Canadian Jewish Congress Research Articles

A Voice Behind the Headlines: The Public Relations of the Canadian Jewish Congress During the Holocaust

ABSTRACT The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the main lobbying group for Canadian Jews during the Holocaust, advocated on behalf of both Canadian and European Jewry by employing a sophisticated public relations strategy. This article investigates three intertwined campaigns to publicize Canadian Jewish war efforts, to raise awareness of the extermination of European Jews, and to advocate that Canada accept refugees. It argues that the CJC used data-driven publicity to demonstrate Jewish loyalty to Canada, which subsequently allowed them to bring attention to Jewish extermination in the non-Jewish press and spurred sustained coverage of the topic. After Jewish extermination became clear, they worked behind the scenes with their allies and used the press to convince the Canadian government to rescue several hundred refugees. By showing the hidden efforts and unknown successes of Jewish organizations, we learn that, while still limited in power, their advocacy methods achieved more than is usually acknowledged. This article breaks with the methodological approach of asking only ‘who knew what and when?’ in press responses to the Holocaust. Instead, it asks how and why stories about the Holocaust made the news. In so doing, it de-emphasizes the decisions of journalists, editors, and publishers and demonstrates the Jewish voice behind stories in the non-Jewish press.

Snowbirds Spotted in Cuba: Canadian Jewish Congress on The Global Stage in the 1960s

The American Jewish community has historically overshadowed Canadian Jewry. In population size, political prestige, and global influence, the power imbalance between American- and Canadian-Jewish organizations throughout the twentieth century has anchored popular understandings of North American Jewish affairs as one dominated by the U.S. Whereas the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) shepherded international Jewish causes throughout this period, its Canadian analogue, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), never achieved such stature. However, on an island ninety miles from the U.S. coast, the fragile geopolitics of the Cold War conspired to recast this relationship. The Castro Revolution initiated a process which culminated in the severing of U.S.-Cuban ties in 1961, leaving a precarious Cuban Jewish community vulnerable. Canada’s geographic proximity and close institutional ties with American Jewry transformed the CJC’s role as the primary caregivers of Cuban Jewry. Consequently, the sundering of American-Cuban relations elevated the CJC to a position of strategic prominence on the international stage ultimately overshadowing its larger, and more illustrious, cousin to the south in Cuba. La communauté juive américaine a historiquement éclipsé la communauté juive canadienne. En termes de population, de prestige politique et d’influence mondiale, le déséquilibre de pouvoir entre les organisations juives américaines et canadiennes tout au long du XXe siècle a ancré la compréhension populaire que les affaires juives nord-américaines étaient dominées par les États-Unis. Alors que le American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) a dirigé des causes juives internationales tout au long de cette période, son analogue canadien, le Congrès juif canadien (CJC), n’a jamais atteint une telle stature. Cependant, sur une île située à quatre-vingt-dix milles des côtes américaines, la fragile géopolitique de la guerre froide a contribué à modifier cette relation. La révolution de Castro a lancé un processus qui a abouti à la rupture des liens américano-cubains en 1961, laissant une communauté juive cubaine précaire vulnérable. La proximité géographique du Canada et les liens institutionnels étroits avec la communauté juive américaine ont transformé le rôle du CJC en tant que principal allié de la communauté juive cubaine. Par conséquent, la rupture des relations américano-cubaines a élevé le CJC à une position d’importance stratégique sur la scène internationale, éclipsant finalement à Cuba son plus grand et plus illustre cousin du sud.

«Un programme unique dans le monde entier»: le Congrès juif canadien et la lutte pour le droit à l’égalité «raciale» et religieuse au Québec (1945-1950)

What were the characteristics of the program developed by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) to fight anti-Semitism and racism in postwar Quebec? Why is this program described by the CJC as “unique in the entire world”? Part of the answer rests with the fact that contrary to their counterparts from other Canadian and American Jewish organizations, the leaders of the CJC in Quebec put legal and judicial approaches aside and developed an ecumenical and persuasive strategy to encourage the public repudiation of anti-Semitism by civil and religious authorities. They also abandoned human rights language in favour of a legitimating discourse based on the notions of order, duty, morality, and common good enshrined in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Finally, they concealed the issues around race and racism by linking their struggle for “racial” equality to the ongoing debates on French-Canadian nationalism and to the linguistic and religious cleavages dividing Quebec society at that time.

‘I Do Think We Can Carry On’: The Women’s War Efforts Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, 1939-1946

The Jewish community’s involvement in the Canadian war effort during the Second World War has been a topic of scholarly interest for decades. However, this scholarship has largely focused on the activities of men, whether as soldiers or members of volunteer organizations, most notably the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). When women’s contributions are noted, it has generally been a mention of undefined volunteer work or their activities as soldiers’ wives and mothers, thus ignoring the monumental efforts of Jewish women. In particular, the Women’s War Efforts Committee (WWEC) of the CJC contributed thousands of hours of unpaid labour, fundraising, running a Next-of-Kin League for the wives, mothers, and children of enlisted men, and working with other women’s organizations for the war effort. However, it was their work on massive projects such as the furnishing of recreation spaces on armed forces bases and the opening of Servicemen’s Centres across Canada that would be most impactful. This paper will explore how the activities of the WWEC increased the visibility of the Jewish community in Canada and contributed to changing the public perception of Jews from that of an unwanted immigrant community to that of an accepted minority group. It will also examine the tensions between the men and women of the CJC and the shifting public roles of women within the Jewish community.

Archiving the Canadian Jewish Congress: New Views from a New Vault

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

The Canadian Jewish Congress Pacific Region Fonds at the Jewish Museum and Archive of British Columbia: The Road so Far

The Canadian Jewish Congress Pacific Region Fonds at the Jewish Museum and Archive of British Columbia: The Road so Far

Introduction: Canadian Jewish Congress Records

Introduction: Canadian Jewish Congress Records

‘The fight on educating the public to equal treatment for all will have to come later’: Jewish Refugee Activism and Anti-Immigration Sentiment in Immediate Post-War Canada

AbstractCanadian immigration policy of the 1930s and 1940s was the most restrictive and selective in the country’s history, making it one of the countries to take the smallest number of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi persecution. After the war, Canada slowly opened its borders, but only through small token gestures in 1947 and 1948. This article explores how the main Canadian Jewish organization lobbied for the welcoming of more Jewish refugees and migrants in the immediate aftermath of the war. It examines how their perception of the public’s anti-Jewish immigrant sentiment and of the Canadian immigration policy’s discriminatory mechanisms informed their strategies. During that period, the Canadian Jewish Congress prioritized constant and subtle action with the government instead of trying to set up mass mobilization campaigns. This strategic shift is an overshadowed but essential chapter of both Jewish and human rights histories in Canada. This article invites a re-evaluation of Jewish activism’s role in ending ethnic selection in the Canadian immigration policy and promoting refugee rights. It contributes to broadening our understanding of how minority groups lobbied and worked with hostile media and authorities.

Visualising Holocaust Child-survivors in Canada: From Post-war Humanitarian Campaigns to National Memory

ABSTRACT In 1947, the Canadian Jewish Congress was authorized to bring 1000 young Holocaust survivors to Canada. The government required all newcomers to be placed in foster families. This led the CJC to set up a campaign to find potential foster parents. Bringing together scholarship on humanitarian photography and on post-World War 2 childhood, this article examines the imagery and accompanying narratives of the campaign and explores how notions of victimhood, resilience, and rehabilitation were represented. It aims to assess how these representations and misrepresentations influenced the survivors’ resettlement but also the long-term memorialization of their arrival in Canada.

“There were cries of joy, some of sorrow”: Canadian Jewish Soldiers and Early Encounters with Survivors

A close study of the early contacts between Canadian Jewish soldiers and survivors reveals many of the features largely associated only with the “liberation” of the camps in 1945. Already in 1944, in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Canadian soldiers had encountered evidence of the Holocaust, especially the stories of deportations, deprivation and loss told by Jews emerging from hiding. Many soldiers heard the stories, were deeply affected by them, and reached out to the survivors and wrote about their experiences to family members. Some accounts of these encounters appeared in the Canadian Jewish press. These accounts fed into a homefront discourse and strategy, encouraged by the Canadian Jewish Congress, which sought to demonstrate to both Jews and non-Jews the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort and the need to help European Jewry.

1944: A Preview of Much of What Would Follow

This article focuses on the little-known arrival of the first group of Holocaust survivors in Canada in 1944. They arrived from Lisbon and came through the efforts of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Congress Executive Director Saul Hayes spearheaded this refugee project. The author argues that, while few in number, efforts to negotiate the entry of immigrants, and subsequent Jewish communal efforts to absorb immigrant populations in Toronto, and reactions to the immigrants, were to prove paradigmatic predictors of communal management and reaction to much larger Holocaust survivor influxes after the war. While the article focuses on immigrant absorption in Toronto, it also discusses broader issues associated with this movement and the role played by the Yiddish press in reporting refugee arrival.

Au nom de l'ordre ou de la liberté? Le Congrès juif canadien face à la répression des libertés civiles et des droits des minorités religieuses au Québec (1945–1954)

The analysis of the positions taken by Canadian Jewish Congress on the issues affecting the repression of civil liberties and the infringement of the rights of religious non-Catholic minorities in Quebec in the decade following the Second World War shed new light on our understanding of the place held by representatives of the Jewish community in the social human rights movement in Canada. The CJC – the main voice of the community – in fact remained on the fringe of the movement protesting the Duplessis regime, refusing to condemn the Padlock Act and supporting the repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious minorities considered to be “seditious” or “subversive.” The controversies that ensued due to these positions demonstrate the ideological, regional, and class divisions the Jewish community and the “human rights community” were undergoing in the postwar period. They expose the tensions that existed within the CJC, between the leaders from Ontario and the Canadian West and their counterparts in Quebec, confronted more directly with the repressive “great darkness” and the pattern of inter-faith relations in this mainly Catholic province. On a theoretical level, this study demonstrates that human rights are a fluid discursive category that may be mobilized differently according to activists, based on their ideologies, their identities, their interests, and the local context in which they operate.

A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik

Reviewed by: A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik Christine Elie Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik, eds., A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press 2016) Histories of the Communist Party lend themselves well to collected works. While these histories are transnational, the nature of organizing – often under circumstances of repression – make them deeply local. Following directives from [End Page 358] the USSR, Communist Parties around the world shared common ideology, but no two shared the same experiences. A Vanished Ideology is located along this intersection of local and global. Focusing specifically on Jewish Communist Party members adds fascinating complexity to the already gripping historiography of transnational leftism. In A Vanished Ideology, Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik thoughtfully curate a collection of essays on the local experiences of Jewish Communists in the English-speaking world. Central to this work are the competing identity politics that often challenged the allegiance of Jewish Communist Party members. Connecting these pieces is the pervasive issue of the primary affiliation of such Party members – often posed is the question: were they Communist Jews or were they Jewish Communists? This distinction was even more pronounced when local party members faced international schisms and debates – among the most ravenous to the Party were the rise (and subsequent Soviet criticism) of Zionism, the escalation of fascism in Europe, and ultimately the revelations of Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. Hoffman opens the collection with his piece on the place of Yiddish-speaking Communists in the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa). He examines the role of both Jewish particularism and the forging of a distinct Jewish communist culture. Jennifer Young similarly addresses the cpusa, doing so through an analysis of the allegiance of the Jewish Peoples' Fraternal Order (jppo) and its role in forging the Jewish Communist movement. Young argues that the jppo contributed to the creation of a community that lasted far beyond its affiliation with the Communist Party. Gennady Estraikh explores Jewish Communism in the United States through the lens of Paul Novick – editor of the daily Frayhayt. Estraikh follows Novick's career and dedication to the daily from its inception in 1922 until its final edition in 1988 during which time it weathered myriad international scandals. Henry Srebrnik introduces the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) and the role of the Jewish community in fostering Jewish identity while both reacting to and resisting burgeoning Zionism. Srebrnik contends that following the 1956 Khrushchev revelations, Jewish Party members had to confront the reality that the USSR and its promised Birobidzhan region had not offered a viable safe heaven from anti-Semitism. Ester Reiter also addresses the cpc, exploring the internationalism that marked eastern European Jewish migrants as secular socialists inclined towards working-class movements. Reiter zeroes in on women's activism and confronts several challenges to Canada's left – notably the Padlock law and 1951 expulsion of the United Jewish People's Order from the Canadian Jewish Congress. Stephen M. Cullen takes us out of North America with his piece on the Communist Party of Great Britain (cpgb). Cullen argues that Jewish Party members are inaccurately painted out of the picture in Great Britain in part due to the reliance on class as the primary unit of analysis in Communist historiography. In addition, Cullen contends, there has been intentional negligence by Stalinist historiography to acknowledge the presence and contributions of Jewish Party members. Basing his work on sound recordings, Cullen "tests" his theories on Jewish presence by relying on interviews with notable Jewish members of the cpgb. Philip Mendes examines the small yet present group of Jewish Communists in Australia. Mendes argues that while they were by no means a mass, Jewish Communists (and their allies) were active participants in the Jewish community. [End Page 359] Concluding the volume, David Yoram Saks delves into the fascinating world of the Communist Party of South Africa. Saks follows the trajectory of several Jewish Communists as they achieved...

Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit ed. by Ira Robinson (review)

Reviewed by: Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit ed. by Ira Robinson Dana Herman (bio) Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit. Edited by Ira Robinson. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. 501 pp. With the approach of Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017, the time is ripe for Ira Robinson’s edited volume, Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit. It surveys the myriad ways in which Jews have contributed to the fabric of Canadian society from its origins to the present day—not only in the well-known urban centers of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, but in smaller cities and towns scattered across the country. Robinson’s aim for the volume is straightforward but difficult to achieve: to present “a comprehensive, if necessarily imperfect, portrait of Canadian Jewry in time, space, and spirit” (11). The book includes the contributions of twenty-five academics, archivists, and journalists. As is typical of edited volumes, the quality of the articles and the treatment of topics is uneven. [End Page 355] The book consists of three parts. The first, “In Time,” is a history of the Jews in Canada. It recounts the Jewish presence in New France, moves regrettably quickly through the eighteenth century, and covers the eastern European migration through two articles, one on Jewish farming colonies and the other on the immigrants’ impact on the communities of Canada’s two major provinces, Quebec and Ontario. The section ends with two excellent essays by Jack Lipinsky and Franklin Bialystok on Canadian Jewish history in the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Lipinsky’s article, “In Search of Unity: Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Canadian Jewish Congress to 1945,” traces organizational growth of the community on both the local federation level as well as the national level with the establishment of the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada and then with the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1919 and its subsequent revival in 1934. Bialystok breaks with current scholarship by presenting the history of Canada’s Jews from 1945–2011 as the “postwar period” and shows how many Canadian Jews still “cling to the legacy of the Holocaust” through their unconditional support of Israel and their fear of antisemitism in Canada (117). The second section, “In Space,” combines history with sociology and political science in offering an assessment of “Jews in Contemporary Canada.” Each of the articles—with the exception of quick and insufficient surveys of Jews in Atlantic Canada and Winnipeg—offers readers a window onto the current makeup of Canadian Jewry, with particular focus on its three largest population centers. Yolande Cohen’s outstanding piece on Sephardi Jews of Montreal—mostly of Moroccan origin—really captures what Robinson was aiming for with this volume: It provides a succinct history of Sephardic Jewry with its large migration to Quebec in the late 1950s and 1960s and weaves a rich narrative through the decades of the twentieth century, showing how these French-speaking Jews established a firm and lasting hold in Quebec society. Her bibliography also helpfully points readers to up-to-date sources that speak to the transnational nature of Sephardic Jewish life. Michael Brown focuses on three changing areas of Jewish life in Toronto: education, governance, and antisemitism—more specifically, the antisemitic events and fallout surrounding the February 2009 press conference called by a group of mostly Jewish student members of Hillel who were opposed to pro-Palestinian actions taken by York University’s Federation of Students. As Brown points out, we are still learning the lessons from the “battle of York University.” The last section dealing with the “spirit” of Canadian Jewry is the most uneven, perhaps because it tries to cover too much material. Rebecca Margolis is an expert on Yiddish in Canada and she explores [End Page 356] the strong connections among Yiddishists on both sides of the border. Richard Menkis’s excellent articles on Reform and Conservative Judaism (with attention paid to Reconstructionist Judaism and the Jewish Renewal movement) as well as William Shaffir’s piece on Hasidim should have been complemented by an equally strong article on Orthodoxy in Canada, but unfortunately that is not the case. Alexander Hart...

Kanada? The Canadian Jewish News and the Memory of the Holocaust in Canada

After the Second World War, Canada remained inaccessible to European victims of Nazism and made clear its position that the issue of survivors ‘was not Canada’s problem’. Nevertheless, after extensive lobbying by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and other groups, Canada’s immigration policies began to ease, resulting in the greatest influx of Jewish immigrants to the country since 1911. Although the initial impact of the survivors was limited, The Canadian Jewish News (CJN) – the most influential vehicle for expressing the concerns of the Canadian Jewish community – created an awareness of the Holocaust’s long-term implications on Canadian and international Jewry by easing strained relations and bridging the gap between the established and survivor communities. If not for the pioneering achievement of the CJN and the Holocaust survivors who politicised important issues and made them resonate with the wider public, Canada’s memory and recognition of the Holocaust, legislation on hate crime, and school curriculum would be lacking.

Jewish Communal Identity at the Crossroads: Early Jewish Responses to Canadian Multiculturalism, 1963-1965

This article challenges the assumption that the Canadian Jewish community embraced the discourse and potential of multiculturalism rapidly and enthusiastically. It has been proven that certain groups—most notably the Ukrainians—used the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which promised to consider the ‘‘contributions of the other ethnic’’ groups, to promote the idea that Canada is multicultural. But the largest organization of Canadian Jewry—the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC)—was very cautious in its dealings with the Commission. It only participated in the Preliminary Hearings, in order to protest the preamble’s language that referred to the ‘‘two founding races. From the records of meetings, it is evident that CJC, based in Montreal—which was the home of the largest Jewish community in Canada at the time—was worried that introducing ‘‘multiculturalism’’ would offend the French. This article also asserts that CJC was not willing to define the Jews as an ethnic group, which was the implied category for groups in the new discourse of multiculturalism. CJC thought that a self-definition of the Jews as an ethnic group would weaken the place of Jews in Canadian society, both because of how Jews defined themselves on the census of 1961 and because they believed that they had a higher profile in the division of society into Protestant—Catholic—Jew than in a society divided into ethnic groups.

In defence of principles: NGOs and human rights in Canada

Preface Introduction: In Defence of Principles 1 My Brother's Keeper: The Canadian Council of Churches and the Rights of Refugees 2 The Misuse of Freedom? The Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Limits of Expression 3 Shocking the Conscience? Amnesty International Canada and Abolition of the Death Penalty Conclusion: Principles in the Age of Rights Notes Selected Bibliography Index

V. A. Kral and the origins of benign senescent forgetfulness and mild cognitive impairment

The concept of benign senescent forgetfulness (BSF) was introduced in 1958 by V. A. Kral, consultant neuropsychiatrist to the Montreal Hebrew Old People's and Sheltering Home (hereafter the Home). BSF was criticized and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was adopted years later. In this paper I argue that a notion of MCI also originated with Kral. A historical review was undertaken of the Canadian Jewish Congress archives in Montreal, Kral's biography and his publications, as well as relevant literature. A discussion was held with one of Kral's collaborators. In the mid-1950s the administration of the Home sought research-derived recommendations to improve residents' conditions. In an initial survey, based on a meticulous neuropsychiatric examination, Kral departed from contemporaneous psychiatric nosology and suggested other criteria in order to classify the home's population. He classified one of the five groups, consisting of subjects with mild memory dysfunction, as having BSF. In his next survey, Kral included psychological tests in addition to clinical assessment and focused on the elderly people who were well preserved (good personal and social functioning). This sample was subdivided into four subgroups, including BSF and incipient amnestic syndrome (IAS). The findings revealed: well-preserved aged people; normal (dull) level of general intelligence; subnormal performance of specific memory and perceptual/organization tests; and no significant signs of malignant amnestic syndrome. This construct is very similar to that of MCI, which is widely used today. The interaction between Kral and a particular home for the elderly at a particular moment in its history gave rise to the concept of BSF, and a notion of what we now call MCI emerged.

This is not a game: testimony and the making and unmaking of the child as a political subject

In Canada in May 2006, Deborah Ellis's book Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli children speak became an object of controversy when the Canadian Jewish Congress protested its availability to junior elementary students in the Toronto school system. The Ontario Library Association (OLA) had nominated the book for its Silver Birch reading program. The books chosen for this program are not mandatory texts on the school curriculum. Rather, the program is designed to encourage children in grades four to six (nine- twelve year olds) to read recreationally. School libraries distribute Silver Birch books and the children who read them can vote at the end of the school year on their favourite fiction and non-fiction works. Under pressure from the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Toronto District School Board restricted access to the book and removed it from school libraries serving children below grade seven. PEN Canada, an association of national and international writers that exists to protect, among other things, freedom of expression, the House of Anansi Press, the Canadian publisher of Three Wishes, and Ellis herself protested the decision made by the Toronto District School Board. In an article from the Canadian Jewish News, Paul Lungen explained that the OLA describes Three Wishes as allowing 'young readers everywhere to see that the children caught in this conflict are just like them, but living far more difficult and dangerous lives. Without taking sides, it presents an unblinking portrait of children victimized by the endless struggle around them.' Critics, however, argue the book presents a uniformly negative image of Israel, provides little context for young readers about a conflict whose details are beyond their understanding, and introduces students to Palestinian youths who aspire to be suicide bombers and kill Israelis.1 In addition, a teacher in the Toronto school system was quoted as saying that 'I didn't feel, and neither did the other teachers, that the children here have the knowledge to understand the difference between opinion and fact'.2 The controversy over Three Wishes raises several important questions relevant to pedagogical issues and social pohcy about the kind of role educational institutions, poUtical lobby groups, community and reUgious organisations, and book sellers should play in the regulation of extra-curricular reading practices for Ontario elementary school children. The oppositions of opinion and fact, the regulation of children who produce testimony and those who read it, and the targeting of children with or without the knowledge to comprehend the meaning of testimony or poUtical conflict beg to be disentangled from one another. Also notable with regards to the controversy was how the poUtics of the debate straddled the 'rights' spectrum, from those in support of the right of free speech to those insisting on the right to participate in Canadian policy making on education as part of the multicultural grid work of 'Canadian society' - the latter clearly achieving its objectives here.3 In order to comprehend these competing human rights' discourses, it is important to reflect on how the controversy mobiUsed children as poUtical subjects within a transnational framework of testimonial discourse. Of particular interest is how these competitive rights' discourses generate notions of childhood, fantasy and the meaning of the Palestinian and IsraeU conflict in the Canadian context. Three Wishes belongs to an increasing number of pubUshed books in the field of testimonial studies charged with endowing the child with the role of bearing witness to traumatic events. In so doing, the child as testifier is empowered to produce historical truth and authentic, reaUstic representations of events. In considering what enables this newly authorised voice, we need to address the contexts in which children testify. In what forms, for example, do children's testimonies appear and how are they circulated? …

An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (review)

An Island Called Homes: Returning to Jewish Cuba, by Ruth Behar. Photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 297 pp. $29.95. Anthropologist Ruth Behar was born in Cuba in 1956. Her family left two years after the Castro Revolution. Her first return trip to Cuba in 1979 was as a graduate st udent. She hoped to do her doctoral research there, but the doors closed once again to visitors. Her visits resumed in the nineties when Castro attempted to bolster sagging morale and a sinking economy by allowing the U.S. dollar and God (p. 21) to make a comeback. Usually limited to fourteen-day stays, she got intimate glimpses of the did not leave. She traveled back as often as she could to stand side by side with who were learning how to be Jews (p. 15) but not to use them for her fieldwork until she realized that being an anthropologist was her passport to return. She teamed up with photographer Humberto Mayol in 2002 and over the next four years they traveled throughout the island documenting what they saw. The book offers a brief historical introduction and an excellent chronology that teU why and how from aU over Europe and the Middle East flocked to Cuba in the early years of the twentieth century. These ethnically divergent immigrants (lumped together as polacos or turcos by the Cubans), came to number around 16,000, created separate institutions and contributed to social change in the years leading up to Castro's revolution. Although they did have fledgUng institutions, the twenties and thirties were uncertain times for as waves of xenophobia influenced laws and Nazi rhetoric tainted the press. But in the forties and fifties these immigrants, began to estabUsh themselves in businesses and professions, were joined by entrepreneurial born in the United States coming to make their fortunes on tropical soil. Together they built schools, synagogues, and social clubs. The triumph of Castro in 1959 caused an abrupt rupture in Jewish Ufe. In a very brief span of time over 90 percent of the community left. The stayed were spUntered, impoverished, isolated, and demoraUzed for many years. Only after constitutional changes in the nineties have been able to practice their faith openly. With the help of outside institutions - the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Lubavitchers, the American Joint Distribution Committee, the Conservative Movement, and many others - the of Cuba have reconstituted themselves, refurbished their synagogues, learned their history and rituals, reaffirmed their connections to the faith in conversions and communal marriage ceremonies and, in some cases, made Aliyah. The first order of business for Behar are the ghosts left behind. In Blessings for the Dead she seeks and finds the tomb of a cousin died just before his bar mitzvah in 1954. Then Elisa Behar 's grave in Guanabacoa puzzles her for years. …