'50 caribou to make one Torah'


Inuit from across Canada's Far North
take part in Shabbat service at Etz Chayim

By MATT BELLAN

C ongregation Etz Chayim may have set a world first last month.

About 70 Catholics from across the vast Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut took part in a specially-organized Shabbat service July 24, 2004 at Etz Chayim, located in the former Rosh Pina Synagogue.

The northern visitors, mostly Inuit, included about half a dozen non-Inuit clergy and two non-Inuit educators.

"As far as I know, it's a world first," Rabbi Neal Rose, who led the service, said last week. "And it happened in Winnipeg."

Dr. Shalom Coodin, a Winnipeg psychiatrist whose duties take him to Arviat, a Nunavut community 265 kilometres north of Churchill, several times a year, passed on a request to Etz Chayim for the Inuit to visit.

"Lyne Rollin, a Catholic outreach worker in Arviat, who's a friend of mine, suggested the visit," Coodin explained.

The diocese there brings Catholics from across Nunavit to Winnipeg annually for a 10-day Catholic spirituality conference. Those gatherings take place here because Winnipeg is the common connection point for flights from across Nunavut, which stretches from the Western Arctic nearly to Greenland.

Rollin came to Etz Chayim three weeks earlier, and helped organize the Shabbat service.

"The visitors arrived at shule 9 a.m. on Shabbes - about 70 people, along with a bishop," Rose, spiritual leader at Etz Chayim while Rabbi Henry Balser is on holidays, said last week. "It took some of them two days to get here." Rose began by spending an hour with the visitors downstairs, describing the synagogue and some basic principles of Judaism. An Inuit woman translated his remarks into Inuktituk, since only the younger members of the group speak English.

"HOW MANY SKINS
WOULD IT
TAKE TO MAKE A SEFER TORAH?"

Everyone then came upstairs, and entered the sanctuary.

"We opened the aaron kodesh and took out the sefer Torah - it was very impressive to them," Rose recalled. "We explained all sorts of things to them through the translator."

During a question-and-answer session Rose included in the service instead of a sermon, an Inuit asked: "How many animal skins would it take to make a sefer Torah?"

"What do you do?" Rose asked him.

"I'm a hunter," the man replied.

"I don't know - you tell me," Rose said.

After eyeing the Torah scroll carefully, the hunter replied: "Judging by the size, I'd say it would take 50 caribou."

The bishop, an older man, asked his fellow Inuit to rise, and "they sang a blessing to us in Inuktituk," Rose added. The visitors then joined Etz Chayim members for kiddush, and people sat around and chatted.

Jonathan Buchwald, Etz Chayim's executive director, said that for most of the visitors, the Shabbat service was "probably the first time they'd met anybody Jewish."

"They were very impressed with Tracy Kasner-Greaves, our cantorial soloist," Buchwald added.

Last week, Rose, who's also director of spiritual care at the Sharon Home, had another pleasant surprise. His wife, Carol informed him that a gift from the visitors from the far north had just arrived for him - an Inuit carving made out of reindeer antlers.

"It was a wonderful experience, something deeply spiritual," Rose said of the Shabbat service. "A lot of people in the shule were very appreciative. People felt we made a real spiritual connection without either side compromising themselves."

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