Organizers of the 36th annual March of the Living commemoration, in Poland, knew that this year’s three-kilometre walk at Auschwitz would feel even more poignant after Oct. 7. That’s why some Israeli Holocaust survivors were invited to join the procession, which honoured not just the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust—but also the 1,200 people in Israel who were murdered in the single worst slaughter of Jews since 1945. Yet it appears some groups in Poland weren’t willing to allow the annual March of the Living to proceed without conflating the ongoing Middle East war with Hitler’s systematic genocide. Pro-Palestinian protesters wore keffiyehs, waved flags and held signs saying “Stop the Genocide” as the marchers passed by. It was a scene one Canadian family will never forget. Harvey Wright, 85, whose grandparents were among Hitler’s victims; his son Erin Wright, of Edmonton, who served as the trip’s physician; and Erin’s daughters, Abby and Zoe, currently university students, all join The CJN Daily to explain why they joined the march this year and how they hope it will help them face an uncomfortable future for Canadian Jews.

What we talked about:

• Read survivor Nate Leipciger’s message to travellers on this year’s Canadian delegation to the March of the Living, in The CJN
• Learn how the annual Canadian delegation to the March of the Living is scaled down for 2024, in The CJN
• Watch the March of the Living 2024 recorded broadcast

Credits:

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here. Hear why The CJN is important to me.

Show notes

Vancouver Holocaust speaker Rubin Pinsky fled a Nazi work camp in May 1942 and survived for more than two years in the forests of Poland, serving as a teenage Jewish partisan. Pinsky, a former yeshiva student, blew up trains, sabotaged telephone wires and killed Nazis and collaborators. One time, he even finished off a timber wolf attempting to hunt a wild rabbit the starving partisans had called dibs on, so to speak—they needed the game for their own next meal. Pinsky’s story of survival, including how he pretended to be a tailor with bad eyesight to enter Canada after the war, is now captured in a gripping new biography. Written by his son Bernard Pinsky, a lawyer and community leader in Vancouver, the book is called Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father’s Life. The sweeping tale spans nearly a century, beginning and ending in the Pinsky family’s small bakery in modern-day Belarus, with stops in Germany, Montreal, Winnipeg, Regina and finally Vancouver, where Rubin died in 2001. For Yom HaShoah, The CJN Daily is joined by Bernard Pinsky, who explains why he took so long to publish his father’s story—and what he hopes readers will learn.

What we talked about:

• Watch the Yom HaShoah National Memorial Ceremony from Ottawa on Monday, May 6, 2024, beginning at 11 a.m. EST
• Buy the book about Rubin Pinsky, and watch his video testimony done in 1983 through the Vancouver Holocaust Centre
• Read how one man is restoring Holocaust-era rural cemeteries in Hungary, one at a time, in The CJN

Credits:

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here. Hear why The CJN is important to me.

Show notes:

At least five Canadian university campuses are now home to temporary tent cities erected by pro-Palestinian students protesting Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The U of T, McGill, Western, the University of Ottawa and the University of British Columbia have all become focal points for protestors insisting they won’t leave until their schools divest of financial ties to Israel, among other demands. Other schools like TMU are coping with sit-in protests. So far, local police departments have not forcibly cleared out the compounds, as happened earlier this week at Columbia University in New York, where the movement began. But protests on this side of the border are equally polarizing: some Jewish students and faculty have joined the protests, while Hillel and other Jewish organizations argue these demonstrations aren’t peaceful, and call for the destruction of Israel and kicking Zionists off campus and out of Canada. So what’s behind the phenomenon? And where will it go next? On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, we hear from Opher Baron, a management professor at the University of Toronto who’s worried that protests could derail an important annual conference he’s hosting next week; then we’re joined by Arno Rosenfeld, the Forward’s antisemitism beat reporter, who’s been covering the chaos from Columbia to UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles.

What we talked about:

• Read more about McGill encampment, in The CJN
• Follow Arno Rosenberg’s work and get his Antisemitism Notebook newsletter in the Forward
• Learn more about Opher Baron at Rotman’s School of Management
• Listen to Wednesday’s interview with three Canadian Sunday school students who took home the top prizes at the International JewQ contest, run by Chabad, on The CJN Daily

Credits:

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here. Hear why The CJN is important to me.