Features
Yvonne Singer, a Toronto artist who was saved by Wallenberg as an infant, is still on a voyage of self-discovery
By RON CSILLAG
As an artist herself, Yvonne Singer can well appreciate the esthetic merits of the open-air monument to Swedish Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg that was unveiled over the summer at Churchill Park in Hamilton, Ont.
Though she had not, as of this writing, personally viewed the installation, dubbed “Be:longings,” Singer spoke admiringly of the 10 bronze-cast suitcases dispersed along a gravel path adjacent to the Hamilton aviary. She knows Simon Frank, one of the project’s three creators, and is aware that suitcases have been a potent symbol of the Holocaust.
“I like the fact that the suitcases are scattered,” Singer, a well-established visual artist and teacher in Toronto, said in an interview over lemon tea in her sun-drenched kitchen. “I think the imagery and symbolism are very effective in conveying the idea of displacement and emigration.” The old-timey valises evoke not just Wallenberg, Singer noted, but all victims and survivors of that terror-stricken era.
The outdoor project is also “minimal, which I like. I don’t like public sculptures that scream at you or are clichéd.”
Singer connects to the installation on a whole other level. The 78-year-old resident of Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood is Wallenberg’s goddaughter. She was born on his bed.
It’s a Hollywood-worthy tale that evolved over time, in a series of eye-popping twists, turns and coincidences—all amid Singer’s own personal voyage of self-discovery.
The backstory is its own blockbuster: The non-Jewish scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial and banking family, Wallenberg, then just 32, was recruited by the U.S. War Refugee Board and dispatched to Budapest to assist and rescue as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied Hungarian capital as possible. He arrived in July 1944, just as the Nazis had shipped some 440,000 Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. They now set their sights on the Jews of Budapest.
Accorded diplomatic status, Wallenberg famously set off on a frenetic pace. He designed, printed and distributed thousands of the famous “Schutzpass”—an official-looking document that placed the holder under the protection of the neutral Swedish Crown. He also scoured the city for buildings to rent, finding 32, and crammed in as many souls as possible. The “safe houses” flew the yellow-and-blue Swedish flag and were declared protected by diplomatic immunity.
Known for his bluster and bravado, his greatest coup came when he persuaded Nazi commanders to call off the liquidation of Budapest’s Jewish ghetto, with its 70,000 inhabitants. The number of Jews Wallenberg is said to have rescued peaks at 100,000. In any event, he is credited with saving more Jewish lives during the war than any single government.
By January 1945, the Red Army was laying siege to Budapest, and Wallenberg was taken into custody, supposedly on suspicion of being a U.S. spy. He promptly vanished into the gulag. A Soviet report in 1956 stated he had died in July 1947 of a heart attack in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, but supposed eyewitness sightings and stories of contact with him from former inmates continued well into the 1970s.
In 2012, the diaries of a former head of the KGB, discovered in the walls of his Moscow home, stated there was “no doubt” that Wallenberg was “liquidated” in 1947.
But back to Singer.
On the night of Nov. 3, 1944, a desperate Tibor Vandor, who worked for Wallenberg as a courier and liaison to the underground, needed help for his wife, Agnes. She was in labour and had been turned away from Budapest’s hospitals, which barred Jews. Wallenberg allowed the couple to use his own room, while he slept in the corridor.
The next morning, he was called in to see a newborn girl. Asked by the grateful parents to name her, Wallenberg chose Nina Maria Ava (Nina was his half-sister’s name, Maria his mother’s). The couple changed the first name to Yvonne, and Wallenberg agreed to be the child’s godfather.
Singer knew nothing of this until she was 34 years old.
It was October 1979 when she read an article, reprinted from a U.S. newspaper, in the Toronto Star about Wallenberg’s plight. The story included a reference to Singer’s unusual birth taken from a Hungarian book on the Swedish hero written after the war. The baby with the Toronto connection, the parents, the godfather—were all there, mentioned by name.
When she read the piece, “I burst out crying,” she told the Star after contacting the paper. Her story spilled forth a week later in a large Saturday Star article headlined “Swedish hero saved my life: Metro woman.”
Singer is still struck by “the incredible coincidence of it all. Here I am in Toronto in 1979, reading the paper… it boggles the mind. I could have easily gone through life not knowing the story. Suddenly, I had a connection to this man, who sounds like he was fascinating.”
Her parents had not told her the story. And there was another missing piece of the puzzle: their Jewishness.
At war’s end, the Vandors went to Switzerland and Holland before settling in Montreal in 1949, where the parents shed their Jewish identities, doubtless seeking to forget. Tibor Vandor even became an elder in the United Church.
“I always pressed them for more information, and they always refused,” even following the revelations in the Toronto Star, Singer recalled. “They told me very, very little.” Her parents never revealed being Jews. Their silence encompassed “anything to do with the war. They were just not forthcoming.”
Singer graduated from McGill University and went on to teach English and French at local high schools. She converted to Judaism to marry her husband, Ron Singer, a theatre director and educator, in 1966. A few years later, a cousin in England recalled being a flower-girl at Yvonne’s parents’ wedding, which she said took place in a synagogue. The parents denied it but their daughter believed it.
Singer’s feelings of alienation as an immigrant child would evaporate on discovering that she had been born Jewish, whether the knowledge came from a cousin or the Toronto Star. “I felt like I’d come home, part of a history that goes back thousands of years. I no longer felt rootless.”
The Singers moved to Toronto in 1971, where Yvonne later began a prolific art career in various media and teaching visual arts at York University. Raising three daughters and a busy life meant there was little time to get involved in the Wallenberg file (though she was pleased when he became Canada’s first Honorary Citizen in 1985 and when Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating Wallenberg a decade ago).
It’s little surprise that Singer’s art has explored themes of identity, history and memory. The outsider status she felt in her early life “is what made me think about ways of expressing that, either through language or visual imagery. So you go to what you know when you’re an artist.”
In 2016, the Swedish government declared Wallenberg officially dead, but to Singer, that offered no finality. “From what I learned, the Swedish government is not exempt from blame for trying to get Wallenberg out. I cannot reconcile the fact that [Wallenberg’s family] could not exert any kind of leverage over the Russians to find out what happened to him.”
In Judaism, being a godparent carries little or no religious obligation. Singer considers the godfather connection to Wallenberg an honour, “but I’m also very sad that I never met him. I think he would have been a fascinating person to talk to. The story is just very, very tragic.”
The grandmother of nine sighed. Over the decades, the story for her was obviously very personal, “and I was still processing it. Maybe I’m still processing it, for a long, long time.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the Hamilton Jewish News. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Features
Joe Kent Suggests Israel Behind Charlie Kirk Assassination, Controls US Foreign Policy in Tucker Carlson Interview
Joe Kent Suggests Israel Behind Charlie Kirk Assassination, Controls US Foreign Policy in Tucker Carlson Interview
After Joe Kent, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast on Wednesday.
While on the podcast, Kent, who resigned from his position on Tuesday, argued that Israel dragged the US into the war against the Iranian regime, suggested that Israel may have been involved in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, claimed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and said that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Themes of Israel controlling US policy and conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination have become commonplace on Carlson’s podcast in recent months.
“We don’t know what happened with Charlie Kirk. I’m not saying the Israelis did this — I’m saying there are a lot of unanswered questions there, and there’s enough data to say there’s a good chance that President Trump feels he is under threat,” Kent said.
“The last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June, in the West Wing stairway,” Kent said on Carlson’s podcast. “And he said very loudly to me … ‘Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.’ Very loudly. He was single-minded.”
“So, when one of President Trump’s closest advisers who was vocally advocating against a war with Iran is suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask questions about that — it’s a data point. A data point that we need to look into,” Kent said, suggesting that Israel may have something to do with the assassination.
There has been no evidence to support claims of Israeli involvement in Kirk’s assassination. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Kent also argued that the US is not really in charge of its own foreign policy: “Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East? Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?” he asked.
Ther former counterterrorism chief argued that Israel forced Washington’s hand by saying it would attack Iran and that the US would be forced to be caught up in Iran’s inevitable retaliation.
“The Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, they could go ahead and take this action, and we would just have to react. That speaks to the relationship — but also it just shows there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war,” Kent said.
In addition to claiming Israel was driving US foreign policy, he also claimed Iran was not close to achieving, or even pursuing, a nuclear-weapons capability. “No, they weren’t [on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon] — not three weeks ago when this started, and not in June [2025] either,” Kent said, referring to last year’s 12-day war between Iran and Israel
“The Iranians have had a religious ruling — a fatwa — against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere. But we also had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or was on the cusp of being lifted,” Kent added.
Experts on Iran have widely dismissed the Iranian regime’s so-called fatwa against having nuclear weapons, noting Tehran has repeatedly lied about and tried to hide aspects of its nuclear program.
The interview occurred one day after Kent resigned from his senior intelligence position, saying he could not support the war and arguing Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. But it was Kent’s broader assertion, that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel voices influenced the decision to go to war, that especially drew swift pushback from the White House and national security experts.
In his resignation, Kent also drew parallels to the Iraq War, suggesting that similar dynamics shaped both conflicts by arguing that Israel pushed the US into the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter.
The Trump administration forcefully disputed Kent’s claims, maintaining that the decision to strike Iran was based on credible intelligence about threats to US forces and interests in the region. Trump dismissed Kent as “weak on security,” defending the operation as necessary to deter Iranian aggression and protect American personnel and allies.
“When I read the statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said. “Iran was a threat.”
Kent himself previously described Iran as a major threat that needed to be addressed.
In a September 2024 post on X, for example, he wrote that “Iran has been after Trump since January of 2020 after he ordered the targeted killing of the terrorist Qasem Soleimani. This isn’t a new threat.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lambasted Kent’s resignation letter as inaccurate.
“The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon,” she posted on social media.
Kent previously faced scrutiny during his US congressional runs in Washington state over links to far-right, antisemitic, and white nationalist figures, including Nick Fuentes.
Features
Arnold Zeal – the road from Kenora To Jacksonville
By GERRY POSNER For Arnold Allan Zeal, his journey through life, though it officially started in Winnipeg in 1943, really began in Kenora, Ontario. Arnold and his sister Marilyn, children of Charlie and Sula ( Bernstein) Zeal, were raised in their early years in Kenora, where Charlie had set up business as owner of a department store: Zeal and Gold. He later became a hotel proprietor (the Kenricia Hotel, still standing to this day and familiar to readers who know Kenora). When Arnold was 12, the family moved to Winnipeg so that Arnold could have a bar mitzvah there. The family lived on Cordova in River Heights.
Arnold soon integrated into Winnipeg life. Oddly, he did not attend Kelvin, where most Jewish kids in the south end of Winnipeg went to high school at that time – since Grant Park High School was not yet built. Zeal attended Gordon Bell High School across the Assiniboine River. At the time he was one of only five Jewish students there. (The others were: Les Allen, Ivan Brodsky, Larry Leonoff and Allan Berkal.)
After high school, Zeal made his way to the University of Manitoba, where he took Science and graduated – first with a BSc, later a Masters of Science in Microbiology/Biochemistry. Following completion of his Masters degree he was accepted into medical school at the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1970.
In those days, once you finished your formal schooling, you had to do a rotating internship. Arnold did his at the Winnipeg General Hospital (later the Health Sciences Centre). He found himself attracted to neurosurgery, one of the most demanding areas in medicine.
It was then that he came under the tutelage of the renowned Drs. Dwight Parkinson and Rankin Hay, also occasionally another famous doctor, Norman Hill – when he came to HSC to do paediatric cases. Zeal completed his residency in neurosurgery at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, followed up by successfully passing the American Board of Neurological Surgery written examination. He then left to take a research fellowship in Microvascular Neurological Surgery at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1976.
In 1977, Zeal moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he became acting chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at University Hospital, an affiliate of the University of Florida (now called UF Jacksonville). After 2 1/2 years there, he left to enter private practice in neurological surgery in Jacksonville.
Over the next couple of years, he became qualified to sit for the oral portion of the examination for the American Board of Neurological Surgeons and the result was that Arnold Zeal was then “ Board Certified in Neurological Surgery.” (Just the names of these boards scare me; no wonder I never entered that field.)
Zeal subsequently obtained fellowships from the American College of Surgeons, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and the American Heart Association. To say Arnold Zeal was well qualified would be an understatement.
Along the way, he took out memberships in various medical associations, including the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, in addition to belonging to multiple regional medical societies in Florida. In 1977, Zeal entered into private practice in Jacksonville, Florida. He became chairman of the Neurosurgery Department in several Jacksonville hospitals, primarily Baptist Center, the largest medical centre hospital in Northeast Florida, where he served as chairman for 15 years. As well, Zeal wrote several prominent papers in peer-reviewed journals. In short, he was a busy guy. Also, something else of interest – starting in 1995, Arnold served as the neurological consultant to the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL, filling that role for the first eight years from the team’s inception.
It was during his residency that Arnold married his wife Janet, then a Surgical- ICU Nurse at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. They became the parents of four highly accomplished sons. Given the demands of neurosurgery, Arnold was not able to spend as much time parenting as he might have preferred and he is quick to point out the fact that the boys turned out as well as they did is directly attributable to his wife of 52 years, Janet Zeal. Janet herself managed to obtain an additional college degree, develop her own business, and manage Arnold’s practice, all in addition to raising the four boys and supporting Arnold.
For over 40 years, Arnold was occupied in Jacksonville as a neurosurgeon. With his busy schedule he was often having to perform surgery at late hours for long periods on his feet, all with total concentration. As one can imagine, sometimes those surgeries are complex, requiring careful decisions in advance of and during the surgery, also leading the surgeon to make instant decisions if things changed during the course of the surgery. (I get nervous just writing about that kind of situation.)
Due to a shoulder injury, Arnold retired from operating, but he continued to evaluate office patients. He remained focused on Gamma Knife surgical procedures until his full retirement in late 2017. Even after retiring from the operating room, he remained active in the field, participating in conferences with his partners and colleagues. He says that he has now managed to get used to getting a full night’s sleep without receiving a call to get to the hospital for an emergency operation.
I asked Arnold what the key qualities were to becoming a successful neurosurgeon? He didn’t hesitate in answering, saying you have to be caring and have what he calls the three “A’s”- Availability, Affability and Ability. He added that you must possess lots of stamina, have good hands (I’m eliminated on that count alone), plus be dedicated to your work. He had them all. Ask anyone who knew Arnold Zeal and what you would hear about him was that he was an excellent diagnostician and had great manual dexterity.
Arnold has no lack of activities these days. Janet and Arnold have their four sons living not far away and, with five grandchildren, they are kept occupied. Aside from all that, he loves to come back to Winnipeg when he can – especially for medical reunions. And – he truly treasures the opportunities to return to his youthful days in Kenora. He knows the Lake of the Woods as if it were the inside of a brain. In short, he is quite comfortable operating a boat as well as operating on the brain!
Features
Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
A police report obtained by the Forward sheds light on the removal of a Chabad rabbi from the campus of Oberlin College last week, after the school administration became aware of a police report that alleged he engaged in sexually explicit conversations online concerning minors.
Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, former co-director of Oberlin Chabad, allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos and videos through the messaging app Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12 and 13, according to the report.
In December 2025 messages to an adult on the platform, Elkan allegedly responded to photos of someone giving a child a bath. The person he chatted with alluded to touching the child’s genitals and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap, the report stated.
According to the Oberlin Police Department report, Elkin shared photos of girls as part of the chat. The department closed the case after a 20-day investigation, with no charges filed.
In a phone interview with the Forward, Elkan said he regretted his participation in the chat, but that his messages were not based on real events. He did not address the photos.
“To be clear, what had happened was an online chat with an anonymous adult on purely fictional, you know, fantastical things that’s not rooted in any kind of reality whatsoever,” Elkan said. “And I entered that, and I should not have, and I take responsibility for that.”
Elkan added that he has been engaged in “professional care and spiritual counseling to deal with all of the stresses and all of the factors that led me to engaging in an unhealthy behavior.”
According to the report, in an interview with police, Elkan confirmed the Kik account belonged to him and said the chats were “escapism” from the stress of his everyday life. He denied ever viewing or possessing child pornography.
Elkan told the Forward that “oftentimes people think of rabbis as godlike and infallible,” and he “made a mistake in one of the weakest few moments of my life.”
“There was no crime. Nothing illegal. Poor judgment, yes,” Elkan said. “And there’s not a victim. The victims here are the Jewish community and my family.”
The fallout on campus
Oberlin president Carmen Twillie Ambar wrote an email last week alerting students and staff of the news that Elkan, who had worked at Oberlin Chabad since 2010, had been banned from campus — without sharing specifics.
“In the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life — including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior,” Ambar wrote. “This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community.”
Elkan criticized how Oberlin handled the situation, saying the email that the college sent to the community about his departure was vague and allowed speculation to spread. He also said the email was made public during the meeting in which campus officials informed him that he had been banned.
“That’s where my hurt, and I think so much of the hurt of the community lies. Because every time we stuck our neck out for the college, and every time we work for the best interest of them and the community, what feels like the very first opportunity they had to show us that same support, they chose a very different route,” Elkan said. “So I take responsibility for my actions, and I hold the college incredibly responsible for how this has played out.”
Andrea Simakis, a spokesperson for Oberlin, said in a statement that representatives of the college met with Elkan via Zoom just prior to releasing the campus message “to let him know we were going to send it, why we were sending it, and that we were banning him from campus.”
Simakis added that the language in the campuswide email “reflects the information in the police report, which we obtained through a public records request.”
Along with serving as a Chabad rabbi, Elkan also certified Oberlin’s kosher kitchen and sometimes led Passover services and other religious celebrations on campus, according to Ambar’s email.
Chabad rabbis are not typically employed by universities, instead operating independently through the Chabad umbrella, with Chabad functioning as recognized campus religious organizations.
Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, a Chabad spokesperson told the Forward. Chabad did not provide further comment.
In the email to the community, Ambar said Oberlin had not previously received reports concerning Elkan’s behavior and was now asking a third party to investigate whether members of the campus community had been affected.
Ambar added that the news would be especially difficult for “those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan,” but “the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action.” Rabbi Allison Vann, who had led High Holy Day services on campus with Cleveland Hillel, will work with students for the remainder of the semester.
The post Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats appeared first on The Forward.
This story originally said that Elkan posted images of children in a bath. He was a recipient.