Local News
Youngest survivor of Auschwitz calls for greater Holocaust education efforts
By MYRON LOVE
Angela Orosz-Richt is greatly concerned about the rising tide of Anti-Semitism in the world.
“It seems that the world hasn’t learned anything from the Holocaust,” she said. “There are still a lot of people who believe that all Jews are rich and influential, that we control Hollywood and the media. The internet is full of garbage and we are seeing rising levels and Anti-Semitic attacks in Germany and France and even Brooklyn.
“And it’s not just the old Anti-Semitism. The lies about Israel are outrageous.”
She further noted that half of Canadians can’t name one concentration camp and many don’t know what Auschwitz was.
“There is still so much more (in terms of education) that needs to be done,” she said.
Orosz-Richt has in recent years taken a leading role in Holocaust education. On Thursday, February 27, the youngest survivor of Auschwitz was in Winnipeg for the first time speaking on behalf of the March of the Living to a full house at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue.
Her appearance in Winnipeg came at the behest of Carrie Shenkarow, chair of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg’s March of the Living Committee.
Her father was an architect, her mother a well-educated young lady who was raised by French nannies. They met and fell in love and were married in 1943.
“Life was good at first,” she said. “My parents had an active social life. They didn’t see the clouds on the horizon.”
The Germans invaded Hungary in April, 1944, and, shortly after, Orosz-Richt’s parents were removed from their apartment to the ghetto and, on May 22, loaded with hundreds of other Hungarian Jews onto boxcars en route to Auschwitz. Orosz-Richt recounted the standard scenes of yelling, beatings, snarling German shepherds and the presence of Joseph Mengele on the platform designating the new arrivals for life or death.
Prisoners whose lives were spared had their heads shaven, were given uniforms and wooden shoes and were given numbers. “All their dignity was removed,” Orosz-Richt said. “They were no longer counted as human beings.”
While her father was worked to death, her pregnant mother somehow survived. She was first assigned to go through the belongings of victims for anything of value. Then, the five-months pregnant woman was put to work at hard labour building roads. What saved her was a reassignment to kitchen duties where she was able to scrounge potato peels.
When, at seven months pregnant, her condition was brought to the attention of Mengele whose staff subjected her to medical experiments consisting of injecting caustic substances into her cervix.
She was being encouraged by others in her barracks to abort her baby. “MY mother had a dream of her mother telling her to trust in God and not abort her child,” Orosz-Richt said.
She gave birth in the barracks with the help of another inmate who had had some medical experience. Orosz-Richt weighed one kilo at birth and her chances of survival were slim. Further upping the odds against her, almost immediately after birth, her mother had to go outside with the other prisoners for the daily roll call.
“She had to stand for three hours in freezing temperatures in flimsy clothing,” Orosz-Richt said. “It was the thought of her baby waiting inside that kept her going. She was afraid that I might have died before she got back.”
After liberation, mother and sickly child returned to Hungary where they lived with Vera’s mother. Vera found a doctor who looked after her baby. Mother and daughter escaped from Communist Hungary in 1948 and, shortly after, Vera married an older man who had lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust.
“I grew up with loving and protective parents,” she said.
Orosz-Richt – who has four children of her own – noted that for the first twenty years, survivors didn’t want to talk about what happened to them. For the next twenty years, no one wanted to listen. It has only been in the last 30 years that Holocaust victims are talking and people are listening.
“Holocaust education is so very important,” she said. “Government needs to be involved and we need to start teaching the Holocaust at a younger age.”
Speaking on behalf of the Federation, Jessica Cogan, Israel and Overseas Chair, spoke about the importance of the March of the Living. “I consider the March of the Living a sacred duty,” she said. “My own participation I consider one of the most meaningful moments in my life. It shaped who I am today.”
She noted that the March of the Living began in 1988. Every year, thousands of young people from all over the world gather once a year at Auschwitz, walk the three kilometers from Auschwitz to Birkenau following in the footsteps of the death march near war’s end and show that the world that the Nazi’s failed in their “final solution”. Then they follow up with a trip to Israel where they celebrate Yom Hatzmaut and celebrate the miracle which is the rebirth of Jewish life in our ancestral homeland.
“Our goal this year was to send 20 students from Winnipeg on the March of the Living – 20 in ’20,” Cogan said. “I am happy to announce that we have exceeded that number. We will have 24 students going this spring.”
While the students contribute to the cost of the trip, Cogan noted, the March of the Living Committee raises funds to subsidize those costs.
“We want to thank our donors and encourage others to give,” she said.
Local News
Application filed by two former members of Etz Chayim Congregation against the congregation to have their memberships restored dismissed by judge
The following is taken from the Canadian Jewish News website: “Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench has dismissed Hadass Eviatar and David Hoult’s application challenging the termination of their membership at Congregation Etz Chayim. In his decision, Justice Vic Toews noted that, although Hoult’s letter describing a hypothetical attack on the synagogue may have lacked sensitivity given the political climate, he did not intend to threaten violence against congregants. However, the judge ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction to intervene in the membership dispute under Manitoba’s Corporations Act, finding that the couple had no financial, proprietary or economic interest that would entitle them to the remedies they sought. The judge concluded that religious organizations are generally free to determine their own membership rules and ordered each side to bear its own legal costs.”
If you would like to read the original article that broke the story about the battle between Hadaass Eviatar and David Hoult with Etz Chayim Congregation you can go to Epic Court Battle.”
Local News
Jewish Federation now says Jewish population of Winnipeg in 2021 (according to the census) was 13,940 – not the 16,000 figure that the Federation had been touting for years
By BERNIE BELLAN (Posted Oct. 27, 2026) Longtime readers of The Jewish Post & News (and this website) would probably know that I have long had a very strong interest in establishing as accurate figures as possible when it has come to reporting the size of Winnipeg’s Jewish community.
For years I argued that our Jewish Federation was exaggerating the size of our Jewish population. I heard the figure of 16,000 bandied about by leaders in our community quite often when it came to reporting the size of our Jewish population – without any empirical evidence to back that figure up.
I had long maintained that the only reasonably accurate figures when it came to reporting the size of Winnipeg’s Jewish population were those produced by the late Evelyn Katz, when she was the unofficial demographer for the Jewish Federation – over 30 years ago. What Evelyn would do is keep careful track of births, deaths, numbers of newcomers but, perhaps most important: the number of people who had left our community.
Thus, in August 2022 when I interviewed Faye Rosenberg Cohen who, at the time, was just about to retire as the Jewish Federation’s Chief Planning and Allocations Officer, I was somewhat astonished to hear Faye say, when I asked her what proportion of our Jewish community was made up of immigrants, she answered that “I can honestly say when I look at those numbers it’s somewhere around 1/3 of the community.”
In response, I asked: “So you’d say it’s somewhere between 4-5,000?”
Faye said: “I think it’s more than that.”
I wrote in that article, “I indicated my skepticism at that time, saying ‘You know that I’ve always been skeptical about the numbers that have been used by the Federation for the population of the Jewish community. I think though that it’s always been more of a case of identification – who identifies as Jewish.’ ”
Later, after the results of the 2021 census were released, I wrote that “if you take into account the results of the 2021 census, the Jewish community cannot be larger than 14,270 at a maximum. But that figure would also include anyone who had either said either their ethnic origin was Jewish or their religion was Jewish.”
Since many of the individuals who had said on the 2021 census that their ethnic origin was Jewish, but their religion was something else, I maintained that ascertaining the real size of our Jewish community was highly problematic.
Still, for the sake of argument I was willing to accept that, realistically, it was somewhere between 13,000-14,000 – but nowhere close to the figure of 16,000 that had come to be suggested by our then president of the Jewish Federation or by other leading figures in our community.
So, it was with a sense of satisfaction that I heard Sharon Graham, who is now the Jewish Federation’s Community Planning and Allocations Lead say to an audience of over 50 people who were at the Gwen Secter Centre on Thursday, October 22, that the Jewish community in 2021 was – at a maximum: 13,940.
Sharon was at the Gwen Secter Centre to speak to Remis Lecture attendees. Her presentation preceded a presentation by Jewish Federation CEO Jeff Lieberman. Sharon used a PowerPoint presentation to provide some very interesting insights into where our Jewish community was at in 2021- and I’m offering some parts of her presentation here for you to read because I thought they were so interesting.
I had actually made many of the same observations about the results of the 2021 census in my own reporting back in 2022, but seeing what I had written confirmed by the Jewish Federation’s point person on planning told me that Sharon has a much more realistic view of our community than did Faye Rosenberg Cohen.
Here, for instance, is a slide that shows the proportion of our Jewish community that is made up of immigrants. It’s slightly under one fifth, not the one third percentage that Faye had suggested.
But, what really set Sharon’s presentation apart from anything else I’ve ever seen presented by someone from the Jewish Federation – other than the aforementioned Evelyn Katz, was the slide she projected which showed that, while there had been a large influx of newcomers to Winnipeg’s Jewish community between 2016-2021 there had also been a significantly high number of people who had left our Jewish community in those same years, as you can see in the following slide:
That is something we just don’t hear discussed by leaders of our Jewish organizations, but let’s be realistic: For many newcomers who came to Winnipeg and were counted as new members of our Jewish community, Winnipeg – for a variety of reasons, was a stepping stone to other communities. It may have been for reasons of better job opportunities, moving closer to other family members, or – the reason that we hear so often when it comes to people saying they want to leave Winnipeg: the weather.
But, whatever the reason, Sharon’s figures show that, as much as GrowWinnipeg may have been an abiding success when it’s come to attracting newcomers to our Jewish community here, getting them to stay long term is a different story.
And, while there were other aspects of Sharon’s presentation that certainly merit discussion, especially the figures she produced about intermarriage, rather than delving into them here, I thought it useful simply to insert them for you, the reader, to see – and draw your own conclusions.
Local News
Marty Green expands his protest against extremist Jewish settlers to two more venues – and is arrested twice more
(Tuesday, October 27) We received the following press release about Marty Green being arrested again, both at the University of Manitoba and at Shaarey Zedek Synagogue:
Both sides came to blows on Saturday, October 24, at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue as security personnel sought to prevent Marty Green from interfering with synagogue traffic as he protested just outside synagogue grounds against the actions of religious settlers in Israel’s occupied West Bank territory. Synagogue Executive Director Rena Secter Elbaze quickly intervened to prevent further escalation. Police arrived shorty thereafter and detained Green for 45 minutes before driving him home and releasing him. It is not clear whether their decision not to lay charges was the result of their own onsite investigation or whether it was at the request of the synagogue executive.
Green has now been arrested four times in the last month and faces multiple charges for disturbing the peace, including two episodes at the Asper Campus and one more this past Friday (Oct. 23) at the University of Manitoba. While Green says initially he was merely handing out leaflets (at the Asper Campus), since his first arrest on September 23, he has returned to the campus with a large placard and an acccordion, accompanying himself while singing songs with lyrics that include such phrases as “The Jews Are Bananas….B-A-N-A-N-A-S”. In addition to listing actions of the religious settlers as including arson, vandalism, and theft, he pointedly alleges that the IDF has been backing up the settlers in their actions.
Green had earlier notified the Shaarey Zedek that he was contemplating bringing his protest to the synagogue. He was told that if he attempted to enter the grounds he would be prevented from doing so. At that time, Secter Elbaze told Green that his intentions were inappropriate, declaring the synagogue to be “a house of worship dedicated to prayer, learning, community, and spiritual engagement.” Green responded that if the synagogue were willing to contact the Crown and inform them that “that there was never any legal basis for their claims that I was conducting myself inappropriately at the Asper Campus” (with regard to his earlier arrests) that he would “voluntarily refrain from carrying his informational campaign to the synagogue(s).”
Green further argues that the recent “psak” (religious ruling) by leading Israeli rabbi Rov Dov Lior, in which Lior declares that it is not merely permissible but praiseworthy for Jews to steal olives from Arab orchards….that this ruling brings his protest within the proper realm of religious discourse. He says further that if the local rabbis were willing to speak out to their congregations against the aforesaid psak, that he might have refrained from taking his campaign to their grounds.
Although Green was released on Saturday without charges, police confiscated his placard. They explained that it was being held as evidence pending an investigation by Major Crimes as to whether it constituted hate literature.
There was no further information given as to what happened at the University of Manitoba.
