Stephen Dubner to kick off 2011 Annual Campaign
By Michael Regenstreif
 Journalist Stephen J. Dubner, the featured speaker at the Jewish Federation of Ottawa’s 2011 Campaign Kickoff, Sunday, September 19, 7:30 pm, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization Theatre, is the co-author, with Steven Levitt, of the 2005 best-seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, a book that uses pop culture to explore economics, and its 2009 sequel, SuperFreakonomics.
While Dubner may be best known for the Freakonomics books, it is the story behind his first book, Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief – originally published in 1998 as Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family – that makes him a fascinating speaker for Jewish audiences.
In a telephone interview with the Bulletin, Dubner explained that he grew up the youngest of eight siblings in a devoutly religious Roman Catholic family in upstate New York; a Roman Catholic family with Jewish relatives on both sides.
Before they met and married, both his Jewish mother and his Jewish father had converted to Catholicism.
“Their conversions were what I call purely fake conversions,” he said. “They had next to nothing to do with persecution, political or economic, or religious repression of any kind, certainly not going in the direction of secularism.
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It was rare, he added, for two Jewish people of his parents’ generation to independently convert to Catholicism and then meet and marry.
“I think it was a very unusual circumstance, like two needles in a haystack finding one another,” he said.
Dubner – alone among his brothers and sisters – journeyed back to Judaism.
Despite having delved deeply into his parents’ choice to convert, and having written about their choices at length in his book, he could only offer “partial explanations for why they both converted,” he said.
“There were a variety of different tensions within each of their families,” said Dubner. “They were both searching for something different in very different ways. They fell under the influence of different people who led them to their choices.”
Dubner added that in trying to understand the choices his parents made in their conversions to Catholicism, “it’s almost impossible to peer into someone else’s mind and heart when you’re talking about something like that,” which led him to concentrate on understanding his own journey back to Judaism.
That journey began for Dubner while he was in graduate school and writing a novel loosely based on his family.
“I got to the section where I was writing about my parents having met and married. I knew, in real life, they had both been Jews who had converted to Catholicism.
“When I started to write about this in a fictional way, I realized how little I knew about it.”
This, explained Dubner, led to what became a 10-year research project. Eventually, he put the novel in a drawer and began to write about his real-life experience.
He interviewed his mother at great length, did genealogical and archival research, and travelled to Poland to track down the places his family had come from.
As a consequence of their conversions to Ca-tholicism, Dubner’s parents were estranged from many of their Jewish relatives and, because he died when he was very young, Dubner was unable to interview his father.
“My dad died when I was 10, so there was a natural kind of scarcity of information about him and about his past,” Dubner said.
So Dubner tracked down his father’s family, “most of whom I had never heard of, much less ever met.”
During this period of meeting and interacting with his Jewish relatives, Dubner became immersed in Judaism and Yiddishkeit.
“I was learning more about my family, my father in particular, and I was also living in New York as a guy in my mid-to-late 20s. I started to learn about Judaism itself on a lot of different levels,” he said.
“As I began to learn a lot about Judaism, Yiddishkeit and Jewish history, I became more attached to and interested in it.”
Although he was raised as a Catholic, Dubner was, in fact, the child of a Jewish mother. So there was no need for him to go through a conversion process.
Conversion, he said, “would be not only redundant, it would be disrespective of Jewish law to convert. Converting would mean to accept the belief that I was no longer Jewish, where as, halachically, I was.”
Tickets for the Campaign Kickoff event with Dubner are $18. For more information or to purchase tickets, contact Nancy Walkington at nwalkington@jewishottawa.com or 613-798-4696, ext. 241.
Rabbi Scott Rosenberg is new spiritual leader of Beth Shalom
By Jacqueline Shabsove
 After a long search, Congregation Beth Shalom has appointed Rabbi Scott Rosenberg to be its new spiritual leader. He arrived in Ottawa and began his duties in August.
Rabbi Rosenberg, originally from Brooklyn, has many positive things to say about his new city.
“Ottawa is a great city and the people here have been warm, friendly and polite,” he said in an interview with the Bulletin. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know people and learning about Ottawa’s Jewish and broader communities.”
Rabbi Rosenberg earned bachelor’s degrees from both Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 1980. He went on to earn a master’s degree from JTS in 1983 and received his rabbinical ordination there in 1984.
He was certified as a mesader gitten (specialist in Jewish divorce law) in 1988 by the Joint Bet Din of the Rabbinical Assembly, the worldwide association of Conservative rabbis. He went on to become the head of the Rabbinic Court of the New England Region of the Rabbinical Assembly for issues regarding Jewish family law. He also was appointed to serve as a member of the Joint Bet Din of the Conservative movement in 2003 and will continue to serve in these positions while at Beth Shalom.
Rabbi Rosenberg began his career at a congregation in Houston, Texas, and then served for 22 years at Temple Reyim, a Conservative congregation in Newton, Massachusetts, before coming to Ottawa.
While serving at Temple Reyim, he held leadership roles in numerous local and national organizations. He served as the president of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis and president of the New England Region of the Rabbinical Assembly. Also involved with the Boy Scouts movement, Rabbi Rosenberg was a member of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting.
“I love teaching, community and Judaism, and when you put those three things together, it’s the perfect career choice,” he said of his decision to become a rabbi. “I always enjoyed studying the richness of Jewish tradition.”
Rabbi Rosenberg said his teachers at JTS had a great impact on him.
“I’ve been inspired by my teachers through their ability to create contemporary relevance out of ancient teachings,” he said.
Rabbi Rosenberg moved to Ottawa with his wife, Amy Goldman. Daughter, Elana, will also be moving to Ottawa, while sons, Alex and Michael, are pursuing their studies in the U.S.
As a new rabbi in Ottawa, he wants people to feel welcome about coming to him with questions.
“I don’t look at denominational affiliation,” said Rabbi Rosenberg. “I look at who an individual is – who they are and where they’re going. I welcome everyone.”
Rabbi Rosenberg is looking forward to serving at Beth Shalom.
“The opportunity here at Beth Shalom is an exciting one,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to creating programming – educational, social and cultural – that will engage our membership and welcome others to grow and learn along with us.
“I’m looking forward to strengthening Beth Shalom’s position in Ottawa’s Jewish community as a synagogue to which people will come to deepen their appreciation of who they are as Jews and spiritual beings.”
Whitton’s ‘historic significance’ is not worthy of honour
It made headlines recently when it was announced that Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa from 1951 to 1956 and 1960 to 1964, had been nominated for official recognition as a Canadian of “national historic significance.”
Nominations are submitted to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, which investigates and recommends to the minister of the environment which nominees they consider worthy of recognition. The minister then accepts or rejects the board’s recommendation. To date, 648 Canadians have been so recognized.
Whitton’s name was put forward by the Ottawa Committee of the Famous 5 Foundation, an organization that encourages women to participate in politics and public service, because she was the first woman to serve as mayor of a major Canadian city.
Whitton’s nomination became news when it emerged that several major Jewish organizations oppose Whitton’s designation on the basis of her anti-Semitism and have asked Environment Minister Jim Prentice to reject it.
Long before she became mayor, Whitton was one of Canada’s most prominent social workers as director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare for more than 20 years and was instrumental in keeping Jewish refugee orphans out of Canada during the Second World War, thus sealing the fate of many in the Holocaust.
Whitton’s role in that shameful chapter of Canadian history is well documented in None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, and in Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada by my cousin Fraidie Martz. (The Jewish war orphans Martz wrote about in her book were only allowed into Canada beginning in 1947.)
In an op-ed published August 18 in the Ottawa Citizen, Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Mitchell Bellman, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, argue that Whitton’s actions, motivated by anti-Semitism, doomed hundreds of Jewish children to die in the Holocaust. That, they say, should make her ineligible for the historic designation. I agree.
Farber and Bellman also point to an incident that took place in 1964, when Whitton was mayor of Ottawa and refused to allow a half-million dollar donation (worth more than $3.5 million in 2010 dollars) from Jewish philanthropist Bertram Loeb to the Civic Hospital to build and equip a research facility.
In an editorial published March 3, 1964, the Ottawa Citizen attacked Whitton for her decision.
“Why did Miss Whitton do it? This is the question that must be puzzling many Ottawans today,” wrote the Citizen.
In a Globe and Mail obituary published when Loeb died in 2006, it was written that some “suspected that Ms. Whitton cringed at the thought of seeing a Jewish name on a city facility.”
Having now read the through the 1964 Ottawa Citizen coverage of the Whitton-Loeb story, that explanation makes sense to me.
Dave Mullington, the author of a forthcoming biography of Whitton, responded to Farber and Bellman with an op-ed in the Citizen refuting allegations of Whitton’s alleged anti-Semitism with a short list of several interactions Whitton had with Jews or Jewish organizations, which, he wrote, “certainly show that she was not as bigoted as some would have us believe.”
Mullington’s defence of Whitton is ironic in light of a December 3, 1982 article he wrote as a Citizen reporter on assignment at Temple Israel for a presentation Abella and Troper made on Whitton and her role in ensuring that Canada not be a haven for Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Mullington reported, in great detail, on Abella and Troper’s research and unquestioningly quotes the authors as saying Whitton was “an outright racist.”
Community-wide Bulletin
This is the Rosh Hashanah community-wide edition of the Bulletin, one of the two community-wide papers we publish each year and distribute more widely beyond our regular subscriber base.
If you’re not one of our regular subscribers, I hope you’ll become one. The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is the best way to keep up with what’s going on in Ottawa’s vibrant Jewish community. We feature news stories, articles from organizations and agencies, features on interesting people in the community, and lively columns covering a gamut of beats from Canadian politics to world affairs, from values and ethical issues to genealogy, book and music reviews, food and humour and more.
From now through October 29, please take advantage of our special offer on local subscriptions. If you’re already a subscriber, you can extend your subscription from whenever it will expire for up to three more years at the discounted price. Please see page 36 for details.
I’d like to offer my congratulations for a job well done to Jacqueline Shabsove, our summer intern, the first hired under the auspices of the Barry Fishman Ottawa Jewish Bulletin Scholarship Fund. Jackie did excellent work as a reporter and proofreader on the Bulletin’s past three issues. And, although her internship has now ended, I’m looking forward to her contributions in the coming year as one of our freelance reporters.
On behalf of all of us at the Bulletin, Shana Tova!
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