Acknowledging who we are
This blog is written by Academy Fellow, Jane Rabinowicz. Jane works to advance food sovereignty and community leadership at local, regional, national, and international levels. She currently serves as Executive Director of USC Canada, one of Canada’s longest-standing and progressive international collaboration organizations.
Following International Women’s Day, I have been reflecting on lineage.
I have always felt the weight of lineage. This has been especially true recently, as I learn about the founder of USC Canada, Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova. Lotta came to Canada as a refugee from Czechoslovakia during the second world war. Her life had been saved by a Unitarian-run medical center in Marseilles when she was near starvation, and she founded USC Canada in 1945 to help communities rebuild in post-war Europe.
As I learn Lotta’s story, I connect to the story of my father’s mother, my Oma. My Oma was one of the most defining people in my life. She worked in a button shop, and I grew up visiting her there, playing with the shiny buttons and hearing her stories. Both Lotta and my Oma were born to Jewish families in Europe and fled to Canada during the war. Both were tiny but mighty, strong, smart, independent women. My grandmother’s only child, my father, was born in 1945, the same year Lotta’s only child, USC Canada, was born.
I am USC Canada’s first Executive Director of Jewish heritage since Dr. Lotta. I have always tried to honour my grandmother in my work, and now I also honour Lotta as well. I feel their stories intertwining, and I feel myself becoming part of this lineage.
Why do I share this story with you? Because lineage puts things in perspective. It helps us understand that the story of where we find ourselves today began before we were born. It takes us out of ourselves, and situates our current reality in the context of time that existed before we came around, and will continue after we are gone. On the heels of International Women’s Day, I acknowledge that I am who I am because of the women who came before me, and the women who have helped to form me – both within and outside my family, and including the wonderful women in the Academy.
I invite this community to consider lineage – both what came before, and will come after us.