Excerpts from: The Jewish Year in Review, 5777

A "Right to work" slogan making a comeback

• Two Dutch old master paintings that were looted by the Nazis from the late Max Stern, who owned the Dominion Gallery on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, were restituted to his estate in a Dec. 12 ceremony at the Canadian embassy in Berlin. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project has been administered by Concordia University since 2002. These were the 14th and 15th paintings recovered since the program started.

• Helmut Oberlander, 93, who’s accused of being a member of a Nazi mobile death squad, was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in mid-July. He had been stripped of his citizenship in 2001, 2007 and 2012, but it was subsequently reinstated each time. The Nazi unit murdered an estimated 23,000 civilians, most of whom were Jews. Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said CIJA applauds the government for this move.

• The controversial newsletter, Your Ward News, was still being delivered to suburban Toronto homes in August, The CJN reported, despite an order by the federal government last year that Canada Post stop delivering it. The newsletter frequently contains racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, Holocaust-denying and Nazi-glorifying content in its pages. The paper’s editor-in-chief said it was being delivered by volunteers and private companies.

• A candidate for the leadership of the federal NDP rejected the endorsement of a newspaper publisher who has denied the Holocaust and praised terrorist attacks against Israel. B’nai Brith Canada praised Niki Ashton for refusing the backing of Nazih Khatatba and his Arab-language newspaper, al-Meshwar.

• An Ottawa teen who vandalized several Jewish buildings last autumn, and who professed pro-Nazi sympathies, was sentenced to a year in custody, including time served, on Aug. 31.

• Montreal city council adopted a resolution to rename Alexis Carrel Avenue and Alexis Carrel Park in the Rivière-des-Prairies-Pointe-aux-Trembles borough. Carrel (1873-1944) was a French physician who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. He was accused of collaborating with the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France. The street will be named in honour of Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012), an Italian-Jewish physician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986, while the park will commemorate Don Bosco, a 19th-century Italian priest who devoted his life to underprivileged youth and was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1934.

Source: The Jewish Year in Review, 5777

Since Baby Boomers have become the New Jew, my solidarity with persecuted Jews has become... solidified. This time they're coming for the 1946-1964 generation.

Had our young Catholic zealot been acquainted with Don Bosco, he may have been more circumspect in his speech. To be fair, his attitudes are not his invention. The "prolife" movement had been circulating these memes years before he appeared in the internet wasteland. It was just waiting for a suitable mouthpiece. There goes the John Paul II generation.