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THE RED INHERITANCE — PART 2
(Ed. note: If you haven’t read Part 1 of “The Red Inheritance,” you can find it here: The Red Inheritance.)
By H.C. Piloski
FOREWORD
The Wider Circle
What follows is not a continuation so much as an expansion. The first part traced a single thread — a granddaughter’s attempt to understand the man whose life shaped her own. But every thread, once pulled, reveals others. And every inheritance, once examined, widens into a circle.
This second part enters that wider circle.
It begins with a photograph discovered only after the first part was finished: a small, creased image of a protest on Carlton Street in June 1953. In the blur of bodies stands a young man — Rachel’s grandfather — raising his hand in defense of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two American Jews condemned in a trial that divided a continent. That photograph opened a door Rachel had not known existed.
It revealed that her grandfather’s world was not confined to Winnipeg’s North End, nor to the furnace rooms and union halls where he spent his working life. His convictions reached outward — to New York, to Europe, to Israel and Palestine, to the global struggles of the twentieth century.
This part follows those convictions.
It traces his years in the CPR union, where he learned solidarity not as a slogan but as a practice. It follows his activism within the Jewish left — activism that began long before his retirement, rooted in the political commitments he carried through the railway yards, the union halls, and the neighbourhood streets of the North End. It examines his belief in Israel’s creation and his unwavering insistence on Palestinian rights. It explores his commitment to nuclear disarmament, his distrust of state power, his hope for a world that might yet choose justice over fear.
It also follows the path of his son — Rachel’s father — who walked beside him for a time before turning away, carrying both admiration and ambivalence. And it follows Rachel herself, as she moves from personal memory into historical inquiry, discovering that her grandfather’s life was part of a larger, often contradictory, often painful, always human story.
This part is not an attempt to sanctify him. It is an attempt to understand him — and the century he lived in.
The shadows are real. The contradictions are real. The hope is real.
This story is one thread in a larger tapestry of inherited memory and consequence. And the circle continues to widen.
PROLOGUE
Rachel had always believed her grandfather’s world ended at the corner of Selkirk and Salter — the bakery, the union hall, the old brick houses of the North End. It was a geography of memory, not history. A place where men argued about wages and women argued about recipes, where politics was spoken in kitchens and carried in pockets, folded like prayer.
But after he died, and after she finished the part she thought would be the end of it, she found the photograph.
It was small, creased, almost brittle. Her father had tucked it into a folder he hadn’t opened in years. On the back, in her grandfather’s handwriting, were the words: Carlton Street, June 1953.
On the front: a crowd of men and women standing outside the old Winnipeg Free Press building. Some held signs. Some shouted. Some looked frightened. And there, almost lost in the blur of bodies, was her zaida — younger than she had ever seen him, his hair black, his jaw set, his hand raised in a gesture that was not anger but insistence.
She didn’t know what the protest was about until she looked up the date.
The Rosenberg execution.
Her grandfather had stood on Carlton Street, in Winnipeg, protesting the death of two American Jews accused of betraying their country. He had stood there as though the fate of strangers thousands of miles away was somehow his own.
That was the moment Rachel understood: Her grandfather’s world had never been small. It had only been local.
The circle was wider — far wider — than she had ever imagined.
And if she wanted to understand him, truly understand him, she would have to follow that circle outward: from Winnipeg to New York, from union halls to espionage files, from the Holocaust’s shadow to the contradictions of Israel and Palestine, from Cold War paranoia to the fragile hope of peace.
She would have to learn why a man who loved his family so fiercely also believed he owed something to the world.
She would have to learn why her father followed him for a time, and why he stopped.
She would have to learn what it meant to inherit not only memory, but conviction.
Rachel closed the folder. She packed a suitcase. She booked a flight.
The wider circle had opened. She stepped into it.
THE UNION MAN
The first thing Rachel noticed about the CPR archives was the smell — dust, paper, and the faint metallic tang of old machinery, as though the building itself remembered the trains that once thundered past it. She had come here reluctantly, almost skeptically. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find. Her grandfather had worked for the railway for decades, but she had always thought of it as a job, not a calling.
She was wrong.
The archivist, a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses, handed her a stack of union newsletters from the 1950s and 60s. “Your grandfather’s name appears quite a bit,” he said, almost casually. “He wasn’t just a member. He was active.”
Active. The word felt too small.
She flipped through the pages. There he was — David Levinson — listed as a shop steward, then as a delegate, then as a representative on a labour committee that had petitioned the CPR for safer working conditions. She found minutes from meetings where he had argued for wage parity, for antidiscrimination clauses, for the hiring of more immigrant workers. She found a letter he had written to the union president, urging solidarity with striking textile workers in Montreal.
She found, tucked between two newsletters, a faded photograph of him standing outside the CPR yards, his arm around a fellow worker, both of them smiling in a way that suggested victory, or at least defiance.
Her grandfather had not been a man who simply held opinions. He had been a man who acted.
But what struck her most was not the union work itself — it was how deeply it intertwined with the politics she had only begun to understand. In the margins of one newsletter, in her grandfather’s unmistakable handwriting, she found a note:
Solidarity is the only weapon the poor have.
It wasn’t a slogan. It was a belief.
And suddenly, she understood something she had missed entirely: her grandfather’s political life had not begun after retirement. It had begun here — in the yards, in the meetings, in the long nights spent drafting resolutions and writing letters. His involvement in the Jewish left, his membership in the Communist Party, his activism for peace and justice — all of it had grown from the soil of the railway.
He had carried his convictions with him to work every day, tucked into his lunch pail alongside sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. He had argued politics during breaks, organized meetings after shifts, and spent weekends in smoky rooms debating the future of workers, of Jews, of the world.
Rachel felt a strange mixture of pride and unease. Pride, because she could see the beginnings of the man she had written about in the first part — the stubbornness, the moral clarity, the refusal to accept injustice as inevitable. Unease, because she realized how little she had understood him.
She had written about his politics, but not their roots. She had written about his convictions, but not their labour. She had written about his life, but not his work.
Her father had tried to tell her, once. He had said, “Your zaida wasn’t just a leftist. He was a union man. That’s where it all started.” She had nodded, distracted, thinking she already knew.
She hadn’t known anything.
She turned another page and found a brief report from a meeting of the Jewish left organization — dated 1961. Her grandfather had spoken about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, about the moral responsibility of workers to oppose war, about the need for solidarity across borders. He had been involved long before retirement. He had been involved while raising a family, while working shifts, while navigating the Cold War’s suspicion and fear.
He had lived his politics openly, stubbornly, deliberately.
Rachel closed the newsletter and sat back.
The wider circle was not only global. It was personal.
CARLTON STREET, 1953
Rachel didn’t intend to go to Carlton Street. She had only meant to walk, to clear her head after the shock of seeing her grandfather in that photograph. But her feet carried her there anyway, as though the city itself remembered what she had forgotten.
The former Winnipeg Free Press building — the Old Lady of Carlton Street — was still there, though it no longer housed reporters or printing presses. Its stone façade, once the backdrop to arguments, deadlines, and the hum of a city’s news, now sheltered provincial civil servants shuffling between offices, fluorescent lights, and government memos. Rachel stood on the sidewalk where her grandfather had once stood, where he had raised his hand in protest on a June afternoon in 1953, demanding justice for two American Jews he had never met. The building had changed purpose, but not presence. It watched her with the same quiet solidity it must have offered him, as though it remembered everything.
She tried to imagine the scene: the crowd, the signs, the tension, the fear. The way people must have looked over their shoulders, worried about being photographed, named, watched — but her grandfather and the few other protesters looked up, not down, toward the illuminated news bulletin above the entrance.
She tried to picture him — young, determined, stubborn — standing there with the conviction that what happened in New York mattered in Winnipeg, that injustice anywhere was a threat everywhere, that solidarity was not a slogan but a responsibility. She imagined him arriving after a shift at the CPR yards, still smelling faintly of grease and metal, carrying the political commitments he had already been living for years: union solidarity, Jewish left activism, Communist meetings held in borrowed basements and back rooms. Carlton Street had not been an exception. It had been an extension of the life he was already leading.
She wondered if her father had been there too, a boy holding his father’s hand, not understanding the words but understanding the urgency.
She wondered why no one had told her.
She wondered what else she didn’t know.
A bus hissed to a stop beside her. A group of teenagers spilled out, laughing, unaware of the ghosts beneath their feet. Rachel felt a sudden, sharp ache — not grief, exactly, but recognition. Her grandfather had lived in a world where politics were not abstractions but obligations. He had believed that the fate of strangers mattered. He had believed that justice was not a matter of geography.
She took out the photograph again. She held it up to the building. The past and present did not align, but the gesture felt necessary.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her father: “Call me when you can. I found something else you should see.”
She stared at the screen. Her father had always been careful with his words, careful with his memories, careful with the parts of his life that touched his father’s politics. He had followed his father for a time — marches, meetings, pamphlets — before turning away, quietly, without explanation.
Rachel lowered the photograph, walked back to where she had parked, unlocked the car, and slid into the driver’s seat. She started the engine and pulled away from Carlton Street, heading north through the familiar grid of the city, toward her father’s house.
The wider circle was widening again. And she was being pulled into it.
THE FATHER’S BOX
Her father lived in the same house Rachel had grown up in, though it felt smaller now, as though the walls had absorbed decades of arguments, silences, and the quiet persistence of memory. He met her at the door with a look she couldn’t quite read — not worry, not excitement, but something like resignation. From the back room Rachel could hear her mother speaking softly to someone.
“I found more,” he said. He didn’t hug her. He never did. But he stepped aside to let her in, which was its own kind of embrace.
The dining room table was covered with papers. Not scattered — arranged. Her father had always been meticulous, even when the rest of his life felt chaotic. Rachel saw folders, envelopes, a few brittle photographs, and a cardboard box she recognized instantly.
Her grandfather’s box.
It had sat in the basement for years, untouched, because her father had insisted it was “just old papers.” Rachel had believed him. She had believed a lot of things he said about her grandfather, because he said them with the authority of someone who had lived through the same storms.
Now she wasn’t sure what he had lived through, or what he had chosen to forget.
Her father gestured to the box. “I didn’t want to open it before,” he said. “I wasn’t ready.”
Rachel sat down. “What changed?”
He hesitated. “You did.”
She didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t ask. She reached for the box. The cardboard was soft with age, the edges worn. She lifted the lid.
Inside were papers from the Jewish left organization her grandfather had devoted himself to — not only after retirement, but long before it. Meeting minutes. Pamphlets. Letters. A stack of mimeographed newsletters with headlines about peace, justice, workers’ rights, and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. She saw dates from the 1950s, the 60s, the 70s — decades of activism layered like sediment.
And then she saw it — a folder labeled Holocaust Education Committee.
Her breath caught.
She opened it carefully. Inside were copies of speeches her grandfather had given before the Winnipeg School Board, urging them to include Holocaust education in the curriculum. There were letters he had written to the Minister of Education, arguing that genocide was not a Jewish tragedy but a human one, and that children needed to understand how hatred becomes policy.
There were notes in his handwriting — fierce, urgent, uncompromising:
Memory is not passive. Memory is protection. Teach them before someone else teaches them to hate.
Rachel felt her throat tighten.
Her father watched her quietly. “He believed in that work,” he said. “More than anything.”
She looked up. “You never told me.”
He exhaled, long and slow. “I didn’t think you wanted to know. You were always… focused on the personal. The family stories. The furnace. The neighbourhood. I didn’t think you cared about the politics.”
“I care now,” she said.
He nodded, but his expression shifted — something darker, something unresolved.
“There’s more,” he said. “About me.”
Rachel waited.
Her father sat down across from her, folding his hands as though preparing for confession.
“I followed him,” he said. “For a while. The meetings. The marches. The Rosenberg protest — I was there. I was a kid, but I remember the shouting, the fear. I remember him telling me that justice mattered even when it was dangerous.”
Rachel felt a jolt — not shock, but recognition. She had always sensed there was something her father wasn’t saying.
“But I couldn’t stay,” he said. “Not like he did. I didn’t have his… certainty. His stubbornness. His faith in people. I admired him, but I couldn’t be him.”
Rachel didn’t speak. She let him continue.
“He never blamed me,” her father said. “But I blamed myself. For a long time.”
Rachel reached across the table and touched his hand. It was the first time she had done that in years.
Her father swallowed hard. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something you need to see.”
He stood, walked to the hallway, and returned with a thin envelope. He placed it in front of her.
Rachel opened it.
Inside was an RCMP surveillance report. Her father’s name was on it.
She felt the room tilt.
“They questioned me once,” he said quietly. “About meetings I’d gone to with him. They wanted to know who he talked to. Who he met with. I never told you. I never told anyone.”
Rachel looked at him — really looked at him — and saw the weight he had carried, the fear he had inherited, the silence he had chosen.
Her grandfather had lived his politics openly. Her father had lived them in the shadows.
And she — she had lived them unknowingly.
The circle widened again.
Rachel closed the envelope. She didn’t know what to say. But she knew what she had to do.
THE EDUCATION FILES
Rachel carried the box home like something fragile, though it wasn’t the cardboard she was protecting — it was the weight inside it. She set it on her kitchen table, cleared a space around it, and opened it again, this time slowly, deliberately, as though she were entering a room she had been warned about.
The Holocaust Education Committee folder lay on top. She lifted it out and spread the contents across the table. The papers were yellowed, but the ink was still sharp, still insistent. Her grandfather’s handwriting — angular, impatient, unmistakably his — ran along the margins of typed documents like commentary from a man who could never leave a thought alone.
She read the first speech.
It was addressed to the Winnipeg School Board, dated 1978. Her grandfather argued that Holocaust education was not simply about history, but about vigilance. He wrote that genocide begins with language, with silence, with the normalization of cruelty. He wrote that children needed to understand how ordinary people become complicit, how bureaucracies become weapons, how prejudice becomes policy.
He wrote:
If we do not teach them what happened, someone else will teach them why it should happen again.
Rachel felt a chill. She had known her grandfather was passionate about justice, but she had not known he had stood before the school board, before elected officials, before committees, insisting that memory was a civic duty.
She turned to the next document — a letter to the Minister of Education. Her grandfather wrote about survivors in Winnipeg who had never been asked to speak, whose stories were fading, whose trauma had been carried quietly through decades of Canadian politeness. He argued that the province had a responsibility to give those stories a place in classrooms, not as Jewish history, but as human warning.
Rachel imagined him writing these letters late at night, after work, after dinner, after everyone else had gone to bed. She imagined him sitting at the kitchen table — the same table where she had once eaten soup and listened to him tell stories about the neighbourhood — never knowing the depth of the battles he fought outside it.
She picked up another sheet — minutes from a meeting of the Jewish left organization. Her grandfather had spoken about the rise of neoNazi groups in Canada, about the danger of complacency, about the need for education as prevention. His words were blunt, unadorned, almost harsh:
We cannot rely on governments to remember. We must force them to.
Rachel sat back, overwhelmed.
This was not the gentle man who had fixed her bicycle, who had slipped her coins for candy, who had told her stories about growing up in the old North End. This was a man who had carried the Holocaust not as memory but as mandate. A man who believed that justice required confrontation. A man who refused to let silence do its work. A man who had fought fascism all his life — including as a Canadian soldier overseas during the Second World War.
She reached for another document — a list of schools where he had spoken. West Kildonan. Elmwood. St. James. River Heights. Transcona. Schools across the city, across neighbourhoods that had never known him, never known his history, never known the weight he carried.
She wondered how many students remembered him. She wondered what he had said. She wondered if any of them had gone home that day and asked their parents questions that had never been asked before.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her father:
Did you find the education files?
She typed back: Yes.
A moment later: He was proud of that work. He didn’t say it, but he was.
Rachel stared at the screen. Her father had inherited the silence, not the certainty. She had inherited the questions.
She looked again at the papers on the table. Her grandfather’s voice seemed to rise from them — urgent, insistent, unyielding.
This was not a man who had lived quietly. This was a man who had lived deliberately.
And she was only beginning to understand him.
Rachel gathered the papers, placed them back in the folder, and closed the box. She knew what she had to do next.
She needed to see the archives. She needed to see the records. She needed to see the world he had fought against — and the world he had fought for.
The circle widened again.
And she followed it.
Closing Note
Rachel sat at her kitchen table long after the papers were back in the box. The city outside moved on, unaware of the man whose life she had just unfolded — a life lived in conviction, in struggle, in stubborn hope.
She understood now that her grandfather’s politics had not been theory but duty, carried through union halls, marches, classrooms, and quiet nights at the kitchen table. She understood that her father had lived in the shadow of that certainty, and that she herself had inherited something different — the responsibility to listen.
She touched the photograph from Carlton Street, the crease worn soft by time. Her grandfather’s raised hand seemed less like protest now and more like insistence: Pay attention. Remember. Act.
She closed the box gently.
And now, she realized, she was listening too.
H.C. Piloski is the one who listens when the past begins to speak again.
Comment from Veronika (Oct. 1): Thanks
Features
Do we treat our Arabs better or worse than the Tsars treated us?
By MARTY GREEN I know many Jews will be outraged at the very notion of comparing the two. “The pogroms!”, I hear you cry. “The Naqba!”, the Arabs might just as well respond. We all have our own simplified narratives regarding the rights and wrongs of the past; but just as the true story of Arab life in Israel is much more complicated than the Naqba, so the story of Jewish life is Russia was, for better and for worse, much more nuanced than the mere fact of the pogroms.
There are some obvious parallels between our respective stories. We came to be the authority over several million Arabs as an unwelcome by-product of our great victory in 1967. Similarly, Russia inherited some half million Jewish subjects over the course of the three partitions of Poland (1772-1795). We were hardly more welcome to the Tsars than the Arabs were to us. We sometimes mock the “genocide” allegations by pointing out how 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs in 1945 now claim to number over 14 million. But we were no pikers by comparison: in the course of the 19th century, our numbers in Russia grew anywhere from ten- to twenty-fold.
We remember how the Russian government quickly instituted the Pale of Settlement, restricting our mobility. Can the Arabs under Israeli rule not complain of similar or worse restrictions? It is true that we have obvious security concerns regarding the mobility of a hostile population. The checkpoint system has almost certainly saved lives. But by the same token, can we be sure that the Russians had no valid reason to worry about the loyalty of their Jewish subjects?
There can be little doubt that in the First World War, many Jews hoped that the German invaders would liberate them from their Russian oppressors. And even before the German invasion, as a large minority group speaking their own language and having close connections with their co-religionists in foreign not-always-friendly countries, surely the Russians had as good reason to be concerned with our loyalty as we have with regard to our Arabs?
(Incidentally, it is said that the Jews of 1812 might have whole-heartedly thrown in their lot with the invading Grand Armee, if not for the unlucky resemblance of the French Emperor’s name with the Yiddish word mapole (meaning “defeat”). But that is a tale for an alternate version of history.)
Finally, we remember well how Jews in Russia were not allowed to own land; the truth is, we mis-remember that “fact” because we did indeed own land, and when challenged our title was upheld in the Russian courts. Similarly, in the Occupied Territories the validity of Arab land titles under Ottoman Law are rigorously protected by the Israeli courts. Nevertheless, some residents of the Jordan Valley may argue that it is less than “rigorously” enforced on the actual ground.
Which brings us to the subject at hand. Because back in Old Russia, in der alter heim, disputes between us and our Gentile neighbors over land ownership and usage were an ongoing feature of life for centuries. For a somewhat poetic description of the nature of these conflicts, I turn to the words of memoirist Falek Zolf (1898-1962), who recalls this about his youth in the shtetl of Zastavia, a village of several hundred on the outskirts of Kamenetz-Litovsk. To preserve a bit of the flavor of the original, I have transcribed Zolf’s narrative here in a mix of English and Yiddish.
“The village led a poor, quiet life. We lived from what God gave us; this one from a manual trade, this one from farming, another from buying and selling, and so forth. A few dozen families pulled in a meager livelihood from working in Asher Guterman’s brewery, which was known throughout the region for its beer. Outside of that, almost everyone had his own garden and his own cow – most likely one which he had raised himself from a calf. You could always rent a small patch from one of the landowners who lived in the Gentile quarter; the vegetables and produce could be sold in the neighboring towns and villages: in Brisk, Kobrin, Orleh, Bialovezh, etc.
“Quiet and peaceful was the flow of life in the stäedtele. It was truly mit’n schwéiss vun sein ponim (by the sweat of his brow) that each one earned his own piece of bread, along with the vegetables which the good Mother Earth provided to everyone in full measure.”
Of course we all know that Jewish life in Russia was not quite so idyllic as Zolf makes it out to be in the preceding passage. Let us see what comes next:
“The stäedtele of Zastavia was at one time, according to the stories of the old men, entirely a Jewish peasant-village. The whole surrounding area with its fields, gardens, and hills had once belonged to Jews, who were originally men of the soil. But little by little, for a number of reasons, the Yiddische erd had passed over into Gentile hands. If a Jewish peasant needed to make a shidukh for his daughter, he might be driven to sell a strip of farmland to a Gentile; and with the money, he could put on a proper khasseneh with all the sheva brokhos. If his son didn’t want to go serve the Russian Tsar and had to run off azh ken Amerikeh, the Jew would once again cut off a piece of land and sell it to a neighboring Goy (to pay the 300-rouble penalty). If his grown children went off to seek happiness somewhere in the far-away, and the elderly parents simply didn’t have the koyakhto go out and push the plow, then the last stückel feld would be sold to the local meshtchan, and with the money they could enjoy the few years remaining to them. And so with time, the Yiddische erdfell largely into Goyische händt.
“In the end, all that remained to us was a large vihon, a communal grazing-field, which according to legend had once belonged to a rich Jewish landowner, who had donated it to the stäedtel. In the end, the Yiddische beheymos had actually been forced to share this pasture with Goyische khazerim. It was painful for us to have to watch those khazerim turning our Jewish vihon into a pigsty, but there was little choice; one was, after all, living in golus.”
Perhaps we should pause here to consider that while the Jews seem to have sold much of their land to the Russians due to economic pressure, there are nowadays, for obvious reasons, only the rarest cases of Arabs selling their lands to Jews. Furthermore, I am not aware of any situations where the Bedouins of the Jordan Valley willingly share their grazing land with the Jews of the hilltop outposts. Whether these differences are to our credit or theirs is not for me to say here.
In any case, we will see further that it was not only economic or social pressures which came into play:
“Unfortunately, the more the Goyischer Gass (the Gentile Quarter) grew at the expense of the Yiddischer Gass, the more brash and the more khutzpah-digker they became. They started to look for any pretext or opportunity to snatch away this last remaining piece of Jewish grazing land, so that not a single Yiddische beheymah should have a place to roam. They would sometimes show up armed with sticks, hoes, and pitchforks, ready to start a milkhomah….”
Sound familiar?
“….but on such occasions, the ZastavierYidden, who were in those days no pushovers, would quickly arm themselves with the implements of ha-yadayim y’dei Eysav and go forth to meet the Gentile foe. Blood would flow from both sides. For the Jews, it was a matter of kidush ha-shem, a case of milkheymes mitzvah, to uphold their Yiddischen koved and also to save and protect the Yiddische beheymah-lach from Goyische händt…”
And of course, in such situations, the Russians would call in local gendarmeria or even the dreaded Cossacks, and the Jews would be quickly dispersed, arrested, or even beaten.
Or were they….?
Perhaps not. Let us see how Zolf describes it:
“Fortunately, these little milkhomos would not last for long. The storm would quickly die down, and the stäedtel would soon go back to its normal, peaceful life, as though nothing had happened.”
And with those words does Zolf conclude his fond reminiscences of his childhood years. But of course that is not the end of the story.
We all know the devastation brought by the Second World War. But in the wake of the Holocaust, we are liable to forget the enormous impact of the First World War on the Jewish world. The collapse of empires was followed by the emergence of new, ideologically-driven regimes which. It is hard to say whether Communist Russia or nationalist Poland was more hostile to the Jews. In any case, Zolf’s village found itself on the Polish side of the border. And the Jewish way of life quickly became economically untenable.
Among the first the measures adopted under the Polish national slogan of “swój do swego“…that the Gentile should only patronize “his own people”….was the establishment of Christian cooperatives, so that the Polish peasants would not see their hard-earned money fall into the hands of Jewish intermediaries. Then there was the nationalization of entire industries like wine, alcohol and tobacco…again, with the purpose not so much of the betterment of the working class as the impoverishment of the Jewish merchant class. Then the strict enforcement of the Sunday laws, so that the observant Jewish shop-keeper would have to close down for two days of the week. Finally, the imposition of a host of new taxes, of which Zolf reels off the names: gruntovi, dokhodovi, handelyovi, obratov… (ed. Note: would be nice to get the correct Polish spellins of these)
The bailiff’s wagon, which quickly made it’s appearance in one Jewish community after another to haul away confiscated goods in lieu of unpaid taxes, was given the nickname “Grabsky’s Aguleh (hearse)”, after the infamous finance minister Grabsky, a notorious anti-semite. And in Warsaw, it was said to have been followed all to often by another kind of aguleh, this one from the khesed shel emes, to collect the bodies of bankrupt Jewish merchants who had thrown themselves from a fifth-story window.
The precarious condition of the Jewish staedtel could hardly go un-noticed by the local peasantry, and before long they had renewed their ambition to take over the last remaining grazing-field, the communal vihon, and make it once and for all Juden-rein. In Old Russia, the Jews had been ready to defend themselves with clubs and pitchforks; and interestingly enough, Zolf records that they had even sought and obtained recourse from the Russian courts:
“Back then the städtel had engaged the services of berühmte advokaten (famous lawyers) who fought the case azh in der gubernieh un in Petersburg. The protzess dragged on for years, until the Jews were able to secure once and for all séier recht zu mägen paschen séiere beheymos auf’n kehill’schen vihon, inéinem mit die Goyische khazerim.
Yes, there was now and then justice available to the Jews from the Russian courts. We sometimes forget that Mendel Beyliss was aquitted by an all-Christian jury. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Arab villagers in the Jordan Valley have also been able to obtain favorable judgments from the Israeli courts on occasion.
But in post-war Poland, things were not the same. The villagers knew that in the course of the war and the fires that had destroyed Zolf’s shtetl, the Jews had lost the papers which gave them the right to to an equal share of the communal lands. In addition, the shtetl had been seriously weakened by the war, the Spanish Flu, and emigration to America. The end was in sight to one and all.
And so one bright summer morning, the Catholic and Orthodox peasants (who otherwise had little affection for one another) herded their flocks into the communal vihon. Zolf describes what happened next. One doesn’t need to understand word for word to get the general picture. Sadly, the same story seems to be repeating itself today in the Jordan Valley: only the roles have been changed:
“Their field-hands let loose the dogs auf die Yiddische beheymos, and drove them weit in a sumpign winkel. The Jewish cattle had to spend the rest of that day versunken in der tiefer blotte, searching in vain for a green stalk mit wâs zu stillen séier hunger, un nischt gekönnt gefinnen. Late that afternoon, they were led home, tired, hungry, and covered with mud. Locked away in their barns, they gnawed at the walls. Séiere hungerige geschreien hâben sich weit getrâgen über’n stäedtel.
“And in the pitiful cries of their hungry animals, hâben die Yidden gehört a min trauerign shoyphar-blâsen, which announced the end, not only for their teuere, liebe beheymellach, from whom they had derived at least a stückel khayunah…but also the end vun séier alt-eingesessene Yiddischen stäedtel.”
Falik Zolf left Poland in 1926 and became a Yiddish teacher in Winnipeg’s I.L. Peretz Folks-Schule. He published his memoir in 1948 under the title “Auf Fremder Erd” (On Foreign Soil).
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Embracing your femininity in Cheshvan
By ELENA KNIGHT Rosh Chodesh Sameach! Though last month’s article (Embracing your femininity in Tishrei) had far more holidays, thus more material, the month of Cheshvan is not as empty as it appears. It may contain no holidays or mitzvot specific to the month, but I take issue with the idea that Cheshvan is “bitter”.
Some people refer to this month as MarCheshvan, Mar meaning bitter, but Mar can also refer to a drop of water; this month is the beginning of Israel’s rainy season! We began praying for rain with Shemini Atzeret last month, so by this time, G-d has usually heard Am Yisrael and started sending rain to the Holy Land. To connect this to womanhood, let’s revisit last month’s article, where I explained the connection of water to femininity.
In Tishrei, I spoke of the divine feminine, and how rain is associated with the womb of creation, fertility, and gentle, life-renewing power. In Cheshvan, however, I’d like to focus more on feminist reclamation of water metaphors; in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad , for example, when trying to protect herself from unwanted suitors, Penelope recalls her mother’s advice: “Behave like water… Don’t try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them.” We can take this literary advice and put it into practice in our lives this month. When in a position where we feel powerless, and in spaces where female assertion is unwelcome, we could do well to be like water. Nobody can hold water in the palms of their hands without losing control of it. Water is not easy to contain. Nor are we women.
Taking Mar of MarCheshvan to mean a drop of water, rather than bitterness, can be interpreted now as a call to action. This month can be the time when we refuse to be controlled, much like the prophetess Miriam. In Torah, Miriam’s connection with water is clear; in Exodus 15, she takes the Israelite women out from the community to sing a song of deliverance through the Red Sea. She is with her brother, our teacher, Moses, when he is sent down the Nile in a reed basket, and she is the one who ensures he is cared for at the Pharaoh’s palace in Exodus 4. In many Pesach seders, a cup of water is set out for Miriam, like the wine for Elijah, because she ensured that the Israelites had water while travelling through the wilderness during the Exodus journey.
Miriam is, clearly, a passionate leader, creating a specific space for Israelite women when they are so often overlooked in Torah stories. By establishing her place as a role model for the Israelites leading up to their freedom from Egypt, the Torah makes it clear that G-d accepts female leadership. This month, let us take a page from Miriam’s book, and lead when we are called to do so. Like I suggested in my last article, mentoring a young girl in your community may be the perfect way to lead.
Cheshvan is also said to be reserved for the time of Moshiach. To prepare for the Moshiach’s arrival, we can act in ways that will bring about Israel’s reformation, both in the land itself and in the diaspora. By supporting charities both in our home communities and in Israel, by acting with chesed, loving-kindness, even when we don’t really feel like it, and by studying–whether that be studying Torah, feminist theory, or any other subject that will improve the world–with fervent passion. By working on tikkun olam, repairing the world, as we have it now, we can bring about a better world for future generations. What better way to remove the bitter reputation of Cheshvan?
Features
CFTC Crypto Regulation Plans Put XRP and Solana in Focus as CLARITY Act Stalls
US crypto regulation is back in focus after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission opened a public consultation on October 5 on a potential framework for certain retail crypto transactions. With the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate, the initiative raises questions about what the agency can achieve under existing law and why its plans matter for XRP and Solana.
For XRP and Solana, the development is particularly notable because US regulators have already identified both assets as examples of digital commodities. The emerging question is therefore not simply what happens to the CLARITY Act, but how far the CFTC can reshape the regulatory environment while the legislation remains stalled.
XRP and Solana price movements in focus
The XRP price and Solana price provide useful context for assessing market movements; comparing both assets over the same period helps distinguish their individual performance from broader changes across crypto markets.
XRP price movements and Solana price movements need to be assessed over a clearly defined period. An intraday range describes the distance between the session’s highest and lowest recorded prices; it does not establish which direction an asset will move next. A daily percentage change provides a different measure, comparing the latest price with a reference point.
Crypto market volatility can reflect changes in liquidity, interest rate expectations, network developments and broader risk appetite. The CFTC consultation adds regulatory context, but the announcement alone does not establish the cause of a particular price movement.
Why crypto regulation is shifting towards the CFTC
The Senate did not reach the 60-vote threshold required to advance the CLARITY Act in September. The result prevented the broader market-structure bill from moving ahead at that stage, but it did not end the push for clearer federal crypto rules.
The CFTC has now begun exploring another route. In its notice covering Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets, the agency is seeking public input on a framework for certain retail crypto transactions and the platforms offering them.
The distinction matters. The CLARITY Act would have established a statutory framework passed by Congress. The CFTC initiative instead relies on powers the agency says it already has under the Commodity Exchange Act.
That means agency action can proceed while the legislation remains unresolved, although it cannot replicate every part of the congressional proposal.
What the proposed CFTC crypto rules could cover
The process centres on two concepts known as Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM. Regulation CTX concerns retail commodity transactions involving crypto assets, including transactions financed through margin, leverage or other forms of credit.
Regulation CAM would examine a specialised category of CFTC-registered market designed for those transactions. The aim is to create a federal regulatory option with requirements more closely tailored to crypto markets.
The framework could address areas such as market manipulation, customer assets, conflicts of interest and market conduct. The agency is also considering what information platforms should provide and how existing market safeguards can be adapted to crypto.
There is an important limit. The CFTC cannot require all spot crypto exchanges to enter that federal regime without action from Congress. Its chairman has described the proposal as an option for firms rather than a nationwide mandate.
That difference helps explain why the CLARITY Act still matters even as regulators move independently.
Why XRP and Solana matter in the regulatory debate
The CFTC consultation brings renewed attention to how the existing federal crypto asset taxonomy relates to XRP and Solana.
In his October 5 remarks, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig pointed to the joint federal crypto asset taxonomy, which identifies Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Stellar, Tezos and XRP among examples of digital commodities.
For XRP and Solana, that classification helps explain why a CFTC-led framework deserves attention. Both assets operate on widely used blockchain networks and have a presence across global crypto markets, so changes affecting how US platforms can offer crypto products could influence market access, liquidity and institutional participation.
It does not mean the new rules would determine their prices. Interest rates, network activity, broader risk appetite and asset-specific developments remain important. Regulation is one part of the market environment, not a standalone price signal.
How crypto wagers relate to market movements
Crypto wagers based on market movements involve a bet on a specified outcome over a defined period. The relevant details include the asset, the condition that must be met, the closing time and the price source used to determine the result. Those terms matter because an asset can move in different directions within the same day.
Short-term price direction is also the basis for crypto wagers on Moon, a crypto betting platform where outcomes are tied to market movements.
For crypto betting, the significance of volatility depends on the wager’s conditions, including whether settlement uses a closing price or an event occurring during the specified period. A rise earlier in the day does not establish the outcome of a later wager, and a regulatory announcement does not guarantee a winning bet. An unsuccessful wager can result in the loss of the amount staked.
The connection between crypto wagers and market news therefore depends on the specific outcome and timeframe. News about XRP or Solana can provide context, while the terms of each wager determine how its result is settled.
How agency action differs from the CLARITY Act
The distinction between legislation and regulation is central to what happens next.
Congress can create new statutory powers and requirements that regulators cannot establish on their own. The CLARITY Act sought to define a broader market structure, including the responsibilities of federal agencies and obligations for intermediaries operating in digital asset markets.
The CFTC is working within authority it says already exists. That allows it to address some transaction structures and market protections but leaves wider questions for lawmakers.
The agency itself has acknowledged that regulatory action cannot indefinitely replace legislation. For markets, that creates a two-track process: regulators can develop rules under current law while Congress decides whether to revisit a broader statutory framework.
That makes the latest CFTC action more than a reaction to the failed Senate vote. It is also an indication of how US crypto policy could develop if Congress remains unable to reach agreement.
What US crypto regulation could mean for Canadian markets
The proposed CFTC framework would apply in the United States, not Canada. Its potential relevance for Canadian markets comes through cross-border capital flows, global liquidity and the role US platforms and institutions play in price discovery.
Canada also has established investment products linked directly to both assets. The Toronto Stock Exchange listed several Solana ETFs in April 2025, including the 3iQ Solana Staking ETF, giving Canadian investors regulated market exposure to SOL.
XRP followed with Canadian-listed products in June 2025, including the 3iQ XRP ETF.
That means regulatory developments affecting XRP and Solana in the United States can have relevance even when Canadian rules themselves do not change. Shifts in institutional participation, exchange access or global liquidity can still be reflected in assets and funds available in Canada.
Currency remains another consideration. Crypto assets are commonly quoted globally in US dollars, while Canadian investors may measure performance in Canadian dollars. Exchange-rate movements can therefore strengthen or reduce the local effect of a move in the underlying asset.
What comes next for the CFTC consultation and CLARITY Act
The CFTC consultation is now underway. The agency is seeking written comments on the Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM framework before deciding how subsequent rulemaking should proceed.
Congress could also return to the CLARITY Act or another version of market-structure legislation. The Senate result stopped the bill from advancing at that point, rather than resolving the broader regulatory debate.
For XRP and Solana, the most important signal is therefore no longer a single Senate vote. Attention has moved to whether the CFTC can turn its proposals into workable federal rules, how crypto platforms respond and whether lawmakers eventually establish a broader framework.
Veronika
October 1, 2026 at 12:17 pm
thanks