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| Michael Regenstreif |
By Michael Regenstreif
Editor
My wife, Sylvie, and I were on vacation in Clearwater
Beach, Florida in December. On December 23, the second night of Chanukah, we
joined several hundred other people – locals and tourists alike – at the
Chanukah party and giant menorah lighting organized by Chabad of Clearwater.
Held outdoors on the main drag on Clearwater Beach,
less than a five-minute walk from where we were staying, it was a typical Chabad
Chanukah event with speeches, songs, a magic show, latkes and sufganiyot. One
of the big hits of the event was Rabbi Levi Hodakov singing his updated version
of Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song.” Local politicians, including Mayor George
Cretekos and several other members of Clearwater’s city council, joined in the
celebration.
There were a couple of police officers who stood on
the edge of the crowd observing the event and the comings and goings but,
thankfully, there were no incidents that required their attention.
However, less than two weeks before Chanukah, there
was a mass shooting at the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey
carried out by a pair of antisemitic extremists. They murdered Mindy Ferencz,
33, an owner of the market; Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49, an employee; and
rabbinical student Moshe Deutsch, 24, a customer. Three others, including two
police officers, were also wounded in the incident. The assailants arrived at
the market shortly after they killed a police detective in a separate incident.
Then, on December 28, the seventh night of Chanukah, a
masked man invaded the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg in Monsey, New York – a
small community north of New York City with a largely Chasidic population – and
randomly stabbed five Chasidic Jews attending a Chanukah party. Other guests
fought back and the suspect escaped in a car. He was arrested by police later
that night in Harlem. In the investigation, police found his handwritten
journals filled with antisemitic views.
Thinking of those incidents just before and during
Chanukah – as well as the antisemitic murders earlier last year at Chabad of
Poway in California and at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 – made
me stop and think about whether we were safe attending a Jewish event in an
accessible public space in Florida, a state where it is easy to acquire weapons
and a state with a history of mass shootings – including the high school
massacre in Parkland in 2018 that killed 17, and the nightclub massacre in
Orlando in 2016 that killed 49.
Although, as already mentioned, there were a couple of
police officers present at the Chanukah event on Clearwater Beach, there was no
security screening. Anyone and everyone had unfettered access to the event.
What would have happened if someone like the attackers from Jersey City or
Monsey or Poway or Pittsburgh had been there that night? (By contrast, when we
attended a couple of concerts in December at theatres in Clearwater, we could only enter after emptying our pockets and being
searched with metal-detecting wands by security guards.)
The sad fact is that we live in a world rife with
resurging antisemitism – and antisemitism is coming from so many different
directions: from the extreme right, from the extreme left, from Islamist
extremists; from some parts of the anti-Israel movement; and from elsewhere.
But as Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a world-renowned expert on antisemitism,
explained during her visit to Ottawa in November, ultimately “they all sound
the same.”
While the internet and its various social media
platforms are a great tool to bring people of common interests together and to
create and build communities, the internet and social media are also a tool for
spreading misinformation – often through conspiracy theories – and hatred.
Sadly, statistics show that there are more hate crimes
committed against Jewish targets in Canada than any other minority group.
Thankfully, few of those crimes have been violent, but every hate crime is
traumatic nonetheless. Who in this community can forget the string of
antisemitic graffiti attacks on Jewish buildings in 2016?
In many ways, we’ve made great strides over the years
in the fight against antisemitism. On many levels, antisemitism, racism and
other forms of bigotry, are no longer acceptable. While just before and during
the Holocaust, Canada had a government whose policy toward Jewish refugees was
“none is too many,” we now have a government that has apologized for that. Not
that many decades ago, the Montreal suburb of Hampstead would not allow Jews to
own property in the town, while now the majority of its residents are Jewish.
At the political level, antisemitism has almost ceased
to be a factor in Canada in the years since the late Herb Gray became Canada’s
first Jewish cabinet minister in 1969. Gray, himself, eventually served as
deputy prime minister for four-and-a-half years between 1997 and 2002, and here
in Ottawa, where we once had an antisemitic mayor, we have since had two Jewish
mayors. There are countless other examples I could cite.
But that doesn’t mean we can stop being vigilant about
antisemitism (and all other forms of racism and bigotry) in Canadian political
life. The province of Quebec recently passed Bill 21, a law banning civil
servants in positions of authority from displaying symbols of their religious
belief – including the wearing of a kippah.
Meanwhile we can look to the United Kingdom for
lessons on what might happen when variations of antisemitism become
mainstreamed. The Labour Party – long the political home to the majority of
British Jews – spent the last several years under the leadership of the
once-obscure far-left anti-Zionist Jeremy Corbyn, who allowed antisemitism to
flourish in the party. Much of British Jewry regarded a potential Corbyn
government as an existential threat to the community and breathed a collective
sigh of relief in December when Corbyn led Labour to its worst election defeat
since 1935 – with most British analysts agreeing that perceived antisemitism
was a significant factor in turning many traditional Labour voters against the
party.
As much as we need to remain vigilant against
antisemitism and stand up to it and fight it whenever it rears its ugly head,
we cannot, as Lipstadt warned, allow antisemitism to become central to our
identity as Jews. “Then we turn Jews into an object – what’s done to
Jews, instead of what Jews do,” she said.
We live in a free and democratic society and while
being mindful of the security of our persons and our institutional buildings,
we must remain free to live Jewishly – however we each may want to do that.
Next December, it’s likely that Sylvie and I
will be back on vacation in Clearwater Beach. And, as usual, we’ll be at the
Chabad of Clearwater Chanukah party.
