Edmonton’s Heritage Festival will include Israel pavilion despite opposition letter to Jewish Federation’s participation

The Israel pavilion will appear at this year’s Heritage Festival in Edmonton, one of Canada’s largest multicultural exhibitions, despite a letter by two groups in the city sent earlier this month calling on organizers to reconsider its inclusion, according to the Jewish Federation of Edmonton.

“This anonymously penned open letter from a fringe anti-Zionist group is a clear attempt to intimidate and isolate our community and delegitimize the State of Israel. It also contained a personal attack, which is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible in the current climate and must not be tolerated,” Stacey Leavitt-Wright, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, told The CJN.

“We have called upon the Heritage Festival Association to denounce the letter as a whole and demonstrate their support for our longstanding participation and contribution to the betterment of the festival.”

The 1,500-word joint letter from Independent Jewish Voices Edmonton (IJVE) and Edmonton Jews Against Zionism (EJAZ), dated May 4 and posted online, said, “the first, and overriding, problem posed by the Heritage Festival allowing an Israel pavilion is in celebrating and normalizing an apartheid state that is carrying out a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.”

IJVE and EJAZ argue that the Israel pavilion should not be allowed to participate for the same reasons the festival rejected the application for a Russia pavilion in 2023. “The Israel pavilion should be excluded on the basis of the scale, persistence, and brazenness of its violence in Palestine and across Southwest Asia,” their letter states.

Among other issues, the letter accuses Israel of creating an apartheid system, consistently violating international law in its actions in Gaza and elsewhere, and displacing over 1 million people in Lebanon since the beginning of the recent war in the Middle East. 

“Our concern is that the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, the organizer of the Israel pavilion, is without question celebrating a state and its government,” the letter writers stated. “To be crystal clear, the Federation is using the Festival as a vehicle to promote an ethno-supremacist, settler-colonial state now committing genocide; it is also promoting a partisan position forwarded by the current Israeli government.”

Leavitt-Wright also addressed the letter from IJVE and EJAZ in her weekly message to members of the community on May 8.

“I was made aware of an open letter sent to the Heritage Festival calling for the rejection of our pavilion and taking issue with statements and actions of the Jewish Federation of Edmonton—including comments attributed to me,” she said. “Sadly, this is consistent with other efforts we have seen to marginalize our community and politicize our connection to Israel as an essential part of Jewish identity.”

IJVE and EJAZ voiced similar objections to the Israel pavilion in a July 19, 2025, letter to Heritage, two weeks prior to last year’s festival. In that letter, identical in many ways to the recent one, the organizations claim that Leavitt-Wright said on July 5, 2025, that the Federation viewed the festival as “its biggest hasbara opportunity.”

In both letters, the groups took issue with the word “hasbara,” which, they say – although it translates from Hebrew as “explanation” – was used by Nahum Sokolow, president of the World Zionist Congress from 1931 to 1935, as a synonym for “propaganda.”

“Early Zionists deployed hasbara as a means to garner public support for European Jewish colonization in historic Palestine and, later, the establishment of the State of Israel through the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians in 1948,” the groups wrote.

Federation told The CJN that it has searched for instances where Leavitt-Wright may have used the term “hasbara” but could not find any.

In the May 4 letter, IJEV and EJAZ say that Federation’s organizing of the Israel pavilion – and, in their view, Federation’s alignment with Israeli state propaganda – threatens the goals of the Heritage Festival to look not at states and governments but at cultures.

“Crucially, we are also concerned that the Israel pavilion’s organizers actively threaten the Festival’s raison d’être: the promotion of inclusion and cultural diversity,” the letter stated.  “Since October 2023, the Jewish Federation of Edmonton has contributed to an unsafe environment in our city, promoted racism against Palestinians, and committed many harms against community members who oppose the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”

The letter concludes by claiming Federation’s participation at the festival through the Israel pavilion would make many participants and patrons feel “deeply unsafe.”

IJVE told The CJN in an email that it had not yet received a response to its letter from Heritage.

“We hope that the Directors will take ethical responsibility and acknowledge that including the Israel pavilion runs contrary to the cultural mandate of the Heritage Festival.  We happen to be Jewish, but we are like diverse Edmontonians and the majority of Canadians in opposing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people,” they wrote.

According to Federation, their involvement with Heritage goes back nearly 30 years, and not all exhibits at the pavilion relate exclusively to Israel.  In previous years, exhibits have included wedding dresses, explanations of Jewish holidays and a sukkah.

Every year, the pavilion offers a sampling of Jewish dishes and performances by local dance groups.  This year, the pavilion will feature sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts) from Bliss Baked Goods, a kosher bakery based in Edmonton.

The pavilion features a story wall that presents moments from Israel’s history. There are large photo canvases and activities, such as an archaeology dig for children. Additionally, there is a market curated from Israeli products.

Federation said that months of planning go into organizing the event every year.  Last year, more than 60 volunteers were involved, and over 10,000 people stepped into the pavilion. 

In addition to being what it calls “the largest three-day multicultural festival in the world,” Heritage says it is “a collection of Alberta-based cultural groups that come together, annually, to share their history, song, dance and food with the world.”

“What makes this festival so special is the number of cultural organizations that come together, volunteer their time and put their cultures on display for our festival attendees to enjoy and appreciate,” said Rob Rohatyn, the executive director of the Heritage Festival, before the 2025 event.

Started in 1964, last year’s festival featured 67 pavilions and brought in 300,000 visitors. This year’s festival is scheduled to take place from August 1 to 3 at Hawrelek Park.

The CJN reached out to the Heritage Festival several times for this article, but did not receive a response.