‘Something concrete’: Why Asian-Canadians were moved to denounce antisemitism

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Now, we also try to work at the legislative and the policy level, to ensure that the laws and the policies work for people, and to provide what we call ‘effective protection.’ So that’s why we help people bring cases to the Human Rights Commission, and work with the Montreal Police Hate Crimes Unit, in order to make people understand more what the Hate Crimes Unit does, and how to access it, and how to work with police when people are victims of hate crimes.

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On the group’s successes:

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One of our most concrete achievements in dealing with hate-based homophobia, is the case of a gay male couple, bringing the case to the Human Rights Commission. And eventually, the Human Rights Tribunal issued the first decision about homophobic harassment.

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Last August, Montreal City Council was about to adopt the first anti-racism policy, in which there was no mention of hate crimes or antisemitism.

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So we brought together a few groups, black groups, Asian groups, to go public, to deplore the exclusion, and ask that hate crimes be explicitly mentioned as an urban safety issue, and to add antisemitism and Islamophobia into the policy. And it was adopted by city council. We hopefully change the policy and the legal landscape to provide greater legal protection and legal tools for people to seek justice.

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On fighting antisemitism through common experience:

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For example, the president of the Cambodian Community Centre (spoke in a talk about) what it means to be a victim of genocide. They understand the trauma that survivors and their descendants still experience. Out of that, there’s a discussion of maybe going to work more with the Jewish community to address the issue of genocide-related trauma, especially when it’s intergenerational.

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So it’s more than just coming out to speak, but also coming out to speak and create opportunities and things to do together in the short and long term.

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Fo Niemi, co-founder and executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations. Photo by CRARR

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For the Vietnamese community, it’s about recalling how the Jewish community helped the boat people in the 70s, when people fled persecution in Vietnam. And for the Chinese community, what we’ve started to do is we’re looking at the commonality of both communities.

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One of the things we found through our work dealing with heritage preservation is that in Chinatown in the 1880s and in 1890s up to the early 20th century, there was a synagogue in what is now Chinatown, and a lot of people in the Chinese community don’t know that. In the most marvellous experience of visiting the synagogue for everyone, it was the first time that they visited a synagogue. Can you believe it? Wow.

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So coming together is not about just to denounce violence, but also to build bridges and create opportunities for long-term cooperation. This is how we can help send a message, and help reduce antisemitism and anti-Jewish stereotypes. We want to look at the human dimensions of it, and the shared experiences.

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On what’s to come:

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Montreal does not have any kind of infrastructure to celebrate Asian Heritage Month. So we hope that next year we’ll try to integrate some of our activities in such a way that we can address the common heritage of Jews and Asians.

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In the Chinese community, we talk about the experience of the Chinese diplomat (Ho Feng-Shan) in Austria who gave visas to Austrian Jews, during the Second War to go to Shanghai. And we want to tell the story of also the Philippines at the time. They welcomed a lot of European Jews (during the Holocaust), as a way to escape. There’s a history of helping, and fighting intolerance. Hopefully that can be a very powerful educational tool, especially when you deal with real people in real communities today.

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