Here’s a question. 

Is there one synagogue – out of the hundreds of synagogues across Canada –which has endorsed  a ceasefire for Gaza?

Please step forward.

I hear no feet shuffling, none. 

I just watched the Shabbat Morning Sermon from Dec. 9, 2023 presented by Phyllis Segal Denaburg, Holy Blossom Temple’s President. Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto is Canada’s largest, and oldest, Reform synagogue.  I was a student there until I was 16 years old.

Atrocities in Gaza? a synagogue president has nothing to say

Ms Denaburg took a few minutes near the end of her sermon to talk about the Temple’s strategic plan for 2024.  She said the plan includes six points:  “building a sacred community, developing our people; cultivating Jewish experiences; celebrating our stories; improving our home and ensuring our financial health.”  

Not a word about condemning- or even questioning – or even feeling a teensy bit uncomfortable with Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. 

Not a word about calling for a ceasefire. 

Instead Ms Denaburg lamented that Holy Blossom Temple’s goals, “are not as lofty as Martin Luther King who called for civic and economic rights, and called for an end to racism.” In the same breath she spoke of Theodore Herzl, “who was the father of modern Zionism who knew that it takes a dream to save the Jewish people.” 

How can Denaburg link Martin Luther King and his selfless struggle to eliminate segregation and racism with Herzl – “the visionary of the state”   and campaigned for a Jewish State in Palestine – though the land was already populated by Palestinian people. 

“Benefit” claimed for Israel taking over Palestinian land

In 1895, the Palestinian former mayor of Jerusalem, Youssuf Zia al-Khalidi wrote to Herzl to warn that Palestine was already occupied and did not need or want to be under Jewish control.  Herzl wrote back to the mayor, insisting that Jewish immigration would benefit the local Arab population.  But in his diary, Herzl wrote the opposite, “Nothing will be sold back to [the Arabs].”  The Palestinians would be “spirited across the border” — code for displaced or ethnically cleansed or denied human rights.  

Holy Blossom Temple used to be one of the most socially progressive synagogues in the country. Of course, it did not take on issues about  Israel and Palestine. This is known as PEP or “progressive except for Palestine.”

John and Yoko’s Bed-in

I remember the time the Senior Rabbi, Abraham Feinberg, at the height of the Vietnam war in 1966-67, travelled to north Vietnam with three other clergymen.  He was accompanied by minister, US pacifist and socialist, AJ Muste, Rev. Martin Niemoller, the Protestant pastor incarcerated in Dachau during part of World War II for opposing Hitler, and Rt Rev Ambrose Reeves, former Bishop of Johannesburg who was exiled in 1960 for speaking out against Apartheid in South Africa.  

When Feinberg returned, he wrote and published Hanoi Diary, a best-selling paperback.  It’s still on my bookshelf today. He criticized the Americans in Vietnam, not Israel.  

I also recall Rabbi Feinberg, quite an elderly man in 1969, taking the train to Montreal, and going to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel to join John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their anti-war “Bed-in” for peace.  It was at the Bed-in that the couple recorded their famous song, “Give Peace a  Chance”.  That too wasn’t about Israel, but about social justice.  

Is this the same  Temple  whose Director of Education for thirty years (1946-76), Heinz Warschauer, himself a Holocaust survivor, stated that “We have tried to give, especially our teenagers, the opportunity to examine approaches, different and often contradictory, conflicting ideas and then arrive at choices.”  

Well open-mindedness is not one of the key features  found in Canadian synagogues today – not even at Holy Blossom Temple. They have closed ranks around Israel’s war on Gaza. The US group, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) says Israel’s war on Gaza has drawn the  “largest mass mobilization of Jews in American history.”  Police detained 400 Jews who held a sit down protest on Capitol Hill and the Cannon Building in Washington DC. Hundreds were arrested when they occupied the main concourse of Grand Central Station in New York. At one demonstration, Rabbi Brant Rosen told demonstrators that future generations would ask: “Did we act, or did we stand idly by while genocide was committed in our name?” Rosen joined dozens of other rabbis and rabbinical students in the US who criticize Israel. Said Rabbi May Le, “we cannot afford to rest while genocide is unfolding in our names.”. 

Canadian Jews who rally for Gaza

In Canada, we have seen an unprecedented number — thousands of Jews– in cities across the country demonstrate for Palestinians’ rights and call for a ceasefire.  Scores of Jews along with others had a sit-in at rush hour at  the concourse at Union Station in Toronto.  Their signs said, “We are Jews, standing with Palestinians, two months into this brutal genocide, that is being committed in our name”. Canadian Jews have demonstrated for a ceasefire in front of the US Consulate in Toronto and in many cities across the country. 

But to our shame, we have also experienced  the collusion of synagogues, their religious leaders and their members.   There is no discussion, no suggestion that  the Israeli actions meet legal definitions of genocide. No one talks about the more than  22,000 dead in Gaza – one in 93 people . No one talks about 10,000 or more dead children.  No one talks about the 56,000 seriously injured children and adults –  or the more than 1,000 children now missing limbs.  Estimates are that thousands of Palestinians are lying crushed under buildings hit  by  Israeli missiles that rain down on Gaza every ten minutes.  

Is it possible that every Jewish “house of worship” is in fact little more than a shill for Israel’s dirty war, for war criminals and Kahanists (followers of the fascist late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who, in better days, was excluded from the Israeli parliament)?

Do synagogues play a part in efforts to seek and destroy the reputations of prominent Canadians such as doctors, professors, and journalists who dare to call for a ceasefire, dare to sign a pro-peace petition, or dare to support Palestinians?  Among those targeted by pro-Israel types are a preponderance of brown and Black people.  (Read my post here).  For example, when Shree Paradkar, an Indian-born columnist at the Toronto Star, dared to publish a column about the myriad of pro-Palestinian professionals caught in the crosshairs of the pro-Israel lobby – she lost her management job at the Star.

Four Toronto restaurant employees lost their jobs for supporting Palestinians’ rights

It’s not just the synagogues that are to blame, it’s the dozens of Hebrew Day schools that teach and promote fear and outrage against Palestinians or anyone  who dares to stand up to Israel.  It is  also the trio of Jewish agencies, CIJA (the Centre for Israel-Jewish Affairs), the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center and B’nai Brith Canada that try to ferret out pro-Palestine supporters to destroy their careers, their reputations and their ability to earn a living.  

What I see as  perhaps most galling is this:  On Oct. 21, tens of thousands marched through downtown Toronto in the National March for Gaza.  As they marched by Moxies Toronto Downtown restaurant, four employees at Moxies stood on the restaurant’s steps to cheer on the demonstrators.  On Nov. 3, B’nai Brith Canada proudly noted on Facebook that the four employees (three were people of colour) “are no longer working at Moxies.” B’nai Brith had contacted Moxies to complain about their staff’s conduct, after seeing this video .  Even Muneeza Sheikh, an employer-side lawyer at the Toronto law firm Levitt Sheikh said employees had the right to peacefully protest, and employers “cannot assume that all gatherings of protestors are a ‘hate fest’.” Nevertheless, four workers who likely earn minimum wage lost their jobs– because of pressure by B’nai Brith. Do the congregants at Holy Blossom support that? 

My research shows  that it is likely that many of the twenty-two cases of silencing, disciplining and even firing  pro-Palestinians supporters can be traced back to efforts inside the establishment Jewish community – to organizations such as B’nai Brith, CIJA and Honest Reporting. 

The Atlantic Jewish Council’s “Hasbara” machine

The Jewish Federation (Federation CJA) is also to blame at a local level.  The Federation is part of the Israeli “hasbara” machine.  Rana Zaman, a Halifax activist who in 2019 won a Nova Scotia Human Rights Award for her volunteer work against racism and for human rights had her award snatched away by the same NS Human Rights Commission that awarded it days earlier.  (for more see here and here)   The Atlantic Jewish Council (part of the Jewish Federation) had complained that Rana was an antisemite because she criticized Israel for shooting unarmed protesters in Gaza in 2018.  That was enough to get the Commission to rescind the award. 

I, too, was at the receiving end of the Atlantic Jewish Council’s fury over my support for Palestinian human rights in 2010.  I  was nominated to be the community member of NSPIRG, the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group, a student research organization at Dalhousie University.  A right-wing Jewish student at Dalhousie (she now works for the conservative Fraser Institute) was used by the Atlantic Jewish Council to write an email to denounce me as an antisemite and an “outright racist.” She sent her email to many including my boss, the president of Saint Mary’s University where I was a professor.  After I threatened to take legal action against the student, she and the Atlantic Jewish Council apologized and backed down.  

Jewish establishment’s McCarthyist tactics

In the end, the bully tactics, the silencing, the doxxing, the McCarthyist tactics will backfire on Canada’s establishment  Jewish community.  People will remember. The very thing the Jewish community is trying most to avoid, antisemitism, will be stoked. And all to defend the indefensible genocidal rampage of a foreign state.

What will it take for Canada’s establishment Jewish community to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, against the mass starvation of women and children, against the destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes, and the obliteration of Gaza?  Instead, the smoke screen goes up here at home — Jewish community leaders express outrage that students on campuses feel “uncomfortable” when other students protest Israel’s killing of Palestinians.  The establishment community dissembles; it claims that on one can trust the numbers of the dead because Hamas is counting — but Hamas’ count has for many years  squared with the UN’s count of the dead, the missing and the maimed.

As most Canadians know, the most important thing is to demand a ceasefire and an end to the massacring of tens of thousands of Palestinians.  Many have commented that there is no military solution.  Only the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people will be the key to a real solution. 

Featured image at the top: Israeli soldiers take up positions near the Gaza Strip border, in southern Israel, on December 29, 2023. (credit: Ariel Schalit/AP)