In an op-ed piece in today's Toronto Star, Rabbi Dow Marmur rails against Nazi skin-heads in Sweden and Canada's admittedly appalling residential school system. The Zionist project to ethnically cleanse Palestine, however, is not worth mentioning.
C.F. Bernadotte
(for those that don't realize the headline and comment above is sarcastic.
Sweden, where I spent nine formative years of my life, is famous for its laudable commitment to openness and individual freedom. It shares with Canada not only much of landscape and climate but also many of the values that make for civil society. The price, however, that Sweden has had to pay for promoting liberty is that extremists, including racists in general and anti-Semites in particular, have taken advantage of it and flourished with impunity.
Even during World War II, for all of Sweden's formal neutrality, some of its citizens were Nazis and many more were fellow-travellers. Afterward, anti-Semites, in their relentless effort to infest the world, spread their poison from Swedish addresses. Still today, neo-Nazi gangs thrive in the land.
But Sweden, like Canada, is also known for its humanitarian work. Thanks to his legendary efforts while serving in the Swedish embassy in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg saved many thousands of Hungarian Jews from being sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis. Some of the survivors settled in Canada after the war.
In the same vein, in the last weeks of the Nazi regime the Swedish Red Cross rescued thousands of Jewish women from German concentration camps. My wife, then age 9, was one of them. Some of these survivors also ended up in this country.
Aware of the yawning gap between menacing abuse of freedom and commitment to care for people in distress, Swedish educator Christer Mattsson has made it his mission to try to bridge it. Knowing that some of the women who were rescued by the Red Cross were so sick that they died upon arrival and that 16 of them were buried in his hometown Karlstad, Mattsson involved a group of teenagers, including gang members, in researching the history of the victims in the cemetery.
Finding out as much as possible about those who died, the group produced a 100-page report that its members recently delivered in person to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. In media interviews, some visitors told of their neo-Nazi backgrounds and how, having learned the truth about what happened to the 16 women and their 6 million fellow Jews, they have come to radically change their views away from error and prejudice.
We have much to learn from Mattsson. Instead of only inviting eyewitness survivors into his classroom, he engaged the young on a deeper and more creative level.
Though there are no Jewish graves in Canada like those in Karlstad, there are other graves, many as yet unmarked, particularly of the stolen children in Indian residential schools who never returned home. An effort to identify the victims and their descendants would reveal some of their history. The students would help turn the lofty words of the Prime Minister's formal apology and the expected findings of the Aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation Commission into acts of true healing.
The scope is enormous. The approach could also be used in relation to other minority groups. Young Canadians would thus have their eyes and minds opened to what has been done and not done to some of those unable to speak for themselves.
Of course, no educational project, however imaginative, can in itself eradicate evil. But the kind of work that Mattsson has been doing may give his Canadian counterparts another tool in the continuous struggle against bigotry, hatred and ignorance that poison the minds of so many, especially the young, and thus potentially threaten the fabric of our society.
Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple.
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