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The JP&N welcomes Beatty Cohan as our newest columnist

Beginning with this column, we introduce to readers a new columnist, but someone whose name is likely familiar to many readers: Beatty Cohan (née Sair). Betty is the daughter of the late Maurice and Edith Sair. As she notes in an email Beatty sent us when I asked her to supply us with a bio, “the column should be dedicated to my parents, the late Edith (who taught at the Talmud Torah for many years) and Maurice Sair, who never in their wildest dreams could have imagined how my professional life would have turned out. They would be thrilled if they knew that I was writing for The Jewish Post & News.
I was a terrible student. I had no interest in math or science or really in any subject. After attending Talmud Torah through grade six, I attended public school. I will never forget a meeting that I had with my guidance counselor at West Kildonan Collegiate (from where I did somehow manage to graduate), who told me that I shouldn’t even consider going to university, given my academic record. When I told my parents what she had said, they fortunately scoffed at her recommendation and instead, encouraged me to find my passion.
However, unbeknownst to them, I had found my passion a long time ago. My passion was people and helping people. I was the Ann Landers to all my friends. The radio show that reinforced my desire to help people, was a show called ASK THE PASTOR. The host was Pastor Egler, who I met in person many years later. It aired every Sunday night in Winnipeg at midnight. When I was probably around 10, I happened to stumble across this show. I would hide my transistor radio under my covers, so that I could listen to it. As you may know, it was a call-in counseling show. I have hosted many call-in counselling shows over the years, including the “ASK BEATTY SHOW” that I currently host and have hosted for almost nine years on the Progressive Radio Network.
I will never forget my mother’s reaction when my book, “For Better for Worse Forever: Discover the Path to Lasting Love,” was published in 1998 and her reactions to watching me on Sally Jessy Raphael and other national television shows. Who would have thought!! She kept my book next to her in the apartment and then in the Sharon Nursing Home, where she spent only a few short months. She died on December 28th, 2005. My father, unfortunately, died in 1982 and missed out on all of the excitement. My father was my life coach and sports coach.
I was probably one of the only Jewish kids who played, competed and won provincial titles in tennis and badminton. I also represented Manitoba at the Canadian championships for many years in both sports.
After graduating from the University of Manitoba with a B.A, I took a year off and worked in a federal social services agency in Winnipeg. I then applied to and was accepted into McGill’s School of Social Work. I worked in inner-city Montreal schools for a few years and was subsequently appointed as one of three directors of the Greater Montreal School Social Services program. I later moved to Toronto and worked in social planning and social policy for the Toronto Jewish Congress. After a few years, I moved to Calgary and became the executive director of Jewish Family Services there.
I lived in Providence, Rhode Island when my book first came out. This was really the beginning of an amazing television and radio career. A few years ago I was a guest on the “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart where I did a segment with Samantha Bee about penis pumps. I have been a guest on over 1,000 local and national radio and television shows.
I started my private practice in Providence and am going into my 36th year as a psychotherapist and sex therapist. In 2000, I moved to Sarasota, Florida, where I continued with my practice and my radio and television career. One day I get a call from none other than Governor Jeb Bush.  I had an “ASK BEATTY” segment on WFTS, an ABC affiliate in Tampa, which aired several times a week.  
Everyone knew that his daughter was having problems and I suspect that one of his aides saw one of my segments. Jeb appointed me to Florida’s Commission on Marriage and Family Support Initiatives. It was a two-year appointment.  I learned a great deal about how and why little gets done!
I now live in New York City and have a practice in NYC and East Hampton. I work closely with Rabbi Joshua Franklin, from the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. We have done many programs together.
I am very happily married to my childhood sweetheart, Jim Vrettos, a sociologist, criminologist and host of The Radical Imagination television show. I also have a married daughter, Jordana and a five-year-old grandson, Jack.

Here’s Beatty’s first column:

Dear Beatty,
I am a 35-year-old, divorced, single parent to a 10-year-old little girl. I’m a highly successful realtor in a prestigious international real estate company in the Hamptons.
I met Mike, 52, at a Hamptons fundraiser about eight months ago. We really seemed to click. He had been divorced many years ago and had ended a long-term relationship just before we met. He told me that he was ready for a new chapter in his life. Although we officially haven’t moved in together, I do spend part of the week at his home when my daughter is visiting her father.
Initially, everything was incredible. We talked and laughed and seemed to have lots of things in common. However, recently, the ups and downs are making me think about ending the relationship. I know that Mike has a lot of pressures at work. He is the vice president of a major financial institution. During the week he is often withdrawn, silent and frequently just plain mean. I try to be understanding.
However, no matter what I do or say, he barely acknowledges me. When I try to talk with him, his reaction often is to explode in anger, denying that anything is wrong and demanding to know why I pick on him. I’ve also noticed he is drinking more and sleeping less. His irritability and mood swings are becoming almost impossible to deal with. This is a typical work week.
Nothing I do or say seems to work. On weekends he is a completely different person. He’s fun, romantic and caring and our sex life is great. But when Monday rolls around, the same depressing scene repeats itself until the next weekend. Do you think he may be bipolar? I love him but his moods are driving me crazy.
– Angel K., East Hampton
Dear Angel,
It’s certainly difficult to be living on the roller-coaster ride that you describe. And clearly, the downs are understandably, becoming increasingly unbearable. My question to you is how much longer are you willing to be Mike’s whipping girl? Have you told him directly how hurt, angry and disappointed you are because of how he treats you? The importance of communicating your feelings — the good, the bad and the ugly — is the first step in trying to see whether Mike cares enough about you to really hear what you’re saying.
More importantly, is he willing to acknowledge, address and try to resolve the issues that are getting in the way of his life, your life and your relationship? He may be so overwhelmed by pressures at work that he’s not fully aware of how badly he’s treating you. However, this is an untenable, toxic, no-win situation for you at the moment.
As to whether he is bipolar, he would need to be clinically assessed in order to make a definitive diagnosis. The ball is really in your court, Angel. What are you going to do? You have two options. The first is to do nothing and continue to be beaten up emotionally. The second is to let Mike know that you will no longer allow him to hurt you and that unless things change, you will end the relationship.
Ultimately, the choice is up to you.
Beatty would love to hear from you. You can send your questions and comments to beattycohan.msw@gmail.com. For more information, go to beattycohan.com.

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Features

History of a Holocaust Survivor Turning Eighty

Henry Srebrnik

By HENRY SREBRNIK On July 19, I turn 80 years old. This is indeed a milestone, but for me, an even bigger one was just being born. My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I found out just a few months ago that, technically, so am I. My parents were from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born in 1945. By 1943 most Jews in the city, including their own families, had been murdered by the Nazis, at Treblinka, and after the uprising in the Jewish ghetto, my parents, by now married, became slave labour in a major Nazi munitions plant, the HASAG-Pelcery concentration camp, in the city. 

The Russian army liberated Czestochowa January 16-17, 1945, and I was born July 19, six months later. You can do the math. My mother was emaciated and didn’t even know she was pregnant, but another month, and it would have been obvious, and she would have been killed. (I never asked how this happened but found out when listening to her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995. The men and women were housed in different barracks, but one night the Germans were delousing one of the buildings and allowed married couples to sleep together in the other.)

Henry as an infant with his parents in post-war Poland

In 1945 the 9th of Av fell on July 19, and the Jewish world had just gone through our worst period in history. I was born in a makeshift hospital at the Jasna Gora, the famed Pauline Catholic monastery in the city. The actual city hospital had been destroyed in the fighting. It is home to the Matka Boska Czestochowska, (“the mother of God”), a very beautiful and large icon of Mary and the baby Jesus. Other women giving birth were surprised and one said, “Ona jest Zydowka.” So, though I am a proud Polish Jew, this could only have helped! The doctor who delivered whispered to my mother that he was Jewish but added that he wanted it kept quiet because he wasn’t going to leave Poland. It also took awhile for a mohel to come to the city for me.

The next few years were spent in Pocking-Waldstadt, a DP camp in the American zone in Bavaria, Germany, and then on to Pier 21 in Halifax and Canada. We lived in Montreal, though at home we were to all intents and purposes in Czestochowa, Jewish Poland.

As I was packing up my books in May because we all had to vacate our offices for the summer due to repairs in our building, I came across a book that I had never read – I don’t even recall where I got it — by the Polish historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records 1944-1947 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Chapter 5 is comprised of “Lists of Jewish Children Who Survived,” in alphabetical order. I am listed on p. 146 (Heniek Srebrnik, 1945). I sent in a form to the Claims Conference in New York informing them. So, at age 80, I’ve become a Holocaust survivor! Compared to that start, the next decades have been easy street! As the Aussies say, “no worries! But the Jewish world has grown darker. Like many others, were I to write a memoir, I’d call it From Hitler to Hamas.

I grew up in Montreal, and have lived in Calgary and Charlottetown, as well as London, England, and four American cities. But I’ve only been to Winnipeg twice, in 1982 and, more dramatically, the weekend of Sept. 7-10, 2021. I presented a paper on “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” to a conference on “Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905-1960,” organized by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. I left the morning of Sept. 11. An hour into the flight to Toronto we were told all airplanes had to land at the nearest major airport. I spent the next three days in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with fellow passengers. We mostly watched the television reporting on the 9/11 catastrophe.

Though an academic, I have always written for newspapers, including Jewish ones, in Canada and the United States. Some, like the Jewish Free Press of Calgary, the Jewish Tribune of Toronto, and the previous version of the Canadian Jewish News, no longer exist, which is a shame. Fortunately, the Jewish Post still does.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

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Features

Why Prepaid Cards Are the Last Refuge for Online Privacy in 2025

These days, it feels like no matter what you do online, someone’s watching. Shopping, streaming, betting, even signing up for something free—it’s all tracked. Everything you pay for with a normal card leaves a digital trail with your name on it. And in 2025, when we’re deep into a cashless economy, keeping anything private is getting harder by the day.

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want every little move tied to your identity, prepaid cards are one of the only real options left. They’re simple, easy to get, and still give you a way to spend online without throwing your info out there. One card in particular, Vanilla Visa, is one of the better picks because of how widely Vanilla Visa is accepted and how little personal info it needs.

Everything’s Online, and Everything’s Tracked

We used to pay for stuff with cash. Walk into a store, hand over some bills, leave. No names, no records. That’s gone now. Most stores won’t even take cash anymore, and the ones that do feel like the exception. The cashless economy is here whether we like it or not.

So what’s the problem? Every time you swipe or tap your card, or pay with your phone, someone’s logging it. Your bank saves the details. The store’s system saves it. And a lot of times, that data gets sold or shared. It can get used to target you with ads, track what you buy, where you go, and when you do it.

It’s not just companies either. Apps collect it. Hackers try to steal it. Some governments keep tabs too. And if you’re using the same card everywhere, it all gets connected pretty fast.

Why Prepaid Cards Still Matter

Prepaid cards are one of the only ways to break that chain. You go to a store, buy one with cash, and that’s it. No bank involved. No name. You just load it up and use it. And because Vanilla Visa is accepted on most major websites, you can use it just like any normal card.

You’re not giving out your real name or tying it to your main account. That means when you pay for something, it’s not showing up on your bank statement. It’s not getting saved under your profile. You’re basically cutting off the trail right there.

Why Vanilla Visa Stands Out

There are a few different prepaid card brands out there, but Vanilla Visa is probably the most popular. You can grab one at grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies—almost anywhere. And once you’ve got it, you can use it on pretty much any site where Vanilla Visa is accepted.

No long setup. No personal info. You don’t need to register it under your name. You just pay, go online, and spend the amount that’s on the card. When it runs out, you toss it and move on. No trace.

This makes it great for anyone who wants to sign up for a site without attaching their real identity. People use it for online gaming, streaming, subscriptions, or just shopping without giving out their main card info.

The Good and the Bad

There are some solid upsides to using a prepaid card:

  • You don’t need a bank account
  • You don’t give out your name or address
  • It’s easy to budget since you can’t spend more than you loaded
  • Most major sites take them, especially where Vanilla Visa is accepted

But there are a few downsides too:

  • You can’t reload the card. Once it’s empty, it’s done
  • You can’t use it to get money out, like at an ATM
  • Some cards have small fees or expiration dates, so don’t let them sit too long
  • A few sites want a card tied to a name and billing address, which doesn’t work here
  • If you lose it or someone steals the number, you’re probably not getting the money back

So yeah, prepaid cards aren’t perfect. But if privacy is the goal, they’re still one of the few things that actually help.

Real Ways People Use Them

Let’s say you’re trying out an online casino. You don’t want your bank seeing it. You don’t want it on your statement. You walk into a Walgreens, buy a Vanilla Visa with a hundred bucks in cash, then use it to make your deposit. Done. The casino sees a card, but not your name.

Or maybe you’re signing up for a new subscription. Could be a video platform, a magazine, whatever. You don’t want it auto-charging your main card every month or sharing your info with advertisers. Use a prepaid card, and it stays off the radar.

Even if you’re just buying something from a site you don’t totally trust, using a card that isn’t tied to your real money is a smart move.

Will These Cards Still Be Around?

That’s the thing people are starting to worry about. Some stores have started asking for ID when you buy higher-value prepaid cards. And there’s talk in some countries about requiring people to register cards before using them.

Governments don’t like anonymous money. Companies definitely don’t. There’s a chance that in the future, prepaid cards will be harder to get or come with new rules.

But for now, they still work. You can still walk into a store with cash and walk out with a prepaid card. And as long as Vanilla Visa is accepted at the places you shop, you’ve got a way to stay private.

Bottom Line

If you’re living in 2025 and trying to protect your privacy online, prepaid cards are one of the last easy options. The cashless economy makes it almost impossible to pay without leaving a record, but prepaid cards break that pattern. They don’t ask for your name. They don’t track your habits. And they don’t leave a trail if you use them right.

They won’t fix everything. They don’t keep you completely invisible. But they give you a level of control that’s hard to find now. In a world that wants to watch your every move, that still counts for something.

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Features

Winkler nurse stands with Israel and the Jewish people

Nellie Gerzen

By MYRON LOVE Considering the great increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada over the past 20 months – and the passivity of government, federally, provincially and municipally, in the face of this what-should-be unacceptable criminal behaviour, many in our Jewish community may feel that we have been abandoned by our fellow citizens.
Polls regularly show that as many as 70% of Canadians support Israel – and there are many who have taken action.  One such individual is Nelli Gerzen, a nurse at the Boundary Trails Health Centre (which serves the communities of Winkler and Morden in western Manitoba).  Three times in the past 20 months, Gerzen has taken time off work to travel to Israel to support Israelis in their time of need.
I asked her what those around her thought of her trips to Israel. “My mother was worried when I went the first time (November 2023),” Gerzen responded, “but, like me, she has trust in the Lord.  My friends and colleagues have gotten used to it.”
She also reports that she is part of a small group of fellow believers that meet online regularly and pray for Israel.
Gerzen is originally from Russia, but grew up in Germany. Her earliest exposure to the history of the Holocaust, she relates, was in Grade 9 – in Germany.  “My history teacher in Germany in Grade 9 went into depth with the history of World War II and the Holocaust,” she recalls. “It is normal that all the teachers taught about the Holocaust but she put a lot of effort into teaching specifically this topic. We also got to watch a live interview with a Holocaust survivor.”
What she learned made a strong impression on her.  “I have often asked myself what I would do if I were living in that era,” she says.  “Would I have been willing to hide Jews in my home? Or risk my life to save others?”
Gerzen came to Canada in 2010 – at the age of 20.  She received her nursing training here and has been working at Boundary Trails for the last three years.
“I believe in the G-d of Israel and that the Jews are his Chosen People,” she states.  “We are living at a time of skyrocketing anti-Semitism. Many Jews are feeling vulnerable.  I felt that I had to do something to help.”
Gerzen’s first trip to Israel was actually in 2014 when she signed onto a youth tour organized by a Christian group, Midnight Call, based in Switzerland.  That initial visit left a strong impact.  “That first visit changed my life,” she remembers.  “I enjoyed having conversations with the Israelis.  The bible for me came to life.  Every stone seemed to have a story.”
She went on a second Midnight Call Missionaries tour of Israel in 2018.  She went back again on her own in the spring of 2023.  After October 7, she says, “I couldn’t sit at home. I had to do something.”
Thus, in November 2023, she went back to Israel, this time as a volunteer.  She spent two weeks at Petach Tikvah cooking meals for Israelis displaced from the north and the south as well as IDF soldiers. She also spent a day with an Israeli friend delivering food to IDF soldiers stationed near Gaza. She notes that she wasn’t worried so close to the border. 
“I trusted in the Lord,” she says.   “It was a special feeling being able to help.”
Last November, she found herself at Kiryat Shmona (with whom our Jewish community has close ties), working for two weeks alongside volunteers from all over the world cooking for the IDF.
On one of her earlier visits, she recounts, a missile struck just a few metres from the kitchen where the volunteers were working.  There was some damage – forcing closure for a few days while repairs were ongoing, but no injuries.
In January, she was back at Kiryat Shmona for another two weeks cooking for the IDF.  She also helped deliver food to Metula on the northern border. This last time, she reports, there was a more upbeat atmosphere, “even though,” she notes, “the wounds are still fresh.  It was quieter. There were no more missiles coming in.
“Israelis were really touched by the presence of so many of us volunteers.  I only wish more Christians would stand up for Israel.
“It was really moving to hear people’s stories first-hand.”
She recounts the story of one Israeli she met at a Jerusalem market who fought in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, who was the only survivor of the tank he was in.
“This guy lost so much in his life, and he was standing there telling the story and smiling, just trying to live life again,” she says. “The people there are so heartbroken.”
Back home, she has been showing her support for Israel and the Jewish people by attending the weekly rallies on Kenaston in support of the hostages whenever she can.
She is looking forward to playing piano at Shalom Square during Folklorama.
Nelli Gerzen doesn’t know yet when she will be returning to Israel – but it is certain to be soon.  “This is my chance to step up for the truth,” she concludes. “I know that supporting Israel is the right thing to do. When I am there, it feels like my heart is on fire.”  

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