Yehupetzville with Ralph Benmergui – Details, episodes & analysis

In recent months, the small nation of Azerbaijan has been making a big push to show off their Jews. The leader of the local Jewish community, Rabbi Zamir Isayev, has gone around the world promoting Azerbaijani-Jewish life, making his pitch to Canadians during a visit in November 2022. Here at The CJN, we've received numerous pitches and press opportunities to go on free trips to visit the country's "Mountain Jews". (We haven't taken them up on any.)

There may be grander geopolitical logic behind all this. Sandwiched in the mountainous Caucasus region between Russia and Iran, the dominantly Muslim country has emerged as an important strategic ally for Israel, who threw its support behind Azerbaijan in the last decade during Azerbaijan's ongoing conflict with Armenia. The culmination of all this has been Azerbaijan opening its first embassy in Tel Aviv in late March 2023.

To get a clearer picture about why Azerbaijan is making this push, and to understand the on-the-ground human element underscoring these international trends, we're joined by Rabbi Isayev in Baku, who paints a very glowing picture of Jewish life in his home country.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. Support the show by subscribing to this podcast or donating to The CJN.

Ralph Benmergui has been hosting Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about small-town Jewish life in Canada and around the world, since its debut on Mar. 17, 2021. Since then, we've virtually visited Jews from Glace Bay to North Bay, Jamaica to Jasper, Little Rock to Lethbridge and beyond.

To mark the second anniversary of his successful show, we decided not to look outward, but to turn home—and home, for Ralph, is Hamilton, Ont.

Hamilton is not a small city, nor is its community of 5,000 Jews unimpressive. But its makeup is changing. The long-overlooked industrial city is now exploding with new developments, condos and gentrification, expanding with Toronto expats and new immigrants attracted by a vibrant urban life and (relatively) affordable housing. Local Jewish organizations have been trying to capitalize on this opportunity for years now, and the results speak to how the face of the city is evolving.

On today's episode of Yehupetzville, Ralph sits down with two community leaders who've been at the forefront of Hamilton's transition: Gustavo Rymberg is the CEO of the Hamilton Jewish Federation, and Laura Wolfson leads the Federation's "Welcome Home Hamilton" initiative, which helps newcomers transition smoothly into the city.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. Support the show by subscribing to this podcast or donating to The CJN.

Over the past generation, the Jewish community of Quebec City has been decimated—first by the Quebec Referendum, slowly by an outward migration of young people, and finally by COVID-19, which coincided with a loss of funds to keep any paid staff. The outlook for the couple dozen active remaining Jews looked grim.

Debbie Rootman wouldn't accept that. She moved there in September 2019, and swiftly took it upon herself to revitalize the newsletter, organize events and galvanize community members as best she could. After facing extreme challenges in the last two years, Rootman felt so inspired by a recent episode of Yehupetzville that she reached out to share her own story—and share the proud, centuries-old Jewish history of her adoptive home city.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

Across North America, Jews are increasingly migrating to large urban centres, abandoning smaller towns for more opportunities and a more convenient Jewish life. One rabbi is on a mission to change that.

As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was assigned to a one-year stint in Waterville, Maine, with one small synagogue and a handful of Hillel students at a local liberal arts college. She quickly realized that the disparate, dwindling community had a chance at surviving through innovative thinking and consolidation: bring together the students and older families to make a minyan, get Hillel kids going to local homes for Shabbat, and foster a cross-generational, non-denominational community that would inspire younger Jews to get engaged.

Today, Rabbi Isaacs is the head of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life, a university program that runs events and brings together Jews from across the Pine Tree State. She's now expanding the concept to cities across the United States, from Honolulu to Lexington. Her pitch: if you believe Judaism is not a privilege to be enjoyed exclusively by those living in the densest cities in the country, the impetus is on you to help redistribute wealth and opportunity.

Rabbi Isaacs joins Yehupetzville to share her story, describe her project and explain why small-town Jews are so often primed to become community leaders.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

If you've heard of Sioux Lookout, a largely First Nations town of fewer than 6,000 people in Northern Ontario, you probably wouldn't expect it to be home to any number of Jews. The rural community, nestled between clear blue lakes and verdant forests, is an attractive summer getaway—but living there full-time can be difficult.

It's that much harder to practice medicine there, with little support or infrastructure, travelling north to fly-in First Nations communities with sometimes no resident physician of their own. But these are the challenges that attract a certain kind of doctor—and, as it happens, several of them are Jewish.

After Benji Goldstein, an Israeli-born doctor, became perhaps the town's first practising Jew, Ben Langer moved next door, on a mission to help underserved communities as a rural family doctor. Together, and with a few other Jews in the area, they began baking challah, celebrating Shabbat and building an ice hanukkiah every winter, becoming an unexpected focal point of Jewish life. Both men join Yehupetzville to chat about the risks and rewards of making a life so far from home.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

Despite Jews living on the island of Jamaica for more than 200 years, the Caribbean island isn't a logical hotspot for Jewish life. Yet Jewish life has thrived over the years. One man at the centre has been Ainsley Henriques, a longtime leader of Jamaica's Jewish community—he's worn many hats, including as the Honorary Consul of Israel in Jamaica, and met with many important figure, including Louis Farrakhan, whom he once took to a Shabbat service at the synagogue in Kingston.

To share that story and others, Henriques joins to discuss Jewry in Jamaica, the future outlook and the Jewish origins of Jamaica's tradition of "Saturday soup".

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

Simon Kreindler was born in Barbados, where he lived until he graduated high school. After that, it was off to Canada—he left behind the Caribbean island's few dozen Jewish families and studied medicine at McGill University. But decades later, in 2013, he felt an urge to revisit memories of his old home and his family's settlement there.

He began researching his parents' journey from Europe to Barbados, and reached out to acquaintances who shared their own family histories. Kreindler stitched these tales together into a self-published book, Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados, released in 2017.

Kreindler joins to discuss his research, what's left of Barbados's community and what it was like growing up Jewish under the Caribbean sun.   Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

In big cities, Jews have large organizations that can advocate on their behalf. In small towns, it's the locals themselves that need to step up. That's what happened when antisemitic incidents were recently revealed to have happened at a school in Stratford, Ont.—just one of a rash of similar incidents in Ontario schools this year.

After Carrie Wreford heard about Hitler salutes and inflammatory videos at her son's school, she wasn't satisfied by the school's reaction, which focused on this specific incident—but didn't get at the root of the problem. So she initiated class tours of a local Holocaust museum exhibit on loan from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which she hopes will educate local kids about the dangers of hatred and bigotry against all people, not just Jews.

Wreford shares her story, and describes life as one of the few Jews in Stratford, with Ralph Benmergui on Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about Jews in small-town Canada and beyond.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

Sheina Lerman has moved around a lot in life, but never has she wanted to live in a big city. After moving to Newfoundland some years ago, during the pandemic, she decided to settle in Deer Lake, a town of 5,000 people—perhaps none of them Jews. She found a nice house across from a sandy beach. Life, for the most part, is quiet.

Except when it isn't. Like in 2021, when she decided to stand for the provincial New Democratic Party in the Liberal stronghold that was home to former premier Dwight Ball, who handed it over to his successor, Andrew Furey. Furey won with 2,838 votes; Lerman came in third with 107. But when you're a come-from-away Jew in small-town Newfoundland, you're no stranger to being the odd person out in a crowd.

Lerman sits down with Yehupetzville host Ralph Benmergui to chat about why she chose this quaint and coastal life, and why she believes more Jews need to leave urban centres and make their presence known across the country.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.

Elena Kingsbury grew up in Maitland, Ont., a small town of about 1,200 people—including just two Jewish families. She would hop across the St. Lawrence River into Ogdensburg, NY, where her family were members of the international Anshe Zophen synagogue, which supported congregants from nearby towns on both sides of the border.

In 2000, Kingsbury would be the last bat mitzvah in the now-closed synagogue. The 9/11 attacks made border crossings too difficult, and a declining population led to the regional exodus of many young locals—including herself. Now an education specialist at the Friends Of Simon Wiesenthal Center For Holocaust Studies in Ottawa, Kingsbury joins to recall her years growing up in the tiny riverside town, and how it shaped her conception of what it means to be Jewish.

Credits

Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.