Features
In 1948, 20 young Jewish men from Winnipeg went to Palestine to fight for the fledgling Jewish state
Ed. introduction: In 1989 my late brother Matt wrote a story about a gathering of 10 “Machalniks” in Winnipeg. Machal, as the story explains, was short for “Mitnadvei Hutz La’aretz,” volunteers from outside the country.
Machalniks were men who volunteered to make their way to Palestine and join the Haganah in Israel’s War of Independence.
By MATT BELLAN
August 2, 1989
When Al Chapnick visits Israel, he avoids Jerusalem.
The Winnipeg insurance salesman has visited the Jewish state three times in the past 40 years.
On one trip he spent a half hour in Israel’s capital and left… and that was it.
Chapnick has vivid, painful memories of fighting from house to house in Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence.
“It overhangs you for the rest of your life,” he explains, his voice trembling slightly. “The thing I remember is having to cover dead victims with lime because the smell was atrocious.”
Chapnick and seven other Winnipeg Jews are known as Mahalniks, an acronym for the Hebrew title the Israeli government assigned foreign volunteers who fought for Israel during the War of Independence.
The letters in Machal stand for “Mitnadvei Hutz La’aretz,” volunteers from outside the country.
The Jewish War Veterans of Canada, Winnipeg Post, in cooperation with the General Monash branch of the Royal Canadian Legion last month, held a dinner at the Legion’s Main Street, headquarters, partly to honour Winnipeg’s eight living Machalniks, and Eddie Kaplansky, a Machalnik from Winnipeg now living in Haifa.
It was the first time, the Machalniks claimed, that an organization in Winnipeg’s Jewish community had come forward to commemorate their sacrifices for Israel.
TOLD THEIR STORIES
The honorees took turns speaking briefly at the microphone set up at one end of the long banquet table, and in interviews later, several told their stories.
In early 1948, only a few months after the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, recruiters were fanning out around the world.
Their mission: to enlist volunteers to serve in the Haganah, Palestine’s Jewish Defence forces, when Israel came into being on May 15.
In Canada, Jewish businessmen, lawyers and war heroes spearheaded the recruitment effort.
Enlisting Canadian Jews to fight in Palestine wasn’t illegal, but the recruiters usually held their meetings quietly, to avoid attracting the Canadian government’s attention.
The British were still in charge in Palestine. Recruiters for various fighting groups in Palestine, including the Irgun, were passing through Winnipeg.
The Irgun was already famous for its attacks on British military targets. Tying to recruit Canadian Jewish boys for such efforts might force the Canadian government to clamp down, organizers of the recruitment drive feared.
Sid Winston, commander of the Jewish War Veterans’ Winnipeg Post, was the secretary for the General Monash branch in the late 1940s and witnessed the Haganah recruitment sessions in Winnipeg’s Hebrew Sick Benefit Association on Selkirk Avenue.
“These fellows came through, and we didn’t even know their names.” he recalls. “We never took minutes.”
The recruiters preferred single men with combat experience.
“A fellow named John Secter did the recruiting out west,” recalls Jack Hurtig, Winnipeg businessman, who grew up in Edmonton.
First, Secter made contact with heads of all Jewish communities across Western Canada.
“They called a meeting, but didn’t say what it was about,” Hurtig says. In Edmonton, Secter told us “what was happening in Palestine under the British. He asked us who was going to go and who wasn’t …”
Hurtig was only 17, but had studied to be an astronautical engineer, and served as a student navigator during the war.
Like many other Canadian Jews who signed up to fight for Israel, Hurtig hadn’t been an active Zionist, but “they felt they had a job to do and they went.”
Al Chapnick was 18 in 1948 and a member of Young Judaea in Winnipeg.
The British had placed a strict ban on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The British had also advised Canada, the U.S. and other countries to interrogate people at border crossings and turn them back if they were heading for Palestine,.
Chapnick, like other recruits, embarked on a long, harrowing, and complicated journey to get around the ban on immigration.
To reduce suspicion that they were heading for Palestine, Haganah agents sent recruits from eastern Canada to cross the border south of Vancouver, and western Canadians to Niagara Falls.
When Chapnick got off the train in Niagara Falls, he used his “cover story.” He informed customs officials he was going to visit relatives in New York City.
Someone contacted him at Grand Central Station and directed him to a hotel where he found 31 other young Canadian Haganah recruits sitting in a room.
The recruits headed two at a time to a boat that has served as a cargo carrier during the war.
Arriving in Le Havre, France they looked for the Haganah contact who would meet them.
“She did,” Chapnick remembers. “It was a 14-year-old girl. She had tickets for all 31 of us, took pictures of all of us, and had train tickets for Paris. Then, another contact picked us up, took us to a restaurant in the Jewish quarter and, from there, somebody took us by train to Marseilles.
“Then trucks took us to DP camps, and there, we were given false identities of people killed during the war.”
At a port outside Marseilles,, a fishing boat designed for a crew of four picked up Chapnick and 155 other recruits for the final leg of the journey.
“It took 16 days to cross the Mediterranean. We couldn’t go too far offshore. There were no lifejackets, no lifeboats.”
Two months after starting his trip in Winnipeg, Chapnick arrived in Palestine.
But as the illegal immigrants got off the boat the British authorities interned them in a camp, intending to ship them to Cyprus.
Chapnick and three others escaped the next day and one of the three, an American, escorted them to a kibbutz where he had contacts
“We stayed there till the British didn’t have any authority in the country,” Chapnick continues.
In June 1948 he joined the Haganah, signing up for the English-speaking Seventh Brigade under a commander from Toronto.
As Calgary historian David Bercuson recounts in “The Secret Army,” a book about the Machalniks, Israel’s War of Independence was a long, exhausting struggle for Jewish survival. It started in May 1948 and didn’t formally end until June 1949.
More than 5000 foreign volunteers signed up to fight for Israel alongside about 43,000 men and women in the Haganah’s commando unit, the Palmach.
Opposing Israel were about 100,000 Arab soldiers from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Palestinian Arabs.
The British equipped the Jordanians and Egyptians well, shipping them millions of dollars worth of weapons in early 1948 and the Iraqis were also well armed.
“The Egyptians came up from the south, as far as Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv,” Chapnick recalls. The Jordanians got as far west as Tulkarm, (about 10 miles from the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tel Aviv), and the Lebanese as far south as the Jezreel Valley in southern Galilee.
“We were infantry, we tried to liberate as much of the country as we could, defend kibbutzim, and so on…”
A month later Chapnick was transferred to an “antitank platoon.”
“I was on a half track,” he says.That group liberated the whole Gail, north of Haifa. “We were all over. We captured Beer Sheva on my birthday – I’ll never forget that day.”
(To be continued.)
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.