Tag: jewish

Categories
Arts

Public Intimacy—discovering the margin between the public and the private

Exhibition, Courtesy: JewishMuseum

The interactive piece kicks off the reopening of the Museum of Jewish Montreal

There is a line drawn between public and private spheres. In our lives, everyone has a limit as to what is kept personal and what we want to display to the public. As of Oct.13, art enthusiasts have the chance to explore this idea through the creation of Berlin artists Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger titled Public Intimacy, showcased at the Museum of Jewish Montreal until Jan. 22. 

The installation is composed of a plethora of curtains hung from a tall metal framework. Curtains of different materials, densities, and colors, are meant for the public to wander through and reflect upon. It’s a maze, and it provides the chance to close each participant off from the rest of the public, allowing them as much intimacy as they desire. 

“The curtains are second hand, they all come from a regional context that has a history with the Holocaust, the contemporary rise of neo-fascism,” said Stokvis-Hauer. “I don’t think that the exhibition is only about that, either. There are a million different things that public privacy can be associated with, it’s such a broad topic.”

The installation’s walls are occupied by immense photographs of mysterious residential windows, accompanied by existential and thought-provoking questions. 

The curtains were found around the Berlin area in historic places. Some were found in abandoned buildings previously occupied by German Democratic Republic government officials, some belonged to Mundingers’ grandmother, and others were found on the street. 

In 2019, the two artists were called in by the Museum of Jewish Montreal to present a project on-site. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down any works in progress, and the Museum of Jewish Montreal was shut down. 

This is the first exhibition since the museum’s reopening and the first Montreal-based project for the artist tandem. In this new space, the artists found even more room for freedom of discovery.

There certainly is an element of the exhibition that harkens to the past and present and leans towards elements of “Jewishness,” according to the museum’s artistic director Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer.  Themes of racism, xenophobia, and possibly other matters relevant to a broader community than the Jewish. 

“We aren’t Jewish ourselves, but we have history with the culture,” said Mundinger. The artist had been invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galicia Jewish museum located in Kraków in Poland. Hirsch had gone as far as spending three years with a concentration camp survivor to create his biography in the form of a graphic novel. The work is not yet published through an official company.

In terms of an exhibit, the museum’s staff team saw Public Intimacy as a connection of interest to the Jewish community in Montreal. For the team, there’s a wide range of interesting questions that are relevant to the Jewish community, and further relevant to other communities. 

“What’s so great about Johannes and Sophia’s work is that it asks infinite questions,” added Stokvis-Hauer. “It invites everyone to think about where the line is between public and private on the macro and micro scales.” This piece, she emphasized, is meditative.

If you want your brain and heartstrings tugged on, all while experiencing the essence of a homely yet conflicted culture, you should visit the installation in the Mile End before it closes on Jan. 22. You can read more about the event on the Museum’s website.

My very Jewish love letter to the Cavendish Mall IGA

Spiritual connection can be found in the most mundane places

It may seem peculiar to admit, but one of the spaces I feel the most unabashedly Jewish is in a chain grocery store.

I currently live in Outremont, my small apartment building nestled amongst the rows of beautiful houses containing large, lively Hasidic families. Between Lipa’s Kosher Market, Continental Deli, and the dozens of synagogues, I could definitely get my share of Jewish culture anytime I left the house. But, as much as I love a Cheskie’s black and white cookie, as a secular(ish) reform Jew, these aren’t really my people.

However, a forty-minute bus ride away, at an unassuming IGA, that’s where my people are.

My grandparents immigrated to Canada around 1953 as refugees of the Holocaust. The war broke out when my grandmother was a young teen, and after losing all of her family other than a sister and cousin, likely to Auschwitz but we’ll never know, she met my grandfather in a labour camp. After liberation, the pair were processed through Italy, went to Israel, then finally arrived in Montreal.

Our family began as working class Mile End Jews, as many post-War Ashkenazi immigrants did. In comparison to the more affluent “uptown” Jews of Westmount, who had already assimilated to Canadian culture through a couple generations of living here, “downtown” Jews like my family had a difficult time initially, adapting to two new languages and secular life, all while reeling from the most awful trauma imaginable.

By the 1980s, after moving through multiple Montreal boroughs, my grandparents, again following the trends of their Polish Jewish peers, finally settled in Côte-Saint-Luc. And there they lived until they passed — my grandfather before I was born and my grandmother this past summer.

Everytime my parents and I would travel to Montreal to visit my grandmother, a trip to the Cavendish Mall IGA was inevitable. Beginning as an opportunity to make sure my grandmother got all of her granddaughter’s favourite foods, and later because driving herself became impossible, the IGA factored into every family trip to Montreal.

Growing up in suburban Virginia, never had I seen so much Jewish food in one place. Or, honestly, Jewish food for sale in general, other than a lonely box of Passover matzah inexplicably stocked in a Hanukkah display.

The IGA has been a constant, not just for my family, but for the large Jewish Côte-Saint-Luc community. The store has a sizable kosher section spanning not only the Eastern European Jewish staples like knishes and verenikas, but also babaganoush and harissa to accommodate the more recent influx of Sephardic Jews into the neighbourhood.

Early in the COVID-19 lockdowns, the Cavendish IGA briefly closed its doors to shoppers. IGA’s parent company Sobeys stated that their decision was made to limit the amount of times residents were leaving their houses. With Côte-Saint-Luc’s especially elderly population, this call was made in an attempt to protect residents from disease. However, the move created a backlash from older residents, who either did not have access to or proficiency with computers and online ordering.

On top of the accessibility concerns of online shopping, closing the Cavendish IGA limited the social aspect of shopping for not only the older community, but Jewish Côte-Saint-Luc residents in general.

Much has been said about food and cooking as community-making, but why do we not extend this thought to the grocery shopping experience?

In Côte-Saint-Luc, the IGA has become somewhat of a cultural hub for the community, as, especially during the pandemic, it’s one of the few places community members, mostly older adults, will get a chance to see their neighbours.

I don’t go to the Cavendish Mall much these days. Since my grandmother’s passing, I’ve only been out to Côte-Saint-Luc a few times to help clean out her apartment. But I went this past week, partially to have an excuse to get some reading done one the bus, but mostly because in the stress of exam season, I was craving the warm embrace of Jewish carbs. 

Once I passed the extensive bakery section, I was greeted by a giant Hanukkah display. “A bit early?” I chuckled to myself, thinking about the cliché of Christmas decorations popping up as soon as Halloween passes. Then, I realized I didn’t even know when Hanukkah begins this year. Turns out it’s Nov. 28, so the joke’s on me.

But after the twinge of pain knowing that Hanukkah will have come and gone before I’m even done with finals, I thought: where else would I come face to face with a kiosk full of dreidels, menorahs, and adorned with an image of a yarmulke-clad cartoon boy?

That’s the thing about the Cavendish Mall IGA. The mundane fact that matzah ball soup mix is sold all year (in a section that actually corresponds to the correct holiday), that it’s the only place I’ve ever found kasha varnishkes outside of my dad’s kitchen, that I can walk around on a Friday early afternoon, see a box of candlesticks in my fellow shopper’s cart and share a knowing look.

Though I had no real reason to go to the IGA recently, even without my grandmother to guide me to the good gefilte fish, the experience still ignited something comforting in me that I can’t quite articulate. Maybe it’s God, maybe just good chicken soup.

 

Feature graphic by Kaitlynn Rodney and James Fay

Categories
Opinions

Disappointed, heartbroken, but not surprised

A Jewish Concordia student on the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue vandalism

As a Jew and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, every act of antisemitism feels personal. But this one, in particular, hits close to home.

Last Wednesday, the doors to the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Westmount were spray-painted with four swastikas. The suspect also brought a gasoline canister and a lighter, but was apprehended by the synagogue’s security team before the situation could escalate further.

One of the largest synagogues in Montreal, the Shaar is a hotspot for important holidays and life celebrations, and a host for many inspiring speakers. It’s the institution where people cook and deliver Meals on Wheels to 4,000 seniors annually. It’s the place where volunteers bake traditional cookies for the Purim holiday and donate the proceeds to Save a Child’s Heart, a humanitarian organization that provides medical care for children with heart problems who otherwise wouldn’t have access to treatment.

It’s devastating to process that such a horrid antisemitic incident happened to a place with such a positive impact on the entire community.

I used to attend Akiva School, the elementary school that is attached to the synagogue. In fact, the security guard who stopped the perpetrator helped me carry my backpack inside every morning as a child. I posed for my cousin’s wedding photos in front of the same doors that were tainted by hate.

At the Shaar, my grandfather watched all of his grandchildren graduate from elementary and high school — milestones that were stolen from him by the Nazis: the very people who those swastikas represent.

I am disappointed, angry, and heartbroken at this act of hate and the possible further destruction that was avoided by the security team’s quick action. But, I wish I could say that I’m surprised.

The most recently available Statistics Canada report states that 19 per cent of hate crimes targeted Jews in 2018.

In June 2019, a Jewish student was spat on and called a “nazi” at York University in Toronto.

A Dawson College bathroom was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti in October 2019.

And these are only two of the 2,207 antisemitic incidents recorded in B’nai Brith Canada’s 2019 annual audit—8.1 per cent more than the previous year.

This trend is not unique to Canada; a man wearing a Camp Auschwitz hoodie stormed the U.S. Capitol last week. A Jewish man was attacked with a spade outside a synagogue in Hamburg in October. Eleven people were shot dead in 2018 at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In 2017, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us!” in their biggest and most brutal public assembly in decades.

This increase in hate crimes might be caused by the rise of social media and the platform it provides for hate speech. It could be tied to political unrest in the U.S. and other countries or a desire to find a scapegoat for the problems of our complicated world. Maybe it’s because the memory of the Holocaust is fading with time.

But regardless of the cause, I am outraged that these events keep occurring. I am tired of seeing my community hurt. Nonetheless, I am fuelled by this outrage to speak out against antisemitism and other forms of hatred, and I know that many others feel the same. In fact, social justice is an intrinsic part of Judaism known as “tikkun olam,” which literally means fixing the world. However, this value is something that anyone can bring into their life. And though fixing the world is a large undertaking, progress can be made in small strides and through a commitment to peace and understanding.

Complicity and silence must be replaced with education and discourse — not only about antisemitism, but about other instances of hatred and racism. I urge allies to stand beside us by following Jewish and anti-hate activists, asking questions, sharing our stories, and standing up when you hear people you know make harmful “jokes” or comments. When people come together to learn, discuss and hear one another, we can assure that while the pain won’t disappear, its cause will not be repeated.

 

Feature graphic by Lily Cowper

Exit mobile version