Shabbat Message - November 6, 2020
This message has 845 words and will take about 4 minutes to read.
Every Monday morning we have our all-staff Zoom meeting, and this week we welcomed Jeff Finkelstein, CEO of Jewish Federation in Pittsburgh, as our guest speaker. We had a frank discussion with him about the challenges they’ve faced as a Federation, as staff, and as a community since the shootings two years ago.
During our meeting, news broke of the terror attack in Vienna. Initially, there were reports that a synagogue had been targeted, although now that authorities know more, it appears that this is unlikely. Still, simply having that happen in the middle of that particular meeting sent chills down our spines. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families.
While there was no change to security levels within Canada, we took the opportunity to ask local Jewish community organizations to review their security protocols.
On Thursday evening, our partner, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Department of History, presented Witnesses to History: I, The Witness - From Memory to Reality. It featured a conversation between Mariette Rozen Doduck and Lauren Faulkner Rossi (SFU Department of History), in which Mariette spoke about her childhood in hiding during the Holocaust, and the challenges she faced as a young immigrant when she arrived in Canada.
We ask a lot of our community’s survivors, and so we want to thank Mariette for sharing some of her most personal and difficult memories. We hope that this online event was able to engage people who have never heard about her experiences before, or perhaps have never heard any survivor’s firsthand account. In an age when Holocaust education is needed more than ever, events like this are crucial.
From SFU, we move on to news from UBC. Staying connected socially and Jewishly is hard enough when you’re new to a campus like UBC, which has 60,000 students, and COVID has made that even more challenging. Thankfully, organizations like Hillel and Chabad are offering terrific programs that give students new ways to be “together.”
Santa Ono, president and vice chancellor of UBC, created this video to draw attention to the importance of staying connected to community, and to thank Hillel and Chabad for the great work they are doing. He very kindly mentions us, too, for the support we provide. (Thank you, President Ono!) When these organizations create a more robust Jewish community on campus, the whole university benefits. A more vibrant campus for Jewish students is just part of what our donors make possible through the Annual Campaign.
We are making community life more exciting for young adults as they build their careers, too, with our Axis Pro series of webinars, in which young professionals share their expertise with other young adults.
When members of the Axis Steering Committee first came up with the idea for Axis Pro, they envisioned developing a peer-to-peer experience through which young adults could learn from each other.
On Wednesday, over 40 young adults joined the first Axis Pro event: Real Estate Investment Strategies. Realtor Jon Samuel helped participants learn how to identify investment opportunities and become familiar with current market trends as well as the resources available for first-time homebuyers. Mortgage broker Eitan Pinsky was on hand to answer lending-related questions.
Other sessions this fall are focused on professional networking, personal finance, and career planning. Todah rabah to Jon, Eitan, and our upcoming speakers, Heather Spiegel, Brent Davis, and Rebecca Dirnfeld, all of whom offered to invest their time and energy to help young professionals.
The Ben Gurion Society (BGS), for young adults who give $1,000 a year or more to the Annual Campaign, also hosted an event this week. On Thursday, 30 young adults engaged in conversation with two prominent community leaders and philanthropists: Horatio Kemeny and our campaign chair, Jonathon Leipsic. The discussion focused on critical issues facing our community and included questions from young adults about how they can be effective community leaders.
Thank you to Horatio and Jonathon for taking time to Zoom with these young leaders. Kol hakavod to BGS co-chairs, Becky Glotman and Yael Segal, for developing inspiring programs for young philanthropists.
Speaking of Yael, she and her husband, Justin, spoke with us about what inspires them. Each of their videos is less than a minute long, but they exude such a genuine commitment to community and passion for making a difference that their words and their energy will stay with you for much longer.
We are truly blessed to have leaders in our community and beyond who are dedicated to keeping memories of the past alive, and to building new ones for the community of our future.
Shabbat shalom.
Ezra S. Shanken
Chief Executive Officer
P.S. Interested in the election south of the border? Watch the deep dive from Jewish Federations of North America here and join us in saying mazel tov to Kathy Manning, who visited our community when she served as chair of JFNA, on being elected to Congress in North Carolina