Phyllis Senese Interview

J. Stanger Ross: 00:00:00 Let's see. Okay, there we go. So now it's recording. So usually
we start by just situating ourselves so that if this digital file gets
lost from everything else, they'll just know what's going on by
turning it on. So I'm Jordan Stanger Ross at the University of
Victoria with the Defying Hatred Project. And I'm sitting here
with Phyllis Senese in her home at 1865 Ventura Way in Victoria
or Saanich?

Phyllis Senese: 00:00:25 Victoria.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:00:25 Victoria. And we're doing an interview for the Defying Hatred
Project. Um, we talked in advance about there being three,
three major themes to the, to the interview. The first being kind
of biographical. How did, how, I'm asking folks, how did you end
up involved in memorial or educational work around the Shoah?
And then, uh, the second is to talk about the nature of that
work. And then the third is to discuss ideas a bit. What... What
do you think this work is for? What do you think it
accomplishes? What's good- examples of good work and, and
less good work? Um, generally I'm pretty quiet in these
interviews. I find that folks have, have a lot to say. So I'm, I'm...
And that's great, I'm learning a lot from them. So, I'm, I'm just
happy to start with that first broad topic, however you want to
approach it. So what how, how did your life lead you to be
working in the area?

Phyllis Senese: 00:01:33 It started when I was very young. Um, it probably was early
fifties that I saw pictures in a history book that was in our
house... pictures from the Second World War and specifically a
picture, I'm guessing it probably was from Auschwitz. It's a very
well known photograph of men in tier bunk beds staring out at
the camera. And I couldn't understand... Really what I was
seeing because what struck me was their eyes, a kind of
deadness, and I wasn't used to seeing pictures like that. And my
mother would explain to me, in very general terms, what it was
about and that, that sparked a curiosity that just stayed with
me. So that through junior high school, through high school,
um, I was reading books about the Second World War, about
the Shoah, sort of very broad, mainly trying to understand how
it could have happened. That was what really puzzled me when
I was very young was, "How could this have happened?" And I
knew about perhaps not antisemitism specifically, but I knew
that there were groups in society that were typically called
names, pushed to the margins, people that others made bad
jokes about, but I didn't have a vocabulary for it. So it was, it
was basically that kind of, um, questioning that got me going
and it just stayed with me. Um, I didn't have any courses at
university. They just didn't exist about the Shoah. When it came



into discussion, it was always tangential, except for one course.
It was an American colonial history course. And Jill Conway was
the professor and she had us reading, um, along with our
history, a variety of sociology books, articles. And one of them
was about survivors and survivor guilt, uh, which was for me, a
new dimension. But that was about it in terms of, um,
undergraduate or graduate even graduate work. But the
questions stayed with me. So when I began to teach, uh, even
as a graduate student doing lectures, uh, I in Canadian history, I
would always bring in the Japanese experience and I would talk
about the Shoah, all of which completely both baffled and
amazed my students because they'd never heard of either. And
I can remember one evening it when I was still in Toronto at-
lecturing at Atkinson College at York, during the break a
Japanese Canadian came up to me and, and, uh, kind of
whispered that, "My family was part of that story and we, we
went on an extended vacation." And that's all he wanted to say
was just, you know, I know what you're talking about, but he
didn't want to discuss it any further. So I think that was another
dimension that I found interesting was the silence around a lot
of these questions that people who had experienced them
didn't want to talk about them. And that basically gave
everybody else permission never to talk about it either. Um, and
I just kept up that pattern of including these kinds topics, uh, in
my courses when I started teaching at UVic and by the late
eighties, um, having sort of been plugging holes in the
department, we had no one, for example, teaching the history
of women in Canada. So I invented a course and taught it for
several years. Then we hired Lynne, so I could pass that off. And
I decided at that point, I'd like to try a course on racism and
antisemitism in Canadian history, just to see how it would work
and what kind of reception it got. So I had to go and make notes
because I couldn't remember. That started in the fall of 1987 as
a special topics course and it went really well. So I offered it
again the next year and it stayed as a, a half year course until
1995-96, when it became a year long course. I had decided
there was just too much material and my students wanted
more. So I, I began with actually two sections because the, the
student demand was so, so huge. Then after it had been going
for about a year or so, and the department had to face the
question, could I devote that much of my teaching load just to
one course and began to say, "Maybe we need to pull back a
bit." But at that point, Continuing Studies stepped in and said,
we want this course, so we'll pay for one section because we're
starting a diploma course on international relations and we
want this as part of our package. So I taught it as two, two
sections of a full year course, um, until 2000. At that point I was
looking towards early retirement and I went to half-time



teaching. So we split the course again into two parts with 1900
as a dividing line. And I would teach the first half in the fall, and
then a sessional would teach the second half in the winter term.
And that kept running until I left and you arrived.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:08:35 Mhmm.

Phyllis Senese: 00:08:35 While all that was going on, I was also doing talks at, um, local
churches or anybody that wanted to hear about it. One of the
people who knew about what I doing was Doug Beardsley from
the English department and he had become friends with Peter
Gary, who had recently arrived in Victoria. And one of the
things, um, well two things came out of that. One was a course
that Doug set up in the English department looking at the Shoa
and the three of us initially team taught it. I would start the
course with a number of lectures to set the historical context
and particularly the long history of antisemitism, which never
gets talked about enough I think. And, and people need to be
not just aware of it, but almost, um, jolted by it. So that was
what I would do. Then Doug would do a section on looking at
various literary works that the students would be reading. And
then Peter would end the course with memoire and the, the
Holocaust survivors' perspective. Um, and again, that ran until
Doug retired. And, uh, which was about the same time I did.
Peter didn't continue participating throughout the whole history
of the course because he got busy with other projects. One of
the projects Peter got involved with was he began to speak at
high schools here in Victoria and up-island, on the sunshine
coast, about his own life, his own experiences and that got
bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, the, there was a publication
that was put together here in Victoria by a number of survivors
who basically had a chapter about their experiences. So there
was, there were a lot of things happening, but it was also clear
that the, the older generation of survivors were starting to die
off. Um, one of the things that Peter then did was found the
[organization]

. And through Doug, he had invited me to participate in
that. And I've been doing that ever since. Um, well we [cough]
excuse me. What we focused on was the high school education
aspect . There were other things that
were being done at the same time. Many of them were just one
time events. One of them that, that I thought was very powerful
was a day long [event] at Vic High with Peter and a
couple of other survivors. And then some aboriginal elders who
had experienced the residential schools. There was a general
assembly where they all spoke and then the students were
divided up into smaller study groups and each group met with a
survivor and an elder and talked about those experiences. And



that would have been something I think that would have been
great to carry on. Um, that raised issues that got bigger and
bigger later on. Um... So I guess that's how I got started and
what kinds of things I was doing. I participated in the
Kristallnacht observation at the synagogue, uh, at the, um,
Shoah memorial at the cemetery. Uh, and that lasted until just
the last couple of years.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:13:11 I'm curious about your experience over time, so as you've
described, so, um, starting, I guess from the beginning of the
biographical sketch that you provided, so in the 1950s as you
started to develop an interest in the topic, you said there wasn't
formal education. Was this something, was it a topic you could
talk about with your family? Was it a topic you could talk about
with your friends? How did that interest of yours fit into other
people's views of the, or willingness to talk about the topic?

Phyllis Senese: 00:13:53 I think it was mostly a solitary kind of, um... Activity because my
mother was interested in history and she and I would often talk
about it. My father less so, because he really wasn't interested
in, in history and didn't have much time. Uh, but it wasn't
something that any of my friends were interested in or even my
teachers. Um, so it was, it was a pretty solitary thing. And when
I started doing more and more work in my lectures on the
Shoah, uh, on the Japanese experience, uh, basically I went and
did the learning from ground zero on my own. And, um...

J. Stanger Ross: 00:14:53 And you were growing up- Did you say you were growing up in
Toronto and did you do your schooling there?

Phyllis Senese: 00:14:57 I did my, no, I did my university undergraduate and PhD in
Toronto. My undergraduate degree was in, uh, his-modern
history at U of T. And then I did my PhD at York. I was in the first
class of PhD students at York... So yeah, it was mostly just on my
own.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:15:28 Yeah. And you mentioned in one of your classes there was a
kind of, um, adjacent reading to help you, I guess, understand
colonial history. So then w- at that point was that, was that a
graduate seminar, did you say?

Phyllis Senese: 00:15:44 No, it was a fourth year.

New Speaker: 00:15:44 An undergrad? A fourth year class. So was that a context where
now folks were talking about the, the Holocaust, you know,
whether you're... the other students in the class had...



Phyllis Senese: 00:15:55 Not really.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:15:55 Yeah.

Phyllis Senese: 00:15:56 It was, it was a topic in a series of topics.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:16:00 Uh huh.

Phyllis Senese: 00:16:00 And um, it's very, it's a, it's an ironic situation because, uh, I was
at university college, in the college system of Toronto, and that
was a predominantly Jewish college. The rest of them were
church affiliated. And even among my, my friends at the college,
the Shoah was not a big topic of discussion. Um, now, many of
them, one of my classmates was Rosie Silberman, who is justice
Rosalie Silberman Abella on the Supreme Court, a survivor or
the child of survivors herself born in a camp, in Germany. But it
was not something that was talked about. I think it was part of
that, that era of silence. And it's only as you get into the 70s
that more and more work in a kind of public way is being done
about Holocaust education. So for example, there's the big
week-long Holocaust education program that's been running in
Toronto for decades. Um, but those, those come later, I think
the fifties and sixties were, here as in many parts of Europe, it
was still time for silence. And it's the, the, the younger
generation that become unafraid of speaking that starts turning
things around. You can see the same kind of pattern in Canada
with the various ethnic communities. Um, let's not talk about
our experiences our past. Um, but then by the sixties and
seventies, you get a younger generation, so they no, we're
gonna talk about it. Um, so it's, it's part of that whole late
sixties, early seventies era of change. And I think the, the history
of the show on response to it is very much rooted in that, that
context.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:18:30 When you finished your phd in...

Phyllis Senese: 00:18:33 '76.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:18:34 And then did you come directly out here or...

Phyllis Senese: 00:18:38 I finished my comps and all my coursework in '72 and that's
when I started at UVIC.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:18:46 Okay.

Phyllis Senese: 00:18:47 It was still the days when, I think I was probably one of the last
people hired without a completed PhD. And that was what took



me four years to finish it because I was teaching. And each year
it seemed I had a new course to get moving into the system. So
it was a, it was a slow process.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:19:10 Yeah. And you s- you started teaching these topics in the eight-,
in the late eighties, in '87?

Phyllis Senese: 00:19:18 As a s- as a separate course-

J. Stanger Ross: 00:19:21 As a s- But you'd been uh-

Phyllis Senese: 00:19:21 I'd been weaving it into my-

J. Stanger Ross: 00:19:23 Weaving it in-

Phyllis Senese: 00:19:23 My general Canadian history course.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:19:26 So from the 70s onward, you been te- from the 70s to the early
2000s, in one way or another, you'd been teaching the topic.

Phyllis Senese: 00:19:34 Right.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:19:34 So initially you said students were kind of, what were those and
what were those responses in those early years? In the 70s
when you'd do a lecture or two, or a reading on...

Phyllis Senese: 00:19:49 Their, their reaction was sort of like mine when I was, when I
was younger of how could this be happening in Canada? How
could this be happening in the world and why haven't I heard
about it? And that last response was the one that I got typically
every year, right 'til I retired, um, at least one person, and it was
usually many more, every year on the course evaluation would
write, "I'm very angry that nobody ever talked about this before
now. I'm a fourth year student. How come nobody ever talked
about this subject before now?" and "I want more." Um, and
that was, that was, that was a typical reaction. They also,
especially when I went to a year long course, um, students had
more time through their reading, through their own research
projects, to get more emotionally engaged. And they found that
very hard too, I think they had always thought of history as
something that you keep at arm's length. And it had never been
for many of them, taught in a way that seemed relevant to their
own time, to their own lives. And that showed up in the course
evaluations too. It got to the point where I would tell them at
the beginning of the year that this course is going to depress
you and by March you're going to feel like you're in a very black



place because of the material. That's normal. And that's
something you can learn from. Think about your reactions.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:21:56 In this, in the ear- the earliest period of your teaching, when it
was completely new information to folks, did you ever get
negative reactions? I don't mean to your teaching, I mean, but
to the topic were people ever...

New Speaker: 00:22:10 No, no. The most reaction I ever got that was critical was from
students who grew up in an evangelical Christian family and
were still involved in their own churches because one of the
things I did, um... I had always talked about the long history of
antisemitism. But once I got to a year long course, I had a bit
more space. And I talked very specifically about how Christianity
emerges out of Judaism. The quarrels between two groups of
Jews initially and the relationship of that to the Roman empire
and how what is happening at the time and then when Christian
scriptures are being written is very critical to understanding why
antisemitism is so deeply rooted in Western culture. And I
found that there were some evangelical background students
who were very uneasy about looking at church history critically.
And the idea that Jesus had been a Jew was something that to
them was incomprehensible. And I did find that with the long
explanation, I would sometimes be able to engage with these
students. Sometimes they didn't want to talk about it, but the
ones that did, uh, in the end would say, well, "I can't agree with
everything you say, but I understand what you're trying to show
us and that makes sense to me but I'm not sure about the
church history." And of course, most of them know nothing
about church history in that period. It seems for many of them,
it starts with Martin Luther and the reformation, and that's real
Christianity. Whereas the earlier versions and the Papal versions
are not legitimate. And that was how I think they'd cope with
the, um, the ideas that they, they found just too, too much
strained, their, their own comprehension. But I didn't have
anybody, um... that was hostile. The day

at Vic High, there was a little group of boys who
were in grades 11 and 12 who were self-styled neo-Nazis who
kept trying to disrupt the event all day long.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:25:26 This was the one with the residential school survivors.

New Speaker: 00:25:29 Yes. And, um, seeing them operate that day, I expected that
they might show up for my class and I was, I was waiting every
year to see if, if somebody like that is going to show up to take
the course with the intention of disrupting it, but they never
did.



J. Stanger Ross: 00:25:51 What did they do ?

Phyllis Senese: 00:25:53 Oh, they would just jump to their feet and start interrupting
speakers. And particularly the, the Holocaust survivors, it was,
you know, "It's all a fraud. It's all been invented, you know, the,
the Jews just want to make money." Um, they didn't attack the
resi-, the residential school survivors in the same way. They
were really focused on the, the Jewish survivors.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:26:20 And how, how was that handled?

Phyllis Senese: 00:26:23 We left it to the student body to handle and the, the student
council executive already had so much experience with these
fellows that they, they just simply shut them out. You know,
we're not going to listen to you and no, you can't have the
microphone and no, you can't participate.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:26:43 Hmm.

Phyllis Senese: 00:26:44 Um, this is not your event. This is a different event. Um, there
were some that showed up when we used to have the [event]

at the UVIC Auditorium. So there were a
couple of years when men from the Jewish community would
come and stand guard, as it were, as the high school students
were arriving and, and filing into the auditorium. And a couple
of times there were, um, verbal confrontations, but that was all
very short lived. So there wasn't, there wasn't the kind of
backlash that I know has occurred at other universities, both in
Canada and elsewhere. Um... The [organization]

has done a number of times, put on, um, events at UVIC
to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January.
But again, it was, it was not, uh, something that was disrupted
by anybody.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:27:57 I'm curious about the syllabus of that course that you taught,
which I inherited. And I think at that time I didn't know that
there was a filing cabinet where we could learn from one
another. So I just invented mine whole cloth. But so I'm curious
to how that, the different elements of that course came
together.

Phyllis Senese: 00:28:21 It was probably a reflection, most of all of my own
preoccupations of trying to understand something. So I, for
example, with the year long course on racism and antisemitism
in the early part of the course, I would do what I called a
Judaism 101, Christianity 101, and Islam 101. And what are
these traditions? What are the, what are the central core



elements of these traditions and then how have they
intersected over time. So that, that was part of, um, my own
preoccupation and it seemed to me that it was, it was going to
be difficult for students to understand how something like
racism, something like antisemitism, any form of hate could be
deeply rooted in a society and continue for a very long time. So
we would spend time talking for example, about the concept of
the other. And for many of them that was a new idea. Now it's
very commonplace, but in the eighties and nineties, it wasn't,
um, my objective was to get them to see it as a kind of dynamic
thing and how it could be changing its shape, its form, but the
core reamined the same then with Canadian history it was a
matter of finding what is available that will give them a sense of
how these concepts have operated in Canadian history. Um, I'd
liked also to use literature, so sometimes I'd throw in a novel,
um, because it really illustrated something. Um, so it was just a
question of, of in way trial and error, of the Canadian history
material, what's available, what is out there, what's accessible.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:30:47 You were teaching, in effect, some ancient history. And then
you were teaching, you were teaching some Holocaust in that
course?

Phyllis Senese: 00:30:56 Oh yeah. Yeah.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:30:57 So how did, um, so that, so you were teaching some European
history?

Phyllis Senese: 00:31:02 I was teaching world history.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:31:03 Yeah.

Phyllis Senese: 00:31:04 That was again, one of my, yeah, one of my own hobby horses
was that, uh, I didn't think students could really appreciate the
complexity of Canadian history without understanding where it
fit into a much larger historical context. So whether I was talking
about the Shoah or I was talking about the fur trade, I was also
always talking about it in a global context. So they got ancient
history, religious history, European history, American history,
British history- and how does this all play out here?

J. Stanger Ross: 00:31:52 Mm hmm. And what were your core? Uh, did you have a..
[laughs] I've become unduly focused! But I think folks will be
interested. Uh, maybe we should, uh, I dunno if you'd be able to
share some syllabi or whether the department still has it, but
we could archive them with the, uh...



Phyllis Senese: 00:32:10 Yeah, they should, they should still have them.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:32:11 Yeah. Um, with your permission, we'll talk about that after. But
um, so what were the touchstones in Canadian history? You
know, once you had done all that contextual work, what were
the, how did you anchor or connect the work you had done on
the origins of those religions and European history of violence
and how did you bring those to Canada for your students?

Phyllis Senese: 00:32:41 I used the idea of cultural baggage. When Europeans go out and
start colonizing what are they bringing with them? And there's
usually a great deal of emphasis on economics. For example, the
economics of the fur trade or institutions. Where do our
government institutions come from? Why did Canadian
institutions develop the way they did, and the Americans
coming from the same route go a different way? So in addition
to those kinds of more, I would say traditional, ways of looking
at it, I really centered it on the focus of cultural baggage. What
else are they bringing? What ideas, what attitudes? So for
example, one of... A book that I, I quite liked was a book on
European history, um, and the name of the author has escaped
me, but it's the making of Europe. And essentially the argument
there was how the Indigenous cultures of Europe are gradually
overwhelmed by the Franco Germanic. And there were some
wonderful quotations from documents, um, 13th, 14th century,
that sounded like Nazi propaganda. And I would take the, the
specific names out and then I would read it to my students and I
would then say who is speaking about whom? And they would
say, oh, it's, it's some Nazi propagandist writing about Jews in
the 1930s. No, it's the Poles writing about Germans in the 13th
century, or some other kind of example. That was a way of
getting them to see that the ideas and attitudes are very old
when they come to Canada. And with it, you then can look at
colonialism and say, why, why Europeans treated the
Indigenous population in a certain way. It's because they have a
history. They practiced in Europe, uh, eliminating minorities,
assimilating them, overwhelming their languages, their
religions. Homo- trying to homogenize them, um, and to, to a
certain degree, they are successful. In a certain degree, there's a
resistance that still continues. But they bring that frame of mind
with them, that attitude, that this is an appropriate way to
behave. It's not something they invent in North America
because they need to figure out how to operate. They come
with a, with a set of ideas.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:36:06 And is it just kind of, I guess, I think squaring the circle, I'm not
sure. Uh, um, is it, is it the argument of the course? Is it your



argument that antisemitism, or hatred of Jews, is a kind of core
constitutive element of that cultural baggage?

Phyllis Senese: 00:36:26 Oh Yes. One of the things I tried exploring with them at the
beginning of the course was language and how we use
language. Um, and how the word antisemitism came into
existence. That there is, there exists before that word a hatred
of Jews. And what is Marr trying to say when he says, "No, I'm
not, I don't hate Jews for religious reasons. I hate them because
I'm a racist. I'm a scientific racist." Um, what does he mean
when he says that? Alright, let's, let's open that up a bit more.
When he says he's this kind of modern, scientific racist, look at
what he says about Jews. What is different about that than
someone writing in the 12th century? Is there a fundamental
difference? And when you unpack it, the answer is no. He's
looking for a way to say, I'm not one of those old fogies and I'm
not religious. I'm a modern, secular person. But how do I talk
about this topic? I have already have a framework. I already
have a language. Oh, I'll invent a new word but it's an a new
word that says the same thing. Um, I guess what it comes, came
down to was I didn't see any distinction between saying that up
to him, it's hatred of Jews, and then it's something different,
because if you look at the long history of hatred of Jews, it's got
political elements, economic elements, social elements, not just
religious. So it's much more complicated. And, um, what I, I
guess all of that was trying to reinforce with them over and over
again that the idea of hate, uh, is not something new. It can
take different forms. And we don't have language, um, to, to
cover the nuances because racism, again, it's a 19th century
concept and it's a false concept, but we haven't invented
language to cover it. Um...

J. Stanger Ross: 00:39:16 I wonder if I'm, uh, it's, uh, I mean I think we're, we're close to
having done this, but I just want to give an opportunity
explicitly, I guess, you know, I envision students using this, um,
interview and courses and, uh, the Germanic studi- Holocaust
studies program, as well as in our department. So I guess if you
were to make your argument about the long history of
antisemitism and its importance to understanding 20th century
history, important to understanding Canada today and so on.
You, yeah, I don't know if you're prepared to kind of just, um,
uh, lay that out. But if you were to, to make that argument for
future students who might encounter, uh, uh, this, this, um,
tape... What would it be?

Phyllis Senese: 00:40:17 I guess it would come back to the, the very simple notion that
you cannot understand Canada in isolation from world history.
Um, if you were, if you look at something like the, the anti-



Japanese hysteria of post Pearl Harbor, that, that and take away
the element of, of war, the underlying hatred of "the Asian,"
doesn't just come into existence in 1941. It has a long history
and it has a history that predates Canada's engagement with
Asia. Um, one of the interesting courses that we did in the
history department, uh, back in the 70s was a team taught
course in world history. Five of us were involved and we each
lectured on our countries, our specialties. So we had British
history, Canadian history, European history, American history,
Russian history, Chinese history. And for a number of weeks,
each of us lectured on how our part of the world had engaged
with the rest of it. Each week there was a seminar and each of
us had, I think had two or three seminars. We would read the
books along with the students so that we were doing the course
essentially with them not just popping in and out to, to lecture.
And, um, that course was, I think for me also very important in
framing how I looked at Canadian history because doing it that
way you could see that you can't talk about it in isolation.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:42:32 Just to push a little on this, I guess...

Phyllis Senese: 00:42:35 Keep going!

J. Stanger Ross: 00:42:35 So what about a student who says, "Sure, yeah. You know, I
take, um, I take world history courses at UVIC and I, I think
about Canada in a global context, but antisemitism isn't a major
theme of those courses. It doesn't seem to be a theme of world
history. This is a ti-, a major theme of world history, it's a tiny
group and it's small in Canada, small elsewhere. Why should I
think antisemitism is a big part of seeing Canada in a, in a world
historical context?"

Phyllis Senese: 00:43:04 Because antisemitism is there and it should be in those courses.
Um, for example, in the 1930s in Japan, um, it has no resident
Jewish population. It has a transient Jewish population
connected with business trade and so on... Um, virulent
antisemitism where the Jew is a cutout, a stand-in for the
United States. Soviet propaganda, again, the Jew becomes the
symbol of something else. Uh, in a lot of their propaganda.
Again, it was the United States, but it could be Western Europe.
Uh, it could be a, um, uh, a European leader. Um, you simply
have to make the accusation, say the word Jew and it is
accepted as an explanation. Well, where does that come from?
That kind of thing is very important in world history because
you can have, um, and we've seen more recent in more recent
times, where was it... Malaysia. Um, again, all of a sudden a
flare up of denunciation of Jews. And when you have simple
stereotypes like the Jews have all the money, the Jews control



the media, then you never have to make an argument about a
particular situation. You just throw out the stereotype and
people respond to it because it's so embedded in, in the history.
Um, there is a long history of antisemitism thriving in a country
where Jews have been expelled. You have England as a good
example, they're expelled and yet antisemitism in the literature,
in the poetry, in the politics continues because it's handy. It, it
makes it possible to talk in code, um, that everybody else
understands. Everybody knows that the Jews are this, that, and
the other. And you can, you can see the same thing happening
with other groups. Um, the way the Japanese are demonized in,
um, and the Chinese, but more so the Japanese, they're the
ones who are the threat, they're going to take your jobs, they're
going to buy out your stores, they're going to corrupt your
women. Um, that's classic. You find the same thing being said in
Greek and Roman Times about their "other." Um, so there are
these stereotypical frameworks that have been created over
time for the "other," whatever the, or whoever the "other" is.
So antisemitism is always there. And what we call racism is
always there.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:46:25 And is it... I mean, I'm thinking also of, I think, uh, other, um,
talks I've heard you give, um, but, um, is, is your argument that,
um, the rel-, the relation of Judaism to Christianity, um,
establishes Jews as, um, uh, foundational to how Christian and
modern culture generates these forms of hate? That is, that it's
not just pervasive, but that it's somehow foundational to how,
uh, these or, or is it rather that you see this as an example
among many, a pervasive example? Like is it a, is it a germ of
something or a seed of something or is it...

Phyllis Senese: 00:47:19 It's a cornerstone of Christianity because of the, the way in
which, and the time that the larger context of the conflict
between the greater Jewish community and the Jews who are
committed to this new prophet. Um, the way that plays out, the
context, so that, that you find in the writing of the Gospels,
which are written, um, two to three... begin to be written two
to three generations after the events. They're based on oral
histories that have been accumulated and then written down.
Um, there is the foundation of many of the stereotypes, um,
and in the way the language is used. So you find the best
example is John's Gospel. He explicitly blames the Jews and
makes the link that the Jews are the children of the devil. The
Jews killed God. If you're capable of killing God, then you're
capable of any monstrosity, any evil. And once you in in a sense
sanctify that idea by making it an element of the Gospel, you
can see in the other parts of the Gospel Stories, the other
stereotypes emerging. Um, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. How



is it done? It's done by a kiss in a context where a kiss between
two men would be extraordinary, would be condemned. Here is
a very intimate act that leads to death. Not only does he betray,
but he gets money. So the imagery of Jews being evil and
associating that with money is a very early Christian stereotype,
which for that early church was not just a mean thing to say, it
was something they believed to be true. And so that gets
written in. But the way it's written in provides a way of then
saying, 10 years down the road, a hundred years, a thousand
years, "the evil Jew" and "money," which is probably the most
familiar stereotype.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:50:29 And it, it, it also helps us understand European colonialism or,
uh, the actions of the Canadian state in the 1940s undertaken
against Japanese Canadians?

Phyllis Senese: 00:50:49 I think it does because if you look at the history of, the parallel
history of what we call racism, uh, you see the same methods,
the same way of, um, inventing a stereotype. It also has a long
history. And so in the case of the Japanese Canadians, there is
such a, and there are individuals in BC who play on preexisting
stereotypes about the Japanese and like the Jews, they are very
much associated with a quest for economic power. Um, and
because they have military strength as a nation, they are seen
as a military threat. The Jews don't have a, a nation. They don't
have an army, so they operate in the dark, the shadows, but
they're every bit as powerful. And, um, you have people in BC
whipping up that kind of hatred. You don't have a lot of people
and you certainly have very few in government saying, "Let's,
let's step back. Let's just, what exactly is the situation in BC?
What kind of threat is there?" The assumption is, without any
evidence: there is a real danger to the country, to national
security, from this population. You have the same response in
Hawaii. So I, I think the parallels are, are, are very real and that
was something I wanted students to see that these kinds of
phenomena don't operate in isolation, but they, they kind of
flow in and out of each other. And the, the lines of argument,
the way of thinking about one group can be easily applied in
another situation to a different group.

J. Stanger Ross: 00:53:07 Great. Okay. I think we've covered that and I think that'll be a
great, a great, uh, gift to future listeners. So thank you. Let's go
to the volunteer work outside of the university that you did. So
can you sketch that for me? So in a little more detail, the, the,
your involvement in the [events] when you started
presenting there and just your history of, I guess, volunteerism,
or activism in, in the area of Holocaust education outside of
your day job.



Phyllis Senese: 00:53:41 Um, well I guess the main one was, was getting involved in the
early nineties, meeting Peter Gary and getting involved with
the, the, the events he was holding that began before he
actually worked with some others to create the [organization]

. He
was a survivor who was liberated at Bergen Belsen on his 21st
birthday, barely alive. And his experiences had left him very
traumatized and the Holocaust was not something he could talk
about until he got to his seventies. And then he felt an urgency
that "I've got to talk about this now, because how long do I have
left?" Um, so I got involved in the [organization]

, I'll use the short title, from the beginning. And my
involvement varied from year to year. Um, almost every year I
would give a talk about the historical context and again, try to
set that in the context of a very old established hatred that, the
Nazis come to power in 1933, but that is not the beginning of
antisemitism. Hitler doesn't invent anything in terms of
antisemitism. He takes what's already there a further step and
you need to understand that. So that was probably my most
consistent contribution to the, to the [events] was to
make that connection for them. And to talk about the, the Ho-,
the, the way in which, um, stereotypes play into the success of
the Holocaust. Why is it that so many people believe this Nazi
propaganda, whether it's in Germany or some other country
that they've overrun? Why is it that they find people in many
places to support them, uh, support the, the whole mechanism?
Why doesn't the resistance, for example, bomb trains or blow
up the train lines heading out of France towards death camps?
Why is it not a priority at that time? How do the Nazis
implement this program? And that I used to, both in my courses
and at [events] , I would talk about how the law
is used, how you can manipulate a legal system to do something
quite different from what it had been doing and who makes
that possible. So it'd be that kind of historical context. Um, and
usually depending on the program, which varied from year to
year, there would, that would then be followed by a survivor
who talked about their experiences. So they wouldn't have to
worry about trying to explain the bigger picture. They could
focus on what happened to them in Belgium as a child, or what
happened, what happened to them in Poland. Um, because that
was, that was the thing that students really wanted to hear, was
the survivor. But we always felt they needed a context. And if
you look at the BC curriculum, there isn't much there. And in
this period, history ceased to become... Uh, history ceased to be
a required subject in the BC high school curriculum. So you
have, you have very few students now actually taking a history
course where they would encounter these kinds of issues. They
might encounter them in some other way, in a different course,



but not, not history. So that was the biggest thing I was involved
in with was the, the um, the [events] , the planning
of it, um, the organization. The [organization] also got
involved, I guess it would be the late nineties... might be a bit
earlier in, um, an active role in the Kristallnacht remembrance
at the synagogue. And also the memorial at the cemetery on...
In-, usually in the spring. I gave a series of lectures on the Shoa
at Holy Cross Church. Again, it was, uh, the first lecture was on
the history of the, the, the complicity of Christianity and the
Holocaust. And there was, uh, an adult Catholic audience who
were very receptive. Of course we had at that time in Victoria, a
very progressive Catholic bishop. Um, so it was that kind of
cohort that would come to the lectures. Um, one of the men in
the community who is no longer alive, uh, was a stringer for the
Canadian Jewish News. And he, um, I had taped th-, somebody
had taped those lectures. He listened to the tapes and asked if
he could write an article for the Canadian Jewish news about my
series of lectures. And I said, "Sure, you know, if you have
questions, just give me a call." He called me back a few weeks
later and said, "I wrote the article and I submitted it and the
editor wouldn't print it. He said it would be too controversial,"
the kinds of things I said, uh, and he was "worried about the
response it might create in Toronto," which I thought was very
interesting because I wasn't saying anything that wasn't, um,
that was really revolutionary or, or, uh, it was the kind of thing
that, uh, anybody studying church history had been saying for a
long time. And there had been, um, one of the things I had
emphasized in those lectures was the, the Christians who came,
who's who, who stepped forward after the war, because there
were very, very few before the war, particularly theologians
who had in any way condemned antisemitism. Probably the
most well known in the pre-war period would have been an
Englishman, Gordon Parks. Um, he.. not Gordon, James Parks.
Uh, he had very explicitly talked about Christianity's role in, not
only the foundation of antisemitism, but the perpetuation of it.
After the war, you get a lot of examination of conscience by
Christian communities, the most dramatic being the Lutherans,
of course with the German connection, they had the, the largest
questions to deal with and eventually come to repudiate Martin
Luther. Because of course... His antisemitistic... His antisemitic
rants against the Jews because they didn't turn to his brand of
Christianity so enraged him that even the Nazis regaled him as,
um, sort of the father of their ideas. Those were not novel
concepts. And many of the churches and many theologians in
the post war period, um, really examined Christianity in a, in a
very, not just critical way, but in a very blunt way, which I talked
about in those lectures. And, um, so I'm not sure why the editor
found it... That it would be too controversial... Um, it's, it's the



Christian theologians who are, and, and Christian writers who, I
think, wrote some of the best argumentation against
distinguishing hatred of the Jews pre Wilhelm Maar and
antisemitism. And um, [coughs] excuse me, they were the ones
who I think wrote the most pointed criticisms of trying to
distinguish the two and that they aren't, they're not two
different things. It's the same thing in a different disguise.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:03:51 I'm going to try to draw you back to the, to the kind of nuts and
bolts of the volunteer work you did. But I feel like Lynne would
be disappointed with me if I didn't ask, and maybe this is the
right time to ask... So are you a member of a faith community?
Do you have a, is there a, is, is, is there any part of your
engagement with these topics that comes from your
involvement in a church or...

Phyllis Senese: 01:04:21 No. Well, yes and no. Um... I guess to the extent that my one of
my earliest questions of how could this have happened, who,
who let this happen, um, I have a better understanding of that
now and in particular the role that Christianity plays. Um... I did
not experience in any church context, any institutional context,
expressions of antisemitism. I did, um, I did experience it both
directly and indirectly from individuals... In our family there was
an an incident, where my brother, who is six years younger, he
and two other children were playing together, one of them was
Jewish. There was an argument about something that they were
doing and not my brother, but the third child said to the Jewish
child when she couldn't get her own way in the argument, uh,
she just snapped at him, "Well, you killed Christ." Um, she was a
Catholic. So I knew from experience that churches and church
people harbored these kinds of attitudes and sometimes
displayed them. Uh, my own, my own religious background is
very mixed. Um, but I haven't been affiliated with any, any
religion for 25, 30 years. And I, I think antisemitism was one of
the things that, um... Was the, the straw that broke the camel's
back. The refusal, the refusal to really engage as an institution
with that past, was something that I couldn't, I couldn't accept
Christianity taking that perspective that... you know It was, it
was like so many other issues that are now boiling over in, in
various churches that they don't want to talk about or deal
with. So, no, I haven't been engaged in any faith community.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:07:22 So when you gave those lectures to... At the Catholic Church
that you mentioned, um,

Phyllis Senese: 01:07:27 Holy Cross.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:07:28 Holy Cross. That- you weren't at- as a member or, uh...



Phyllis Senese: 01:07:33 I was at the time.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:07:34 Okay.

Phyllis Senese: 01:07:35 Um, and uh... It was just something I thought we needed to do. I
also, at Holy Cross, one of the, one of the survivors who came to
the [event] , who was a close friend of Peter Gary's,
was a man who had, who was Polish, a Polish Catholic, who had
been rounded up for political reasons and thrown into
Auschwitz and survived. And he would come to give, uh, talks
here in other places and he would wear a replica of his
prisoners uniform. And I had him come and give a talk at Holy
Cross. So I, I, as I was in the process of myself disengaging, I still
wanted the church to have to face some of these issues.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:08:45 So back to, um, you had some involvement organizationally
also, in addition to speaking, you also had some, um, role on the
board of the, of the [organization] .

Phyllis Senese: 01:09:01 David Katz and I were co-presidents in... Somewhere in the
nineties for a couple of years. I had a-, I had been asked if I
would, if I would take on the job and I said I wouldn't do it
because I wasn't Jewish. And there had been occasional, uh,
remarks made that there were some in the Jewish community
who didn't like the idea of non-Jews playing any kind of
prominent role in Holocaust education. Um, so David agreed
to... That we would, we would be co-presidents, um, most of
the time through the, the 90- after David and I finished our term
from that point on, the [organization] tended to be
organizationally and, and uh, kind of one man operations where
the rest of us were regarded as, um, a sounding board, um,
discussion group. But ultimately, someone else was taking the
leadership of making decisions, which had both good and bad
aspects to it. And, um... But my role in those years was mainly
being part of this larger group that would meet to discuss what
are we going to do at this event. Um, there was a time in the
90s when we were able to get a fair amount of money through,
uh, federal and provincial grants for multiculturalism events, uh,
anti racism events. And, um, so that gave us the funding to do a
lot of things that otherwise would be impossible. And, uh, so my
role became one of just sort of participating in a group rather
than any kind of leadership, um, through the early two
thousands. Um, I guess we're about two- well about 2006, uh, I
became treasurer. And, uh, so my responsibilities there were
more in terms of managing the accounts, dealing with tax,
federal tax reporting, uh, provincial society obligations, um, that
kind of thing. But I also continued to participate in discussions



about what are we going to do, how are we going to do it? And,
um, when asked giving, giving a talk .

J. Stanger Ross: 01:12:11 And the [event] continues on or you-, do you
remain involved ?

Phyllis Senese: 01:12:15 Mhmm.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:12:15 Yeah.

Phyllis Senese: 01:12:16 Um, when we had large scale funding we were able to rent the
UVIC auditorium and have a day long [event] for
about 1,100 students. Uh, when we began to lose the funding,
we had to go to a different model. And, uh, we got a lot of
feedback from teachers saying that a day long event was too
much for their students and we could see it, that they would,
many of them would disappear at the lunch break and not
reappear afterwards. So we went to a model of half-day
[events] and the Victoria School Board, uh, very
generously donated the use of the Oak Bay High auditorium and
their, their tech crew. So the, the model that evolved, uh, was,
uh, two sessions, morning and afternoon on each of two days.
And we also tried to divide it between, um, middle school
grades and high school grades. Uh, then we would have at each
session, um, I would give the historical background talk and a
survivor would speak and then we'd do it again in the afternoon
and then two more sessions the next day. And that's, that's
what's continued. The numbers are not as great, but we still
have about between five and 600 students. Uh, we've also
moved it from the spring to the fall, again at the request of
teachers. We used to have it usually in, in April when the
auditorium at UVIC was between large scale events, the music
festival and convocation. There were, there were dates in there
that we could, we could book it. So now it's, it's still being held
at, at Oak Bay High in their new facility and the school board still
very generously allows us to use the space and their technical
support.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:14:49 Have you noticed a change in students' engagement or
receptiveness over time or...?

Phyllis Senese: 01:14:57 No. Um, the one thing that is consistent is I think that they...
Which has become more of a problem is they, they lack the
historical context, um, because they don't take history. So that
is all new to them. What has remained consistently high is that
they're interested most in being able to listen to and then
afterwards talk to a survivor, um, because it makes a connection
with them. I think at that emotional level in a way that a history



lecture can't. And it's very common when the [event]
ends. Um, students that don't immediately have to

run out and jump on a bus, are mobbing the survivor with
more- We always have a question and answer period as part of
the event, but students tend to be, especially the middle school
students, tend to be very shy about asking a question in front of
the group, but they'll mob the survivor afterwards to ask the
questions. So, um, for them it's a very exhausting process and
we, some- depending on who is coming to speak, we have had
to sometimes have one survivor speak the first day and
someone else the second day because they just can't do two,
they're, they're all so elderly now.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:16:43 So what do you think or hope is achieved in these events? What
are the, what are the outcomes , or even
in your courses, you know, what, what, what's the outcome of
it? What's the ideal outcome of education in this area?

Phyllis Senese: 01:17:06 Well, the ideal outcome is that they engage with their own
community. Um, when I was teaching, I always told my students
that now that you know something, you have responsibility to
act out there. This, this is not just a course that you cram
information and then when the exam is over, you empty the,
the data bank. Um, this is something you need to take out with
you and talking with students in that course. And then
sometimes meeting them even years after they've had the
course. That's what's happened. Um, their engagement may be
at a very small level, the level of their own family. But I've had a
number of students come up to me , former
students who are now teachers in the high schools here in town
and say, I'm, you know, I brought my students because I took
your course and I know how important this is. Um, when we
conclude the [events] , either I do it in my talk or
whoever's wrapping up the event does it, but we always tell
them that they are now witnesses. You know, you've met a
survivor, you've talked with a survivor, you've asked your
questions, you've heard their story. You have a responsibility to
take that story out there. Go home and tell your family, tell your
friends, tell your neighbors, and get engaged because nothing
will change if people don't act. And your action could be
something very small. For example, if you're with a group of
friends and people start telling jokes denigrating Sikhs, you
speak up, you say something. You're not a Sikh, but what
they're doing is wrong and you know better. So it's, it's that kind
of I suppose, outreach that we want them to be engaged in and
it's always hard to know how successful it is. But I think they're,
what we've done with the [events] and what the
school districts have done in terms of developing anti-bullying,



anti-racism programs, the, the greater effort that's being made
now to include more Indigenous elements in education, the
new, um, sexual orientation and gender program that's being
rolled out in our schools. I think that has a big impact too. And
that students, one hopes, that they will start seeing connections
between all these lines of action and what the problems are and
how we got there with them. That raises a, a question that has
been a problem in Holocaust education here and elsewhere.
And it was a, a question that really troubled Peter Gary a lot and
that is: Should we be speaking only about the Shoah or do we
try to relate the Shoah to what else is going on? And that, that's
been a divisive issue here in Victoria. Personally I, I think you
need both. Um, but I think his fear was that then you get into
arguments about equivalency and um, he didn't want the Shoah
denigrated in any way or downgraded, which could happen if
too much equivalency is built into the comparisons.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:21:48 So we've talked a little bit about this prior to, to meeting also,
but I do have an interest in, and I have been asking folks about
the divisions in, um, memorial and educational work that's
happening in Victoria. So, um, you were there to see a lot of
that unfold. Are there two different sets of ideas operating? I'm,
I'm trying to leave largely outside of these discussions, except as
you or others think is appropriate, I'm trying to leave largely
outside of the discussion, the kind of personality or highly
personal aspects of disputes and try to get at this question, are
there two different visions of how the Holocaust should be
remembered or taught and what are those two different visions
if there are?

Phyllis Senese: 01:22:45 Well, I think to the extent that there are two different visions, it
would be that issue of, of should the Holocaust be examined,
memorialized, studied, taught, discussed only on its own or do
we say that there are lessons the Holocaust teaches that can be
applied in other contexts? Um, I think that's a, a fundamental
division. And it... I think it d-, it is displayed in both, um,
memorialization and education, but perhaps more so around
the issue of memorialization. Um, I don't have enough distance
yet to be able to say that that division of ideas about the
importance of the Shoah is separated from or can be separated
from personalities. Um, I think when you have organizations,
any organization in any context, you tend to have people
emerge who not only for a vision of, of what the group should
achieve, but a vision of what they themselves should achieve.
Um, I think personalities do tend to be an issue. And in the, in
the experience of any particular group that can loom very large.
And the, the, the question of what is our vision can get lost.
And, uh, I think that's happened to some extent here in Victoria.



J. Stanger Ross: 01:25:04 And so we have one group that is organizing, Krista- the two
major, I guess memorial activities in town, the Shoah project,
uh, doing the Kristallnacht and the Yom HaShoah up at the
cemetery. And then we have another group that's organizing
the [event] in which you're involved. So in terms of
this division and I, I, I've absorbed, even though I'm, I'm going to
act like I haven't, I have absorbed this idea that personality
matters also, but it is, is, is, is the Shoa project and those
memorial events do those groups
in your view tend, how does that division on, on um, on the
sing-, what do we want to say? The singularity of the Holocaust
or the value of viewing it, um, in its own terms versus more
comparative terms let's say how do those two organizations or
the groups or the events that they organize, how do they reflect
a division on that topic?

Phyllis Senese: 01:26:24 I'm not sure that, that when it comes to vision, there is a lot of
disparity. Um, without going into the personalities and all of
that, what happened was a point was reached where the clash
of personalities got to be so toxic that the only solution was to
split the memorial events away from the organization

and our, our charter emphasized education and by that
point, those of us who are still involved, were all educators. So
the, the simplest solution to the toxic environment was group A,
what became the Shoa Project, you take the memorialization
because that's what you clearly want do. Um, and we'll continue
with education and um, but in terms of vision, I, I don't see a
great disparity. I was at the Kristallnacht, not this past fall, but
the previous fall. And it seemed to me that the, all of the core
material of the event was completely consistent with what had
gone on before. And it had the same elements of: these are
lessons that can be applied in other contexts. So I didn't see in
practice a whole lot of differentiation, nor at Yom HaShoa. So I
think in this case, personalities and, and the kinds of toxic
relationships that can result, um, that was more of a, an issue
than differing visions.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:28:50 Is there any, um, is any of it around the question of what
constitutes expertise or who should speak or what constitutes
authority in this area?

Phyllis Senese: 01:29:10 It could. Um, and again, I think one of the issues underlying
issues that probably nobody really wants to talk about is the
question of whether or not these programs, events, should be
exclusively or mostly the work of the Jewish community or is
there a place for non-Jews to be involved as well? Um, and not
necessarily just on the fringes, but at the core. Again, I think
that, that would most likely end up being an issue of



personalities too. Because there are, there are some individuals
who take the position that by being, by the very fact that they
are Jewish lends them a credibility that a non-Jew would not
have, they may not have expertise in the sense of knowledge,
information, um, but that Jewishness conveys an authority
that's important. Um, it's very, it reminds me very much of
issues I've been involved with where there is conflict among
members of different aboriginal nations. And the question is,
"Who's more Indian?" And by being "Indian," that makes me an
expert. Um, so there is some of that.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:30:59 Is part of the argument... So there's the kind of, "I'm Jewish"
argument, is part of the argument also, is part of this authority
contest or authority dispute... Does any of it relate to proximity
to the Holocaust, essentially? A personal, a personal proximity
to the Holocaust? So that, getting to that question kind of,
"Who's more Indian?" That is to say, among Jews, there are
differences in how connected they are. Of course there's
survivors, then there's...

Phyllis Senese: 01:31:35 Right. That's very much an issue, uh, in, in, in many cases. Um...
We're getting to the point now though where the, the, the time
gap is we're looking at many generations after the Holocaust
and I guess it's still too soon to tell what is the longterm
damage, the longterm trauma from generation to generation.
When does that peter out or does it ever peter out? Because I
think for those who want to claim that by virtue of family
proximity to the Holocaust, um, that conveys a certain
authority... When, how long can you carry on that argument? If
you grew up in a household with grandparents who were
survivors and the family dynamic is very much affected by that,
that's one kind of experience. But if you never knew those
grandparents and you, all you had were family stories, what is
your proximity? What if your family got out in time and most of
them survived? They are of that generation, but they were able
to get out and get to England, get to North America or South
America, anywhere where they could be safe. Does that
diminish your credibility? Or are they, um, I witnessed several
squabbles between survivors. Um, those who were in camps
and those who were on the run. Those who were in camps
insisted they were the only ones entitled to be called survivors.
If you weren't in a camp, if you weren't through that brutal
trauma, you were not a survivor. Um, which again, it's, I think
that also is a reflection of personalities and the impact of
trauma. That "My trauma is so much bigger than anybody else's
could ever be." So it, you get many layers around the issue of
authority and credibility.



J. Stanger Ross: 01:34:30 And did those issues of proximity to the Holocaust come into
play in the, in ultimately the division into two organizations in
Victoria?

Phyllis Senese: 01:34:41 Not that, not that it was ever articulated that way. Um, it
might've been a... Part of a hidden agenda or subconscious
feeling, but it wasn't anything that was articulated, at least not
that I ever heard.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:35:04 Okay. I think I've probed that as much as I would [laughs]. Is
there anything else we should add to the discussion before we
end taping?

Phyllis Senese: 01:35:21 Hmm. Not that I can think of... Other than... I would like to see
history brought back to the, the, the, the high school curriculum
as a required subject and along with so many other things that
the Holocaust be part of that education. Um, I guess I worry
that the kind of high speed times we're in, uh, the digital world
that we're in, subjects like the Holocaust, antisemitism, racism,
these require a lot of time to get at. You can't do it in a tweet.
And that's the one thing that we're losing. And I think students
at the high school level, at the university level are, are losing the
time needed to reflect on, on really deep issues. And these are
deep issues. And there are so many other issues that also need
to be talked about. How do you prioritize? So I'm glad I'm not
having to design curriculum.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:36:50 Okay. Thank you.

Phyllis Senese: 01:36:52 Did you have any other questions?

J. Stanger Ross: 01:36:54 No, I think I, I think I've asked most of what I wanted to ask.
Yeah, thank you.

Phyllis Senese: 01:37:00 Oh, you're very welcome.

J. Stanger Ross: 01:37:01 I'll turn off the recorder.





















Phyllis Senese Interview 5.11.2019 (Part 1) – Defying Hatred Project

Stanger-Ross: So I'm here again. This is Jordan Stanger-Ross with the Defying Hatred Project,
talking with Phyllis Senese. I always say "se-nay-zee" cause I come out with like an Italian --

Senese: It is and that's the Italian pronunciation.

Stanger-Ross: I can't remember if we went over this last time. Cause someone else was telling
me that they say "se-nays".

Senese: "Se-nays" yeah. That's how it was pronounced in my husband's family to be more
American.

Stanger-Ross: Ok yeah, there is that dropping of the vowel, yeah. On Ventura Way at our house
in Victoria for a second interview around the themes of this project. So as I was just saying, we
had a bit of a correspondence after the prior meeting that covered three topics that you wrote me
about and we thought maybe we'd draw them into the actual recorded interview. And the first
one, I guess -- well I don't know which one came first for you, but the part that was in the email
that I saw first was about your own personal background with religion and your parents and how
that relates to your starting to become interested in these topics.

Senese: My family on both sides originates in southeastern Europe in areas that are now part of
Ukraine and Moldova. When my grandparents were born on my mother's side they were part of
the Austro-Hungarian empire. Farther south they were part of the Ottoman empire. So my
background culturally is that kind of eastern European melting pot of all kinds of influences.
Most of which, for me, I experience more through music than anything else. Put on some
Klezmer music or some Turkish music and I feel like I'm at home. In terms of religion, when my
parents were growing up in the late 20s and 30s, people of eastern European background in
Canada were among the unwelcome and they both faced a lot of discrimination in their personal
lives. For my father's family they lived first in Saskatchewan and then in Windsor in fairly
compact communities of other eastern European immigrants so that they had that larger culture
to give them a bit of protection. But my father always felt that discrimination very keenly, so for
him talking about the past was taboo. You cut it off, we're here in Canada and we're now
something and somebody different. So I never got much family history from him.

[00:03:22]

Senese: For him I think religion was part of the experience of his family. My grandparents were
both very involved in the orthodox church but I don't think my father -- I don't think it meant
very much to him. At least he never gave any indication that it did in terms of how he
approached religion or anything he ever said. It was something that you did, it was part of being
part of that family. But I don't think he was deeply spiritual. I could be wrong but as I say he
never talked about it so who knows. My mother's family was in the eastern Catholic church, the
Greek Catholic church. She left that church as, I guess, in her late-teens, early-20s when she left
home, and became an Anglican. Her sisters all left the Greek Catholic church and some became
Roman Catholics, some became Anglican, they just scattered. Looking for a place where they



felt, I guess, comfortable. My mother was much more spiritual than my father, she was more
attached I think to institutions and ritual than he was. And so for her the Anglican church had a
kind of comfortable familiarity but also sort of more Canadian. But because of my grandmother
who died when my mother was still quite young, my grandmother apparently had a very
interfaith and ecumenical kind of viewpoint. When they got to Manitoba she wanted to live in
Saint Boniface so that her children would learn French and have a bigger cultural experience
than just living among other eastern European immigrants. Didn't work out that way, they ended
up in East Selkirk, north of Winnipeg, in a very much eastern European kind of little community.
But with enough people of other backgrounds to make it really quite interesting. And it's because
of that kind of attitude, I think, of my grandmother's that my mother made a point of making sure
that we knew about Judaism. And I always assumed that it was because of her ability to
understand and accept the reality that Christianity was built on Judaism, that Jesus was a Jew.
For her that was not a radical idea, that made perfect sense. So I was taken with other kids to the
synagogue in Calgary to go on a tour and, you know, see the interior, learn about it, and that
kindled an interest for me. That I guess went along with -- I think we talked about this earlier --
about my coming across pictures from Auschwitz as a child and not being able to comprehend
what on earth was this all about and my mother trying to explain it to me. So I had this sense of
Judaism being something familiar, something that was not strange or foreign from a very early
age. And as is true of most people who have eastern European roots, there are some Jewish
strains in my DNA. Presumably in my ancestry but I don't know where, I don't know when. I
mean that's all in the past, it's all lost.

Stanger-Ross: I think you said you did a DNA test.

Senese: Mhm.

Stanger-Ross: So what motivated that?

Senese: Oh, curiosity.

Stanger-Ross: When was that?

[00:07:54]

Senese: About five years ago. Actually it wasn't the Jewish link that I was looking for, it was
something even more interesting. In my mother's family, my grandmother and three of her
children -- four of her children -- all have very specific eyes. Very Asian eyes. And we thought
that that might have been a result of the long-term effects of Genghis Khan moving west,
because he certainly swept through that area and controlled it for a while. So that was sort of a
kind of interesting what if we're related to Genghis Khan. My daughter really picked up on that.
She went to St. Margaret's school and they would have heritage days because they had so many
international students. You know, "come in your national costume." My daughter went once as
Genghis Khan.

*laughing*



Senese: So that was what we were curious about and as it turned out there wasn't much trace
there. But there were all kinds of little traces but nothing specifically that would connect to
Genghis Khan. So that's where the motivation for the DNA came from. But it just confirmed that
there was a Jewish heritage that I think a lot of people in the family had suspected but didn't
know about and that was just sort of there. And for me I found that even though my mother
insisted my brother and I be brought up essentially in the Anglican church, I realised when I was
13 that I didn't believe it. And so from that point on, for a while, for many years, I was sort of
questing for a religious home. Went to different churches, went to different synagogues, and in
the end I found that I could stay for a while and eventually I had to leave. So for the last 30 years
I haven't been going anywhere. I found that I didn't need to.

Stanger-Ross: That religious background, did that have an impact on your interfaith initiatives?
Can you talk about your interfaith initiatives and do you see those as linked?

[00:10:44]

Senese: Not directly. I think the link there was more recognising that enough time had passed
that -- and the mainstream Christian churches had themselves progressed enough that they were
willing to engage in those kind of activities. I had thought for a long time that people of faith
should be banding together, that if you could step back and look at the essentials there was so
much common ground and so many contemporary issues that if they pooled together to deal
with, there's a powerful force. But everyone was in their own little box. For example, early on in
-- well, say the 70s and 80s in Victoria -- when there was a case of Antisemitic graffiti, it would
always be noted and that's unfortunate, that's too bad. But there was no sense of other faith
communities stepping up to do something. Now it's much more common and I mentioned to you
that one link that became very important -- I wasn't part of it, I just knew about it -- was St. John
the Divine church and the synagogue, congregation Emmanuel. So that in more recent times if
the synagogue has been graffitied, people from St. John will come and help with the cleanup.
When the mosques in New Zealand were attacked a few months ago, the mosque here, people of
all kinds of religious and non-religious backgrounds came to make a chain around the mosque so
that worshipers could feel safe, even in Victoria somebody's got their back. That would have not
happened twenty years ago so things have progressed. I was trying to push it and I thought the
Holocaust was an obvious way given the links between Christianity and Judaism which was
something I taught in some detail in the course I did on racism and Antisemitism. It was
something that churches were starting to talk more about themselves in terms of understanding
the roots of Christianity and wherever I could get a platform I would give a lecture or a series of
lectures. It was something that I was very much enmeshed in in my teaching and in this
community work. So I organised series of commemorations of Kristallnacht on a Sunday close to
the Jewish celebration, but separate. So that people could go to both. The first one was held at
the Catholic cathedral and that was because I was friends with the bishop, Rémi de Roo. And he
was a very enthusiastic supporter of interfaith initiatives and it was the thing he was doing and
had been doing in his own work. He was also very close friends with Victor Reinstein, Sue
Berrin. So for him it was a natural and he was a very enthusiastic supporter of the event. The
next year we held it at the Anglican cathedral because, again, the Anglican bishop, the Catholic
bishop, and the local head of the United church had been working together in tandem for a
number of years on interfaith initiatives and in particular getting the centre for studies in religion



and society off the ground at UVic. So that was a collaborative project and for them it was
natural to collaborate on something else. These events were well-attended and the participants
included survivors who spoke about their experiences. We included readings in Hebrew, music.
It was very broad but it focused on the Holocaust. There was not much mention made of other
groups who had been persecuted by the Nazis and that was an issue -- I don't know if you want
to pursue it now or come back to it -- but that was an issue that turned out to be very divisive in
Holocaust initiatives here in town, was whether events should focus only on the Holocaust or
whether the Holocaust was a way of opening up a bigger discussion.

Stanger-Ross: Yeah, maybe we'll come back to those divisions. I'm fascinated though by these
events. How would an event like that have differed in its program, if at all, from the one that
would occur in the synagogue for Kristallnacht?

[00:16:48]

Senese: It would have differed only in very small ways. It had become a tradition to read Leo
Beck's prayer as part of the service at the Shul. We didn't include that in the other services but
we read other things, poetry from the period, someone would read the 23rd Psalm in Hebrew.
The music would be different. It would not be Christian hymns, we didn't do any of that, but it
would be essentially secular music appropriate to the occasion. The year that we did it at the
Anglican cathedral, there was a group -- I think they called themselves the Rainbow Choir, I'm
not sure if it's still in existence -- but it was an LGBTQ choir that was fairly newly formed. I
can't even remember now how I heard about them. But I got some contact information and asked
them if they would come and sing. And they did. And I think they did that for two years running.
So we were including other groups but not making them the focus yet of anything much.

Stanger-Ross: And who was involved in this? So there was you --

Senese: It was me.

Stanger-Ross: You.

Senese: Yeah. I was the one who was basically organising it. Because it was the one sort of
initiative that we'd bandy about that I was really keen on and wanted to do. And since there
weren't that many of us actually doing stuff, people said "fine, if you want to talk it on then do
it."

Stanger-Ross: When would this have been?

Senese: In the early-90s. Early- to mid-90s.

Stanger-Ross: Ah.

Senese: So I would connect with whoever I needed to at a particular church and explain what I
wanted to do and were they interested in hosting it. And I was never refused. In fact, because the
chaplains at UVic were an interfaith group, as soon as they heard about it they not only



supported it but wanted to host it at their home church the following year. We did that for four
years and then a group of people came forward and said we want to be involved, we want to
make this bigger and this is really important. And at that point I was sort of facing burnout
because of everything else I was doing. I was happy to have others come along and say they
wanted to organise. The problem was that I think they didn't see it the same way I did and it
became -- it lasted I think one more year and instead of being held in a church, the event was
held at the Alex Goolden Centre. And then it kind of just disappeared and at that point I just
didn't have the time or energy to try and take it up again.

Stanger-Ross: When you started did you take the program basically that Victor was using at
Emmanuel and just adapt it slightly? Were you just familiar with what was being done at
Kristallnacht and so you --

[00:20:57]

Senese: Yeah I was familiar with it because I had frequently participated in it, either giving a
talk or one year I read the Leo Beck prayer. Mostly it was giving a small talk towards the end of
the evening highlighting some particular historical theme relating to Kristallnacht. And the
Kristallnacht, especially after -- I'm trying to think, was it after Victor left? Yeah, I think it was
after Victor left, the program there went through a few years of different people trying different
formats, different approaches, to see how it might work. With Victor it had been basically the
same program outline and then different people doing different parts and different survivors
speaking, that kind of thing. So it was similar but different. I wouldn't say it was just taking the
program and adapting it. It was starting fresh and saying in this context, because I wanted the
focus in terms of the audience to be more from the Christian churches and the non-
denominational community and non-religious community. The Jewish community I thought
knew what happened. But it was that larger community that needed to be drawn into this to not
only get information they might not have but to become more emotionally invested in it. That
this is not just something that affects just this little small community in our bigger community,
this affects all of us. And one of, I guess, my hobby horses had always been talking about the
Holocaust -- was that it is not sufficient to simply say, "oh the Nazis drove the Germans crazy
and they had this aberrant period in their history and now it's all over," but that the whole world
was complicit in what went on. That was the theme that I constantly stressed, is that we're all to
blame in one way or another. And so it's a job of repair and reconciliation that is a long term
project and a much bigger project than just saying once a year "oh it was too bad what
happened."

Stanger-Ross: I think you mentioned in the email that the Kristallnacht events at that time were
smaller, hadn't been growing, didn't have as much outreach dimensions as you might have hoped.
Am I imagining that?

Senese: Do you mean the one at the churches?

Stanger-Ross: The one at the synagogue.



Senese: Um, the attendance there fluctuated. It depended I think to a large degree on who took
responsibility or if anybody took responsibility for publicity, for making contact with local civic
officials, with church leaders, community leaders to get them to come, with getting something in
the newspaper to highlight the event. So some years the synagogue was packed to the rafters, you
just couldn't squeeze another person in, and other years it would be just the main floor and there
would still be seats available. So yeah it fluctuated but I don't think it was because there was a
lack of interest out there. I think it was a lack of our ability -- because there were actually so few
people doing any work, that it depended on whether or not anyone stepped up to take
responsibility and then how well they did the job.

Stanger-Ross: So were the events at the synagogue mostly Jewish community or not
necessarily?

Senese: Mostly Jewish community but there were always people from the larger community
there. Not just politicians or civic leaders but there would be -- cause we would send out an
email to all the churches telling them that this was the event and they were invited to come. How
many people from other communities came would depend on, again, the publicity. The
synagogue event was always in an evening and that may or may not have an effect on the
number of people coming out. Being November the weather sometimes was awful so particularly
older people would not come. The event at the churches was always on a Sunday afternoon. And
again, depending on what people were doing. But we had very good attendance at the Emmanuel
Baptist and Grace Lutheran are both fairly small churches and they were pretty full at both
events. And at both cathedrals we had very large crowds. So they were well attended. I think
there were people who wanted to know, wanted to come. Whether they came another time I don't
know.

Stanger-Ross: And do you think that could have continued indefinitely the way Kristallnacht
had or did it have a lifespan?

[00:27:29]

Senese: I think it could have had a lifespan of its own if it had been possible to get a sustained
large enough group of people to work on that project. I think it would have also had a longer life
if there had been people from the church communities who had wanted to sustain that, but all of
these kinds of groups turn out to be very small in terms of the number of people actively engaged
and there are so many things they want to do that there isn't enough time, there aren't enough
people to go around and organise it and sustain it and to keep it going because people want to
move on to something else. That was one of the biggest problems, I think, that the [organization]

faced was that there were so many good ideas of things that we should be
doing but we needed to be in a city the size of Toronto with a comparable pool of people who
had the time and energy to be engaged. But we didn't. And so events tended to be -- one year it
would be event after event and wonderful. And then the next year we couldn't do the same thing,
it would be just the basic service at the Shul. I think it's a common problem for any organisation.

Stanger-Ross: I don't know whether this will transition to the next topic or whether this fits also
within those church events. You said among the organisers of those events there was some



discussion over whether the event should focus just on the Shoah or the murder of Jews or
whether there should be other aspects of that history or other histories of genocide. So those were
discussions that were happening within the group that you convened, among the folks who were
involved in organising those events at the churches?

[00:29:54]

Senese: No because I was the organiser for those. I did ask -- I'm trying to think. I guess it was
the service at the Anglican cathedral. One of the people who spoke was a woman, Japanese
Canadian, who as a child had been interned. And she spoke about her experiences. That was a
little bit of initiative to bring in -- and then when I did my talk I spoke about how --

Stanger-Ross: Do you remember who that was?

Senese: Midge Ayakawa.

Stanger-Ross: It was Mij. I was wondering if it was, okay. Then you were saying "your talk..."

Senese: In my talk I spoke about how the Holocaust is -- the centrality of it is the attempt to
eradicate the Jewish community but that as part of that effort there were other groups that were
targeted as well. And that even in Canada, beyond what was happening to First Nations, we were
targeting groups. So she was going to be representing that. But that was a small part of the whole
program.

Stanger-Ross: Did you ever bring First Nations into that discussion, into those events?

Senese: No. One of the very first events we did, really before the [organization] as such
was formed, took place at Vic High and it was an event that had Holocaust survivors paired with
Aboriginal elders. They all spoke to the big assembly about their experiences and then the group
was broken down into small study groups and each small group met with an elder and a survivor
and talked with them. But there weren't strong connections built to the local Indigenous
community which, looking back on it, I think is a shame. And I'm not sure there are links being
built now. But that would have been another component certainly to bring in. In the events that
we were doing at the same time for the high school, gradually we brought
more and more through the 90s and into the 2000s, we would bring more and more discussion
into that event of the other groups in Europe that were being persecuted and then link it to
Canadian examples to try and help students see that these events don't happen in isolation and
the ideas that erupt in one place are not unique to that place but there are echoes of it all over the
world. And that did create a lot of division. If we can segue to that.

Stanger-Ross: Mhm.

[00:33:34]

Senese: There were those who thought -- and I'm speaking now in the context of the
[organization] -- there were those who thought that the point of the



[organization] was to only discuss the Jewish experience. And that to include anything
else was to diminish and, for some people, it became even a question of disrespecting the
victims. So there were people who began to drop out in the late-90s
over that issue.

Stanger-Ross: Which folks were dropping out?

Senese: The people who wanted the focus to be exclusively on the Jewish experience began to
drop out because the -- you know, we never took votes on a lot of this stuff, it was discussion.
But it seemed that the majority of people wanted to broaden the focus to put the Holocaust into a
larger context. So there was that split. Some of that was generational. It tended to be people who
were older and particularly survivors who thought that talking about anything else was somehow
diminishing the importance of the Holocaust. And they just refused to -- they really didn't even
want to discuss it. For them it was a black and white issue. Younger people and particularly
those of us who were involved in education tended to look at it more from the perspective of
"what is the opportunity here to teach about the Holocaust in this bigger context?" So that
became I think a major dividing point. And as always happens in small groups a lot of that is
exacerbated by personality conflicts. We dropped -- in the late-90s when we would have a
meeting to discuss what are we going to do this year for this event or that event, we might have
up to, oh, anywhere between a dozen and twenty people show up. Then it dropped off to eight to
ten. And by the early-2000s it was just a handful.

Stanger-Ross: And that conflict was one of the reasons for the reduction in the number of
people in the group?

Senese: That was one reason.

Stanger-Ross: And we're talking about the [organization]

Senese: Right .

Stanger-Ross:

Senese: That was one, I think it was a major one. But again I think personality conflicts played a
big role. Another big factor was burnout or, in some cases, it was just people had been doing it
for so long that they just couldn't do it anymore. For others the problem was that as Jews
engaged in the community, the Jewish community, there was so much that needed to be done,
there were so many other organisations that needed people to work on issues. People who wanted
to get involved as local representatives for national organisations. They felt that was important
and how do you divide your time up? So that became I think a major factor for a lot of people
pulling back and eventually just not doing anything relating to the [organization]

because they were busy doing something else. It wasn't a case of withdrawing
to do nothing. But how many ways can you divide yourself up when there are so many initiatives
that need to be addressed and need human energy to do it? So that I think was another major
factor.





Stanger-Ross: Well more radical -- I don't know how to situate. Was it situated on one side
where it advocated a broader approach and mostly was confronting folks who had a view of a
more exclusive focus on Judaism or the Jewish experience? Or was it also situated in relation to
other kinds of dissent that had other proposals in respect to how remembrance should operate?

[00:43:14]

Senese: No, I think the divisions were primarily exclusive focus on the Holocaust or broaden it
to a larger context. The only differences were how would we do that? How would we broaden
the context without diminishing the importance of the Holocaust? And it was mainly a question
of who could we include, how would we do it? So for example, we would light memorial
candles, six memorial candles representing the six million. Well let's light another candle for all
the others. That would be one way of doing it. And then let's light a candle of hope for -- well,
then should we have a candle for those who rescued Jews? So it was that kind of discussion. I
don't think that ever reached the level that I would call dispute. But it was groping for how can
we broaden it but not diminish the Holocaust as a Jewish experience. Who could we get as
speakers? What should we highlight? Who should we highlight? And eventually I think we
mostly did it through one of the contextual talks that was given as an event. That while the Nazis
had this program to eradicate the Jews, the Jews were at the head of a list, a long list. So I would
talk, for example, in my historical background about how when the Nazis come to power who do
they go after first? They don't go after the Jews. They go after the socialists, the communists, the
trade unionists, the intellectuals. People who could organise against them, people who could
understand the implications. So you start eliminating who could organise against you and you
start passing laws to isolate the Jews, to normalise exclusion. And how this is an event that takes
place over time, it's not just one big explosion. So we kind of approached it in that way of "let's
bring in the other groups by talking about the Holocaust in a larger context but keeping the focus
on the Jewish community." It wasn't a satisfactory way of doing it but in the context of the
[event] where there is a time constraint that was one way we could do it. We talked
about how at public events we could have speakers representing other communities, but as our
human resources diminished our abilities to do these kinds of events diminished as well. So it
never flowered the way it could have. It still can if there are people who are willing to take it on.
But that's always the fundamental problem. There was another kind of dispute that -- really two
kinds of disputes -- that occasionally intruded into the [organization] but tended to
happen more in the context of the synagogue. And that was a conflict between survivors as to
who was a real survivor. People who had been in the camps -- there were some who had been in
the camps who insisted that you were a survivor only if you had been in the camps. And this
caused great offense and anger among those who had survived the attack on their village and
then fled, many of them in Poland fleeing to Russia and surviving the war there. Sometimes in
brutal conditions and persecution, sometimes joining partisan forces. So that was a real dispute
and it affected the [organization] only in a sense of "if you're going to ask so-and-so to
light a candle I'm going to be offended or I'm going to be angry cause he's not really a survivor."
Or "if you're going to let him light a candle because he's always rejecting me as a survivor." So it
was that kind of thing. And then there was a dispute -- again it was more in the context of the
synagogue but it affected the [organization] too in a number of ways -- and that was a
number of individuals, again it was a small number of individuals but very vocal individuals,
who rejected the notion that non-Jews could talk about the Holocaust, that they had no business





experienced it, I know that. And in that sense I can have the slightest bit of feeling for what
someone else has experienced although their experiences would have been far worse than mine.
But only in that sense could I think -- and I don't really know anybody who would be talking
about the Holocaust who was non-Jewish who would try to make it as though they had
experienced it, as though they had really felt it and understood it. I think you can at an
intellectual level but not at an emotional level. Only by some kind of rough comparison.

Stanger-Ross: I'm thinking about how you described both your parents as having described
experiencing discrimination as eastern European --

Senese: Children of immigrants.

Stanger-Ross: Children of immigrants, yeah. I would have thought that maybe that would be
another source.

Senese: I suppose it was. My mother had the experience of leaving home in East Selkirk -- I
guess she would have been about 17. Going to Winnipeg to get work. They all had to leave
school early because somebody had to be earning money. She went to Winnipeg and went to an
employment agency, saw a job that she thought she could do, applied for it with her Ukrainian
name. Which was Pitlowany. And she was told no, the job was filled. She went back the next
day, the job still advertised. So at that point she changed her name as had her two older brothers,
to Pitt. P-I-T-T. How much more English can you get? She got the job. So that was a story that
we were told as kids over and over again, of, you know, this is what it was like. So that was I
think a contributing factor to me and my brother in terms of how we saw other people. My
father's approach to these kinds of questions was secrecy. You don't talk about where you're
from, you don't talk about your ancestry, you don't talk about your origins. We lost as a result our
ancestral languages because they were never spoken at home. And because my father was in the
air force and we moved around so much, we lost a lot of the cultural. We were basically left with
food. So yeah, that all played a part. But I think probably my mother was the biggest influence in
terms of the way she was very open-minded about everything in the world. For her everything
was a source of curiosity and interest. And if you want to know something, go find it out. If you
want to do something go do it. If you want to experience something different, sure, go visit the
mosque, go visit the synagogue. Don't just sit there. So yeah, she had I think a very profound
influence. And that all came together and I think drove the kinds of questions that I was always
asking in my teaching and my own research.

Stanger-Ross: I want to pause for one second --

--END OF PART ONE--





Phyllis Senese Interview 5.11.2019 (Part 2) – Defying Hatred Project

Stanger-Ross: Okay, so we've turned the recorder back on so I guess this is now the third taping
in the interviews of the Defying Hatred Project of Phyllis Senese, by Jordan Stanger-Ross. I don't
know if I said the date last time. What are we on here? November 5th 2019.

Senese: Yes.

Stanger-Ross: At her home in Saanich. So. We were just talking about whether or not to
conclude this topic and we've decided that we will. One of my curiosities in entering this project
was the current split within Holocaust memorialisation and educational activities in Victoria.
Can you describe the split? First of all, maybe its origins and then what you think its causes and
dimensions have been.

Senese: I think the best way to understand it is in the context of the question of leadership of the
[organization] . When we started out in the early-90s there really was very little in the
way of formal structure. It was basically initiated and driven by Peter Gary, a
Holocaust survivor, who had been speaking at schools but wanted something larger to be
happening and this was his way of trying to create something bigger that would involve more
than one school at a time. The emphasis was on education. When it became clear that something
was being created there was a discussion about the need to create a Society in a very formal legal
sense and that required the writing of a constitution. So a constitution was written with a four
person executive and some objectives and all the usual things that you need in a formal society
and it was registered with the province and with the federal government as a charitable
organisation, which made it possible for the [organization] to do fundraising and issue
tax receipts. But through most of the 90s the organisation was run very informally and initially
very collaboratively. We're talking about half a dozen people who would meet to sit around a
table and discuss "how are we going to do this?" We're going to have this event for high school
students, when is it going to be, where, how, etc. And we'd just sit and thrash it out. And then
each person would go away and do some piece of work to make it all happen. It became very
difficult I think because people had so many different kinds of commitments that they wanted to
be involved in, it was always difficult to get a large stable group together to essentially run the
[organization] and what began to happen by the mid- to late-90s was the emergence of
an individual who would say "ok I'm willing to be president." But then that individual would
take over everything. "Oh, I'll take care of this, I'll take care of that, leave that to me." And it
became a one-man show. In the one instance that this particular president moved, so someone
else stepped forward and said "oh I'll take it on" and very quickly took over every aspect which
made it easier for everybody else. One of the problems was that in that particular case, that was a
very busy individual who began to fail to get things done. Sometimes important things like filing
annual reports with the federal government. Completing the annual reports to the BC societies
regulator. It became a kind of one-man show which was, I think, very dangerous for the
[organization] and I think it probably contributed to people staying away. Why join
when someone else has got it all under control and doesn't want to delegate? So we arrive about
2005/2006 with the [organization] essentially falling apart and only four or five people
left who are willing to keep it going. And at that point the individual who had been the one-man
show dropped the [organization] for other commitments. That all meant that over time





group, those of us who were left in the [organization] basically pulled out our
constitution which said our first priority was education and at that point we said "if you want to
do commemoration and not education, go do commemoration. But this [organization] is
about education." And that was what split that particular group away from the [organization]

and they took over the commemorative events at both the synagogue and the cemetery.
And that's where things stand now. Some of that was driven by personality conflicts. But I really
felt there was an undercurrent of something else going on in terms of taking over for
maybe the same mission but going in a different direction with it. Trying to recreate something
that had occurred in another city with a bigger platform. After this split occurred I went to the
next events at the synagogue and at the cemetery and felt very unwelcome and frozen out by
members of that group. As the fight had become more acrimonious, other people had jumped
into the fight who had not been involved at the beginning, so there were more people jumping in
taking sides which kind of ratcheted up the animosity level. I felt that was at play when I went to
the two events subsequently.

Stanger-Ross: Were the events different?

[00:13:43]

Senese: It differed perhaps in detail but not in spirit. But it had been a question of control, who's
going to control this event. It was never said but the reality was there for all to see that by the
time this developed most of the people involved -- most of the handful of people who were still
involved were non-Jews. Nothing was ever said but one's left to wonder if it was
part of that old debate about whether Jews and non-Jews can approach the Holocaust together. I
don't know. By that point I was so tired of the acrimony that in the end it didn't matter, a break
needed to be made.

Stanger-Ross: I guess I've already asked a question going in this direction, but we were saying
while we were on pause that these kinds of organisational or leadership matters deserve at least
potential consideration. But I'm still searching -- and maybe it's just not there -- for any kind of
difference in substance in how they envisioned that the Holocaust should be memorialised.
You've just suggested one that might lurk beneath the surface, but in those discussions were
there explicit divisions about the ceremonies themselves or about the educational content itself?
Was there some difference that hinged more on how history was actually being told or explained
in these events?

[00:16:03]

Senese: No, no. I don't think there were ever real issues of substance, it was who's going to
control it. And whose vision of how it should be done is going to be the dominant one and that's
where I think the personalities came in. Strong personalities on both sides. But particularly from
the group that had approached the [organization] wanting to change things. I think that
was really the only substantive issue was who's going to control it, not a basic difference on
whether the Holocaust should be central or part of a larger context. That never really entered into
the debate. Because the commemorations, both at the Shul and at the cemetery, frequently
mention in one way or another that the Jews were not the only victims. Their story is the central





every survivor now. There are those who have insisted in the past and are still insisting that only
Jews can commemorate it properly, authentically. Only they have the right to do it. I don't
believe that and I believe actually that that point of view is a denigration of the Holocaust. I think
the whole community needs to take responsibility and commemorate it. How you do that is of
course always the difficult question. I think some of these disputes might diminish in time
because it was an older generation that was more concerned with questions of authenticity,
"who's a real survivor, who isn't?" The division they want to create between Jews and non-Jews,
I think that's passing but there will be other issues. Something else will crop up because it's
human nature.

Stanger-Ross: Do you think those issues fade with urgency and attention to it? That is to say
that as those questions fade in part due to distance from the event, just the event itself will lose
salience.

[00:25:23]

Senese: It might. That's always the danger and you can certainly detect that in many places
around the world now. I wouldn't call it Holocaust fatigue, I'd say it's more indifference. You
know, "that's old news, what about some more recent catastrophe? We should focus our attention
there." I think we have to focus our attention on all of it but then you're back into the question of
how and that's where disputes will come. But I think that is a danger and it's certainly a question
that's been preoccupying the [organization] in the last few years. How are we
going to do the [event] , how can we have a comparable impact on students without a
survivor? Because that really, with the students, that has been the most powerful part, is actually
having a chance to have someone standing there in front of you who looks like your grandparents
-- more likely your great-grandparents now or your great-great-grandparents -- talking about
what it was like to be a six year-old hidden in a basement. Hearing the Nazi boots overhead and
peeing your pants. And having to stay there for hours until it was safe to come out. It's only when
someone who experienced that tells that that it grips a student in a way that me telling them that
story wouldn't. Invariably after the event officially winds down, the speaker, the
Holocaust survivor speaker is swamped by students wanting to shake their hand. Not to ask them
more questions but just to touch them. And we always tell them that as of today you are a
witness now. You have a responsibility to talk about what you heard, what you saw, to remember
this person. The program for the [event] has on the back a picture and a story about a
child of the Holocaust and whether or not they survived. You know, take that home with you,
you're a witness to that child's story. This could have been you in another time and place. Can we
keep that up when there is no survivor? I don't know. Putting on -- I mean there's enough video
available and filmed interviews with survivors but it's not the same thing. So you'll have to redo
the project in ten years and -- or at least that part of it.

Stanger-Ross: Yeah. Anything else?

Senese: Not that I can think of.

Stanger-Ross: Ok well thanks so much, it's been really interesting, wide-ranging set of three
recordings I guess, one interview. So thank you.



Senese: Thank you. I'm glad to participate.

--END OF INTERVIEW--