Honouring Holocaust Remembrance Day - A reflection by Tammi Fromstein
A reflection by Tammi Fromstein, speech language pathologist and member of Holland Bloorview’s Jewish Employee Resource Group
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (people) to do nothing - Philosopher Edmund Burke
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day impacts me personally in so many ways. I lost an entire side of my family in the Holocaust, and my family’s last living Holocaust survivor has recently passed away, luckily well into her 90’s. My family also came very close to having another side of our family killed when their Kibbutz was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, and luckily our 22 year old cousin escaped the attack on the Nova Music Festival in Israel. I never thought I’d live to experience the rise of anti-semitism that we have since been seeing around the world, especially in Toronto, which is reminiscent of the stories I used to hear from my grandparents. This includes my family’s history in health care, as they changed their last name to sound “less Jewish”, so my great uncle could get accepted to University of Toronto (U of T) medical school, and we just recently received a formal apology from U of T.
According to Statistics Canada, the Jewish community was the most targeted group for religion-based hate crime in 2024 (68.6 per cent), despite the fact it makes up just 0.9 per cent of the population (acc. to the National Post). For those of us familiar with our history, the antisemitism we’re seeing across health care, university campuses, targeting Jewish owned businesses and synagogues, excluding Jews from the arts, harassing Jews in the street, shooting at and killing Jews (e.g. Bondi Beach), is not new. This was what happened with the spread of Nazism in the 1930’s prior to the Final Solution, which ended with the murder of six million Jews and many other minorities who weren’t considered an “Aryan race”.
I worked with Steven Speilberg’s Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) Foundation many years ago, and after interviewing Holocaust survivors, family photos were taken of the descendants of survivors. Many of them explained their generational trauma to me, but ended by showing how strong and resilient they are, and the wonderful lives they were able to create in Canada. Because Jew hate is an old form of hate that pre-dates the Holocaust, the Jewish community has not only become closer, but we’ve become organized and can stand up for ourselves more than we were able to in the past. What I’ve realized is even the smallest gesture of support or kindness is so appreciated and meaningful, and makes us feel like we’re not going through this difficult time alone.
