Canada: April 17, 2008

More Schools Join Human Rights Program

WINNIPEG —  Nineteen new junior high and high schools from Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland will be joining the Asper Foundation’s human rights and Holocaust education program this year.
Some 1,200 participants from 30 Canadian cities and nine provinces will travel to Washington, D.C., to see freedom memorials and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in five separate trips that began April 6 and run until May  28.
The foundation has funded more than 6,000 participants of many faiths and backgrounds in 101 cities, representing every province and territory, since the program began in Winnipeg in 1997.
The program includes an 18-hour education program on human rights and the Holocaust, with added emphasis on U.S. history, the civil rights movement and the situation in the world today. Students must also volunteer in their communities on public projects when they return.

Kosher Food Coming

CALGARY — Kosher food will be available for the first time in Calgary hospitals by the end of this month or the beginning of May, local community leaders say. The Calgary Jewish Community Council has partnered with Sari Shernofsky, a hospital chaplain in the Calgary Health Region, and local mashgiach Phil Wolfe, to help bring kosher food to the hospitals, the Calgary Jewish Free Press reported. The impetus for the change was a request from a man whose father was ill in hospital and his family had to provide him with kosher food. Shernofsky said pre-packaged kosher meals will be flown in from Vancouver to Calgary’s Rockyview Hospital and distributed from there.

Pearlson Fund Set Up

TORONTO — Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has set up a fund in memory of Temple Sinai’s founding rabbi, Jordan Pearlson. The Jordan Pearlson Scholarship Endowment Fund will help worthy and needy BGU undergraduates, the Canadian Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev announced earlier this month. Rabbi Pearlson, who died Feb. 23 at 83, was involved with BGU since its founding and served as president of the Canadian Associates of BGU for 10 years.

Rwanda Remembered

OTTAWA — A motion to recall the 1994 Rwandan genocide, introduced by Mount Royal MP and Liberal Human Rights Critic Irwin Cotler, passed unanimously April 7 in the House of Commons, 14 years to the day after the killings began. “No one can say that we did not know,” he said. “We knew, but we did not act, just as we know today about [Sudan’s Darfur region], and are not sufficiently acting.” Some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in Rwanda over a three-month period in 1994.