Winnipeg Board Of Jewish Education Stonewalls Questions About Antisemitic Incident

The handling of the affair by both schools seems designed to hide the harm done to the Jewish community and shield the coaches and athletic directors. They worked out a secret deal that appears to be primarily intended to protect the game of basketball in Manitoba – and not teenage Jewish athletes. Our information is, that not even this incident was reported to the parents of the Gray Academy players.

As TheJ.ca reported last week, there is a history of problems between the teams, and none of it was ever reported – as required – to the Manitoba High School Athletic Association.

High school sports has become a hotbed of aggressive and sometimes violent conduct towards Jews.

At a girls basketball games last Saturday in California, “Buena Park students held up pictures of Swastikas on their phones to distract (shooters)”;  at a championship boys soccer match on Feb. 15 in Miami, a mob yelling “Hitler was right” and “Dirty Jews” attacked Scheck Hillel players and fans; one Jewish student was hospitalized with a metal cleat lodged in his eye after repeated kicks to his face.

With Jewish education officials and Federation leadership keen on keeping the details of the Rady Centre incident a state secret, conflicting and escalating versions of what transpired have been circulating. A number of reports to TheJ.ca have claimed that antisemitic gestures, described as a “Hitler salute” in one instance and a “Hitler mustache” in another, were made by UW players, and that people were spit on. TheJ.ca was also told that Miami was not the only place “dirty Jews” was uttered in contempt to high schoolers.

Yet another version, from a family connected to the team, asserted that only 3 Wesmen players were involved which makes the outcome – collective punishment of all the UW players – really hard to fathom. At press time, another family close to the team said the antisemitic incident consisted of chants or statements of “Free Palestine!” – which is a genocidal chant of the terrorist Islamist Hamas.

Until the adults responsible for the Winnipeg Jewish community and for our students come clean, fear within the Jewish community – on edge since the rock and bottle throwing riot on May 15 2021 that injured some Jewish teens and which was never addressed by the Jewish Federation – will continue to grow. We expect that even wilder versions of what is being covering up by all parties will continue to unfold.

Alone you may think that one non-violent incident does not hold a place of significance for the Jewish community in Winnipeg – we have overcome much more – but how are we to measure warning signs, or alternatively (Hashem Willing) to celebrate the lack of incidents, if we can’t even get our own community to identify and expose the bigotry in the first place?

If the “leaders” in our community are gate keeping the truth and won’t stand up for us who will? What kind of an example does it make for the Jewish students that experienced the incident? It screams “Sweep things under the rug and don’t rock the boat too much kids.”

The goal is not to publicly identify some minors that may have made some gestures or espoused hate filled rhetoric, but to have our community support each other and to track the frequency and severity of each incident. No federation, or board alone should have the power to silence an event like this. 

(At press time Thej.ca hadn’t yet heard back from Minister of Education Wayne Ewasko or Sports and Culture Minister Obby Khan. The MHSAA was unable before deadline to verify the schools are working directly with them. The Rady JCC did not respond to our inquiry before deadline. We will have lots more on this story, and more from Prof. Cotler, next week.)