Features
Return to Ukraine: searching out the Rosner family past
Introduction: Not too long ago we were contacted by former CBC Manitoba managing editor Cecil Rosner, who asked us whether we’d be interested in publishing a story about a trip he took in 2012 to visit the area in Ukraine where both his parents were born. Although it’s been 10 years since Cecil visited Ukraine, given the current situation in that country we thought it timely to get a sense of what life was like in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion.
By CECIL ROSNER ““Oi — look at the way the schlemiel drives.”
We are bouncing along the potholed roads of Western Ukraine, heading from Lviv to my mother’s hometown of Buczacz. Our driver and guide isn’t Jewish, but that doesn’t stop him from endlessly whistling Fiddler on the Roof tunes and inserting Yiddishisms into every second phrase.
“These guys are all ganefs (thieves),” he says of the policemen we pass, as he forms his thumb and forefinger into a pistol and slowly pulls the trigger. Alex doesn’t like the speed traps the highway patrols set up, and he appreciates oncoming drivers signalling him to beware of cops just beyond the next hill. It’s an important issue for our driver, who crisscrosses Ukraine’s roads all year-long, ferrying tourists to distant towns and villages in search of their Jewish ancestors.
For Alex, who holds a history degree and is an expert at tracing genealogical roots, it’s an occupation he never dreamed he would have. But in the chaos of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when jobs were evaporating and everyone was trying to reimagine their lives, it seemed like a useful niche to pursue – especially as foreigners were finally trying to discover exactly what had happened to their relatives during the Second World War.
That’s why I’m here too, along with my wife and a cousin. Both of my parents were born in the region, and both were here when the Nazis occupied the area in 1941. In different improbable and miraculous ways, they both survived the war and emigrated to Canada. But every single other family member was shot, gassed, beaten or starved to death by the Nazis and their collaborators. We came here to see what traces of their lives remained.
It seemed logical to make our first stop the local museum, right across from the old city hall. Buczacz is little more than a village, with about 13,000 people. In the early part of the 19th century, Jews made up two-thirds of the population. While that number ebbed and flowed over the years, Jews were still in the majority when the Nazi occupation began. But that would have been difficult to discern in the museum.
In all the display cases, and in the colourful photo album that the town produces, there is no specific mention of a Jewish population. There is scarcely any reference to the Second World War, except for a notation that the town “was released from German invaders and captured by the Soviet Union.” Wouldn’t a town’s museum want to address what became of the majority of the population? What happened to thousands of farmers, shop owners, tailors, tinsmiths, doctors, lawyers and politicians? Doesn’t the mass roundup and extermination of most people in town even rate a mention?
The only hint of any Jewish presence came in the form of artifacts from the life of Shmuel Agnon, a Jewish writer born in Buczacz who won the Nobel Prize for literature. But the entire fate of the people Agnon wrote about had been erased.
Alex had little luck getting the museum’s employee to throw any light on what the town was like in the immediate pre-war period. She genuinely seemed not to know. But there were a few things I already knew.
My mother, Mina, had been born here in 1913, and her family owned a wholesale distribution company. They carbonated water and stored it in big, forty-litre copper cylinders, shipping them along with ice to shops throughout the area. When she was 25, she married my father, Michael Rosner, who came from nearby Kolomaya. In 1939, they opened a small retail store on the main town square, probably within metres of the present-day museum.
When the war broke out in September 1939, there was a reprieve. The region came under the control of the Soviets, and Jews were under no immediate threat. All that changed when Hitler marched eastward in 1941. My father was conscripted by the retreating Soviets, and my mother was trapped behind Nazi lines for the remainder of the war.
For the next three years, every member of my mother’s family – her parents, five brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins – were dragged from their hiding places, bludgeoned or shot, or sent off to be executed. They were all dumped into unmarked graves. My parents’ first-born child – my brother – also fell victim, dying at the age of three in 1942.
My mother’s survival defied any normal odds. She fled from one hiding place to another, escaping just in time to avoid capture. She spent 11 months in the attic of a Polish family along with five other Jews. She took an assumed name and boldly convinced the Nazis she was Christian. Finally, after Buczacz was liberated, she re-united with my father and they came to Canada to start anew in 1948.
I had been to Buczacz once before, with my mother, in 1990. We came with a documentary crew to record her first visit back home since the war. It was an emotional trip and a difficult one for both of us. But we learned very little of the actual events that had transpired in the town, or the exact locations where they happened. That’s why, nearly 15 years after my mother’s death, I was returning for a second time.
I convinced Alex that our best strategy on this trip would be to find older people and ask them what they knew about the 30s and 40s. Alex seemed skeptical. For one thing, the war had begun more than 70 years ago, so it was unlikely there would be any useful first-hand witnesses at hand. And there was also the collective amnesia that pertained to inconvenient truths.
After all, a segment of the population had actively collaborated with Hitler. They were instrumental in helping identify and round up the Jews, the Communists, and all the other elements the Nazis wanted to destroy. Some might still be living in Buczacz and surrounding areas. Their children and grandchildren almost certainly are here.
The museum’s employee finally gives us a sliver of hope. There is someone in town we should visit – someone who knows the history and might be able to help us. His name is Mykola.
We drive for a few minutes and stop at Mykola’s house. I am expecting to find an elderly man who may have been a teenager during the war. Instead, we come upon a 40-something man in sweatpants and a Maple Leafs T-shirt. He is clutching a handful of papers and photographs. One of them shows a photo of Buczacz’s surviving Jews standing beside a memorial gravestone in 1944. Out of the original population of 10,000, no more than 100 survived. One of the people in the photo is my mother.
Mykola has taken an interest in wartime history, and now helps visiting tourists locate family remnants. He has a variety of interesting documents, including a map of pre-war street names, and a mid-19th century register of townsfolk. It turns out that he knows about some of the Jewish families that lived in Buczacz during the war – a handful of them have returned over the years, and he has helped them find their old homes and landmarks.
We ask Mykola if he could help solve a puzzle my mother and I couldn’t figure out on our previous trip. Her family had lived on a street called Zeblickevicie, which had changed names several times after the war. From her description, though, we knew it was beside a stream that ran into the Strypa River, a subsidiary of the Dniester.
We pile into the car along with Mykola and he directs us to the location. The stream had been covered over, except at the point where it emptied into the Strypa. Though the original home was no longer there, he shows us the exact location where my mother’s family had lived. I saw the idyllic surroundings, the lush vegetation around the quiet river, and for the first time I had an inkling of the peaceful life my mother experienced before the war changed everything.
While we were all walking along the old Zeblickevicie street, Mykola bumps into a friend and exchanges a few words with him. As we walk on, the friend stops my wife, Harriet, and our cousin Nina and says: “Mina Rosner – I am a Witness.” That is the name of my mother’s book. Alex is impatient. He had rich experience of locals trying to pester visitors, and he was eager to move us all along. But Harriet and Nina persist. It turns out the man on our chance encounter knows all about my mother’s story, and offers to take us on a tour of where she lived, where she went to school, where she hid during the war, and where her family members were killed.
Over the next 24 hours, Alex grudgingly admits he was wrong. Our serendipitous encounter has linked us up with Jura, a 60-year-old retired computer technician, astrologist and local historian. He knows my mother’s exact birthdate, and, it appears, everyone else’s in town. He has a photocopied version of my mother’s book, and he has pieced together her recollections with precise locations of many of the events she describes. If photographic memories actually exist, we figure he has one. He is a visiting tourist’s dream come true, and Alex has to take a back seat while Jura takes us on a remarkable tour of my mother’s life.
The first stop is just around the corner, on a street that used to be called Chechego Maya. I remember it from my mother’s stories, but we could never pinpoint it on our previous trip. Jura shows us the building where my mother’s sister and her husband ran a hardware shop. He knows the address because it’s listed in trade publications of the era. Though my mother’s original house and her parents’ store no longer existed, I finally had an authentic touchstone of some of her family’s life at the time.
Jura takes us to the pre-war building on Kolejowa Street that served as the cheder, the religious school, where Jewish kids studied. We visit the girls’ school and middle school where my mother was a student, and walk into Buczacz’s Sokol theatre, where she watched dramatic performances and movies as a teenager. A group of children is rehearsing a musical concert on stage, and I can imagine my mother sitting in the auditorium with her brothers and sisters and friends.
Just down the road, near an orchard, Jura shows us the garden of a long-ago demolished home where my mother hid during one of the Nazi aktions, or periodic killing sprees. A bunker had been constructed in the cellar, and this helped shield her and other Jews from capture. The Nazis conducted four major aktions during their occupation of Buczacz before declaring the town Judenrein, or completely free of Jews. But the declaration turned out to be false. My mother, along with dozens of others, managed to survive with the aid of courageous gentile families who risked their safety to shelter them.
In the middle of our travels, Jura pulls out a sheet of typewritten names – people who had served as policemen, gendarmes and SS officers during the war. I recognize some of the names. Some of the Nazi war criminals and their collaborators have been brought to justice, but the vast majority remain undetected and untried for their crimes.
We go to the Jewish cemetery, where many of the town’s Jews – including my mother’s parents – were taken to be executed. The place is untended and overgrown, a jumble of brush and junk, with headstones in various states of disrepair. We find my great-grandmother’s grave. It’s significant, because two plots over my mother buried her first-born child, Isaac, in an unmarked plot. I clear away the branches and debris from the group of headstones in the area to get a better view. I bend down and touch the ground where the brother I never met is buried. Exactly 70 years later, someone has come back to this place to remember.
Jura takes me down a path through brambles to a spot where survivors had erected a memorial to the war’s victims. The place is overgrown with trees and bushes now, but he says there was nothing here before the war. The marker no longer survives, and even if it did, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to find it without an expert guide.
Our next stop is Fedor Hill, another killing ground where thousands perished. It’s difficult to see traces of anything here, but Jura once again guides us to a marker commemorating the killing of 450 people during the early days of slaughter in 1941. It had been erected by a survivor’s family well after the war.
A far more prominent memorial on Fedor Hill is dedicated to the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the military wing of a movement that initially collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of winning an independent homeland. In fact, throughout our travels in Western Ukraine, there were numerous new memorials to Ukrainian nationalist fighters in places where it might have been logical to place markers noting the victims of the Nazi era. We saw this on the side of a synagogue in Ivano-Frankivsk, near the Jewish ghetto entrance in Lvov, and many other places. In my father’s hometown of Kolomyia, it was a similar story — no mention of Jews or Nazi victims in the local museum, no remnants of the huge Jewish population, and a patriotic memorial to Ukrainian nationalist figures on the site of a former synagogue. In the re-written history of today, the UPA and its related Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists are presented as groups that fought both Soviets and Nazis; no mention is made of the collaboration in 1941 that led to so much destruction during the war.
Throughout our trip to Ukraine, we were reminded of the upcoming election campaign and the ever-present imagery of Ukrainian nationalism, especially in the Western part of the country. In a land that was exercising its brand of democratic activity, we had to wonder how thoroughly the country had come to grips with its recent history. Many countries are wrestling with related questions, trying to reconcile horrendous events of the past with a way forward. But as in any process or truth and reconciliation, there needs to be an initial recognition of what took place. Erasing and denying the past is rarely the path to building a healthy future.
At the end of our tour in Buczacz, Jura wanted to know the exact date of my mother’s death. He also was interested in our birthdates and any other information he could glean from us. In a country that chooses to forget so much, he was something of an anomaly.
Features
From painting and making bead necklaces as a teen – to nursing for most of her life – as well as writing a recipe column for the Jewish Post from 2010-2014, Francine Kurlandski has had a myriad of interests.
By BERNIE BELLAN We are often asked by readers why we profile so many ex-Winnipeggers.
“Aren’t there enough Winnipeggers with interesting stories to tell?” is what a lot of readers ask us.
The truth is that finding interesting people to write about is the easy part; finding writers who want to take the time to interview those interesting people though, and then turning that interview into a well-written article is the hard part.
When I was the publisher of this paper I generally shied away from doing exactly that kind of profile. It was time consuming and, knowing how fussy many individuals are about what’s written about them, I always felt an obligation to let the interview subject vet what I had written – even to make changes if they didn’t like how some things came out.
I started to record all my interviews – few as they might have been, and then transcribe them using a transcription service on my Mac computer.
But, for quite some time I had refrained from conducting any interviews. Then I was contacted by someone at the Jewish Post office in the Gwen Secter Centre who told me there was a very nice woman who was going to be visiting Winnipeg soon – and this particular woman thought that I might have an interest in interviewing her.
I was told that her name was Francine Kurlandski. “Why does that name sound so familiar?” I wondered to myself. With my curiosity whetted I phoned the number Francine had left with the Jewish Post and said to her, when she answered the phone, that her name was very familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place her.
Francine answered: “Don’t you remember? I used to write a recipe column for the Jewish Post?”
It all came back. Of course, now I remembered, but didn’t Francine also have another name when she used to write for us? I asked.
“Yes, I was Francine Teller to start. Then, when I got remarried, I started using my new married name – Kurlandski.”
“But most of my friends in Winnipeg will remember me for my maiden name, which was Wise,” Francine added.
The daughter of Marion and Israel Wise and sister to Elaine, Francine, who was born in 1957, said she grew up in River Heights – at 756 Lanark to be specific. She attended, in order: John Dafoe, J. B . Mitchell, and then Grant Park.
Along the way, when she was 17 years old, Francine was also Miss Israel for the Israel Pavilion at Folklorama.
Francine had told me prior to the interview that her first career was as a nurse, so I asked her whether she had long had a desire to study nursing. Initially, she was unsure, but she says she “inherited the caring feeling that is so instrumental in nursing” from her father.
Israel Wise had a degree in social work, Francine said, and “worked for the province helping Indigenous people.” In addition, “he was also the youth director at the Shaarey ZedeK Synagouge and president of the General Monash branch of the Canadian Legion for veterans.” Francine’s mother, who worked for Technion Canada “also had a social service bent, so nursing was a natural fit,” Francine suggested.
Still, before eventually entering the Misericordia School of Nursing, Francine said her first love was art, a talent she now says “lay latent within her. “She recalls going downtown on weekends: “I remember going to the stores that had sold these little tiny beads – and that was so popular then. And I got into making beaded and feather necklaces.
“And then that led me into teaching myself how to do macrame, needle point and knitting. So, I loved all those crafty things. My parents had a cottage at Gimli. I remember loving to draw, and would go into the dock and sketch the boats and the birds. I loved all that.”
But, aside from her love of art, Francine found that enrolling in nursing school was a perfect fit for her. She remained a nurse until quite recently.
Francine was married at what we would now consider a very early age, when she was only 21. When she was 23 she and her then then husband moved to Toronto where Francine began “painting suede kippas with Sesame Street characters, also Ghostbusters, and I sold them to a couple of Jewish bookstores here.”
She began to study watercolouring in earnest, inspired, she said, by a trip she took to Israel where she saw the artists’ colony in Safed.
Francine noted that “once my children were in their teens, I had time to explore my painting. And that’s when I started a painting course from the city of. Toronto. I also connected with a group of artists in North York, and to this day, I belong to the Toronto Watercolor Society where I got to meet like-minded artists.”
Francine said she just recently retired from nursing after 45 years. The last 20 years of her career, she said, were spent working for another former Winnipegger, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz.
The mother of three sons, Francine explained that her home could be described as modern Orthodox. All three of her sons had the opportunity to study in Israel, she noted. Two of them studied at Yeshiva University while another one attended at Touro, in New York.
When the oldest was 18, she said, she took up painting more seriously.
I wondered though, about Francine’s cooking expertise. From where did that come?
“Was your mother a really good cook?” I asked.
“My whole extended family were good cooks, especially my late aunt, Karen Wise,” she answered.
In 1997, Francine noted, hospitals across Canada embarked on a downsizing campaign.
“I was on leave because I had a baby at that time. I really needed to bring in income. So, for extra income. I started to cook from my home… wholesome, nutritious food. I started a vegetarian food business, and did that for four years. And with that food business I thought I could teach cooking lessons, and write recipes for the paper.”
As a sidenote, I said to Francine that I didn’t remember when she actually wrote a cooking column for the Jewish Post, but when I checked our archives, it turned out that it was from 2010-14.
Francine’s food business lasted until 2003, until she began working for Rochelle Schwartz.
It was around that time that Francine started trying to enter some of her paintings in juried art shows. She continued to study art for a certain period with a private art teacher.
“Every course you take as an artist, you learn how to improve,” Francine observed.
“After I experimented with all kinds of different subjects I focused on portraits and Judaica art. I’ve always had a deep interest in the Jewish lifestyle.”
When it came to marketing her paintings though, once again Francine had to ” learn, even to put something on Instagram. It was all baby steps. And you’re doing this all by yourself. You don’t wanna hire someone to do it.”
Francine has had her art exhibited in many of the art society’s exhibitions and is working with Toronto’s United Jewish Appeal for a future showing.
You can imagine the excitement Francine must be feeling. If you want to see samples of Francine’s art you can check out her Instagram page. Just go to Instagram and look for @artistfrancine.
Features
Moe Levy reminisces about the late Izzy Asper
By BERNIE BELLAN In March 2023 Moe Levy retired as executive director of the Asper Foundation, after 23 1/2 years in that position.
To that point Levy had been the only person to hold that position. In an April 2014 column about Levy I wrote about how he had come to fill that role. Prior to becoming executive director of the Asper Foundation, Levy had an extensive background in both the public and the private sectors.
After coming to Canada from his native Bombay, with a stop in Israel along the way, Levy entered university here, acquiring both a Bachelors and Masters in Business Administration from the University of Manitoba.
As I noted in my 2014 article, “Levy says that he began to work for the Manitoba government as soon as he graduated from university here. ‘I started off as a consultant, he explained. In two years ‘I created the first business incubator program in Canada,” he said with pride. ‘It was called ‘Enterprise Manitoba.’
“One of the programs that grew out of that particular initiative was something called ‘Business Start”,’which saw young entrepreneurs receive $5,000 grants from the government,’ ” Levy added.
Later, Levy was involved in various other enterprises, including joint ownership (with his brother) of what became two well known restaurants in Winnipeg (although both have since closed): Moskowitz and Moskowitz” (at the corner of Mayfair and Main), then Schmeckers (in St. James).
As I noted, however, Levy and his brother eventually sold the restaurants. “ ‘I couldn’t stand the restaurant business,’ Levy explained.”
In 1993, along with other investors, Moe bought a company known as the Northern Fur Exchange – which is where I first met Moe and his late wife Barbara (who was heavily involved in managing the company), when I went there to do a story about the business.
“But, by 1999, Levy says, he ‘wanted to take the company in a different direction than his partners, so he sold his interest to them and began to take stock of where he wanted to go
from there.
“ ‘I was 51 years old. I saw an ad in the Globe and Mail. It was an ad for a Jewish foundation (in Winnipeg). It didn’t say exactly which foundation. The ad was for an executive director for that foundation.’
“ ‘I threw my name into the hat,’ he said, without knowing that he was applying to be executive director of the Asper Foundation. Levy had met Izzy Asper only once before – in 1997, when Asper was in the process of endowing the Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba. While the two men eventually forged a close relationship, it was as a result of Izzy’s sudden death in 2003 that Moe Levy found himself working hand-in-hand with Izzy’s daughter, Gail.
“While the Hebrew University was the major focus of the Asper family’s involvement in Israel for years, Gail paid tribute to the Asper Foundation’s work in Israel having ‘greatly expanded’ since Moe Levy became executive director of the Foundation,” I wrote in that 2014 article.
This past May 22, Moe Levy was the guest speaker for the Remis Luncheon group. His talk was advertised this way: “Moe will recount many compelling and funny stories of working with Izzy, one of Canada’s leading philanthropists and entrepreneurs. including the initial vision for the Canadian Mureum for Human Rights, the Asper School of Business, and many ground breaking projects in Winnipeg and Israel.”
Before he began his talk I asked Moe whether anything he was about to say would be off the record. He thought about it and replied that if he were going to say anything that he didn’t want recorded, he would let me know. As it was, he only thought of going off the record once – and even though he didn’t say: “This is off the record,” the fact that he even contemplated it led me not to repeat what he had said. (As you read on, you’ll find what it is that I withheld printing.)
Levy began by recalling sitting in Izzy Asper’s “beautiful back yard” one July evening in 2000. “He had just given away $50 million in the last 10 months. I started on September 1, 1999 and, in six months – $10 million to the Jewish Foundation, $10 million to the Winnipeg Foundation, $5 million to St. Boniface (Hospital), $5 million to the Hebrew U…”
“I had just come back from visiting the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Izzy’s passion for human rights goes back to 1973 when he tabled the first Bill of Rights in the Manitoba Legislature.” (Asper was leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party at the time. I remember interviewing him for a paper I was writing about the Manitoba Liberal Party.)
During the course of that evening, Levy said, Izzy broached the idea of building a human rights museum in Winnipeg. “Later that night, around midnight,” Levy continued, “the phone rang.”
“It has to be Izzy,” Moe’s wife (the late) Barbara said.
Picking up the phone, Levy observed that Izzy told him, “You know that idea we spoke about tonight? After you left, I went downtown and I found the land that we’re going to build this museum on…It’s the same site on which the museum is located today,” Levy noted.
“But,” Levy added, Izzy also told him: “It’s Tuesday night. By Friday I want you to get the land – to tie up the land.”
“But Izzy,” Levy said he asked Asper, “there are a lot of levels of government to go through.”
“Don’t worry,” Asper replied, “Just tell the guys I sent you and it’ll get done.”
Levy told a story about the first trip he took with Asper. It was on Asper’s private jet; they were flying to Toronto. As you might expect, if you knew anything about Izzy Asper, “the cabin was full of smoke.”
The purpose of the meeting was to meet with “two of the most important Zionist figures” in the history of Israel, Levy said: “Smoky Simon – who created the Israel Air Force; and Harry Horowitz” (who had deep roots in right wing Zionist causes, according to information on the World Zionist Organization website). Simon and Horowitz wanted “to get a million dollars for the Menachem Begin Centre.” (Incidentally Levy also mentioned that Horowitz had once come to Winnipeg at Sid Halpern’s invitation. Sid Halpern is a regular attendee at the Remis Grooup Luncheons and Levy was looking right at him when he made that remark.)
(What I find so contradictory about Izzy Asper, however, was that, as a supposed staunch defender of human rights, his actions belied the notion that he was a champion of human rights. Anyone who admired Menachem Begin, for instance, could hardly have been considered an advocate for human rights – unless by human rights you meant the rights of certain groups, but not others. Oh well, we’re all full of contradictions, aren’t we?)
Levy went on to describe his “life with Izzy as nothing short of amazing, exhilirating, exciting, such as “putting together the jazz series…” Apparently, according to Levy, Asper would go so far as to choose the playlist for any jazz concert performer (sounds like Trump), but “come Monday morning,” Levy said, “I would receive a memo from Izzy saying they did not play the playlist in the order I gave it to them!”
Also, according to Levy, Asper couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the jazz concerts. Instead, he would head up to the top of the Berney Theatre (home to the Asper Jazz Series) and “count the empty seats.”
Again, in addition to complaining about artists not following his playlist instructions, Asper would complain about empty seats in that same Monday morning memo. Since the concert series was invariably sold out in those years, any empty seat signified a subscriber not having shown up.
In that same memo Asper would complain, for instance, that “there were 17 empty seats. Those subscribers could have given their seats to someone else!”
The subject of Holocaust education was also something that was very important to Asper, Levy noted. “Izzy recognized very early on that we needed to reach not the Jewish kids, but the non-Jewish kids, so that over the course of time we’ve sent 14-15,000 kids on trips to Washington” (to visit the Holocaust Museum).
Another memorable incident which had a connection to Asper and in which Levy played a part, albeit a minor one, was “the Concordia riot” of 2002.
“Concordia” (University, in Montreal) ” was a hotbed for antsemitism,” Levy explained.
Along with Rabbi (Joshua) Poupkow, who was from Montreal, Levy and Asper decided (in September 2002) that it would be a good idea “to bring BB Netanyahu to Montreal to speak at Concordia. He (Netanyahu) was in between jobs, after serving as Finance Minister (of Israel), then Prime Minister, he was on the speakers’ circuit. So, we paid him …to come for three lectures: Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg.” (Levy wasn’t sure whether the exact amount Netanyahu paid should be published, so I won’t repeat the figure here. Suffice to say, it was a huge amount.)
“We knew that” the pro-Palestinians had as their aim that, “if Netanyahu shows up, he’s never, ever going to speak at Concordia. So this became a major challenge for Izzy. ‘I’m going to bring him here (Montreal) and I’m going to make sure he speaks,’ ” Levy said was what Asper wanted to do.
“Of course, BB always wanted to fly on a private jet, so Izzy – who had other things to do, told me to take his private jet and go pick up BB.”
“So I flew on Izzy’s private jet to pick up BB. I’ll never forget – his wallet was about this thick (and here Levy gestured with his fingers showing how thick Netanyahu’s wallet was) and it was full of thousand dollar bills,” Levy observed.
“Anyway, by this time, the press is full of stories – about how students are going to stop him from speaking,” Levy said. “So we land – and Netanyahu has one security guy with him and, I’m not kidding, he was about this high (gesturing to show that he was very short). But he had a lot of guns on him. I don’t know how many.”
“There are about 20 police cars waiting for us and they wouldn’t let the security guy off the airplane with the guns, so we sat while” diplomats negotiated how many guns the guard might be allowed to take with him and, in the end, “he was allowed to take one gun with him.”
As one might have expected, there was a huge crowd of demonstrators surrounding the hotel where Netanyahu was staying (the Ritz-Carlton).
Netanyahu though, was determined to speak at Concordia. However, his “security guy got on the phone with the Mossad in Israel and they said there was no frigging way they were going to let him speak. So his security guy told him he’s not going anywhere.
“But BB, all of a sudden, decides he wants a haircut. Someone tells him there’s an Arab barber in the basement. He was asked whether he was okay with that?”
He answered, “absolutely.”
Levy described the ensuing scene: There’s BB sitting in a chair, with this “Arab guy giving him a haircut,” while BB’s security guy has his hand resting over his jacket where his gun is – ready to spring into action if needed.
The upshot was that BB “was not allowed to speak.” A riot did take place at the Sir George Williams campus of Concordia University. Levy noted that there were two documentaries made about the riot, (one by the National Film Board, titled “Dicordia,” and the other by filmmaker Martin Himel, titled “Confrontation at Concordia.”)
Another story Levy told was about a meeting held between Asper and then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien to discuss federal funding for the Human Rights Museum. (Levy says the meeting was held at the Prime Minister’s residence in Ottawa, but every other source that I was able to check referred to a meeting at Izzy Asper’s Palm Beach residence, in 2001. Perhaps there were two meetings.)
In either event, Levy said that, as the only other person in the room during that meeting, he was fascinated with the notion that the most powerful man in Canada at the time, Jean Chretien – according to Maclean’s Magazine, was meeting with the second most powerful man, Izzy Asper, again – according to Maclean’s Magazine,
As Levy described it, “there’s these two guys, arguing over how much money” the federal goverment would be willing to commit to the building of the human rights museum. “There was something explicit going on between these two guys. I thought: ‘You two guys use that kind of language with each other?’ “
Asper always liked to dream, Levy noted. For example, where the skating rink now sits on the Asper Campus, “he wanted to build a 500 seat concert hall,” Levy said.
He told another story about a trip Izzy and Gail Asper took one day in 1999 to Steinbach, where they were supposed to meet with Chuck Loewen of Loewen Windows. The purpose was to hit up Loewen for a contribution to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which was still only a dream that Izzy wanted to bring to fruition at that point. Although one of Canada’s most successful businessmen by then – perhaps actually the most successful at that time, Izzy was not above doing the grunt work that was indispensable to raising enough money for the museum project – so that eventually the idea was that with enough privately donated money, it would leverage the federal government into contributing to the project as well.
Levy said that, while sitting in his oiffice, he got a call from Gail, who said, “Moe, we’re at Marion and Lagimodiere. How do we get to Steinbach?” It turned out they were in the wrong lane, but eventually, after much explaining which way to go, Izzy and Gail did make it to Steinbach, Levy observed.
Levy recalled the say he heard the news that Izzy had suffered a massive heart attack – and had died. “It was October 7, 2003, and we were on our way to Vancouver to launch an international architectural competition” for the design of the new museum.
Izzy Asper’s funeral was one of the largest ever held in Winnipeg. It attracted former prime ministers, the then-Prime Minister (Chretien), and a host of dignitaries from all walks of life. The day that Izzy died, Levy added, he was supposed to have received an honourary Indigenous title from Manitoba Grand Chief Phil Fontaine, which, translated into English, Levy explained, was “He who walks among the stars.”
Levy said: “What can I say about Izzy except that he was charismatic, a raconteur, bon vivant, had a great sense of humour, was an entertainer…he lived a hundred lives.”
Later in his talk, Levy added this about Izzy Asper: “He was the kind of guy who made you think you could accomplish anything. He made you sit there – and imagine and, before you knew it, you were doing things well beyond what you thought was your own capacity.”
In describing the effort that went into fundraising for the museum, Levy noted that “When you think about it, 75% of the money privately raised came from this little city (Winnipeg) – $115 million.” That fact was pivotal in then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s coming forward with a major contribution from the federal government: $100 million plus $21.7 million annually for operating costs.
Turning to Izzy Asper’s “passion for Israel,” Levy described Izzy’s support for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, saying that Izzy was determined to undertake the human rights museum project without sacrificing any of his commitment to the State of Israel.
Levy noted that “in a month the Hebrew University is going to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Who was there (at its founding)? Einstein, Freud, Buber – the greatest minds that ever lived,” he suggested.
Features
“Antisemitism from the Crusades to the Holocaust”
Presented by LIONEL STEIMAN at the Lanny Remis Speakers Forum, May 8, 2025.
One of the questions I wanted to answer in my course on the history of antisemitism was why culturally assimilated European Jews seemed blind to the rising tide of antisemitism during the years in which they had grown up? Of course they didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They knew of the pogroms, of course, but they were in Russia, not in such sophisticated centres like Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, cities to which Jews from the east had flocked by the thousands, taking advantage of the opportunities offered during the rapid industrialization of the later nineteenth century. In Vienna they would eventually become the propertied and educated elites of the upper middle class. What they underestimated was the danger they faced from masses prone to the appeals of antisemitic demagogues.
The reason was that these Jews were the beneficiaries of what was called “Jewish emancipation,” the removal of age-old restrictions on Jews that had limited what they could do, where they could live, and much more. Emancipation facilitated the admission of Jews to society on terms of equality with other citizens. They were granted the right to vote, freedom of movement, access to education, and other areas from which they had been barred. France was the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jewish population, which it did during the French Revolution. Subsequently, the process of ‘Emancipation’ was launched everywhere in Europe except the Russian Empire, and by the later 19th century was relatively complete.
Emancipation had been the product of the so-called Enlightenment, when philosophers and rulers got the bright idea that Jews, whom they had regarded as scarcely human, would stop being Jews if only they were given an opportunity to be like everyone else. If they were given freedom, the right to vote, and access to other occupations than peddling and money-lending they would lose the negative characteristics associated with Jews. This Jewish ‘character’ was not considered a matter of ‘race’ or ‘blood’, but was seen as a product of the environment in which Jews were forced to live. But behind these novel ideas lay centuries of popular hatred and prejudice rooted in religion and superstition.
So it was almost inevitable that there would be a popular reaction against the emancipation of Jews, and attempts made to roll it back. Jewish entry into areas in which they’d never before been seen made people uneasy, to say the least. And because Jews in western Europe were abandoning their distinctive dress and manner, thus assimilating and becoming indistinguishable from non-Jews, their presence came to be feared all the more. Opponents of emancipation demanded the re-imposition of restraints and restrictions on Jews, many of which dated back centuries. They organized and gave themselves a name intended to distinguish themselves from the religious bigots they scorned. Their “The League of Antisemites”, was founded in 1878 by a journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr.
The word ‘Antisemite’ was a totally new, totally invented word. But it had a scientific ring to it, as did so much else in this age of scientific progress. Antisemitism dissociated itself from the age-old anti-Jewish prejudices rooted in religion and legend, claiming instead to have a basis in science. The word ‘Semite’ was taken from the field of philology and referred to a grouping of languages, though soon it was referring to a category of people as well. And since Jews were the only “Semites” in Europe, it was they whom anti-Semites opposed. Soon, inflammatory antisemitic publicists and their products proliferated in various countries, most especially in France and Germany, the countries where ‘Emancipation’ had proceeded furthest, and needed to be rolled back. Meanwhile, beneficiaries of Emancipation dismissed antisemitism as a matter for the gutter, or for cynical politicians
The most prominent politician to exploit antisemitism before Hitler was Karl Lueger, the famous mayor of Vienna, who used it to woo the masses. During his tenure from 1897 to 1910, Vienna became the most advanced city in the world: public facilities such as gasworks, public transit, and housing were unmatched anywhere else. And nowhere else in Europe did Jews feel more secure. Lueger was a charming man; with Jewish friends, he was often seen attending Jewish marriages and bar mitzvahs. When the contradiction was pointed out, he replied, “I decide who’s a Jew.” Antisemitism was socially acceptable and taken for granted everywhere. After all, compared to Jews in Russia, with regular pogroms claiming hundreds of lives, Jews in Vienna, Prague, Paris, or Berlin were safe and could relax. They would never have dreamed of joining the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Russia for America every year. In fact, they scorned them, and their Yiddish, which they regarded as a “jargon and not a language at all.
Nothing remotely like the Russian pogroms had occurred in the West since the First Crusade of 1095. Prior to that, the Jews of Europe had enjoyed relative peace and security. And because their value as physicians, merchants, and scholars were prized by rulers, Jews often enjoyed privileges later denied them. So why had everything changed in 1095, with the launch of the first Crusade, the armed campaign to secure recapture the Holy Land from Islam? When Pope Urban II proclaimed the Crusade he made clear there was no act more deserving of heavenly reward than to die on Crusade: to do so was assurance of immediate salvation. But when the first crusaders set out for the Holy Land, they asked themselves: “Why are we going all the way to the Jerusalem to defeat Christ’s Muslim enemies when the Jews who murdered him are right here among us?” So as the armies of French Knights set out for the East, they plundered and massacred age-old Jewish communities en route, and even made significant detours to do so. Some of the Jewish victims believed their suffering heralded the coming of the Messiah. Others thought the Pope had promised a blanket pardon to anyone who killed a Jew. Jews could save themselves by becoming Christian, and some were offered baptism. Such conversions were rare. Far more common was mass ritual suicide, or “Kiddush ha-Shem”, sanctification of the divine name.
Within a century, popular pressures moved the Pope to decide to legislate that Jews everywhere be required to wear some distinguishing mark. Specifics were left to individual countries. France required Jews to wear a yellow patch on their cloaks; Germany required a yellow, cone-shaped hat. To this day, ‘yellow’ has negative connotations, notably that of cowardice. The year of this legislation was 1215: from that point on, Jews are seldom depicted without such insignia, whether in art, sculpture, or other illustrations. This began a process that continued for centuries: the separation of the ‘image’ of the Jew from their human reality. The very word ‘Jew’ became a synonym for various undesirable qualities, triggering repugnance by its very mention.
This separation of the ‘image’ from the individual allowed Jew-hatred to flourish in the absence of Jewish people. In the mid-1970s a student of mine from Sioux Lookout told me that before he came to Winnipeg he thought that “Jew” was simply a word for crooked bargaining. The boy was himself no anti-Semite; he seemed totally open-minded, and eager to learn. I found that people with Jewish friends or a Jewish doctor or other professional could still hold antisemitic views simply because their prejudices were independent of their lived experience. A colleague from a town in the north of England told me that folks there seemed to have three categories of Jews: there were “powerful international Jewish financiers”; there were the Jews in the Bible- the “Israelites”; and there were Jewish shopkeepers, who were well liked but who didn’t affect their prejudices about “the Jews.”
Where did all this begin, this separation of “Jews” from the individual human beings they really were? We have to go back to the very beginning of Christianity, which began as a radical messianic sect of Jews, whose leader, a young rabbi called Jesus, was tried and executed by a Roman court under the authority of the Roman Governor. His followers believed he was the “Messiah” who would transform Israel. Their foremost missionary was Saul of Tarsus, much later known as St. Paul. Although Saul’s original mission was to persecute the followers of Jesus, he underwent a conversion “on the road to Damascus” and joined them. Paul’s sermons and letters became central books in what eventually became the New Testament. Because Greek was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean world, Saul became Paul, and “Messiah” became ‘Christos’. Soon Christians and Jews became ever deeper entrenched in an antagonistic relationship. Christians couldn’t understand why Jews refused to recognize the truth and accept Christ. Either they must be blind, or stupid. Since obviously they were neither, they must be evil. And so in the New Testament’s book of John they are “sons of the devil” and bound to do his work. (John 8:14) During the Holocaust, some people cited the passage from Matthew in which the Jews implicitly confess their guilt for the death of Christ: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matthew 27:25).
Throughout the centuries that followed, Jews were depicted in various art forms as devil-like creatures, with horns and tails and cloven feet. Sculptures on churches and public places showed Jews with blindfolds signifying they were blind to truth. A particularly popular motif was the so-called “Judensau”, which depicted a rabbi lifting the tail of a huge pig to look for his Talmud, while other Jews gathered beneath the pig to suckle. Variations of the “Judensau” can still be found sculpted in public places in Europe. Then there was the so-called “foetor judaicus.”, the innate stench of the Jewish body. And it only got worse.
The Church Fathers who laid the theological and pastoral foundations of Christianity defined Jews as a threat to the moral and political foundations of Christendom, just as they were a threat to the soul of every individual Christian. Some Church Fathers accused Jews of killing Christ, thus making all Jews thereafter guilty of the crime of “Deicide”, killing God! Scores of other accusations against Jews proliferated. The logic was simple: for if you would kill the Savior, what else wouldn’t you do? Soon Jews were being accused of all manner of outlandish crimes: spreading plague by poisoning wells; killing Jewish children to use their blood in baking matzoh; and even drinking Jewish blood in their rituals. If you would believe what was patently impossible- since drinking blood was taboo for Jews, what wouldn’t you believe? And thus, reasoned one prominent historian of antisemitism, the road to Auschwitz was begun over a thousand years ago.
Incidentally, the last “blood libel” trial was held in Kiev (then in the Russian Empire) Russia in 1913. The verdict was ambiguous: yes, the crime had indeed been committed, but the accused, Mendel Beilis, was not the murderer. Although both sides could claim victory, the trial helped perpetuate the myth of ritual murder: the killing of a Jewish child to use its blood to bake matzoh.
But if the “road to Auschwitz” was begun a thousand years ago, why wasn’t the attempt to exterminate Jewry also begun a thousand years ago? After all, in the 4th century C.E. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire; the Romans made life difficult for Jews but made no attempt to kill them all. Why not? The answer lies with the greatest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine (354-430). It is true, he wrote, that the Jews are guilty of the crime of Deicide, of killing the Savior. So they should be persecuted, but not too much; and they must be made to suffer, but not too much. And they should not live near Christians. Their suffering and eternal “wandering” would be proof of their guilt; and they would be living (if unwilling) witnesses to the truth of the Christian faith. This idea was repeated in variations by subsequent Popes, who in any case held out the possibility that Jews could avoid all this by converting. The Jewish communities of Europe, despite some ups and downs, were able to live relatively peaceful lives. Theirs was not an unbroken tale of suffering. But the myths, legends, and lies about them remained.
The attack on this hateful tradition began in the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment. The absurd notions of Jews having horns or drinking Christian blood now seemed out of place. Philosophers and intellectuals attacked all manner of superstitions including those that appeared to support Christianity. In attacking the Church these thinkers also attacked its beliefs that justified Jew-hatred. The further decline of religion in subsequent centuries occasioned by the rising prestige of science might have resulted in a decline of anti-Jewish prejudice, but instead the whole cluster of prejudice and superstition only found a more secure foundation in science.
Of course the word ‘science’ here must be qualified, for in the 19th and even part of the 20th centuries “science” included craniology, physiognomy, and eugenics. Today they are regarded as pseudo-sciences and historical curiosities, but prior to World War II they enjoyed a respect like that accorded to physics or any other exact science. Everywhere, “race” was accepted as a valid category for defining human groups, though its analytical usefulness was increasingly questioned until the term itself was discarded. By the 1880s Europe had completed its ranking of the world’s so-called “races” along a sliding scale. White, northern Europeans topped the list, which ranked other inhabitants according to skin colour, head-shape, physiognomy, and other physical characteristics, all of which were believed to denote the intellectual and moral qualities indicating a group’s level of ‘civilization. So where did Jews fit in? At first they were ranked simply as a sub-group of Europeans; one theory even had them at the apex of the white race; but antisemites attempted to find a scientific basis for excluding them. Since the Middle Ages, as was pointed out, Jews were believed to have a distinctly unpleasant odor, so there must be a scientific basis for it; but none was found. Researchers fanned out over Europe measuring skulls, noses, and other physical features thought to distinguish Jews from other white people. Was there a typical ‘Jewish nose’? One survey found the so-called Jewish nose was most prevalent in the Polish nobility. Research found no support for the popular belief that Jews were dark while gentiles were fair. Regional variations were such that many different ‘races existed within any given country. Wider research showed that Jews tended to resemble the populations in whose midst they resided.
In today’s “post-Truth” era we know too well that dangerous beliefs can persist despite overwhelming evidence against them. This is what happened with the cluster of beliefs encompassed in the term ‘antisemitism.’. The failure of science to support antisemitism or the notion of “race” did not stop people from believing that it did. Others recognized that science could provide little support to prejudice, so antisemites shifted their ground again: the essence of race, they argued, was in the blood—not in its physical elements but in elements which could not be measured, and whose power was therefore all the greater. By thus elevating ‘race’ to the level of ‘mystery’ late 19th century racists were merging prejudices based on religion with the emerging force of nationalism based on “race.” To the ancient belief that Jews were the enemies of Christ was added the modern belief that they posed a threat to the nation. Thus religious and racial antisemitism were strengthened by the most powerful political force ever to emerge, modern nationalism. And because Jews were a threat to race, which was the biological foundation of the nation, they were enemies of the state.
The political force of this antisemitism showed itself in 1897 with the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna, who was mentioned earlier. The antisemitism that was such a powerful force in central Europe also ignited the worst political crisis in France since the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair. Raging at the very time Lueger was making Vienna the most advanced city in Europe, the Dreyfus Affair threatened to destroy the French Republic. Spreading far beyond the issue of the guilt or innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer charged with treason, it polarized the nation between supporters of the Republic, and those who would restore the pillars of the old order: Monarchy, Church, and Aristocracy.
With the spread of industrialism and its threat to agrarian and village life, there was a heightened urgency to demands that the influence of Jews be curbed. The prominent role of Jews in finance capital and speculation earned them blame for the scandals and crashes that dogged the era. Jewish prominence in the free professions of medicine, law, journalism and publishing all increased Jewish vulnerability to various charges of malfeasance. Add to this the persistence of the blood libel, and public depiction of Jews as pigs, goats, and devils; the stereotypes of greedy, conniving Jews proliferating in literature and fairy tales everywhere—the list goes on and on. The reality is that antisemitism had come to permeate the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Its assumptions were widely shared across the political spectrum; general distaste for Jews was fashionable in high society; blatant antisemitism was articulated at all levels of culture, and freely expressed from church pulpits and in parliaments- including those of Canada.
But what was it about antisemitism in Germany that made the country ripe for a rabidly obsessive anti-Semite like Adolf Hitler? Israel’s most respected Holocaust historian once commented: “If people had been told in 1914 that within one generation most of the Jews of Europe would be murdered, their answer would most certainly have been: The French are capable of any crime.” The reason for this comment was that France was by far the most prolific producer and disseminator of antisemitic literature, purveyed by some of its most respected writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum; it was the home of repeated outbursts of vicious Jew-hatred, most notorious of which was the Dreyfus Affair, the likes of which had never been seen in Germany. The name Edouard-Adolphe Drumont (1844-1917) is synonymous with French antisemitism. In 1886 he published La France Juive. Its Index listed not only prominent Jews but all prominent figures having anything to do with Jews, implicating thousands in what many already believed was an inevitable national degeneration. Drumont provided a list of “hidden Jews” who had been masquerading as Frenchmen. Since antisemitism permeated every element of French culture and politics, there was no need for a specifically anti-Semitic party or movement. Antisemitism was simply a constant in culture and society.
Germany was considered the safest country in Europe for Jews, and although antisemitism was certainly widespread, it hadn’t occasioned significant violence there since the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. So what happened? Why was the Holocaust “Made in Germany”? The answer is Adolf Hitler. There is a consensus amongst many historians: “No Hitler, No Holocaust.” Antisemitism was a necessary cause of the Holocaust, but it was not a sufficient cause. The Nazis were an insignificant bubble in the froth of discontent, for which people commonly blamed the Jews. In the years following World War I, Antisemitism was common currency in political discourse all over Europe. For Hitler, communism and capitalism were both Jewish conspiracies, and the major figures in both were all of them Jews, whether in Moscow or New York. During the 1920s, support for the Communists and Nazis grew, especially during the Great Depression. In 1932, 30% of the German labour force were unemployed, compared to 22.5% in the US and 24% in Canada. Even so, the Nazi victory was not inevitable. In late 1932 the party’s electoral support was declining. There were several other options available, and yet President Hindenburg chose to appoint Hitler Chancellor.
Hitler’s subsequent dismantling of German democracy is part of a complex political story involving far more than the antisemitism which was common everywhere. In any case, Hitler’s genocidal hatred of Jews was not wholly representative. Antisemites may have desired the exclusion of Jews, but not the annihilation of the Jewish people. While Hitler’s murderous fantasies were exceptional, he was able to gain control over the entire state apparatus necessary to realize them. And however extreme his views, their individual elements were available and accessible throughout the Christian West. Everywhere in Europe, the Nazis found accomplices in murder because their victims were Jews, everywhere the historical ‘other’. The Holocaust was the product of a pervasive antisemitism that, in the Nazi mind, placed the Jewish people outside the bounds of humanity, and marked them for extinction.
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