Features
The Little Synagogue in Me: How one of the last surviving prairie synagogues found a home at Calgary’s Heritage Park
By IRENA KARSHENBAUM Looking back, I can’t believe it’s been 12 years since The Little Synagogue came to Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village, the largest living history museum in Canada. It feels like another life.
I remember lying in bed at night, dreaming about this project, how I was going to put a synagogue in Heritage Park. Everything seemed so far into the future.
Then all the things I was wanting to do, planning to do, needing to do, happened. All the nights, all the emails, all the meetings, all the phone calls, all the begging for money, all the running around are now a blur.
There is a false front, yellow, wooden synagogue with a white veranda at Heritage Park today, one of the last rural synagogues to survive on the prairies and have the distinction — and good fortune! — of being included in the permanent collection of any historic park in Canada. The first, and only one. To date.
The Montefiore Institute, as it was originally known, tells the story of early Canadian prairie settlement and that history includes Jews who fled the raging anti-Semitism of Russia and Romania, to the edge of the earth, to Alberta. They built their colony in 1910 in the Palliser Triangle, blanketing much of southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, where nothing was supposed to grow, and in the bitter cold and in the dry, scorching heat, they broke the land. The Jewish people were living on the Canadian prairies from the very beginning, beside the Danes, Italians, Ukrainians, Volga Germans and many others, the Montefiore Institute tells this story today.
The Montefiore Institute was built in 1916, abandoned by the mid 1920s, and moved to Hanna, about 130 kilometres west, around 1940. In time, it was plastered in green and white siding, the porch was covered to create a much-needed extra bedroom for the family’s numerous children, an addition was built in the back, and the cutout where the Magen David once looked out into the distant horizon disappeared under siding. Its transformation to an unassuming bungalow was complete. Its Jewish history was lost from memory. The family thought they were living in the most luxurious home they had ever lived in, a conversion from an old church.
Two generations later a motley crew of volunteers found the Montefiore Institute and, after discovering that thanks to the dryness of the climate, it was like new, and would be able to withstand a 230 kilometre trek on a truck from Hanna to Calgary.
Two years had passed since I emailed my proposal to Heritage Park, when we drove to Hanna early one June morning, in 2008, and watched a crew of young men remove the building from its foundation. They inserted giant, square wooden beams under the house and “rolled” them. The building ripped off the foundation and slowly slid on to the truck bed. Oh how those workmen’s bodies moved! None of them were big or stocky or bulky – what you’d think they’d have to be for such physically demanding labour. They moved like ballerinas. They were lean, the kind of lean that I have encountered in men who have lived difficult lives. How hard they worked! And when they were done, we gave them pies, bought at a Hanna bakery, as an expression of our gratitude. It felt shameful. They got paid, sure. But it still felt wrong. Like it wasn’t enough.
Hanna was left behind and for five long months there was that farm at Strathmore, 50 kilometres east of Calgary, where the synagogue underwent exterior restoration. The ugly siding was removed, and lovely, raw wood was revealed underneath, covered in nails as numerous as a child’s freckled face. The nails were yanked, the holes were filled and smoothed and the exterior was painted by the restoration crew that drove out to Strathmore and back to Calgary and back out there and back to Calgary, day after day.
Every time I would speak in public about the project, my voice would crack and a tear would betray me. What’s wrong with me? I’d ask. I’m not religious. This isn’t even my history, if you think it in simple terms. My family left Kharkov, the Soviet Union in 1978, travelled through Vienna and stayed in Rome before arriving in Calgary in 1979. Those homesteaders came from Russia and Romania in 1910. If you think of it as our collective Jewish history, then sure, this is my history. Maybe my soul knows something my head does not.
People thank me for loving history. It sounds simple. I’m not simple. This is more than loving history. I love ideas. Projects. A good story. Adventure. I love to create things. Work with people, that’s when you really get to know them. This is about that. It’s about creating beauty in the world, in one small place.
The Little Synagogue races along the highway one late November day in 2008. It has an escort of electrical crews. It slows down, the electrical crews raise the overhead wires and the building slowly passes underneath. Imagine a little yellow synagogue racing down the highway. Very cute. It comes to a stop on the corner of a farm on the outskirts of Calgary because it can’t travel through the city in the middle of the day. It will cause traffic jams. We go home and wait ‘till night. I’m scared that some kook might burn down our precious jewel. The time can’t pass quickly enough, but then it does and we move our kinder, don’t shlof we tell it, in the middle of the night. Television crews chase it. It’s quite the sight. It would make for a great musical. The name is easy, “Little Synagogue, The Musical!” With an exclamation point. Too bad I can’t write lyrics or music or act or carry a tune or tap dance. It might also make a nice Disney cartoon. Barbra Streisand can sing my parts.
The Little Synagogue arrives at Heritage Park at 4:00 o’clock in the morning. The Meshugenah Synagogue Chasers go to Denny’s for breakfast as there are no Heritage Park staff up that early to accept our gift. We warm up, fill our bellies with eggs and toast and return to the park where we are greeted by “Important People”. They graciously accept our gift. The Little Synagogue is driven into the park grounds and placed on its foundation.
Another long winter, the begging for money is endless, the interior is restored, the benches are made, the bimah is built, the mezuzahs are carved to look like they are worm-eaten. Very apropos for a rural synagogue. As all of this is happening, the grand opening celebration is being organized. There is no time to go grocery shopping, there is no time to trap the dust bunnies hopping all over my floors. There is hardly time to work to earn a living to pay my bills. There is no time for anything other than the grand opening, the synagogue, work, the grand opening, the synagogue, and what should I wear? And what shall I say in my speech at the opening?
We’ll get a thousand people at the opening, I tell my board and opening committee. They tell me I’m crazy. 600, 800 max. No, we’ll get 1,000, I argue with them.
The speech gets written and rewritten, over three months. The dress is bought. I’m lent a choker festoon necklace, a vintage looking handbag. I cave and buy a $400 hat. There are people all around working hard, doing this and that, and on the Thursday before the grand opening everything stops. I can hear the silence. I have nothing to do that weekend except show up at the grand opening celebration on Sunday, June 28, 2009. We eat burgers at a park the night before. The air has the sweet smell of flowers, the sun blushes its pretty face on us like from a scene out of Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams.”
The day of the grand opening arrives. My mother dresses me as if I am a princess, lunch at Heritage Park, and the crowds start coming, and coming, 2,000 people appear, and more. Our most generous donors take turns carrying the Torah, regally crowned by a chuppah and the joyful people follow behind. They sing and clap and have tears in their eyes. Very Important People give speeches. My voice cracks, again, when I give my speech. My soul knows something my head does not.
The greatest joy in life, I think, comes from dreaming. Then doing.
Founding president of The Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project Society, Irena Karshenbaum will give a talk about this special project for the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada on Sunday, May 30, 2021 at 2:00 pm CDT. Click here to register: https://www.jhcwc.org/programs/
Irena Karshenbaum writes in Calgary. She can be reached at irenakarshenbaum.com.
Features
The Gaza Peace Plan is not a Done Deal, but an Opening
By HENRY SREBRNIK (Oct. 23, 2025) The idea that Hamas will voluntarily disarm, that international forces will deploy in the Gaza Strip, and that the process of building a Palestinian government by people like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which a disarmed Hamas does not participate, are false hopes, if not fantasies. But does this mean U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan was useless? Of course not.
Trump understood the necessity of bringing the war to an end. But he also believed that endless debate among experts or, worse, historian and lawyers, would never produce an agreement. He presented an offer – actually, an ultimatum – to Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas that neither could refuse: immediate, unconditional and complete release of all hostages and missing persons, something the Israeli public longed for, in exchange for a final end to the war, which a humbled Hamas needed.
Two years of war has left Hamas weaker than it had been in decades. Israeli bombardments had shattered the group’s military capabilities and depleted its arsenals. In many neighborhoods, control had drifted to local clan networks and tribal councils. This hinted at something that could one day replace Hamas’s iron grip. To prevent this, Hamas has been ruthlessly murdering all potential rivals in the areas of Gaza it controls since the ceasefire went into effect.
Despite the severe degradation of its military capabilities during the war, Hamas still has more soldiers and weapons than all its rival factions in Gaza combined. Hamas has managed to redeploy approximately 7,000 militants to reassert control over the territory. They have publicized photographs and videos of their forces murdering and torturing; the victims include women and children.
The ceasefire is a temporary reprieve for Hamas: a chance to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next round of fighting. In Islamist political thought there’s a word for it, hudna — a temporary truce with non-Muslim adversaries that can be discarded as soon as the balance of power shifts. Then the time for jihad will arrive again. Hamas was established in 1987 and isn’t going to disappear.
In fact Hamas also says it expects an interim International Transitional Authority to hire 40,000 Hamas employees, and Hamas spokesman Basem Naim says he expects its fighters to be integrated into a post-transition Palestinian state.
Still, Trump has succeeded in ending the current war in Gaza, where Joe Biden failed. Biden’s national security team, drawn almost entirely from his supposed expert class, didn’t even see the crisis coming. Just five days before the attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had published an article in Foreign Affairs in which he wrote that “the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
Biden also had insulted the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, by publicly condemning the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And, of course, there was Biden’s poor relationship with Netanyahu, and his chronic inability to get the Israeli prime minister to do what he wanted.
By contrast, Trump returned to office with substantially more influence in both the Gulf and Israel, based on his first-term successes in the Middle East, especially the Abraham Accords (for which he’s never been praised by his political enemies).
Four Arab countries formally recognized Israel, beginning with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Sudan and Morocco. The next stage was intended to include Saudi Arabia. One motive put forward by some analysts for the October 7 attacks was that they were intended to provoke Israel into a response that would derail Saudi Arabia’s admission.
Instead of sitting Israelis and Arabs in a room and expecting them to negotiate an outcome, Trump’s approach has been to exert leverage through other players in the region, especially, Egypt, Turkey, and – most importantly – Qatar.
In Jerusalem, they call Qatar “the spoiler state.” Israelis describe the emirate as two trains running behind the same engine. One, led by the Qatari ruler’s mother and brother, supports the Muslim Brotherhood and is an unmistakable hater of Israel. The other, led by the prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani and several other senior figures, seeks rapprochement with the West.
The Qataris were shocked when Israeli jets on Sept. 9 conducted an airstrike in Doha targeting the leadership of Hamas. They then signed onto Trump’s peace plan at a meeting in New York Sept. 23, hosted by Trump and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim Ibn Hamad Al Thani, and attended by the leaders of eight Arab states, along with members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Netanyahu was then browbeaten into accepting the plan (and also forced to apologize to the Emir for the airstrike). It was somewhat ironic that the airstrike made the peace plan possible. As well, Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June gave this negotiation some very sharp teeth.
“If you would rather leave peacemaking to the historians and diplomats, then you may wait a long time for wars to end,” suggested Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in an Oct. 15 Free Press article. His advice? Go to the “deal guys: They get the job done.”
In a sense, both Israel and Hamas had accomplished their goals. Israel had broken the Iranian axis of terror by eliminating Hezbollah and Hamas as a fighting force, along with the Iranian nuclear threat. Hamas had succeeded in luring Israel into a trap that led it to become hated and isolated around the world. This included the labelling of Israel as genocidal and the global call for a Palestinian state.
The rest of the 20-point peace plan will be addressed in a step-by-step fashion. Meanwhile, Israel must ensure that it retains freedom of action in Gaza, by decisive action against any attempt by Hamas to rebuild its army, its rockets, its battalions and its divisions.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Why Fitness Routines Fall Apart — and How to Rebuild Yours
Every spring, gyms see a flood of hopeful faces. New shoes, fresh playlists, unwavering intentions, by mid-summer? Half of them vanish into the fog of abandoned routines. The story repeats year after year until it starts to feel almost scripted. Why does enthusiasm evaporate? The easy answer involves willpower but that explanation misses the point. Habits don’t fail because people are weak. Life stress, boredom, and monotony ruin routines. Timely lever pulls can change narratives. The hardest part is persevering when motivation wanes.
Mistaking Motivation for Momentum
Most chase that opening surge, the lightning strike of motivation, but then stop searching once enthusiasm fizzles. A scroll through sites like PUR Pharma (pur-pharma.is/) or a glimpse of an influencer’s progress triggers a burst of action: new workout gear ordered, plans scribbled in planners destined for dusty drawers. Yet momentum fades when small setbacks pop up (a late meeting here, rainy weather there). Real progress comes from building systems stronger than any fleeting pep talk. Those who frame fitness as something owed to motivation end up back at square one every time life interrupts, which it always does.
Overcomplicating Everything
It’s tempting to turn wellness into a science fair project with spreadsheets and specialized equipment lined up on day one. This is the allure of complexity disguised as seriousness, a new diet paired with seven types of supplements and four color-coded bottles. Simplicity gets lost in the noise almost instantly. Most successful routines rely on two principles: keep it simple and keep showing up even when everything else is chaos outside those gym walls. Anyone insisting that perfection is required before taking step one has already constructed an excuse not to begin at all.
Forgetting Fun Completely
Who decided exercise must hurt or look like punishment? Somewhere along the line, fun got swapped out for grind culture and “no pain, no gain.” That isn’t just unappealing, it’s unsustainable over months or years. If sessions feel like torture devices borrowed from medieval times, nobody should be surprised when commitment falters fast. Seek activities that actually spark some joy or curiosity, a dance class instead of yet another treadmill session, maybe, or play a pickup game rather than slogging through solo circuits again and again.
Ignoring Recovery (and Reality)
Sleep deprivation, disguised as discipline, fools anyone, except perhaps uncritical Instagram followers. Ignoring recovery turns ambition into tiredness faster than any missed session. Because bodies break without rest, routines must breathe with owners. Cycling, real leisure, and honest self-checks regarding weekly goals build endurance, not continual pushing.
Conclusion
Change rarely arrives by force alone but usually grows quietly from patterns repeated imperfectly over time, even if last month looked nothing like this week so far. Drop the hunt for nonstop inspiration. Instead of breaking behaviors at the first hint of stress or boredom, build habits that last. People who rebuild methodically after every stumble or detour make progress, not those who peak and then fall.
Features
How DIY Auto Repairs Can Help You Cut Costs—Safely
Regular maintenance and minor repairs are the greatest approach for many car drivers to save money without sacrificing dependability. DIY repairs can save you a lot of money over the life of your car since most of the expense is in the labour. DIY helps you learn how things work and notice tiny issues before they become costly ones. Every work requires planning, patience, and safety.
Test Your Talents with Safe Limits
DIY solutions succeed when one is honest about their talents. Wiper blades, air filters, and occupant filters are beginner-friendly. With the correct equipment, intermediate owners can replace brake pads, spark plugs, coolant, and brake fluid. Pressurized fuel, high-voltage hybrids, airbags, and timing components are risky. Only professionals should manage them. Limitations protect you and your car. Drivers trust sources like Parts Avenue to find, install, and schedule manufacturer-approved work.
Set Up a Reliable Workspace and Tools
Good tools pay for themselves quickly. Ratchets, torque wrenches, combination wrenches, heavy jack stands, and wheel chocks are essential. It is advisable to engage specialists for specific tasks. A clean, flat, well-lit, and open space is essential. Please take your time. While working, keep a charged phone nearby to read repair instructions or write torque patterns.
Find the Problem before Replacing the Parts
It may cost more to replace something without diagnosing it. Instead of ideas, start with symptoms. OBD-II readers detect leaks, sounds, and DTCs. Simple tests like voltage, smoke indicating vacuum leaks, pad thickness, and rotor runout might reveal failure. A good analysis saves components, protects surrounding parts, and fosters future trust.
Maintenance That Pays off is Most Crucial
Jobs compensate for time and tools differently. Prioritize returns and maintenance. Change the oil and filter, rotate the tires, evaluate the air pressure, replace low brake fluid, clean the coolant with the right chemicals, and replace belts and filters before they fail. These items extend automotive life, stabilize fuel efficiency, and reduce roadside towing issues that can take months to resolve.
Do as Instructed, Utilize Quality Parts, and Follow Torque Requirements
Understand the service. Set the jacking points, tighten the screws in the appropriate order, and use threadlocker or anti-seize as suggested by the maker. Rotor wear can cause leaks, distortions, or broken threads. Choose components that meet or exceed OEM requirements and fit your car’s VIN, engine code, and manufacturing date. Cheap parts that break easily cost extra.
Test, Record, and Discard Carefully
Safely test the system before patching. Check under the car for drops, bleed the brakes again, and check fluid levels after a short drive. Note torques, parts, miles, and repair date. Photo and document storage for car sales. Properly dispose of oil, filters, coolant, and brake fluid. Controlling hazards protects your community and workplace.
Know When to Seek Professional Help
Self-employed individuals recognize their constraints. If a task is challenging, requires special instruments, or involves safety, consult an expert. Collaboration makes cars safer, cheaper, and more efficient. Selecting, planning, and implementing processes properly improves performance, lowers costs, and ensures safety.