May 2 has been declared an official day of remembrance and mourning in British Columbia after last weekend’s horrific attack on a Filipino cultural festival in Vancouver. To date, 11 people died and dozens more remain wounded after a 30-year-old man drove an SUV into a crowd at the city’s Lapu Lapu festival on April 26. The suspect has been charged with multiple counts of second-degree murder, but the investigation continues.
Leaders of the Filipino community say they feel deeply touched by the heartfelt outreach and solidarity being shown by Canadian Jewish groups.
In Vancouver, Jewish residents have mounted prayer vigils and also set up an emergency fundraising campaign. The outpouring of support is being described as an example of kapwa, the Filipino tradition of solidarity and unity, as that community processes the grief while seeking answers on how the mental health system failed so badly to prevent the massacre.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, we’re joined by two members of Canada’s Filipino community, who also share deep ties with the country’s Jews: David Decolongon, who works in Vancouver for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), has family and friends who attended the festival and witnessed the horrific attack; and Primrose Madayag Knazan, from Winnipeg, is an award-winning Filipinx-Jewish author and playwright with expertise on how the Philippines helped rescue European Jews during the Holocaust.
Transcript
Ellin Bessner: That’s the voice of Ezra Shanken. He’s the head of Vancouver’s Jewish Federation, and he was speaking Sunday at a prayer service at Beth Israel synagogue the day after a sudden car ramming attack on pedestrians buying food at a local Filipino cultural festival. At least 11 people died, and 30 more were wounded. The attack happened just before the start of Asian Heritage Month on May 1st. Jewish Heritage Month started that day too. But instead of celebrating, the Province of British Columbia declared May 2nd a day of mourning and remembrance for the victims of the street festival, which was named after a Filipino military hero from the 1500s, General Lapu-Lapu, who helped defeat Spanish colonizers.
Ellin Bessner: As news of the attack spread through B.C. and across the country, Jewish politicians, organizations, and private citizens reached out. They visited Filipino churches, held their own prayer services, or together, as you heard. The Jewish Federation of Vancouver has now mounted an emergency fundraising campaign through its website for donations to help the victims and their families. Now, as the Vancouver police investigation continues and more details come out about the attacker, some members of the Filipino community say they are deeply grateful for our community’s support. They call it kapwa, solidarity between two Diaspora people who’ve been closely tied ever since the Holocaust, when the Philippines provided visas to 10,000 German and Austrian Jews. 1,200 were able to safely escape to the Philippines as refugees.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Friday, May 2, 2025. Welcome to the CJN Daily, a podcast of tThe Canadian Jewish News and made possible in part, thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
David Decalongon would have been celebrating at his community’s Lapu-Lapu Festival himself last Saturday, joining friends and relatives who were there, but he had a prior commitment, so he learned about it only when his phone started blowing up with messages asking if he was okay.
Ellin Bessner: Decalongon was born in Vancouver to Filipino immigrants. He works for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, or CIJA’s Pacific office, handling policy and communications, including crisis communications, skills which he’s been using to help the Jewish community cope with antisemitism in this country since October 7th. He never expected to see his own community become a target or have to put his skills to use this way.
Meanwhile, in Winnipeg, Primrose Madayag Knazan was at home when the news broke. The award-winning author and playwright was born in Manitoba to Catholic Filipino parents.
Ellin Bessner: She fell in love with her now husband and with his Judaism and she converted. Decalongon and Madayag Knazan didn’t know each other before today, but they share the anger and grief and the search for a way forward based on the Filipino concept of kapwa. And they join me now. Welcome to The CJN Daily, both of you.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Hi. Happy to be here.
David Decolongon: Thanks for having us.
Ellin Bessner: Well, I’m sorry that we have to meet under these conditions, with this news. I want to ask you both, first of all, when you heard, how did you hear the news on the day the incident happened?
David Decolongon: We were actually celebrating a birthday in the family. We were about 10 blocks away from the Lapu-Lapu Festival. We started to see police cars barrel down Fraser Street one after the other. We were wondering what was happening. It was in the general direction of the Lapu-Lapu Festival. We didn’t know anything had happened at the time, but a sense of dread started to take over us as we started to see some of those emergency vehicles come back. And in particular, as we were heading home, we saw a police car come down Fraser Street and intentionally block traffic so that the ambulances could get through. And for us, that’s when that sense of dread started to kick in. So for us, it was a very shocking evening. And even now, we’re still trying to message family and friends, trying to figure out if they were there, whether or not they’re okay, and what sort of support we can continue to provide them.
Ellin Bessner: Wow. And Primrose, you’re three provinces away. But how did you hear about it?
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Well, we were just watching TV at around 11 p.m. at night when I found out. While watching TV, my husband turned to me, he said, “Oh my God, there’s been an attack on the Filipino community.” And immediately I went onto social media and we just started just reading everything we could. I checked on my friends to see if they were at that. A lot of them were not. I have family and friends in Vancouver, and it doesn’t look like any of them were. Thankfully, we’re not there, but still it affected us greatly. By the morning, everything blew up and we were trying to comfort each other. Immediately I had emails and texts from friends and family across the country to see if I was okay. Lots of support from the Jewish community. I had choir practice that night with the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue, and they were wonderfully supportive and so was my work. But it was just a horrible, horrible tragedy that happened.
Ellin Bessner: How large is the Filipino community in British Columbia, David? And Primrose, tell me also about Winnipeg’s size.
David Decolongon: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Filipino community in B.C. is more than 170,000 people dispersed across the province. The larger pockets of Filipino life in B.C. are in the lower mainland. We see, in various pockets of Vancouver, such as Joyce Station, South Vancouver, where the Lapu-Lapu Festival happened. I grew up for a number of years going to a Filipino church a few blocks away from where the festival grounds were. I have family and friends who live in that neighborhood where the unfortunate event happened. And so many of them were the first people that I had reached out to to make sure that they were fine.
Ellin Bessner: I think the police said 100,000 people went that day to the festival. Primrose, tell me the size of the community where you live in Winnipeg?
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Well, in Manitoba, about 10% of the population is Filipino. That’s about 100,000 people. We have a very large population. We had the largest population per capita. Tagalog, actually, in the last census, came second and beat out French as the most spoken language, second most spoken language in Manitoba. So it’s a huge part of the population. So we feel connected to everyone across the country.
Ellin Bessner: Now you mentioned people were reaching out to you guys. What have you been receiving in terms of, like, Jewish community official and non-official offers of, you know, financial support? Tell me what you’ve had happen right away since the attack.
David Decolongon: Absolutely. So I think one of the things that perhaps I can back away and sort of discuss first of all, are our communities and perhaps how our communities connect. Just as you know, the Jewish community is a diasporic community and has people sort of, and community members and family, across the world. The Filipino community is the same way because we’ve had to travel to different parts of the world in order to seek a better life. And so, just going off of my own personal geography, and I’m sure Primrose has a very similar story, I’ve got family across Canada, in the United States, France, parts of the Middle East, the UK, different parts of Asia. And so when an event like this happens, similarly as with the Jewish community, you start to see concern from all other parts of the world because we don’t necessarily know where our family is.
I was getting calls from Dubai asking how we were doing from family members over there. And so it very much affected us.Â
In terms of how the local Jewish community has reacted in Vancouver, there has been a long history of the Jewish community and the Filipino community working together and being together. Most of those are through personal links. I know that in my own personal story and my family, I have plenty of family members who have had Jewish co-workers and friends. I have had family who have chosen to actively join the Jewish community. And so the links between our communities are strong.Â
On the night everything happened, some of the first people to reach out to me were leaders and members of the Jewish community. Everything from personal offers to help. On the night of, a community leader reached out to me and said if there are any people who are struggling to get home because of the police barricades or because public transit was no longer operating, that they would be willing to open their doors for our community members.
Ellin Bessner: Like to sleep over type of thing?
David Decolongon: Absolutely, yeah. Ezra Shanken, the CEO for the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, sent a very simple message to me. He said, you are family. We are here with you and we’ll help you get through this. And so the Jewish community in Vancouver has stepped up over the weekend. I know that they had opened up fundraising for within the community. I know that a substantial amount had been raised in order to support Filipino BC and the organizers of the event. Because unfortunately, the Jewish community in the past 18 months, and even before that, has had to deal with crisis responses. And so they have been able to lend a lot of their expertise and support to the Filipino community.
Ellin Bessner: And what did that mean to you when this outpouring was happening?
David Decolongon: It felt like a little bit of a role reversal for me. In the past 18 months, I’ve worked in Jewish advocacy and I viewed my role very much as trying to stay strong for the community, for my friends, family, and co-workers and colleagues in the Jewish community. As you know, they were dealing with some of the most traumatic experiences that they had faced in a generation. I very much viewed myself as trying to be their advocate and trying to work on their behalf. But that role has felt reversed in the past few days. Since Saturday, there have been moments where I’ve had to close my office door when news or the details of somebody who was murdered on Saturday come out. When I hear about, you know, the struggles and, you know, the stories of some of my family members who were at the festival are thankfully physically safe, but have witnessed some horrific images there. The Jewish community has really stepped up and, you know, both at the leadership level and in terms of the personal level have really, really stepped up to make me feel supported in my role.
Ellin Bessner: You said your family members were actually…they saw this happen. You want to tell us a little bit more?
David Decolongon: Yeah, out of sake for the privacy, I’m not going to sort of name them, but I do have family members who both were there at the festival and left shortly before the car had driven through the crowd. And I also have family members who were on East 43rd and had fortunately walked off of the road and onto the sidewalk as the vehicle had barrelled through the crowd. Some of them were some of the first people to call first responders when that happened. Thankfully, they’re safe, but in discussions with my family, they’re visibly shaken, and I know that, you know, they’re hurting right now quite a bit.
Ellin Bessner: I’m sure they’re going to need counselling, for sure. And what about you, Primrose? You said you’ve been getting a lot of support from your relatives from all over, but also, what about the Jewish community? How has that manifested in your situation?
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Well, the Jewish community and the Filipino community have been intertwined since the time of the Holocaust. I’m actually writing a play about this that talks about how the Philippines was the only country before the Holocaust to actually take in Jewish refugees and how there is a small but thriving Jewish community that still is, still located in Manila and Makati.
Ellin Bessner: Isn’t there, like a documentary film about the. There is a person. Like the Filipino Schindler type of thing?
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Yeah, yes, exactly. Yes, there is a documentary, a couple out there about the Filipino. About the Philippines taking in Jewish refugees. And they would have actually taken in up to 10,000 refugees, except for the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.
Ellin Bessner: You’re writing a play about it. All right, we’ll have to interview you about that.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Yeah, that was actually the play that won the Jewish playwriting competition in 2022. So there is a history of the Jewish community and the Filipino community being intertwined, and it just carried through the support of the Jewish community and the Filipino community in Manitoba and in Winnipeg.
We had a nominee program for nurses to come here specifically to Manitoba, as well as seamstresses and factory workers. And because of that wave of Filipinos coming in, they were largely supported by the Jewish community. And Jewish businesses and Filipino businesses are largely intertwined and support each other. We even celebrated it recently at a Shabbat dinner in November, I believe, last year. Even in the last few days, I’ve heard from the Jewish Federation, who’ve reached out to me directly to voice their support, and just to family and talking to people from the synagogue, coming to me directly. Every time somebody comes to me to tell me about how terrible they’re feeling, and what they can do, I tell them about the Filipino concept of kapwa. It’s about the connection of self and others, the idea that when one falls, we all fall, and then we’ll rise together. The idea of kapwa is not just limited to our community; it is expanded to everyone, to all of humanity. So for other people, other cultures, and for the Jewish community to come and be part of our kapwa is very touching, as we are able to weave our communities together further.
Ellin Bessner: David, did you want to weigh in on this?
David Decolongon: Absolutely. In terms of rising up together, one of the things that, as you were discussing earlier, was that a lot of people had attended this event. Even though it was a Filipino celebration, the entire city came out to celebrate with the Filipino community. I just want to take a moment to recognize that even though it is our community bearing a lot of the emotional weight as we look at the list of people who have died, a number of them belong to other communities.
The reason why many political and elected leaders were so emotional in their response to what happened was that many of them were at the festival that day. So for us, in terms of talking about rising together, we really have to look at this thing as a whole. Even though it is our community and the Filipino community that is suffering right now, plenty of other communities are hurt, and plenty of other communities are looking at how we can try to lift each other up together as a family and as human beings who all live together in this society, in Vancouver and across Canada.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned the word attack. I think that was one of you, and the other one said an incident, an accident, or tragedy. At first, everyone thought it was like terror or was worried that it was terrorism, right? Because that’s what I was kind of thinking. Now it’s turned out that it was mental illness, where this person shouldn’t have been allowed out on the street. How does that sit with you? What do you want to know more about?
Primrose Madayag Knazan: It’s so difficult to navigate because, when it first happened, there’s, of course, sadness, but there’s also rage and frustration. It’s so easy if it was a terrorist attack or a hate crime; you can direct that somewhere and band together to fight against it. But how do you fight against the system? Because what it came down to was a systemic failure for the mental health of an individual who really should not have been out driving in a weapon. It was an extremely dangerous situation that should never have happened and could have been preventable. Where do you direct that rage, and how do you prevent it from happening in the future?
David Decolongon: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I just look at this entire situation as tragic. Reading the backstory of the person who committed these heinous murders and seeing both his tragic backstory and how the system had failed to intervene and prevent him from doing such a thing. I think going forward, we are going to be looking for answers, and in the fullness of time, I think we will have those answers. We need to let the justice system play out so that these families can get justice. We will also have to change how we keep these events secure so that everyone can enjoy them and go home safely with good memories. We will need to change how the mental health system works here so that something like this doesn’t happen again. But also, at the end of the day, my focus is on ensuring that the families currently affected feel comforted and safe.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Right.
David Decolongon: Right now, community members are shaken and need mental health support. Where I think we need to focus right now is on making sure that the people who are immediately affected can get the resources and help that they need today.
Ellin Bessner: How can our audience help do that?
David Decolongon: Yeah, so at the larger level, for members of the Jewish community, I know that the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s fundraising website is still up. I’d be happy to share the link with you.
At a personal level, reach out to your friends and family in the Filipino community. From my work in the Jewish community, I know that a lot of the frustration and sadness since October 7 has been because community members are still living with trauma and sometimes feel like the world has moved on from their trauma and sadness. For many in the Jewish community who have Filipino friends and family, don’t assume they’re alright. A month, a week after this, many of them will be carrying a lot of that trauma with them.
One of the things often not talked about in our culture is that sometimes we do wear a lot of trauma and stress without talking about it, so being that safe outlet for your Filipino friends and family would mean the world to many of them right now who are suffering.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: In a lot of Asian cultures, and especially in colonized cultures, we are intergenerationally taught to bear that burden. Filipinos are often seen as the smiling, happy people. But we have lots of generational trauma that stems from colonization, just like Jewish people have the same generational trauma. When you have those burdens, it’s so easy to internalize them, keeping them to yourself. We do need to learn how to be there for each other, be willing to talk about mental health, and be willing to unburden ourselves when necessary and to share.
Ellin Bessner: All right, thank you for all of this really deep thought and heartfelt expression. Is there anything you want our listeners to understand that I haven’t asked?
David Decolongon: I think one of the things I want to come back and reflect on is the spirit of Lapu Lapu Day, which is built on courage and resilience as a culture. In terms of our shared cultures, both of us have dealt with trauma, have dealt with historical tragedy, but in many ways, both of our cultures have been resilient and operated with courage and strength to keep on going. And so, as dark as today and as the next few weeks seem, we will get through this together. And I’m ultimately and eternally grateful to all of my friends and family in the Jewish community who have been nothing but understanding and supportive during this dark time for our community in Winnipeg.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: In Manitoba, we have a lot of these similar types of street festivals. We have like the Manitoba Filipino Street Festival, we have Folklorama, we have Street Fest, we have Philippine Independence Day, and that goes all month long. We have numerous festivals like this, and it’s a way to bring a bit of home to Canada because these street festivals are popular in the Philippines as well. It’s sad to have seen something so beautiful be marred by this. But as we go forward, I think that we can still celebrate together as we’re coming into Philippine Independence Month coming up in June, and we can grieve at the same time and come together as a community across each of our provinces, across Canada, and across the world. It’ll be like a dark mark on our history. But in a way, I think that we can still find a way back to a way that we can still find joy. And in that joy, we could celebrate these individuals who were murdered and celebrate their lives because that’s what they would have wanted.
Ellin Bessner: Our deepest condolences to you as you go through this.
David Decolongon: Thank you.
Primrose Madayag Knazan: Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
It’s not the first time Canada’s Jewish community has made such a gesture. In 2013, after Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, Canadian Jewish groups donated more than $200,000 to send overseas for disaster relief efforts in that country. You can find out how to donate by going to the links in our show notes.Â
We’ll end with the words of Winnipeg Rabbi Matthew Leibel, the rabbi of the Simkin Centre, a Jewish elder care home which relies heavily on a largely Filipino staff of caregivers. Leibel is now one of the co-hosts of the “Not in Heaven: CJN podcast.
David Decolongon: It’s always awful. And this one is just like an extra added level of awful, because I think that my story is not unique. And I know many, many Jewish and Filipino families who have intersected over the now generations. You know, people tell me about taking care of my mother, and now they took care of my kids, and now they’re back. I always see it from that perspective, but I also know it from the Filipino perspective, too. Being stopped by people who work here and just the fond memories they have of working with a family for 30 or 40 years, I mean, that is something special.
Ellin Bessner: Our show is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman, and the managing editor is Marc Weisblott. Our music is by Dov Beck Levine. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Related links
- Where to donate through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Filipino Community Emergency Support Fund.
- When Canadian Jews fundraised in 2013 to help disaster relief efforts in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan struck the country, in The CJN.
- When the Philippines rescued 1,200 European Jews during the Holocaust, in The CJN.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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