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RSS FeedsHer father pretended he could use a thimble to get into Canada. His father stitched together the scheme. Now a project has brought them together
(The Star Fashion & Style)

 
 

21 may 2018 20:17:56

 
Her father pretended he could use a thimble to get into Canada. His father stitched together the scheme. Now a project has brought them together
(The Star Fashion & Style)
 


Knowing how to put a thimble on his finger helped Binem Russak and his family escape life in a displaced persons’ camp in Austria for a new home in Canada.That was the task the Jewish Holocaust survivor was asked to perform under the “garment workers scheme,” an immigration program following the Second World War in which Canadian officials, led by Torontonian Max Enkin, visited displacement camps across Europe looking for recruits to fill a tailor shortage.“We had no papers, nowhere to go. We were all stateless,” said Russak’s daughter Shirley Hanick. “Then somebody came to the camp to do the test. That was the only way out for us.” Hanick was 6 months old when she, her Polish parents and older brother arrived in Quebec City on Oct. 10, 1948 after an 11-day voyage from Germany. Her father was not a tailor at all, but rather a salesperson. “My father always said it’s all because he knew how to put a thimble on his finger. That’s what got us into Canada.”In 1945, when Canada’s door was largely closed to Jewish immigration, Canada’s Jewish community came up with a way to rescue Jews from displacement camps: Filling labour shortages in postwar Canada became the pretext to sneak them in.Inspired by a federal government program aimed at attracting loggers to British Columbia, Enkin, who was a garment factory owner, and others in the clothing sector pitched Ottawa on the idea of recruiting tailors from displacement camps. Not all recruits were actually tailors or had the necessary skills, but they were all set up to work in garment factories for at least a year after arrival. Seven decades after Canada ushered in 2,000 people, more than half of them Jews, under the garment workers scheme, Hanick connected with Enkin’s son Larry through The Tailor Project, a research initiative to trace the whereabouts of those Jewish “tailors” and document their stories through artifac ...


 
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