Third in a Series

Toronto (special) -- As part of this city's emphasis on multiculturalism, members of the Jewish community plan to stage an Ashkenaz Festival beginning this coming Monday, Aug. 30, and ending Monday, Sept. 6. But if you can't take that non-stop Air Canada flight from San Diego to Toronto so soon, don't fret -- an eclectic mix of Jewish culture pops up in Toronto in all sorts of places, both expected and unexpected!

The Ashkenaz Festival can be compared to San Diego's Jewish Film Festival, Jewish Book Festival, Streisand Family Festival of New Jewish Plays, and Jewish Arts Festival all rolled up into one concentrated week of cultural celebration. One of its features is a parade from the Kensington Market area, where Jewish immigrants first settled in the early 20th century, to the Lake Ontario waterfront where participants will hear speeches, look at displays, and picnic.

Don't get the idea, however, that this is an ordinary parade in which there is a distinction between those who are in the parade and those who are onlookers.   Rather, according to Anne Barber, director of the Ashkenaz Parade, the parade is a journey in which onlookers are encouraged to follow the klezmer bands and other musiians as the route wends from one Jewish landmark, restaurant, bandstand or Jewish happening to another.

Giant styrofoam archways and other  props have been prepared for placement along the route, which will trace a metaphorical journey of a young Jewish person and and older one, according to Barber.

"We have giant puppet figures of age and youth, like an old, decrepit, bowled-over aging figure led by a youthful figure and on the journey they change; they become more as one," Barber said.  "The older fiure finds new life, the younger figure finds maturity and a lack of fear, and they become more unified in that way. 

"The journey has perils--as all journeys do. There are certain threats to age, the proximity of death which is personified, and there are figures of fear-- dybbuks." Of course, by the time marchers reach their destination, the story will end happily ever after.  

The festival celebrates European or Ashkenaz Jewish culture, but not just in a nostalgic way. "It is a festival of New Yiddish Culture, which means that people take traditional forms and explode them open and find new ways of expressing them," Barber said. "We draw from the traditional, the historical, and we take it to new levels. It is drawn from folk culture, and it is a living culture."

The Ashkenaz Festival is just one of many such celebrations held year round with official city encouragement in Toronto. The city is proud of its many ethnic neighborhoods representing countries and peoples from all over the globe. In Mayor Mel Lastman's view, the festivals serve a double purpose. They bring tourists to Toronto and give residents a reason to stay home and enjoy the fun.

But even if Toronto did not hold an Ashkenaz Festival to explore and celebrate Jewish culture, a visitor to this Canadian metropolis--without ever going to a specifically Jewish institution such as a synagogue, JCC or day school--would find that Jewish culture is well represented in various public places.

On our recent trip, my wife Nancy and I were not surprised to find items of specific Jewish interest at Toronto's two best known museums -- the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). But it took us by complete and pleasant surprise that there was even such material to be found at Toronto's unique Bata Shoe Museum where, you
might say, human culture is studied from the ground up.

The Royal Ontario Museum allocates a lot of space to archeological finds, including artifacts from Israel and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean. 

One section traced the development of writing, saying it was first developed in the Levant about 3,700 years ago. "Our alphabet is a direct descendant of this early system," according to the exhibit. "The first alphabets were made of pictures which represented sounds. For
example, the sound 'b' was represented by a house. The word for 'house' was 'bet' in the West Semitic languages. By 1100 BC(E), the use of the alphabet had spread to Greece, but it was not until 300 years later that the alphabet was widely accepted through the Mediterranean world. "

Another exhibit depicts a tomb discovered at Bab Edh Dhra on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The tomb was unusual because it was located at the bottom of a shaft. Exhibit notes wondered whether the unusual tomb configuration suggested that a new group came to the area, perhaps during an invasion, "or does it suggest that these people had always lived on
the desert fringes and now were moving into the rest of the Levant?" 

Nearby, artifacts dated at 1550 BCE from a more typical tomb near Jericho included pots, footed bowls, juglets for perfumes, oils and measurement, alabaster bottles, scarabs, and assorted pottery.

In another display case were various artifacts from the City of Jerusalem, all dated as being from 900 BCE, shortly after the construction of the First Temple by King Solomon, to 586 BCE, when the Temple was destroyed and Jews were sent into the Babylonian exile. Among the artifacts, many of which may have come from non-Jewish cultures living alongside the Jews, were pottery bowls, clay animals, human figurines, jugs, loom weights, arrowheads in bronze and iron, and pottery vessels stamped with royal seals.

A Torah enclosed in a case, Sephardic style, is an important artifact in a section that traces the propagation of the Bible to the peoples of the ancient world. "With the spread of Judaism and Christianity, the need for access to the Book in many languages became acute," according to the exhibit 's notes. "Thus by the Third Century BC (E), the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Greek for the Jews of Alexandria and thereafter all the Scriptures were put into Latin for the Christians of the Western Mediterranean and into Aramaic for the Jews and Christians of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The process of translation has never ceased." 

A Torah of early 20th century vintage from Iraq was donated to the museum by theater impresario and discount store owner Ed Mirvish. The ROM notes connected the Torah to the ancient archeological finds: "Translation did not fill all the needs of the community. Because of its Divine character, the text needed to be preserved in its original language as well. The fidelity of this translation is witnessed by the Torah scroll of today, which differs only in insignificant detail from the First Century BC(E) Scrolls found near the Dead Sea."

 * * *
Biblical art was well represented in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, including a larger than life statue of Adam sculpted by Auguste Rodin, and a pair of paintings attributed to an unknown 16th Century artist: The Messengers with the Water before David, and The Queen of Sheba Visiting King Solomon.

Except for plaques naming these three works, the gallery offered no further explanations for the edification of visitors. In contrast, paintings by a pair of Jewish artists--Camille Pissarro and Marc Chagall -were presented with interesting explanatory texts.

Pissarro's Boieldieu Bridge in Rouen, painted in 1896, "celebrates urban life," according to a posted explanation. "From his hotel room, the artist painted the new signs of the city's industry: a steel bridge, river traffic, train station at the left and factories in the distance. The elevated point of view punctuated by plumes of smoke from the boat and chimneys heightens the feeling of bustling activity."

Chagall's Over Vitebsk depicts a giant man, larger than the houses of Vitebsk, floating on his side like a giant 5th Avenue Parade balloon over the tiny shtetl.

The Art Gallery of Ontario uses the painting to illustrate the ideas that motivated surrealistic painters. Explanatory text mounted near the painting teaches this lesson:

"Bizarre fantasy, the strange, the threatening--many artists in the 20th century have preferred these subjects to the world of the everyday. They viewed the rational and the orderly with suspicion. For many radical artists, reality lurked beneath the surface of things in the traditional realm of the human psyche. In the 1920s, surrealist artists in France set out to explore the strange realm. To understand the human condition, they dug down into the shadowy world of dreams and unconscious; a world of psychic drives and uncensored thoughts and freakish images. They hoped to throw off reason, freeing the psyche to provide new subjects in a radical new direction for art. The unconscious, the irrational, the psyche are all appealing notions but can we really spell out what they mean? ..."

 * * * 
In a change of pace, Nancy and I visited the Bata Shoe Museum and found that soles and souls were on the minds of the curators. One exhibit among many in the unique shoe-filled museum dealt with the role of shoes in religion. We checked out the section on Judaism first, learning that in Psalms 60:10 when King David says "upon Edom will I cast my shoe," he was making reference to a symbolic act by which people signified the acquisition or transfer of property.

Both Assyrians and Hebrews had a ritual "whereby shoes were presented as signs of sealing bargains," according to the museum's explanatory text. 

It went on to report that "in Orthodox Jewish practice, when a loved one dies, the grieving family goes shoeless during the shiva period of mourning as a sign of poverty, for without the deceased they are poorer."

The exhibit also discussed use of a ceremonial shoe called a halizah, which "was removed from the foot of an unmarried man by the childless widow of his brother, releasing him from his obligation of wedding her as implicit in Judaic law." 

In Exodus 3:5, God's voice coming from the Burning Bush instructed Moses (as translated in the Stone Edition of the Tanach ), "Do not come closer to here, remove your shoes from your feet, for the place upon which you stand is holy ground."

The Bata Shoe Museum notes that for Muslims "to show respect and submission before Allah, footwear is removed before entering a mosque. Throughout the Islamic world, this has resulted in styles than can be easily slipped on and off, most commonly resulting in a backless shoe or 'mule.'"

As for Christianity, the museum noted that the Church adopted the cross as a symbol to remember the crucifixion of Jesus. It noted that the Pope's attire, as well as that of other ranking church officials, "often used the cross to embellish robes and footwear inspiring faith in the congregation." 

In a section on eastern religions, the museum noted that Buddhist monks typically will wear robes and shoes in colors ranging from orange to saffron. "The golden orange color worn by Chinese Buddhist monks represents the enlightenment of Buddha," according to the exhibit.

Among the Hindu, there is a story of the god Vishnu, in his incarnation as Prince Rama, being exiled from the kingdom by his brother Baharata. Notwithstanding his trickery, Baharata knew that Rama was the rightful king so "placed Rama's golden sandals on the throne and ruled for 14 years in Rama's name."

Followers of Jainism practiced ahimsa, a doctrine demanding that humans do as much as possible to avoid injuring other life forms, and even to avoid upsetting the stones and the air. This resulted in "stilted sandals" which were designed to prevent the wearer from accidentally crushing an insect underfoot Additionally, Jains discouraged the use of leather.

Among ancient religions represented in the collection is that of the Incas. Specifically, the exhibit dealt with the issue of how people who were to be sacrificed to the gods ought to be dressed. 

A pair of rawhide llama moccasins in the exhibit "belonged to a boy who was sacrificed" and were "placed in a basket with objects for his afterlife and buried in the mountains in the southeastern portion of the Inca empire. The mountains which were the source of water were considered the source of life for the Incas. The sacrifice elevated the status of the victim's family as the child is transformed into a deity."

Thomas Bata was a shoe manufacturer who decided after World War II that he would open up new markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America - especially in rural areas where many people heretofore had gone barefoot. His wife, Sonja, accompanied him on numerous trips and became fascinated with the large variety of ceremonial footwear they would find as they went from one place to another. 'What made people wear such totally different shoes?" she wondered. 

"The collection really started as doing market research," she told Nancy and me. "Even in Africa where an awful lot of people were still barefoot, their kings had shoes, and their priests had shoes -- it was a status symbol to put something on their feet. So why was the shoe designed in a certain way? I started collecting more and more of these local traditional types of shoes...."

Eventually, Sonja Bata put together a collection of shoes that would have put Imelda Marcos's to shame. In fact, a pair of shoes once owned by the former first lady of the Philippines is included in the collection, along with shoes worn by such other celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Indira Gandhi, Diana Princess of Wales, Madonna, 'Ginger Spice' of the Spice Girls, Elton John, Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart.

Besides items in its standing collection, drawn from an inventory of more than 10,000 shoes and pieces of footwear, the museum offers such special exhibits as one now running: "Hebert and Beth Levine: An American Pair."

Herbert Levine Inc. was a manufacturer of fashion shoes for women, and a large selection of the company's trend-setting styles--along with delightful explanatory notes--fill a large upstairs gallery at the museum. "In the '50s, Levine pared the she down, showing more and more of the foot and making 'almost undressed' the only way to be dressed. In the 60's, Levine continued to use the chicest of shoes as well as dipping into the plastic, pop and freelove that defined the decade. By the time Herbert Levine Inc. closed in 1975, Beth and Herbert Levine had single-handedly changed the face of shoe fashion several times..."

The Coty Fashion Critics Award went to the Levine boot in 1967 -- recognition for the years Beth Levine spent in "endless experimentation with leathers, synthetics and finishes. She produced a gamut of styles from lacy knee highs to see-through cowboy boots, and the stretch boot which included shoes attached to hose, fashion hip weighters, and boots that came with attached miniskirts and garter belts."

Although Beth Levine was the creative designer, and Herbert Levine was the businessman, they decided to put his name on the women's shoe line in conformance with gender prejudice at the time that business was a man's province. 

Beth Levine had started in the business as a shoe model "with a perfect size 4B foot" and understood far better than many male designers employed by other companies that "if a shoe is beautiful but doesn't fit the foot it is not a quality shoe."

Besides being sold in stores, Levine shoes were often sought by actresses for film and stage productions as well as by such former U.S. First Ladies as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pat Nixon. Beth Levine feared that neither of the wives of former presidential rivals John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon would appreciate bumping into each other at her studio, so, one day, she frantically had to rearrange their fitting schedules. 

On another occasion, Barbra Streisand came to her studio and insisted she wanted to buy antique lace up booties to wear in the Broadway production of Funny Girl. Levine said she talked her out of it by taking her to a large mirror, and saying to the actress in Yiddish, so no one else would hear, "Don't make yourself ugly!"