STIRLING: Shoes and Jews at Calgary City Hall

On September 30 2023, Mayor Jyoti Gondek was engaged in an act of reconciliation with indigenous people. She and several city officials were at Fort Calgary to announce the location of a memorial related to Indian Residential Schools. According to the planning document, the 215 pairs of children’s shoes that once graced the steps of Calgary City Hall will be bronzed, along with the teddy bears and become a permanent memorial to a phantom genocide.The mayor thanked everyone for their patience “…as we made sure we got this memorial right.”Historically, for the Indian Residential School memorial, the mayor got it all wrong.The 215 shoes are meant to echo the display of 20,000 shoes at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum of the Holocaust — the number of Jews typically gassed per day by the Nazis.Jewish Calgarians have many relatives whose shoes are part of this historical display at Auschwitz. Real people. Turned to ashes by antisemites.However, at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, no graves have been found. The shoes at city hall never belonged to such victims. Most were likely made in China, by Uighur slave labourers who are facing cultural and actual genocide. And Teddy Bears were designed as a tribute to Theodore Roosevelt, a man who openly hated Native American Indians.Of the 51 children said to have died while enrolled at the Kamloops Residential School, independent researcher Nina Green has located all but a handful of their complete death certificates. Many are signed by a parent. Most of the children were returned to their reserve for burial there. All but four did not die while at the school. No record of murders. No record of midnight burials by children. It is most likely that the widely memorialized ‘215’ honors the buried clay tiles of an abandoned septic field trench.So the mayor of Calgary pays homage to a phantom genocide and plans to spend a million dollars memorializing it with bronzed shoes and toys that never belonged to anyone.Meanwhile, when Hannukah 2023 (Year 5784 for Jews) rolls around, the mayor turned the 35-year tradition of lighting the menorah at Calgary city hall into a political side show with a last-minute divisive public announcement that she is not attending. Not attending a ceremony that Jews have celebrated in Calgary for 135 years.... In 1990, when Jyoti Gondek was about 21 years old, Calgary City Hall hosted a pictorial exhibit called “Mepa’ate Ma’arav: The Farthest Horizon: 100 years of Jewish History in Alberta.”Most people think Jews immigrated to Canada after World War II and the Holocaust. Certainly, some did — but few people know that hundreds of Jewish people built the city of Calgary from the ground up.In 1888, Jacob Diamond and his wife Rachel, originally from Vilna in Lithuania, became the first permanent Jewish residents of Calgary. That was sixty years before Israel was established as a state. The Diamonds were lighting the menorah for Hannukah back then, safe and sound in Calgary. They settled here eight years before Theodore Herzl wrote his book The State of the Jews — which advocated for a country for Jews, a proposition that was ultimately turned into a reality when the modern-day state of Israel was founded. Herzl was a secular Jew. What prompted him to write such a document? When posted to Paris as a journalist, then culturally considered 'the capital [city] of the century' of the entire Western world, he was revolted by the violence and cries of “Death to the Jews” that echoed in the streets as he covered the trial of Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason. Though Dreyfus was tried, convicted, exiled and jailed, it turned out he had been framed. After a long fight, he was exonerated in 1905, restored to military service and given the Legion d’honneur, the highest French order of merit.Bella Singer and her husband Abe, also Jewish pioneers, arrived in Calgary in 1910, taking up menial tasks and janitorial work. They had seen the rising antisemitism in Poland and found sanctuary and a future in Calgary.Bella Singer lived to the age of 103, safe and sound in Calgary. Her son and his sons became entrepreneurs, real estate magnates and philanthropists, giving back to the community.Many Jews who settled here in Calgary and thrived have gratefully given back to this community — endowing medical facilities, educational facilities and the arts. Virtually every Calgarian has benefitted from the Jewish contributions to Calgary, whether through facilities funded by successful philanthropists, or via the small shops and services that Jews have provided for more than 135 years to their fellow Calgarians.Now the Jews who helped create a beautiful city have suddenly become political pariahs over a festival that, ironically, celebrates the triumph of light over darkness. Now, in their time of sorrow and need of support, they are abandoned by Mayor Gondek — a woman who claimed to “get it right” on something that is all wrong, but fails to do the right thing, with grace, for the Jewish community that has contributed so much to Calgary.It was gratifying to see so many Calgarians did not share Mayor Gondek’s views and they “got it right,” turning out in droves to light the menorah and to stand as one with Calgary’s Jewish community.Michelle Stirling researched, wrote, and co-produced historical shows about Southern Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Dempsey, then curator of the Glenbow Museum.

STIRLING: Shoes and Jews at Calgary City Hall

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