US/World News

Canadian rabbi owns gaffe omitting of Jews from Holocaust monument

(JTA) – A Canadian rabbi who participated in the planning of a Holocaust memorial monument whose plaque omitted any reference to Jews apologized for what he said was inattentiveness. Rabbi Daniel Friedman of Edmonton made the apology in an interview this week with the Ottawa Citizen about a gaffe that ended with the removal of the plaque of the Canada National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa ahead of its replacement with a plaque that does mention Jews.

At the Sept. 27 opening ceremony of Canada’s first Holocaust memorial, “we suddenly realized an egregious error has been made,” said Friedman, who chaired the advisory council on the monument’s creation. Initially, Jewish critics and partisan politicians blamed senior Ottawa bureaucrats and even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who spoke at the opening and had previously made a similar gaffe. But it soon became evident that although the Holocaust monument was an unambiguously “Jewish” site, the error was chiefly the council’s, with part of the blame put on the government’s Heritage Ministry, the governmental arm responsible for the monument. The controversy erupted soon after the $7.2 million memorial’s opening.

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