Rabbi Marat Ressin was concerned when he heard the preliminary Canadian results for the World Zionist Congress elections. The prominent member of Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community ran as a candidate for the international organization, dubbed the “Parliament of the Jewish people”, under the United for Israel slate. While the final Canadian numbers aren’t yet public, voter turnout was much lower than Canadian Zionist Federation (CZF) organizers had hoped—approximately 18,000 voters in a country of 400,000 Jews.
When he heard that, Rabbi Ressin—who has a PhD in economics—immediately questioned whether it was worthwhile to spend what he estimates was $1 million on marketing, staffing and operating the software for the online voting campaign.
For Rabbi Ressin, it hits especially hard, as he believes many Russian-speaking Canadian Jews weren’t able to vote. Voting was online-only, posing a challenge to seniors; payment was tightly restricted; and, critically, the CZF election website was only in English and French.
Despite it all, Rabbi Ressin understands that establishing a democratic process had one positive result—it strengthened the community and its ties to Israel. He joins Ellin Bessner on The CJN’s flagship news podcast, North Star, to explain why Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community may appeal the results, regardless of the organization’s internal findings.
Transcript
Rabbi Marat Ressin: And it affected terribly our community. For example, none of our seniors were able to vote. None. And it’s really, really.
Ellin Bessner: That’s the voice of Rabbi Marat Ressin of Toronto. He’s a prominent leader in Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community. He was also a candidate for the election to one of Canada’s 19 seats at the World Zionist Congress in Israel later this year. Rezin ran as part of Canada’s United for Israel slate. The election took place from June 5th until June 15th. We still don’t have the final results. An investigation has been underway for the last three weeks to check red flags and irregularities in some of the Canadian ballots. More about that a bit later. Expectations had been high for the turnout in this year’s elections because, for the first time, the balloting was thrown open to all eligible Jewish adult Canadian Zionists. Before, it hadn’t been a truly democratic election; Canada’s Zionist groups used to choose the delegates by a sort of in-house agreement. In 2025, the Canadian Zionist Federation organizers hired an American company to run the online-only voting platform. Two hundred seventy-three Canadian candidates from nine different slates put their names in, and regulations were drawn up that were supposed to prevent the kind of widespread cheating and possible fraud that we’ve seen coming out of the Zionist election in the United States so far and in the UK as well. Organizers expected about 25,000 Canadian Zionists would vote. The candidates spent months marketing and drumming up interest across Canada. But when the balloting closed, the turnout was much lower than organizers had hoped—about 18,000 voters. The CJN has learned these are the preliminary numbers. While the Russian-speaking candidates from Canada did very well in the last election in 2020, when they won five or a quarter of Canada’s allocated 20 seats on the World Zionist Congress, this time Rezin thinks his Russian-speaking community faced some big barriers to voting. So many thousands did not or could not vote. He says that’s why his slate is considering launching an appeal of the whole Canadian election to the World Zionist Congress’s in-house court.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Generally speaking, there are about 400,000 Jews in Canada, and overall, for all the slates, only about 18,000 people voted. So it’s not a very good representation, actually. I think next time we’ll have to do a better job with that.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Friday, July 4th, 2025. Welcome to North Star, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, made possible thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation. As I mentioned before, the final results of the Canadian Zionist elections aren’t available yet. That’s led to some frustration and concerns from some of the nine slates who fielded candidates. I wrote a whole long print story about it with all the allegations for The CJN’s website, and you can read it if you go to the link in our show notes. In a nutshell, election officials say they’re trying to rule out cheating. They’ve rejected 500 people who tried to vote using prepaid credit cards. A further approximately 200 votes might have come from people who also voted in the US election, which is a no-no. Then there are some addresses to check out where multiple people voted. There were some other glitches, like 500 people registered but didn’t complete the two-step process to pay and then vote. But none of these red flags is as worrying to Rabbi Marat Ressin as the bigger issue for his Russian-speaking community. The way the election was set up, he said, was online only, with no paper ballots, just credit cards, and a big language barrier he feels effectively kept his community from voting. Rabbi Rezin is also a board member on the Canadian Zionist Federation, so he was directly involved in the election setup. He wants you to know that despite all the problems, the fact that 18,000 Canadian Jews voted should be celebrated. He joins me now to unpack his concerns.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Thanks for having me.
Ellin Bessner: It’s now almost two weeks later, and we still don’t have the results. So I’m wondering if you are concerned, or do you know why it’s taking so long?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Yeah. So, first of all, I’m concerned with what happens in Israel. You know, right today in Gaza, seven soldiers were killed, and that’s what concerns me much, much more than this. Yes, of course, I’m not much interested in the elections between Jews. I think we need shalom bayit anyway and whatever, so I’m not concerned. I know that in the States there was a problem with wrong votes, like some fraud going on or something like that. As far as I know, we don’t have anything like that in Canada, which is great. I’m proud to be Canadian once again. However, we have some issues, you know, wrong votes or some people vote with a different postal code or something like that. To the best of my knowledge, they’re dealing with that. Also, there were some issues with the process of voting as well. It was way too complicated and it happened not exactly how it should have been. So some people are concerned with the outcome. We have to deal with that, but we’ll be fine. First and foremost, I want to say that our president and our first vice president did a tremendous job putting together all the technology, all the process, and everything. I’m happy we did it so smoothly coming into the elections. But, of course, it’s the first time in Canada, and there are many problems. I can explain to you what specifically the problems are.
Ellin Bessner: Sure. You said there were difficulties in voting. Just full disclosure to our listeners: I did vote, and it was a real pain. The website didn’t work, it didn’t let you even know anything about it. I still can’t open the slates on my Mac. But those are technical issues, and our listeners may also have had other issues. Also, you couldn’t do it if you were not computer savvy.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Yeah. As you know, our community, the Jewish Russian-speaking community of Canada, was affected mostly by the hardships of the elections. Originally, we specifically asked the elections committee to make sure that seniors would have an easier way to vote, like for example, paper ballots or something like that. The decision was not to do it. We specifically asked to make sure that the description would be in languages other than English and French, including Russian in our case. It was the decision of the Central Election Committee in Jerusalem to do so, but it wasn’t. Then again, it was a decision of the Central Election Committee, with us questioning them about that, that people would have different options to pay, including debit cards. In our community specifically, the number of people who don’t have credit cards is proportionally the biggest, not comparably biggest. Some credit cards, like debit Visas or debit MasterCards, worked; other debit cards didn’t. It affected terribly our community. Also, when we discussed the processes, it was my suggestion not to charge $2 because it was not about money; it was about checking if people actually live in Canada. My suggestion was to ask people to write their ID number, like the way people vote in Israel. You know, you put your ID number, and that’s it. That’s how voting happens in Israel.
Ellin Bessner: Your passport or your permanent resident status.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Yeah, whatever document—the legal ID. Just put your number, you can easily check it. But no, the decision was that people have to pay specifically to check that they live in Canada. Speaker A: And the way you do it was the most complicated. Our community was affected tremendously by the hardships of voting. I have to say that we got the result, not the one we expected, specifically because of that. The overall feeling is not so good because people are upset that they wanted to vote but were not able to vote at all. No seniors. We tried to go to different organizations that worked with Russian-speaking seniors, but organizations like UGA specifically told them to not allow us to speak with them. However, CZF also never did that. So, our seniors were not able to vote, period. Anyway, I’m not blaming anyone.
Ellin Bessner: Well, hang on a second. It’s important that I understand something. Do you have any idea what the numbers might look like that would not be able to vote?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Okay, so we have 23 and a half thousand people on our list. I believe that below 3,000 actually voted, and none of the seniors voted from our community.
Ellin Bessner: What else would you have liked to have seen that would have been taken, that would have been acceptable as a payment?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Oh, we have many families, like a couple of seniors, for example, or new immigrants who don’t have credit cards because the rule was if you have a credit card in your family, in your household, then you may use one credit card for that. But what if people don’t? In the most common situation, you either have credit cards in your household, or you don’t. Like, for example, in my family, everyone voted with their own credit card.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah, I’m disturbed to hear this. It was something that never occurred to me. I was reading some of the other coverage out of the United States where there were frauds voted by bots. The Gmail addresses were nearly the same. So obviously there were patterns of organized, let’s just say, irregularities in the States. Besides the actual difficulty of actually voting, what are you hearing about the investigation of the votes that got in?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Well, I’m not aware of any types of fraud like that in Canada, as I said. That’s what I expected, and really, once again, I’m proud to be Canadian. We don’t do that. At the very beginning of the campaign, we brought all the volunteers together and told them we’d better fail than cheat. So make sure that nobody, nobody, nobody does anything which is incorrect. We don’t need it. It’s one united Jewish family, and we don’t need this. Basically, my original feeling was that we don’t need any elections. We just have to sit together and decide like the old ways they did it.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah, yeah.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Because we actually spend a lot of money basically on nothing. The only good outcome out of this is that more people became aware of what happens.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned that this is the first time, and we knew this was the first time in several generations that they had an actual “quote” democratic vote. Lots of people did not know really that it used to be done kind of by a gentleman’s agreement for so many years, you know. Do you know how much was spent to actually conduct this year’s vote?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Well, it’s hard to know. I know our organizations have to pay about 90,000 American dollars, but every organization also spent on marketing on something. I believe we spent about $100,000, and yeah, there are how many? Nine slates. So a million dollars. We spent a million dollars on basically nothing. That’s why my original approach was just to sit and make the decision. But people have ego, not people here; people in Jerusalem have ego, and they influence people here too much. Like, for example, in our case, our friends in Jerusalem cannot affect our decisions in any way. But other organizations that somehow are more dependent on what people in Jerusalem think…
Ellin Bessner: What do you know in terms of the actual results? Are you able to reveal, or not yet the preliminary?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: No, no, no. And it’s fair to not do it. I can say that basically everyone got plus or minus what was expected. The only slate that got less is us, and I explained to you why.
Ellin Bessner: And now it may change a little bit depending on those several hundred votes that are still red-flagged.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Yeah. Also, our board is weighing the opportunity to apply to the Central Election Committee to appeal. Because what had to be done was not done. My personal position is to not do it. I’m looking for Shalom Bayit, but it depends on what our board will decide. Because certain things that had to be done were not done. First, the description on that website, everything was complicated. Yes, the description wasn’t in Russian, despite the fact that it had to be. People had to be able to vote and receive codes by SMS. It didn’t work. People had to be able to pay by debit cards. It wasn’t happening. We were not allowed to talk to people in organizations who deal with Russian-speaking seniors. All of this is not good. I still think we need Shalom Bayit, we need to let it go. But I don’t know. So, in case our organization applies an appeal, it will take even…
Ellin Bessner: Longer, and the deadline is July 28 for the cutoff so that they can have the conference in October in Jerusalem, right? For all the votes all around?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Officially, yes. But if there will be an appeal, then it will take additional time. It’s okay, it’s not a problem. By the moment the Congress takes place, everything will be set.
Ellin Bessner: Is there anything else that I didn’t ask that you think our listeners should know about what this means for Canada’s influence on the World Zionist Congress in Israel? Because we get to have a say, even though we’re a small community, we should get to have a say. So how is this voting impacting maybe what our voice will be in Israel?
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Right. So first of all, it’s very important for everyone here to understand that the World Zionist Congress is our parliament. It’s the parliament of the entire Jewish people, and we have to have our influence on it. I always ask people, can you be a Zionist while sitting in Canada? And I believe yes, you can. But you have to do something. You have to think of Israel. You have to do something. You have to donate, volunteer, and participate in elections of the Zionist Congress and affect decisions because it’s a serious budget allocated; approximately 17% of the land in Israel is controlled by the Congress, many programs and many important things. I think it’s important that everyone here understands that this is our way to be Jews, this is our way to be Zionists. This is our way to be the community put together. Now, I think after these elections, more people became aware of the Congress of the Zionist movement, which is good and important. But from another perspective, all these fights when there is war in Israel. Exactly. When the war in Israel goes on. To me, it was a little bit harmful to participate. Anyway, Yihiyeh Seder, as we say, all will be good.
Ellin Bessner: I appreciate you sharing your challenges and your views, and it’s been really an honor to talk to you about this. Thank you so much.
Rabbi Marat Ressin: Thanks for having me.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like. For this episode of “North Star,” made possible thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation. We contacted the Canadian Zionist Federation and spoke to many other sources. Cost was likely a factor in having only English and French on the website and not Russian and Hebrew, although many of the individual slates did translate their own materials, but not the voting instructions. The CJN had a helpline with staff available during the election period to help people who were getting stuck. The President of the Canadian Zionist Federation, Stan Greenspan, says, “Our only wish was to have a completely fair and honest election, and we did everything we could to make sure it happened that way.” Our show is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman, and the music is by Brett Higgins. We’d like to hear from you on this one. We’re at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Related links
- Investigation into irregularities and ‘red flags’ delaying release of final Canadian results in World Zionist Congress election, in The CJN.
- Hear what’s at stake in the World Zionist Congress elections for Canadian voters.
- Read more about the election on The Canadian Zionist Federation website.
- Why The CJN’s Treasure Trove columnist, David Matlow, urged Canadian Jews to vote in the WZC election.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Bret Higgins
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