Mr. Chairman, I'd like to express my appreciation for the invitation to address this committee today.
As well, I'd like to commend this committee for giving its attention to this pressing issue of human rights in Venezuela. It's an honour to speak in front of the distinguished gathering.
In particular, it's an honour to speak before a personal hero of mine and a great leader of human rights in Canada and around the world, the Honourable Irwin Cotler.
So it really is a pleasure to be here. As I know my allotted time is limited, I'll get right to the point.
The Jewish community of Venezuela was once a successful, thriving community. They lived with a sense of security and peace and continuity, living in harmony with their fellow Venezuelan citizens. At the community's peak only 10 years ago, there were 24,000 members of the Jewish community of Venezuela. Today there are 12,000 Jews living in Venezuela, and the numbers are decreasing every year.
Just this past week, I had the opportunity to speak with the Venezuelan chief rabbi, Rabbi Pynchas Brener, who said that right now, as we speak, the community is holding its breath and waiting to see who else is leaving. Having lost half the community in the last decade, as the school year now comes to a close, now it is the time when many of the families are announcing that their turn as well has come to leave Venezuela, a country that many of these families have called home for many generations.
Why are they leaving? Why are the Jews leaving Venezuela? It is because the government of Hugo Chávez has created an environment of fear and terror for the Jewish citizens of Venezuela. In 2004 and 2007 there were two separate government raids on Jewish communal institutions. The alleged purpose of the raid was to search for weapons and contraband in the Jewish communal institutions. The real purpose of the raid was to demonstrate that the Jewish community and all who support Israel are unwelcome in Venezuela.
The 2004 raid, for example, was carried out in the Jewish community school Colegio Hebraica at 6:30 a.m. on a school day. Twenty-five policemen, many of them armed and masked, held the children hostage inside the locked school while performing their search. Of course, the search produced no tangible results. It was unfruitful as declared by the government, but the threatening message was clearly conveyed.
A similar raid was carried out in 2007 on the Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, a social and sports club. Once again, the government representatives discovered nothing inside the Jewish communal institution, although the members of the Jewish community live in fear that in the course of the raid the government obtained the Jewish community's records off of the club's computers.
In January 2009, in the early morning hours of the Jewish Sabbath, 15 unidentified men broke into the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas. They destroyed offices, they wrote threatening messages on the synagogue's interior walls, and they desecrated holy objects. One month later, in February, a bomb was thrown into the Beth Shmuel synagogue, damaging property and sending a threatening message to the Jewish community.
For your perusal, I'd like to submit into evidence, as we discussed before, Mr. Chairman, some photographs that I took on a subsequent visit following these attacks on the community.