TORONTO — Your Outreach Network Of The Arts (YONA) founder Marcel Cohen hopes that music will help build bridges between different religious groups on university campuses.
Cantor Aaron
Bensoussan, performs at a recent YONA concert at York University. [Sheri Shefa photo]
Seated from left are Egyptian-born George Sawa and Cantor Aaron
Bensoussan, performing at a recent YONA concert at York University. The
music inspired audience members to join hands and dance. [Sheri Shefa photo] ( with video)
Your Outreach Network Of The Arts (YONA) founder Marcel Cohen
hopes that music will help build bridges between different religious
groups on university campuses.
YONA is an organization that aims to bring people of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds – particularly Jews, Muslims and Christians – together in non-partisan environments.
Cohen, a 40-year-old special education teacher at Netivot HaTorah Day School, said that it may seem as if the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on university campuses is a new phenomenon, but he remembers similar activity from anti-Israel student groups when he was a University of Toronto student from 1987 to 1992.
In response to the hostility he felt as a pro-Israel Jewish student, he and a friend started a group called the Jewish Student Council.
Then Cohen and Jewish students at smaller campuses in Toronto without organized Jewish campus groups planned apolitical, bridge-building programming.
He said the positive programming left the anti-Israel groups with nothing to protest or complain about.
“That was the genius about it,” Cohen said, adding that his positive programs made the anti-Israel programming look even more aggressive by comparison.
“In juxtaposition to them only saying horrible things about Israel, I didn’t say anything bad against them. That was not lost on student government and even the editorial in the campus newspapers.”
Once Cohen graduated from university, he decided to make aliyah. While living in Israel, he reached out to Israeli government officials to convince them of the need to develop positive campus programming.
“I approached the consulate here, but they weren’t interested. I approached the Israeli government… but they were too busy with the peace process or the intifadah,” he said.
“When I came back to Toronto in 2003, I kept approaching the consulate. Now, this year, when I approached them again – you can see that I’m very stubborn – they not only were open to the idea, but they said this is the most important thing.”
Earlier this month, on April 6, Cohen organized a concert at York University that featured performances from Egyptian-born George Dimitri Sawa, a master of the qanun, a string instrument; Suzanne Meyers Sawa, his wife, who holds a master’s degrees in musicology from UofT; Cantor Aviva Chernick, a singer of Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish and English songs, and Moroccan-born Cantor Aaron Bensoussan, who sang and played the guitar.
At one point during the performance, when Sawa and Bensoussan shared the stage to perform Hineh Ma Tov, members of the audience clapped along with the beat and linked hands while they danced around the stage.
He said that holding the event at York “was 100 per cent intentional. That was the place that I felt I needed to go to. It’s calling for me. It’s got my name all over it. It is a place that needs healing.”
Cohen said he’s been organizing concerts since 2004. He said he was inspired by the riot at Concordia University in 2002 that kept the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from delivering a speech on campus.
Following that, when Concordia denied a request from Hillel to bring former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to speak at the school for fear that a repeat of the Netanyahu incident would occur, he contacted Hillel and worked together to bring a cultural, rather than political, message to campus.
He said that they brought an Israeli band, Shemesh Ve Kochavim, to play Jewish and Israeli music.
Cohen said both Jews and non-Jews responded to the event.
“This concept is starting to gather a lot of steam,” he said, adding that Christians and Muslims help him organize events.
Cohen said that one of the most important aspects of YONA is that the programming is free.
“I discovered that if you charge [a cover fee], you won’t get anybody but those who support Israel. If you don’t charge, it is accessible to everyone and the curious people will come,” he said.
“Muslims and Arabs… now have a safe forum to explore Jews and Israel… Trying to out-hate them will never work.”
But to be able to present the programs free of charge, Cohen relies on donations from private donors as well as help from organizations to work out the logistics.
He said when it comes to the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic atmosphere on some campuses, “a lot of people are standing around in horror and they don’t know what to do. This is the rallying point… By interacting with each other in these positive places… relationships will grow from that.”
His ultimate goal, Cohen said, is for non-Jews to see Israel for its diversity, and complexity.
“The delegitimization [of Israel] is all about generalizations, oversimplifications and really a lot of misinformation. Just by seeing what an Israeli looks like, at this point, just by putting a human face on an Israeli does a world of [difference].”