Post-Traumatic Growth And A Unique Friendship: Don Barnard And I

There was one more gesture toward the tail end of the trip that really floored Don, when I bought him a professional-level video camera. I also contacted Larry Vickar and other prominent members of the Winnipeg Jewish community, to try and obtain some more help for him.  Larry arranged for Don to get a car on very reasonable terms, which included the provision of photographic services to Larry’s car dealership enterprise.

Ultimately my only expectation from Don was that he would spread the message about Israel as he had already been doing for years prior to his first trip.  

“I’d like to counter the message that aboriginal youth are getting in the prisons and the mixed martial arts clubs” where, Don says, they typically hear a completely slanted pro-Palestinian point of view. “If the opportunity ever came for me to speak   with aboriginal youth or to the community at large I would gladly share my message with them about Israel. “

Recently Don received a grant from the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba to make a documentary movie about Israel and his special relationship with my wife Orly, Oren, and myself. Yolanda Papini-Pollock, the aforementioned filmmaker, is collaborating in the production of the film. One of the major themes is about how Jews, an indigenous first nation people in the land of Israel, have survived the Holocaust and transformed Israel into a gem of nations, excelling in such diverse areas as academia, agriculture, medicine, high-tech, the military and many other fields of endeavour.

Dan Brom, Ph.D., a renowned clinical psychologist in Israel refers to this phenomenon as “post-traumatic growth”. The film will compare the survival from the Holocaust of the Jewish people to the cultural genocide which has occurred in the aboriginal First Nation people in Canada who have been oppressed for decades and still have not managed to recover from the trauma precipitated by their treatment by the Canadian government and society at large.  

Orly and I arranged for Don and Yolanda to interview a number of Israeli dignitaries including prominent people in the military, mental health, immigration, an organization dealing with non-natural disasters such as terrorism as well as with Holocaust survivors. This documentary will be screened locally and internationally in early 2021.