Lila Sarick , our website’s news editor, on the work of covering the Israel-Gaza war’s complex impact on Canadian Jews A first draft of history
S ince Oct. 7, the Canadian Jewish News has published over 200 news stor- ies and first-person columns on its daily website. I’m the news editor, my byline has been on many of those stories and I have assigned and edited nearly all of them. Re- porters, or at least old-school ones like me, were taught to be dispassionate observers, and we maintain that professionalism here. We report what we see and I leave it to our columnists and pundits to try and peer into the future. But I also want to pull back the curtain a bit and tell readers what it’s been like being a Jewish journalist in Canada over the last five months. On the morning of Oct. 7, I was visiting my adult son in the United States. As we got ready for synagogue, we checked our phones. My colleague Ellin Bessner, who hosts The CJN Daily podcast, had already texted me that there was breaking news from Israel. As my son and I scanned the reports, it was clear that something catastrophic had occurred, but it was hard to under- stand what exactly had gone on. The one awful detail that rattled around my brain all morning was a report from a southern kibbutz that a baby had been found, but the parents were missing. What could have happened that a baby had been aban- doned while the parents had disappeared? Now, of course we know the details of those terrible hours and days in Israel. But that morning, as my son and I walked
to synagogue, all we had were questions. How could Israel’s security have been so thoroughly breached? What had happened to that baby’s parents? My son belongs to a lively and thriving independent minyan where decisions are made collectively. That morning, a brief but uncomfortable debate broke out about whether to add a psalm for Israel, just before the Yizkor memorial service. Some people had not looked at their phones be- cause it was a holiday and didn’t yet know the news. Others had already heard from family in Israel who had been called up to fight and were distressed. And one or two, who opposed the addition of a psalm were ambivalent (at best) about Israel. (In the end, a psalm was recited.) On the walk home, another question arose. What would this mean to us in Canada where sentiments about Israel were already complicated and conflicted? Was this an attack on Israel’s very exist- ence, so eerily similar in timing to the Yom Kippur War in 1973? Should we march to the Israel Bonds office, chequebooks in hand, as many in my parents’ generation had—or was this something equally terrible but different? These two parallel currents—the trauma of what had occurred in Israel and its impact on North American Jews—have preoccupied me since that morning. The first story The CJN published about the attack was on Oct. 8. I interviewed the
childhood friends of Vivian Silver, a Winni- peg peace activist, who was presumed to have been kidnapped from her home on Kibbutz Be’eri. Lynne and Michael Mitchell had talked to Silver just a few days before the attack and they were careful to speak about their friend in the present tense, even while Lynne’s voice cracked a little. They told me about her commitment to peace between Israelis and Palestinians and their hope that all her good deeds would somehow spare her. Tragically, Silver’s body was identified weeks later, in the burned-out ruins of her home. The stories of the Canadians killed in the attacks were heartbreaking—some were just kids attending the now infamous rave.
20
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator