Category Archives: Person

In terms of Jewish history, for some reason the University of Alberta, because we had Hillel at that time (we still have it today) but in those days all student organizations had to have the faculty advisor. I was a co-faculty advisor with the late Dr. Norbert Berkowitz. I was working with the Hillel group. We had a lot of fun with the students — there were speakers coming in and we would arrange for breakfasts at, for example, Beth Shalom. We would have a breakfast there about once a month and it was a very nice time. 

Regarding the other aspect is Beth Israel synagogue, as I am Orthodox this was the synagogue I decided I would attend. I got on to the board ‘68-69 and remained on the board until 1996. During that time, I still remember when I first came onto the board, but board activities were conducted almost entirely in Yiddish at that time. Little by little as the older members passed away, it moved towards English. I still remember quite a few of those “Golden Oldie” old timers, they were really fine people. 

During the time I was on the board with Beth Israel, I was a ritual chairman. I was also the chair of the Kashrut Committee for the synagogue as well as, eventually, chair of the Kashrut Committee for the city of Edmonton itself. I was also active with the old Jewish Community Council and I was the chair of “community relations” and it was my job to write to the newspapers anytime something Jewish came up. We had great problems and often it had to do with Israel, defending the State of Israel against statements that some people had made. At one point, I was informed from Jewish Community Council, they had met with the RCMP, that at that time the Black September movement was active among the Palestinians. They were sending letter bombs into Canada and I was considered one of the prime targets because of my defense of the State of Israel. We would occasionally get midnight phone calls from some Palestinian supporters. I would have to hang up on them, it was harassment. Things were put in the mailbox, I won’t tell you what. I even had a bit of a tiff with the Talmud Torah. Because of my family’s potential for letter bombs, I asked that our family name and our phone number be deleted from the phone book, which they used to issue in those days. They came around when they understood what the matter was. 

There was latent antisemitism, you didn’t know it but it was there. For example, for the birth of our second child I had taken my wife right to the hospital. Her water had broken and I was signing her in. In those days, at the University Hospital and in other places they asked you for your religion. I was trying to move faster so they could get her right upstairs to the maternity ward for and the woman writing it all up says “Well, what’s your religion?” I said “Jewish”. “Oh, Hebrew,” she puts down. I said “We’re not Hebrews, we’re Jews. Hebrews are our ancient ancestors.” And she’s writing  and says “What do you do for a living?” I told her “I’m a professor at the U of A.” “What department are you a professor in?” she says to me. I told her Elementary Education. Her answer was “Oh G-d help the children,”. I gave her a nasty look. At that time I didn’t feel like pursuing the matter because my wife was out there, the birth came before anything. She got the note from my look that she had overstepped the line. At that point, they didn’t feel like taking it any further. We also had some incidents of something very strange. At that time, in about 1976-77 Rabbi Kronenberg was the chair, who was the principal at the Talmud Torah. He was in Beth Israel synagogue one Sunday and a Christian class came in, youngsters, I think upper elementary school age. And they wanted to know if they could get some information about the synagogue. They were told the rabbi was there and he would be glad to speak with them. So they brought him into the synagogue, the children sat him down and he was talking to them about various aspects of the synagogue; the windows, how many windows, why there were that many, what they were all about, and then he was talking about the Torah and told them that the ink used for the Torah was very, very durable. He asked if anyone knew why. A kid raised her hand and said “Yes, they use Christian blood to mix in with the ink to write the Torah.” He immediately corrected that one, but it goes to show you what was floating around at that time, what might still be to this day. I hope that it’s not that way because in general we’ve been very well accepted here. At the time I came in, the president of the University was Jewish and again, later on Dr. Myer Horowitz was president of the U of A, also Jewish.

The Kashrut Committee for the community, I was the last chair and I unfortunately had to disband it. There was some controversy starting between the Conservative rabbi at that time and the Orthodox rabbi at that time, and I felt that the matter was unfortunately something that had to be resolved. I sent a letter to the president of Jewish Federation at the time stating that if this matter was not resolved I would be tendering my resignation. Unfortunately, the matter was not resolved. I tendered, the Kashrut Committee was disbanded, and the late president of Chevra Kadisha, a wonderful man, Nate Siegel, took over as a community mashgiach. He was a very fine man: he never took any money from the community for the work that he did on the Kashrut Committee.
I’d like to see and to know what’s going on with [Hillel and the University] occasionally. I’m still active with Beth Israel after a hiatus pertaining to some disagreements around the building. I’m back on the board again and active with the synagogue with its minyan. I’m there virtually every day for the minyan and unfortunately during this pandemic, I can’t can’t get over there on Shabbos. It’s a little bit disconcerting, but otherwise yes, still with Beth Israel.

The two places that came to my mind – one is the Jewish Community Center that was, and the other is the building that’s known as the Chesed Shel Emeth, so it’s the building that belongs to the Chevra Kadisha and those are two significant places because of my connection to Temple Beth Ora. So I joined Temple Beth Ora a week after I moved to Edmonton because my cousin’s son needed a brit [milah] and and I was living in their dining room at the time and they had to join the temple in order to access that resource of the synagogue and so I decided to join as well. So that was in 1987, and so for me the Temple Beth Ora was my Jewish experience, really is, in Edmonton intertwined with Temple Beth Ora.

Intertwined with the Jewish Community Center because that’s where it was situated, I initially got involved in communications and coordinated communications committees and then I got drawn into being on the board. I always say I was like on the board for most of my adult life so I I started off as I moved into the role of VP administration and then VP ritual and then became president of the synagogue so I got deeper and deeper into it and I spent a lot of my volunteer time in Edmonton, a lot of my volunteer time in Edmonton was being involved with the synagogue. 

The space that we used, the Jewish Community Center, was very much a part of the identity of the synagogue and all the stories and associations in those first few years were with that space, where we were a tenant in that building. Lots of different things that went on there, but that space was a a shared space as you know, and so the room that was was our sanctuary, during the week it was sometimes used for Feldenkrais, movement therapy classes, and I don’t know what else went on there, and then you know on Friday night it was transformed into a sacred space for our our congregation. If it became our sanctuary, the same room could take on a very different significance for the people who were making use of it. 

There was a lot of uncertainty about what would happen with that site for years and years, so we always knew that there was a possibility that we might have to relocate, but I think that Temple Beth Ora was in that building for 25 years. So it was a long association with that building. Knowing that we might have to relocate, Marshall Hundert, who is a developer and very knowledgeable about land and space opportunities, landed on one option which I was thinking about as kind of a “confluence of opportunity”. So he knew that the apartment was on the second floor of the Chesed Shel Emeth, where the Chevra Kadisha has their building for funerals. He knew that the second floor apartment was being rented out to tenants in the community. That apartment is where Les and Mary, the couple that manages the cemetery, actually lived and raised their three children. 

The other important piece is that at the cemetery the community had renovated the little chapel, so almost all the funerals were being held in the chapel at the cemetery, and so the sanctuary [at Chesed Shel Emeth] was only being used a handful of times during the year on average. It was really being used for the “markers of the community” — not necessarily major figures in the Jewish community, but people where the family thought it was going to attract a lot of people. I have some very specific memories of huge funerals in that building. 

So Marshall knew that that apartment was being rented out and that the sanctuary wasn’t being used very often. He pictured that the space upstairs could be transformed into being our offices and space for our school, the Beit Sefer — the Sunday school — and the meetings. The living room, he imagined, could be for the rabbi’s office and the administrative person, the bedrooms could become the classrooms and meeting space, and then the kitchen could be renovated. He also had the idea that we could take out the back few pews, the rows of beautiful, wooden pews and put them into storage, and then we would have a social hall at the back of the sanctuary. So that, for myself and for a number of people, the idea of using that space as a sanctuary in particular was hard to get our heads around because it was a place that had only the saddest of memories, the biggest funerals. There was one for Alan Stein, who did a CBC broadcast. Another one was for Earl Klein who died at 33, and I was very good friends with his former wife. He had young kids and he had a brain aneurysm when he was on a tour as an actor. The sanctuary was full of people who were sad and so it was a place that only had memories of sadness, mourning, and loss. The notion that we would use this space for other purposes was really hard to picture, but one of the thoughts that helped me was thinking about smaller Jewish communities that don’t have separate buildings for funerals and for congregations. Where all those life cycle events take place in the same space, so I think it was like starting to put a crack in that shield of protection of thinking that we couldn’t possibly use this space for that purpose. So that decision was made that we would make the move there and Marshall almost single-handedly did the renovations upstairs. He negotiated the terms of the lease so the move from the Jewish Community Center to the building downtown was on a particular day. 

We actually did different things to make that an important move, so on a particular day we had a plan to walk the Torah scrolls from the Jewish Community Center to the Chesed Shel Emeth. We had arranged for people to handle different segments of that walk from the west end to downtown. I think Felix Friedman was the president of time and I think he walked the whole distance. We had our last service at the Jewish Community Center, walked the Torah scrolls, and then had our first service at the Chesed Shel Emeth downtown. So that was how we marked that occasion. We actually have, since then, had a couple of other occasions so we had an event that we called the Chanukat Bayit, the dedication of our new home. We invited the whole community for that and then later on we had a “rededication” of the stained glass windows that Vivian Manasc and her father had designed and created. So we had a special event to rededicate those stained glass windows which now sit at the back of the sanctuary. So those are some ways in which we marked that transition to give it meaning. 

The first transformative moment I had was seeing Sarah and David Feldman’s professional wedding photos. Theirs was the first wedding that took place in that building. That was led by Rabbi Carmit Harari and it was really an odd feeling because it was with this oxymoron of these beautiful photos and this happy occasion happening in that space. Their photos were just beautiful and it just put a different light on that building. Then came a baby naming and the first Bar or Bat Mitzvah and gradually it felt like we had a chance to lay down new memories for that space. I think we started to fill it with music — I was part of Chavurat Hashir, the group that was leading music, laughter, sadness, and holiday celebrations. Other people in the broader Jewish community came and they started to have different experiences. So, vicariously, you start to take the feelings that they were conveying, and I think it was that laying down of new memories was a really significant part of embracing that space.The other thing I just want to mention is that I think that Temple Beth Ora, for 25 years was a tenant in a recreation center and then we became a tenant in one of the most central institutions in the Jewish community. In a place that so many people have some connection to and we were in the center of the city. For me, having never lived in the west end, it felt like we were now in some ways legitimized as being now part of, connected, associated with a major institution. That felt different — I mean my own feeling about being a member of the temple didn’t change, but I felt like our place physically and kind of psychologically in the community had shifted by virtue of that move. 

So we traded off a beautiful view out of those panoramic windows of the river valley. Each time it was a very contemplative view outside of our sanctuary at the JCC and we traded that off for a beautiful sanctuary in the building downtown. For quite a while, we kept calling it the Chesed Shel Emeth and at a certain point, someone said “we don’t have to call it that, it is our synagogue.” We put our sign on the outside and, for us, that is Temple Beth Ora. It was interesting to sort of see that transformation of feeling like this is our place now. It is a shared place for sure, but it is our synagogue.

Hello Deli, that’s one that I do miss. There aren’t truly places where people come and sit down and enjoy Jewish food together — we really don’t have that kind of place anymore. Because I didn’t live in the west end, bakeries and things like that didn’t have that much of a role in my experience. Hello Deli really stood out as just a place where it felt good. Having lived in Toronto for a number of years, maybe it gave me a little feeling of that association of places you would go and feel that connection because of food.

Well, we came here in ‘81 and my husband started by working in Wetaskiwin and I continued working with the Federal Government in the Medical Services Branch. He was hired in 1984 to the Talmud Torah School as a grade four Hebrew teacher. So he worked there for five years, we started our family and we had five children. So Talmud Torah would have to be my number one spot. I was a volunteer there for 20 years. And every Jewish ladies group in the city that looks for fundraising or is involved in doing any kind of activities, not as a member so much as a worker, I came out. Then 18 years ago, I got hired by Jewish Family Services. So I’ve split my time between JSS and Talmud Torah and I’ve been quite active. I’ve helped out in summertime in Heritage Days, I help fundraise in Hadassah and Na’amat, National Council of Jewish Women, or you name it, I’ve been there fundraising. I was a bingo chairman at the school, I was a casino chairman, anywhere there’s money to be made to help Jewish organizations. My husband when he taught there, they were still on 135th, so my children were in the school. That’s when they moved to the West End, five minutes from our home. I was there every day in the new school and every day in the old school. So between volunteering when my husband was still teaching, and then going on when my kids attended, I was a daily volunteer there. 

Maybe four years ago, we were on 124 Street in my time. Two different locations went over by Stony Plain Road, 103/104 Avenue. Then we moved to 102 Avenue and 124 Street and then we moved to the West End. 

When we first came here my mother passed away soon after, and my dad moved in with me. I brought him home from Toronto from the shiva and we were quite involved with Chabad. My children and my dad went on a regular basis and he schlepped them behind him every Saturday morning. I think I’ve volunteered and made thousands of latkes for them over the years, and stuffed every calendar in the September newsletter. You name it, I’ve done it. Blew enough balloons up for Purim and Lag Ba’omer and any kind of picnic and cooked and done everything. And that’s Beth Israel as well. In the last few years my son joined Beth Israel. Also through Jewish Family Services over the last 18 years we used to do a Meals on Wheels program before COVID stepped in and said ‘Uh uh, no no’. So we would use the Beth Shalom and Beth Israel. I would request the use of their kitchen and we would take out meals to seniors that were in nursing homes or at home alone. Four or five times a year we would take out a meal. I would collect 30-40 volunteers to do the cooking, the cleaning, and the delivery. 

Because the position I have as a SMART worker in Jewish Family Services began eighteen years ago this August as a joint effort between the Jewish Drop-In Centre, another place where I hang out a lot, and Jewish Family Services….16 to 18 years later, I’m still here. The Drop-In Centre is a great place for seniors. It’s had its ups and downs over the years, and the kinds of seniors that it attracts today are different from the seniors it attracted 15 years ago because the baby boomers are a whole different type of senior. They’ve been educated and worked all their life, whereas older seniors that are in their 80s and 90s were survivors from the War or housewives in their home and you know, they have different priorities and different things they were looking for and were happy to come out and volunteer and help in the kitchen and do the meals and they would take transportation. I used to be a driver volunteer for people. When my dad was alive, I used to drive one day a month. It was my day to drive six people from the West End. Now these people who come, they’re looking for parking — they don’t want to ride there and there is no parking around there. It’s very difficult. The programs that you offer, and the interest that people have are not the same that they once had. But they have… I love the lunch program. They draw in lots of people, lots of locals come that can walk there. Then I was on the committee for the seniors for the OPH (Our Parents’ Home). So I worked on that committee for at least 10 or 12 years, helping in the hearing, helping provide the statistics during the building time and the fundraising time, that’s, that was my end. I could tell how many seniors there were, what was involved, how many were in nursing homes, what level of care they required. All kinds, any kind of information like that, I was a plethora of knowledge. 

Like I say the Seniors Drop-In Centre, the needs of the seniors have changed. The type of experience they’re looking for has changed. And COVID has really meant… you know, stopped a lot of people from getting together and being able to fit 60 people in that room and have lunch, celebrating a birthday or a special event or all those things are gone. 

At Talmud Torah, when my husband started teaching there, had 325 kids. Now, I don’t think they break 100. When Junior High started there, my children attended, all five of them. Their junior high doesn’t exist anymore. So you know, everything is changing. Everything as everyday comes along is different from the day before. And what’s really sad in our office, too, we used to bring the people together, do a lunch, do a program, we would have a guest speaker come up but those days are gone — we can’t bring people out. And the loneliness and isolation has really, really set in. So we try to phone our clients on a regular basis, but, you know, a phone call is wonderful, but seeing someone up close and personal is way better. And a Jewish Family Services that you know, that’s what we thrive on. And that’s what our people thrived on. So this year, whereas before we were doing meals, and that we’ve been providing gift bags for every holiday for every Yom Tov that came along, and trying to just keep people connected. They get a phone call asking if they’re interested, a phone call saying someone is coming to their door, their choice to open their door or, someone speaks through the intercom or to have it left outside. It just makes a whole big difference. Like nobody is starving and nobody is desperate for the gift bag, but they are desperate for all the things that come along with it and just thinking that someone cared enough. 

Because now our holidays… like what’s Pesach without 50 people at your table and going to shul? What’s Yontif without singing and all the rest of the stuff that goes on on a Shabbat, on a Friday night? Those things are gone now. And so someone cares enough to send you the little tidbits that were always a part of those holidays in the past, it really means something. We get lots of follow up and lots of phone calls thanking us for what we’ve brought back into their life. 

Well, we’re going to be losing the other school, the Menorah School at the end of this year, and that is going to take with it a lot of families. I have two children that were really involved in the kosher community and such. One daughter lives in Israel and one son lives here and he goes to BI (Beth Israel) now, but they’re involved with that group of people, with the community, with the Triple Five. All those things that supported this Jewish community are really sadly missed, and going to be missed even more as the year ends. The kosher restaurant in the mall is gone now again, it’s been back and forth, in and out a few times, but it’s gone. 
I think what we mostly miss is being able to get together at things like Purim and Lag B’omer and all the community events. Like it was a lost community. I celebrated and have been a part of that every year as long as I can remember, you know, working at the celebration and bringing people together. It was always nice, it was always fun, it was always very heimishe, and those things are gone. But that’s more because of COVID than because of anything else. You know, if COVID wasn’t stopping us from joining together and being a part of a group, I think those things would have been around this year and last year. But three days after Purim last year was when everything shut down.