drawing, often turning to the natural world as a theme. In abstract landscapes, she com- bined etching with her distinctive emboss- ing, as our obit noted. An inspiring but tough mentor, she was a teacher and later head of the graphic arts department at the Saidye Bronfman Centre School of Fine Arts (SBC) in Montreal from the mid-1960s until 2006. She was recalled as a renaissance woman who loved life, lived intensely and dedicated her life to the pursuit and teaching of art. Another can’t-miss obit was on business- man and philanthropist Leo Goldhar . Anyone born above his parents’ delicatessen and cigar shop in Toronto, a tough kid with a short fuse who never graduated high school but went on to fame and fortune, must be compelling. When he died on March 11 at 91, Goldhar was an icon in Toronto’s philan- thropic community. The street-smarts he earned early in life were deployed to build successful land de- velopment and construction businesses and advance an enormous array of charitable ventures. His crowning achievement was the Joseph & Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus in Vaughan, a hub for the GTA’s growing Jewish community that Goldhar realized by tackling land acquisition, zoning and fundraising challenges. “He was a force of nature,” said his lifelong friend, Lionel Schipper. “Once Leo took something on, he was relentless.” Sometimes, obit writers cannot avoid using a cliché. But in this case, it was true that Hamilton’s Rabbi Bernard Baskin was vir- tually a household name in Canadian Jewry. Rabbi Baskin served as spiritual leader at Temple Anshe Sholom in Hamilton, Ont. for 40 years and was a long-time columnist for The CJN. He died Jan. 18 at the grand age of 102. Admiration for his staying power in the pulpit was outdone only by his voracious reading regimen. He wrote thousands of thoughtful book reviews for The CJN and other newspapers for over half a century. He delivered his annual book talks in Hamilton well into his 90s. When he moved into a Toronto retirement home in 2017, he con- tinued giving book lectures, and his final talk was just three weeks before he died. He was indeed one of the People of the Book. With the death of MP Jim Carr last Dec. 12 of multiple myeloma and kidney failure at the age of 71, Canada’s Jewish community lost a friend, advocate and supporter. A descendant of Russian-Jewish immi-
Leo Goldhar
“He was a force of nature. Once Leo took something on, he was
grants, Carr, a one-time professional oboe player and journalist, served in the Liberal cabinet in two ministries. He was diagnosed with cancer the day after being re-elected in 2019. The year before, he’d led a mission to Israel to oversee the modernization of the free trade agreement between the two coun- tries. “I’m delighted as (a) Jewish member of Parliament and as a Jewish member of the
relentless.” — Lionel Schipper
cabinet to be here representing Canada,” he said at the time. Our obit could not but re- flect Carr’s rare quality: A politician who was a genuinely decent guy, and who died too soon. A nice postscript: In a June byelection, his son, Ben Carr, replaced him as Liberal MP in Winnipeg South Centre. Builders make for good obits; you can see their legacy every day, for free. The “two Jacks,” as The CJN obit combined them, played seminal roles in building modern Toronto, and died within days of each other in October 2022. Jack Diamond and John “Jack” Daniels were both Jewish immi- grants, and both became architects—a field in which Jews of their generation were rare, as The CJN’s obit noted.
Jim Carr
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