A Troubling Lack of Transparency, Integrity and Dialogue: Joint Letter to CMHR Board of Trustees

 
July 3, 2026
Board Chair and Board of Trustees  
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
85 Israel Asper Way
Winnipeg, MB 

Re: Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present 

Dear Mr. Nycum and Members of the Board of Trustees, 

We write on behalf of organizations that collectively represent the vast majority of Canada's vibrant and deeply rooted Jewish community. 

We do so at a moment that our Prime Minister describes as a "crisis of antisemitism," and when Canada's civic compact—the principle that all Canadians should be treated fairly and by the same rules—is failing Jewish Canadians. A moment that requires Canadians “not [to] transpose foreign conflicts onto each other” and for public institutions “to ensure that no Canadian community is driven from those institutions by hatred.” 

It is in this context that we share our grave concerns about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights' Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present exhibit and its now well-documented failures in curation and governance. 

For months, we engaged the Museum in good faith to help ensure the exhibit met the standards of historical accuracy, scholarly integrity, and meaningful consultation required to fulfill the Museum's mandate. We offered the assistance of respected subject-matter experts and repeatedly warned against excluding communities directly impacted by the content while relying on the advice of political activists. 

Instead of engaging constructively, our outreach to the Museum’s CEO Isha Khan and leadership was met with a troubling lack of transparency, integrity, and meaningful dialogue. 

Rather than addressing our concerns, including the involvement of a content advisory network member who publicly referred to a core tenant of our faith as “a disease that should be destroyed,” Ms. Khan encouraged us to simply trust and accept the museum’s questionable judgment and opaque process.  

The CEO has publicly suggested our concerns were unfair because we had not seen the exhibit. Yet there was an intentional effort to keep representatives of the community and experts who could provide a supportive lens to the curation team out of the process. Even the museum’s own Board of Trustees was kept at a distance. This lack of oversight was among the factors that led the Museum's only Jewish trustee to resign. 

As part of the exhibit’s launch, Ms. Khan sat for an interview with anti-Israel activist and Iranian regime apologist Samira Mohyeddin who has propagated anti-Jewish myths on social media. The decision to grant this interview raises further concerns about whether political activism has been prioritized over established principles of governance and institutional accountability.  

The egregious mishandling of the exhibit has now been validated by the Federal Government. Heritage Minister Marc Miller publicly acknowledged both "an error in curation" and "an error in governance," specifically criticizing the Board's failure to review the exhibit before it opened and saying that these errors “should be directed to the Board that does need to do its job.” 

We have also already seen the real-world consequences of an exhibit that has pitted communities against one another and emboldened audiences to express hatred against Jews, including using the museum as a platform to say “Reconciliation is renaming Izzy Asper Street, Free Palestine.”    

In sum, this exhibit has been a serious failure of governance, curation, and public trust. We repeatedly raised concerns about the exclusion of impacted communities, the lack of transparency, and the absence of historical accuracy, yet those warnings were ignored. The result is an exhibit that risks inflaming hatred and importing a foreign conflict into Canadian society without the balance, rigour, and context required of a national museum. 

We urge you to rectify the failures in curation and governance and hold Ms. Khan accountable.  

We look forward to your response. 

Sincerely,  

Simon Wolle, CEO, B’nai Brith Canada
Noah Shack, CEO, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs 
CEOs of Jewish Federations from across Canada