Features
JCFS works to meet the needs of Holocaust survivors
By BERNIE BELLAN In 1933 the Jewish population of Europe was 9.5 million. Following the war it was 3.5 million. Two thirds of European Jewry perished in the Holocaust. Prior to the war Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe: over 3 million. Following the war, it was reduced to about 45,000.
There were approximately 4 million Jews living in the Soviet Union or Soviet Union-occupied territories prior to the war. Approximately 1.5 million survived – either by hiding in the forest or fleeing deeper into the Soviet Union.
By 2020, however, according to the Claims Conference, which represents all Holocaust survivors in negotiations for reparations with various governments, particularly the German government, only 400,000 of the 3.5 million Holocaust survivors still remained alive.
But, where did the Holocaust survivors end up?
A good many Holocaust survivors made their way to Israel, where about 400,000 were still alive in 2020. Of the rest, the majority made their way to North America, primarily the US.
According to the Jewish Heritage Centre though, approximately 35,000 Holocaust survivors made their way to Canada by 1953, of whom about 1,000 settled in Winnipeg.
The number of Holocaust survivors here took a further increase some years later, according to Adeena Lungen (who is one of two social workers working full time for Jewish Child and Family Service in the area of Holocaust Support Services, the other being Sonja Iserloh. There is also a Russian-speaking worker on the staff of JCFS, Margarita Iskijavev, who also deals to a certain extent with Holocaust survivors.)
There were actually two waves of Holocaust survivors whose origins were mostly from within the former Soviet Union, and who made their way to Winnipeg within the past 40 years, according to Adeena. The first wave was made up of emigrés who had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The second, and more recent wave, has been made up of parents of younger immigrants who were adults and who have come to Winnipeg, primarily from Israel.
Still, with the inevitable attrition as a result of the fact that almost all Holocaust survivors are now at least in their 80s or 90s, the number of Holocaust survivors in Winnipeg has been dwindling.
According to Adeena, there are “around 100 in the JCFS database”.
We were curious to know though, how the lives of these Holocaust survivors has been impacted by Covid in the past two years, so we spoke with Adeena to find out more about a group about which most of us don’t know very much.
It turns out that I have encountered many of these Holocaust survivors – without realizing it, several times at the Lubavitch Jewish Learning Centre, when I’ve attended various events there, also at the Adas Yeshurun – Herzlia Synagogue (which is where we used to have our office), and where I would occasionally see groups – almost all made up of women, congregating there. (Adeena explained that, prior to Covid, the Herzlia used to play host to frequent luncheons for Russian speaking Holocaust survivors.)
Adeena told me that she began working at JCFS in 1999 and moved into working with Holocaust survivors in 2000.
Much of her work has involved dealing with compensation claims through the aforementioned Claims Conference, which has distributed over $457 million in compensation to survivors around the world to date.
(I noted, in talking to Adeena, that we had been publishing a full page ad every year for quite some time that would be sent to us by an Israeli advertising agency, in which new information about claims and eligibility for survivors would be listed. It occurred to me that we haven’t received an ad of this sort for quite some time, so I contacted our Israeli intermediary to ask him if he knew why that was. He told me that he has also been asking the Claims Conference why they haven’t publicized any new announcements regarding compensation. Subsequently he told me that he forwarded my inquiry to the Claims Conference and he did receive a response back from them. In his words, “This looks promising.”)
While it may seem unusual for governments, especially Germany’s, to constantly be revising the criteria for compensation for Holocaust victims, Adeena explained to me that the process of negotiation is an ongoing one, with new criteria for eligibility for compensation being added on a constant basis. Interestingly, she noted, the government of Romania has also now engaged in negotiating compensation for Romanian Jews.
As a result, much of Adeena’s work over the years has involved filing applications for individuals. As one might expect, there is a great deal of documentation required in the process, but Adeena says the results have been gratifying.
In addition to compensation received from outside sources, the JCFS has created special programs designed to meet the particular needs of Holocaust survivors within our local community.
For instance, JCFS is able to provide home care services for Holocaust survivors, depending on their physical and financial needs, with financial assistance coming either from the Claims Conference or a Montreal-based centre known as the Cummings Centre. Those two organizations allocate funds to partner agencies such as the JCFS which, in turn, decides who gets home care.
I asked Adeena what types of services are available through home care?
She said: “Cleaning, doing laundry, and companionship – above and beyond what the WRHA might provide.”
Given the advanced ages of most of Holocaust survivors, I wondered how many are still able to live on their own?
Surprisingly, Adeena said the answer is that most are still living on their own – and the home care, as well as other support services provided by JCFS and other agencies such as the Gwen Secter Centre and the Rady JCC, have played instrumental roles in allowing so many of these survivors to remain relatively autonomous.
“Since 2000, the Gwen Secter Centre has been hosting a luncheon program twice a month for Holocaust survivors,” Adeena noted (a program, incidentally, she started), although of late that program has been scaled back to once a month.
Adeena further added that “For the last several years Heather Mandell-Kraut, the JCFS Team Lead in Older Adult Services, and Keith Elfenbein, JCFS Case Aide in Older Adult Services, have coordinated and run the group. With the arrival of Covid, both Heather and Keith have kept the group operating both virtually and in person, when possible. The continuity of this program, especially during these challenging times, has had a positive impact on the overall well being of survivors.”
The Chabad Lubavitch has also been very involved with Russian speaking seniors – not just Holocaust survivors, Adeena said. And, while in-person meetings are not taking place as a result of Covid, there is a “tight knit” group that meets regularly online, and which is facilitated by another JCFS worker, Anna Shoichet.
“Before the pandemic that group numbered around 40-50,” Adeena noted; however, since the pandemic took hold the number has shrunk to “20-30”, she said.
I wondered though, whether the advent of Covid has had any more traumatic effect on Holocaust survivors than the general population?
Adeena responded that survivors are having to deal with “some of the same issues that affect us all”….yet there is no doubt that the “confinement” associated with Covid, along with the even more traumatic isolation associated with the lockdowns to which seniors especially have been subjected have exacerbated the feelings of isolation that were already fairly common with Holocaust survivors.
“For these people the fear of dying is always present,” Adeena said, “yet they still show incredible resilience and resourcefulness.”
For survivors, the common refrain, she noted, is that “I’ve survived the Holocaust; I’ll survive this, too.”
“I don’t think survivors are in worse shape than they were before Covid,” Adeena added, although she cautioned that one area that has had a particularly debilitating effect, not only on survivors, but on many other seniors, is in decreased visits to doctors.”
In that regard, JCFS is in constant communication with all its senior clientele, almost always by phone, checking to make sure that things are all right and that day to day affairs are being tended to.
Adeena pointed to the hiring of Danielle Tabacznik as the JCFS’s “Seniors Concierge” in 2020 as an example of how JCFS is taking a pro-active approach in reaching out to isolated seniors in the community. Danielle keeps in touch with regular groups of seniors, often facilitating communication among seniors over the phone through group chats. Adeena clarified that “the creative initiatives developed by Danielle Tabacznik, the Jewish community’s Senior Concierge, are the results of a pilot project of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg that is housed at JCFS.”
And, while more recently, Adeena and other workers have been able once again to see many of their clients in person, the restrictions necessitated by Covid protocols still entail much of thier work being conducted over the phone.
Over the past couple of years I’ve often been focusing on the work that many of our agencies have been doing in adapting to the hardships thrust upon so many of the less fortunate among us. In so many ways Winnipeg’s Jewish community can be proud of how agencies such as the JCFS have continued to seek out new ways of interacting with those among us who might otherwise go unnoticed. And, as we note in our story about the Jewish Federation and its continued success in helping those agencies to meet those goals on page1, this is one Jewish community that continues to meet the challenges thrust upon it by Covid.
Features
EINSTEIN, RITA AND ME
By DAVID R. TOPPER In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate student majoring in Physics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh – there was only one girl in my advanced physics classes. As I learned later, nothing much had changed since the days of Einstein. When he was studying Physics at the Polytechnic in Zurich, the physics classes were all male – except for Mileva Marić, a Serbian who was the first girl in high school ever to take a physics course in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. Because Switzerland was the only place where women were admitted to university classes, she was there with Albert in Zurich.
She was very smart, especially in math, and also proficient at the piano. Born with a dislocated hip, Mileva had a slight limp, and the men in the class ignored her – except for one, Albert. They became a couple and eventually married.
Back to me in my university physics classes – where it seems that little had changed for over sixty years. In my advanced classes there was only one girl. Her name was Rita. She mainly stayed to herself. Majoring in Mathematics, she took all the advanced physics courses available, right through the fourth year. In short, in those predominantly male classes, she was an anomaly – alone and ignored by her classmates.
Except me. No, I didn’t date her, yet I didn’t ignore her. During those undergraduate years, I lived at home and took a bus or a trolley to school five days a week, leaving early in the morning. The university is in downtown Pittsburgh. Walking to the campus, I first went to the Physics Department, using it as my base. From there I went to my other classes during the day. There was a small classroom in the Department that was almost always empty, especially in the morning. It could be used for individual studying or small group discussions and such. In the early morning, I was usually the only one there – except for Rita, who used it for studying, too. She often was there, even before me. Usually the conversation started by me saying something like: “Hi Rita, did you get the last problem in mechanics class homework?” Her response was invariably, “Yes.” We would go over it, with her finding my mistakes. We had an amiable relationship that never went beyond our interactions about physics – right up to the end of our university years. As far as I can remember, I don’t think I knew much about her beyond the classroom.
But one event, which I’ll never forget, stands out. It was during our last year of classes in a course on the theory of relativity. For the textbook the prof used a paperback edition of the original papers on the theory. Early in the course, we went through Einstein’s first paper of 1905 – step by step. On this particular day, the prof came in and said he had a problem with the next step in the paper. As we all sat with our books in front of us, he pointed to a certain equation where we ended in the previous class. In the next sentence, Einstein says that such and such follows. The problem for the prof was that he didn’t know how Einstein got that deduction. I looked at it, and didn’t have a clue either.
Just then, Rita’s hand went up. She said she thinks she knows how Einstein got it. The prof asked her to come up to the blackboard and show him. Rita did, and the prof said that she was right. I’m quite sure that – then and there – Rita got an A in that course, if not an A+.
That gives you some idea about Rita and my relationship with her at the time. Not a very significant part of my 4-year undergraduate years – except for this one event in a physics course.
Why then am I bringing this up now, so many years later? Here’s why.
I graduated with my BS degree in the fall of 1964. I then went to graduate school at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, majoring in Physics. (It’s now Case-Western Reserve University.)
When I moved there, I lived in a formerly swanky hotel on the edge of the campus, which was purchased by the university as a residence solely for graduate students. They called it The Graduate House. Eleven floors, the top 8 with suites for students, with one floor solely for female students. It was a radical experiment in co-ed living for the time.
My first day there, after getting my room and putting my things in drawers and so forth, it was late in the afternoon – and I was hungry. I had been told when I registered that the dining hall would open the following morning, but for now there was no food. However, on the third floor there were vending machines with sandwiches and such, so I went to find them.
Going down the elevator, exiting at the third floor, and walking down a hall – suddenly I heard my name called. “David, what are you doing here?” Turning around – there was Rita! It was quite a surprise for both of us. This tells you how minimally we interacted before; not even knowing that we both were going to the same graduate school.
I told her that I was majoring in Physics at Case. She, of course, was majoring in Math. After a chat about all this, I said that I was looking for the sandwich machines. She said that there was a diner nearby, and she was going there for dinner with someone else she had just met so I went, too. Thus, Rita and I reunited in Cleveland, now living in the same building.
In a short while, I made friends with a group of people in the Graduate House with diverse majors. Some were in various sciences, others in humanities. It was a lively group, with animated discussions on a range of academic topics, including politics, especially as the Vietnam War became the center of the news in the USA.
Rita was not a part of that group, but I did often see her. Being the eager student that I was, I was up early, getting to the university to study in the library before classes started. Coming to the dining room for breakfast, not long after it opened, I often saw Rita, too – all alone in a far corner. I took my tray and we had breakfast together. Except for that morning ritual, I seldom had any interactions with her.
Thinking about this now, I find the parallel morning rituals (first in Pittsburgh and then in Cleveland) a fascinating serendipitous episode in my life. The difference was that in Cleveland, we were not taking the same courses so we didn’t have to compare solutions to homework. We did talk about our respective courses, and interestingly a parallel appeared. By around mid-term of that first year in graduate school, we both were less than enthusiastic about what we were learning and, accordingly, were both thinking of not carrying on in our respective subjects.
For me it was Quantum Mechanics and the impossibility for us to know reality in itself. Everything was statistical, uncertain and almost esoteric. I found the uncritical attitude toward this world-view to be almost religious in nature. (I only learned later that Einstein felt the same way!)
For Rita, it was the same, despite the different fields. The math now was far beyond basic geometry, algebra and calculus. Topology, Group Theory, Galois’ Theory, and more – all culminating in Gödel’s Theorem, which asserts that all mathematical knowledge is inherently incomplete. It all was too esoteric for her. She knew that she was not going to get a PhD in mathematics.
We commiserated together, with another parallel in our unusual relationship, but with a difference. I still wanted to get my Master’s Degree and somehow still go on to get a job as a professor – that had been my goal in life ever since my first semester at Duquesne. Rita, however, was thinking of dropping out immediately and leaving university life altogether.
For me, this problem was resolved in my second year of Physics at Case, when I took a course taught by Martin Klein. Although he was a physicist in the Department, for many years he no longer was doing research in it. Instead, he was writing papers on the history of the subject – mainly involving Einstein, Boltzmann, Gibbs, Ehrenfest and others. Today those papers are paragons in the field. It was my extremely good luck that the department permitted him to teach such material for the first time.
I loved the course. I was enthralled by the topics – this was the way I wanted to learn physics, through its history. After getting my Master’s in Physics at the end of that year, I moved across campus to the History of Science Department. In another four years I had a PhD in the subject.
Back to early 1965: I tried to talk Rita out of dropping out, but she was adamant. The kicker was this: she really preferred numbers with $$$$ in front of them. Yes, she wanted to be an accountant. She didn’t want to waste any more time here, when she could be home getting her accounting credentials. As I recall, sometime before the spring of that year she went back to Pittsburgh. I’m sure she had an easy time getting her accounting licence and all that went with it. As she was very smart. My guess is that she was an excellent accountant and was very successful in that career.
I have no way of knowing. We didn’t keep in touch (honestly, I don’t know why not) and I can’t even remember her last name. All that I can recall is what I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I find these two interactions between Rita and me an interesting and pleasing tidbit about life and relationships – so much so that I deem it worthy of repeating here.
David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific, Academy of the Heart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag. and elsewhere.
His poem Seascape with Gulls: My Father’s Last Painting won first prize in the annual poetry contest of CommuterLit Mag – May 12, 2025.
Features
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Features
How to read fixed, daily, and progressive jackpot labels at Betscore Casino
Modern casino lobbies feature distinctive jackpot tags designed for easy recognition across various game tiles. Browsing through Bet Score, you will see that the platform uses a consistent system to present fixed, daily, and progressive jackpot displays. This brief guide explains how these labels are typically formatted, offering visual cues so you can confidently interpret each jackpot category. Betscore Casino presents these markers in a clear and recognizable way.
Across the lobby, jackpot labels act as immediate visual indicators that separate one game’s prize structure from another. These tags use bold text, simple icons, and standard placements, which makes scanning for your preferred jackpot type quick and intuitive. While game tiles may share basic design language, the wording on a label—along with visual styling such as meters or timers—lets you know at a glance whether a jackpot is static, day-specific, or incrementally building. Familiarizing yourself with these UI elements helps you compare options in Betscore Casino without clicking through each game panel. Understanding the visual symbolism of these badges saves time and keeps your focus on how casino interfaces communicate essential details about their jackpot mechanics.
Decoding fixed and daily jackpot displays in casino lobbies
When you spot a “Fixed” jackpot label in the lobby, it indicates a set prize amount displayed the same way every time you encounter it. This number stays constant, appearing directly on the game’s tile or badge and often repeating on the game’s detail page, to minimize ambiguity. The layout generally favors a clean, uncluttered presentation, with the static number supported by an icon or highlighted term that reinforces its status as unchanging. In Betscore Casino, these design choices create a straightforward reading experience where the fixed amount sits front-and-center beside the badge, making it easy to identify among multiple game tiles.
For “Daily” jackpot displays, the interface uses visual cues to highlight the time-based nature of the prize. You’ll often see the jackpot label paired with a reference to days or a timer-style icon, sometimes in the form of a calendar symbol or a clearly defined time window. These elements are usually grouped with the label and placed at the top or side of the tile so you can instantly tell that the jackpot is awarded on a daily basis. The combination of wording and visual accompaniments ensures that the daily structure stands out. This consistent tagging makes daily jackpots particularly easy to sort when scanning the available offerings.
How progressive jackpot meters stand apart and quick display checks
Within the lobby, “Progressive” jackpot labels are closely linked with animated or meter-style visual treatments. The jackpot amount is shown as an ever-increasing figure, typically larger or highlighted in a contrasting color, to draw attention to its dynamic nature. Often, the progressive badge sits beside or above this meter, so the relationship between label and rolling number is obvious and direct. In Betscore Casino, this design philosophy visually distinguishes progressive jackpots from fixed or daily options at a glance, creating an immediate sense of anticipation around the changing prize amount each time you browse the lobby.
When identifying jackpot types quickly, three main cues make reading the tags straightforward. Fixed jackpots always feature a stable, non-animated number next to their badge, keeping things simple and clear. Daily jackpots consistently add a day-based timeframe indicator, which could be text or a countdown, usually positioned close to the label for easy association. Progressive jackpots, by contrast, are marked by a running total or animated meter, making them stand out as prize amounts increase. Paying attention to these conventions, you’ll find it much easier to compare options and navigate the jackpot categories provided with confidence and efficiency.
