context.
Masson: I don’t think that we are ignoring that. This exhibit is not about the full story of what has happened in Palestine, in Israel. It’s not, you know, the scope of this small exhibition. This small exhibition has a scope and the scope was really to create an opportunity and a place for Canadians to be able to encounter Palestinian Canadians and hear their voices.
JP: Given the current mood in the Middle East and the ongoing tensions between Israel and various other actors, the concern among many in the Jewish community that this is going to lead to a heightening of antisemitism and an exhibit like this seems that it it’s not going to do much to improve relations between Jews and Palestinians when it focuses on only one side of the story. How do you respond to that?
Masson: Well, this is only one exhibit of of many, of many stories that we have.
Following is my interview with Isha Khan. Khan began by explaining that she is “the CEO at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and I’ve been here as CEO of the museum since August of 2020. So almost six years.”
JP: So let’s get right down to discussing (the exhibit). I spoke to the curator. I asked a lot of questions about the exhibit itself. I’m more interested in asking (you) about the general context and the atmosphere in the community. The accusation has been made repeatedly by various leaders of Jewish organizations that you have not been willing to consult on this exhibit. How do you respond to that?
Khan: I think the word consult can mean many things. We have a community engagement practice. So for us that means that depending on the scope of the exhibit and this exhibit is about Palestinian Canadians and their experiences, the impacts of the human rights impacts, of forced displacement, which means we engage with that community as we share their stories. Many folks in the Jewish community will say we haven’t consulted with them and yet we have met with leaders of Jewish organizations from across Canada, main uh, major federations, foundations, local Jewish organization representatives many times to talk about this exhibit, to explain what its scope is, what it’s about, what it’s intended to do, and most importantly, what it isn’t. And unfortunately there continues to be misconceptions about what it is. So we hope people will come and see it.
JP: I think the fear in the community – and I think it’s well founded is that this will foment an increase in antisemitism. Can you understand that concern?
Khan: Absolutely. I personally and any member of our team who’s talked to folks about this has said that we unequivocally share the concern about antisemitism in Canada today. That is part of our mandate. And we will continue to do that work and we can also share these stories of Palestinian Canadians – you know, telling the story of one community’s human rights violation in no way should negate or minimize the experience of another community. That’s what this museum was designed to do….designed to build understanding of shared humanity and that’s what we believe we’re doing responsibly.
JP: Just before I began this interview, I was taken (down to the fourth floor; the Nakba exhibit is on the fifth floor) to see the gallery of other human rights violations. I’m not sure what it’s called. (It’s where there is a ) recitation of various human rights violations, including what happened in 1947 and 1948 (in Palestine). They offer passing reference to the displacement of both Jewish and Palestinian refugees. Would you consider ever having an exhibit about the displacement of Jewish refugees from Arab lands in 1948 and subsequent years?
Khan: We would absolutely consider it and in fact have shared with leaders of the Jewish organizations months ago that yes, these are important stories that need to be told (and) invited them to work constructively with us on developing that content. Unfortunately we didn’t really receive much response.
JP: How long is this exhibit supposed to be on for?
Khan: So this exhibit right now we’re saying is a minimum of two years. That’s because it is an exhibit in a standing gallery and so it also depends on our updating of our other galleries and, you know, exhibits take a bit of time. This one is four years in the making and so we’ve just committed that it’ll be a minimum of two years and we’ll see where things go.
JP: There are a lot of other refugee situations in the world – (for instance) South Sudan, and just this morning I was saying to Isabelle that I received an email about the situation for people from Burundi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I didn’t realize that was a problem. I know that the Congo has had ongoing problems with displacement of populations. It it seems to me it’s not an unlimited number of stories like this you could tell, but there are a lot of others. How do you decide which ones take priority?
Khan: We’re often asked the question of how we decide, and it comes back to how this museum is designed. Each gallery is intended to tell a different story. It has an objective. So this exhibit, Palestine Uprooted, is in our Rights Today gallery. It’s to talk about global human rights issues. And we know that people want to better understand human rights of Palestinians. There’s no question. It’s being talked about, debated, discussed all over the world. And so we’re being responsive there to that need. And we know that Palestinian experiences were under represented in our galleries and have heard that for years. To your point though that there are other stories – the design of this museum is that you ought to be able to feel something, understand something about the forced displacement of one community and apply it to another. So now this story stands along the forced displacement of the Rwanda people, indigenous peoples, Ukrainian people, the Igbo people. You’ve named a number of others that we do need to develop content on over time, but it’s done depending on what gallery it is, what we are trying to invoke…because we’ll never be the encyclopedia of all human rights atrocities in the world. That’s actually why we’re called the Canadian Museum for Human Rights rather than the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.
We’re here to to develop an understanding through the stories that will impact people.
JP: Okay. I want to ask a politically loaded question.
Khan: Okay.
JP: The Jewish population of Canada is at best 450,000. In that range, Jews don’t have the political impact that they used to. At most, there are 12 to 16 ridings where the Jewish vote can make a difference. The Muslim population has grown substantially. It has a much larger political impact. Did that factor in to this exhibit being mounted in any way?
Khan: Absolutely not.
JP: So, I’ll ask the question that I asked the curator of the exhibit. Where did the impetus for this come from? Did it come from Palestinian Canadians?
Khan: The this exhibit came from a recognition, our decision. I hold responsibility ultimately for the decisions made by my team. It was made based on the recognition that Palestinian experiences were under represented in this museum. We absolutely heard from the Palestinian community organizations in Canada and had heard for many years that their stories were underrepresented. Ultimately, the decision was ours. And as we look at this gallery and updating our content, this is ‘rights today’ – global human rights. We know that the world is talking about Palestinian human rights and the stories of Palestinian Canadians naturally belong in our collective memory alongside many other stories that are told here.
JP: There was one particular aspect on one of the panels when I was sent a preview this morning and it referred to the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005 which led to a lot of Israeli deaths that we generally refer to as the Intifada. There’s no mention of Israeli deaths on that panel. Would you agree that might have been an oversight?
Khan: I mean I know that there the factual point is absolutely accurate. The decisions on the curation of the exhibit are not ones that I make, but certainly if that is a concern that we will look at.
Local News
Nakba exhbit at CMHR now open – here’s what it looks like
By BERNIE BELLAN (Posted June 26)The following press release was sent to me early Friday morning June 26 (Photos supplied by Annie Kierans, CMHR) Nothing that follows has been edited. I leave it to you to form your own opinion:
Winnipeg, MB — June 26, 2026 — The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will open a new exhibit tomorrow that explores human rights violations related to the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinian Canadians.
Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present will be on display in the Rights Today gallery on Level 5 until 2028. Featuring personal stories told through artifacts and video testimonies, the exhibit presents Palestinian Canadians reflecting on their ongoing struggle for human rights. The small exhibit reveals enduring patterns of loss and resilience, helping visitors understand more about this contemporary human rights story.
Palestinian Canadian stories are now included alongside many other stories of forced displacement and human rights violations featured in the Museum’s galleries. Each of these stories contribute to our visitors understanding of human rights and help the Museum fulfill its mandate to foster reflection and dialogue.
Exhibition highlights
Personal stories and artifacts: Experience firsthand accounts from Palestinian Canadians sharing their journeys of displacement and memory through a series of five artifacts. Cases display artifacts like property deeds, house keys, and a traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, accompanied by short videos that deepen understanding of the impacts of displacement.
Powerful artworks: In her painting Bound Together in Gaza, Malak Mattar, a Gazan artist, captures the struggles and resilience of her generation shaped by conflict. Her work pays homage to Guernica, Picasso’s powerful masterpiece depicting civilian suffering during war.
Curfews and Closures, by Rajie Cook, bears witness to life under military occupation during the 2000–2005 Palestinian uprising, when curfews and closures were expanded and further limited basic rights and freedoms.
Cultural heritage: Discover traditional Palestinian embroidery called tatreez. Tatreez motifs and colours are tied to place, family history and regional identity. Patterns are associated with particular towns, villages or areas of Palestine. In this way, tatreez is a form of storytelling: a way of preserving memory, sustaining identity and expressing resilience across displacement and exile.
Poetry and reflection: Engage with Mahmoud Darwish’s evocative verses, inspiring personal reflection on exile, voice, and responsibility. Visitors can take a card containing Darwish’s poem and add a personal note, fostering ongoing dialogue beyond the exhibit.
Contemporary context: Witness striking images of current events in Gaza and the West Bank, connecting past displacement to ongoing struggles.
Quotes:
“No force can silence the truth we carry. Growing up in Canada, my children lived the Nakba through our stories. And now we watch it happen again, live, on our phones. When I see the images coming out of Gaza, I am not watching the news. I am watching my history repeat itself.” -Fouad Sahyoun, a Palestinian Canadian featured in the exhibit
“We developed this exhibit with a clear awareness that Palestinian Canadian voices have too often been marginalized, silenced or spoken over — and that anti-Palestinian racism affects whose stories are heard and whose suffering is recognized. That is why we intentionally centred Palestinian Canadian voices throughout the exhibit.” -Isabelle Masson, Curator of Palestine Uprooted
“Human rights matter precisely when they are inconvenient, when the question of who deserves the dignity of having their rights recognized is genuinely contested. These are the moments where having a national museum for human rights is most important.
There are people who believe this exhibit should not exist in its current form. There are people who believe it should have existed sooner. There are people who will visit this exhibit and feel that it does not say enough, and others who will feel it says too much.
We have listened to every one of these voices. We have reflected. And we have renewed our resolve to continue the difficult, sometimes contested, and often controversial work of building understanding about human rights. We are a museum grounded in Canada’s human rights framework, whose mandate requires us to bear witness to the full complexity of the human story. We are proud to open this exhibit because the story it tells will help achieve that mandate, and because this story belongs in the collective memory of Canadians.”
- – Isha Khan, CEO
Local News
Nakba exhibit at human rights museum set to open despite mounting criticism
By NOAH STRAUSS (posted June 25) The Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ Nakba exhibit is scheduled to open this Saturday, June 27, despite growing criticism and calls for it to be delayed or revised. The exhibit has sparked public debate in Winnipeg and beyond regarding how it presents the history surrounding the creation of the State of Israel.
Earlier this week, Mark Berlin resigned from the museum’s board. In his resignation letter, he expressed concern that the exhibit presents a one-sided narrative and does not adequately address the experiences of Jewish communities affected by the events surrounding Israel’s independence.
The Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe,” refers to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1947–1949 conflict that followed the creation of the State of Israel. Critics of the exhibit argue that it focuses primarily on Palestinian displacement without sufficiently acknowledging the broader regional consequences of the period.
Some Jewish advocacy groups also point to the experiences of Jews who left or were expelled from several Arab and Muslim-majority countries in the decades surrounding Israel’s creation. Estimates suggest that between 850,000 and 950,000 Jews left or were displaced from countries including Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen, under a range of circumstances including persecution, expulsion, and confiscation of property.
In his resignation letter, Berlin, a faculty member at McGill University specializing in human rights law, wrote, “Telling the story with a one-sided perspective chosen by the museum serves to deepen division and contributes to further hostility toward Jews in Canada.”
Following his resignation, CIJA President Noah Shack released a statement saying, “The resignation of the museum’s only Jewish board member is a clear indictment of the museum’s handling of the controversial ‘Nakba’ exhibit.”
The exhibit’s VIP opening is expected to include invitations to representatives from all three levels of government. Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham had initially been invited but later declined following discussions with representatives from the Jewish community, including CIJA Manitoba Vice President Gustavo Zentner and Jeff Lieberman, President and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg.
Members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community are also planning a peaceful rally outside the museum on Friday at 5 p.m., according to organizers.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is expected to release a formal statement ahead of the exhibit’s opening.
(added June 26) To see interviews that Bernie Bellan conducted with Isabelle Masson, curator of the “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg and Isha Khan, CEO, CMHR about the exhibit go to curator of exhibit and CEO interviewed
