|
|
 
Remembering Sam Kaplan
RABBI JONATHAN KAPLAN
Publisher and editor-in-chief for 36 years of the Jewish Western Bulletin, veteran Canadian journalist Samuel Kaplan died in Vancouver on Tuesday, July 15, 2008, in his 83rd year. He was buried in Israel on Thursday evening, July 17, at Eretz HaChaim cemetery in the Jerusalem Hills.
Rabbi Baruch Zaichyk, Sam Kaplan's rabbi in Vancouver for 10 years, led the funeral services at which a large gathering of family and friends heard eulogies from Sam's son, Jonathan, and granddaughter, Franny Kaplan, who lives in Israel.
A special community-wide memorial service will be held Sunday, Aug. 17, at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue at 7 p.m. to mark the end of the Shloshim (30-day mourning period).
Born in Winnipeg, Man., on June 30, 1925, Kaplan was the fifth of six children of Rachmiel and Sarah Kaplan, who emigrated to Canada from Kremenchuk, Ukraine. A graduate of St. John's Tech in Winnipeg's famous North End melting pot of Canadian intellectuals and artists, he sang lead roles in Gilbert and Sullivan in high school.
Kaplan joined the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, where he served as a wireless telegrapher on a Corvette (fast attack boat) stationed in Halifax.
After the war, Kaplan attended the University of Manitoba, where he met his future wife, Mona Rich. They married on May 9, 1948, and saw the headline "State of Israel Declared" on their honeymoon. Still reeling from the Holocaust, Sam's wife recalls how he determined that day to dedicate his life to helping Jews who were in trouble anywhere in the world.
Kaplan's five-decade career in journalism began with a summer job in 1946 as a journalism intern at the daily Winnipeg Free Press. He later worked for five years as editor of the weekly Western Jewish News in Winnipeg and, subsequently, as editor of the English section of the Israelite Press, a Yiddish-English weekly.
In 1960, Kaplan was invited by the Vancouver Jewish Community Council to become editor of its weekly Anglo-Jewish newspaper. Kaplan and his wife, Mona, took over the Jewish Western Bulletin and, within two years, the husband-wife team transformed it into an independent weekly able to cover all its expenses and end a decades-old community subsidy.
In 1979, Sam Kaplan received the Smolar Award for Excellence in North American Jewish journalism for a series of interviews he did in Egypt prior to the Camp David Peace Treaty. He was twice named as runner-up for the same award, and received a 20th Israel Anniversary Award of Excellence for a full-color tourism edition in 1968.
In recognition of his efforts as president of the B.C. Ethnic Press Association and the Canadian Ethnic Press Association, Kaplan received the Canada Centennial Medal, which was presented to him by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in Montreal, as well as a Canada 125 Medal.
Over the decades, Kaplan interviewed and wrote in-depth articles on Jewish and international newsmakers on five continents, including two interviews with David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, Moshe Sharett, Israel's second prime minister, Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize winner and current president of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Moses Rosen, chief rabbi of Romania, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Simon Wiesenthal, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who became a personal friend, and activist Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kaplan frequently was interviewed on CBC Radio and Television on events in Canadian Jewish life and Israel.
Kaplan worked with historian Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, to help free Russian Jews. He reprinted Gilbert's revealing articles on the condition of Jewish prisoners in the Gulag (Siberian prison camps) on the Bulletin's front pages. He also ran a weekly "Gulag Record," chronicling the imprisonment of key Soviet refuseniks in the Gulag for the crime of wanting to emigrate to Israel, and encouraging his readership to write appeals to help win their freedom. Sir Martin Gilbert took editions of the Bulletin into Russia to show refuseniks, and reported the enormous hope it gave them that a newspaper on Canada's Pacific coast was fighting for their freedom. All are now free.
Prior to Camp David, Kaplan and his wife went to Cairo for a series of interviews with Egyptian leaders on the prospects for peace. Kaplan was the first Jewish journalist to be granted an interview with Dr. Butros Butros Ghali, then Egyptian foreign minister and later UN secretary general. He also interviewed Tahshin Bashir, then head of the Arab League, who later became Egypt's ambassador to Canada.
The journalist and his wife undertook a memorable 23-hour train trip from Beijing to Kaifeng, China, to find and interview one of the few living descendants of the ancient Jews of Kaifeng, who came to China via the Silk Route in the 12th century.
Kaplan served as founding president of the Canadian Zionist Federation in Vancouver, was president of Congregation Schara Tzedeck for two terms, headed the Vancouver State of Israel Bonds campaigns for two years and founded the first Vancouver Ulpan Institute to teach conversational Hebrew. He also was very active and held numerous offices in B'nai Brith.
Samuel Kaplan is survived by Mona, his wife of 60 years; his three sons: Frank Barry in Nanaimo, Jonathan and wife Abbe, in Memphis, Tenn., and Rabbi David Kaplan and wife Rochel, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; five grandchildren: Zachary, Franny, Ezra, Yaakov and Tully; his sisters, Esther Finkle and Lily Kaplan, and brother, Jack Kaplan, all of Winnipeg; and many cousins, nieces and nephews.
The family requests that donations in memory of Samuel Kaplan be sent to the Pacific Torah Institute in Vancouver (www.ptibc.org) or to Canadian Magen David Adom (www.cmdai.org).
(^top of page)
Discover community's past
Learn all about the city's Jewish history through your feet.
RON FRIEDMAN
In honor of B.C. Day and with this year marking the 150th anniversary of Jewish settlement in the province, the Jewish Independent took advantage of the balmy weather and went on a walking tour organized by the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.
The tour, called In the Footsteps of Jewish Vancouver 1886-2006, takes participants on an approximately five-kilometre journey through the neighborhoods of Gastown and Strathcona, visiting some of the city's earliest Jewish landmarks. The philosophy behind the tour is that, to learn about community, one needs to know about the people who lived and worked in the neighborhood. To that purpose, the staff of the museum pored over piles of archival material, including hundreds of photographs, letters and documents, as well as hours of oral histories, in order to give participants a real sense of early Jewish life in Vancouver.
The walking tour starts off in historic Gastown, at the intersection of Abbott and Water streets. Our guide was Naomi Goldman and the first stop along the way was 42 Water St., the site of what was formerly Zebulon Franks hardware store. It was in this two-storey building that the first Jews in Vancouver got together to pray. Franks' was one of many Jewish businesses located on Water Street in Vancouver's early days, when the city was little more than a few dirt roads along the banks of Burrard Inlet. The Jews of the time were mostly merchants and peddlers, people who came over from eastern Europe and set up businesses outfitting prospectors.
The original store burnt down in the Great Fire of 1886. When the site was renovated in recent years, the owner wanted to have the façade look exactly as it did in its original form but, not having the plans, the designer only managed to get it nearly right, inserting one too many windows on the second level. In the back of Franks' store was Blood Alley. Goldman gave us two possible explanations for the name, either because it was a place where public executions were carried out or because there were several butcher shops on the street and the blood from their work would flow down the alley.
Our second stop was opposite a building that takes up a full city block. When 22-year-old Sam Cohen opened the Army and Navy store in 1922, after making a fortune selling liquidation stock from closing, bankrupt or destroyed stores, the Gastown area was the commercial centre of Vancouver. Etchings from the time show horse-drawn carriages, dapper men and well-dressed women strolling down the street. You get the feeling that this was once the trendy part of town but, today, the smell of urine is thick in the air in one of the most neglected parts of the city.
Before it was bought by Cohen, the building was home to Vancouver's first community Yom Kippur services. In 1892, the Agudace Achim Society rented a hall in the building from the fraternal order, the Knights of Pythias. The building is now owned by Vancouver socialite Jacqui Cohen, Sam Cohen's granddaughter.
A short distance from the Army and Navy store is the site of the Oppenheimer Grocery Warehouse, named after its owners and Vancouver's second mayor, David Oppenheimer and his family. Learning a lesson from the fire that consumed nearly all the city,
Oppenheimer and his brothers constructed their warehouse out of brick - it was the first brick building in Vancouver. On the invitation of the Oppenheimers, city hall, which at the time was housed in a tent while a new building was being built, temporarily operated out of their warehouse. The building, which is now listed as a world heritage site, was purchased by singer Brian Adams in 1991. It currently functions as a world-class recording studio, where Canada's top musicians, like Avril Lavigne and Sarah Mclachlan, come to record.
A 10-minute walk east brings participants to 496 Hastings St. and the site of the Orwell Hotel. Though it functions as a low-income housing development today, during the 1920s and '30s, it was the centre of Vancouver's Zionist activities. Housing organizations like Young Judea and the Zionist and Social Society, the Zionist Hall played a central part of the community in the days that forming a Jewish homeland in Palestine was one of its main focuses.
Another story of entertainment trivia is told at the next stop along the way. On the corner of Hastings and Dunlevy streets sits an old seven-storey building called Ferrera Court. Once the home of a Jewish family headed by local tailor, David Marks, a small apartment in this building was the meeting place of a couple that would go on to become one of the world's most renowned comedy teams – Jack Benny and Mary Livingston. (You can find out more on the tour.)
The walk then takes participants past Strathcona public school. Goldman told us that, in the early 20th century, most of the area's Jewish children would have gone to this school, where they would have encountered the children of immigrants from all over the world. Although she described the Jewish community of the time as very tight knit, she also said that the neighborhood was very multicultural and that Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine would regularly intermingle with non-Jewish Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Irish and others. While the wealthier, more established Jews, who tended to live in the West End, spoke mainly English, Yiddish was the common language in Strathcona.
The next stop was a place that could be described as Vancouver's first Jewish community centre. In a residential house, built in the Queen Anne-style of architecture, at 800 Jackson Ave., the Vancouver branch of the Council of Jewish Women was first established in 1924. Two years later, the house turned into a so-called neighborhood house, serving as a second home to many of the city's newcomers, offering English classes, library facilities and a children's summer camp. In 1927, a well-baby clinic was opened there. The house closed shortly after the first Jewish community centre opened, on Oak Street, in 1928.
A short distance away, we came to a house that once was the site of a Jewish-owned grocery store and butchery. Owned by the Merin family, Zion Grocery was a hub of the neighborhood, a place for Jews to socialize with friends and relatives and gossip while making their weekly purchases. Goldman told the group that people would often buy chickens for Shabbat in nearby Chinatown and then give them to the grocer/shochet (ritualistic slaughterer), who would then prepare them according to the laws of kashrut. Families who couldn't afford to pay for their groceries in cash would occasionally trade clothes and family trinkets as barter.
On the other side of the street is where Rabbi Nathan Mayer Pastinsky lived. Stories tell that when Pastinsky first arrived in Vancouver from Winnipeg in 1918 and saw flowers on the ground, where in Winnipeg there had still been feet of snow, he immediately knew that this was the place for him. While initially engaged to perform the ritualistic duties of shochet, mohel (circumciser) and cantor, Pastinsky, or, as he was affectionately known, Father Pat, soon assumed full rabbinical duties. From Goldman's stories, it's clear that Pastinsky was a character, indeed.
Near the rabbi's home lies the site of the original Schara Tzedeck Synagogue (which has since relocated to 19th and Oak). Located at the intersection of Pender and Heatley, the synagogue was initially named Bnei Yehudah (Sons of Israel) and was renamed Schara Tzedeck. In a show of community solidarity, the construction of the Orthodox synagogue was made possible, in a large part, by the aid of the city's more well-heeled Jews, many of whom affiliated with the Reform movement. Recognizing the importance of the synagogue, the wealthier community members, many hailing from German or British origin and longtime residents of Canada, banded together with the poorer and more recent immigrant Jews of the area to build the city's first substantial Jewish building, with room for 600 people. Today, the building still has the exterior characteristics of a synagogue and even has an engraving of the Ten Commandment tablets on its front, but functions as a condominium.
The last part of the walking tour is optional, as it takes participants through some of the roughest parts of the Downtown Eastside. East Hastings Street, sometimes referred to as Skid Row, is a gathering point for many of the city's homeless, drug addicts and people with mental or other disabilities. This area was once lined with Jewish-owned businesses. Now all that remains to remind of those days are the old B.C. Collateral Loan, Gastown's oldest business, once owned by Harry Evans, and Knowlton's drug store, which at one time was owned and operated by Mike Ratner and Al Ragosin.
Longtime Jewish Western Bulletin advertisers, the Hub, a fancy men's clothing store at 45 Hastings St., is currently occupied by United We Can, a recycling depot that services the city's bottle collectors. The San Francisco tailors/cleaners/pawnbroker shop was one of Vancouver's longest-running businesses, owned by three generations of the Snider family – the store, originally established in 1908, closed earlier this year and is now a vacant lot.
The walking tour of historic Jewish Vancouver is a great way to learn both about the Jewish community and its early days and about the Gastown/Strathcona neighborhoods and its waves of success and failure. The richness of the experience depends mostly on your degree of inquisitiveness. While not too strenuous, the tour does consist of two hours of walking at a relatively brisk pace and, due to construction work in several places along the route, it is not wheelchair friendly. While it is possible to take the tour independently, it is not recommended to go alone because, as mentioned, the walk takes you through some unsavory places.
Remaining guided tours take place Wednesdays, July 30, Aug. 13 and 27, at 1:30 p.m.; and Sundays, Aug. 10, 17 and 31, at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The tours leave punctually, so be sure to get there on time or even a few minutes early. For more information and to book a space, contact the Jewish museum at 604-257-5199. Tickets are $10 and participants receive a booklet that includes historical summaries and an easy-to-follow map.
|
