A few nal Menschen: Mendelson Joe (born Birrel Josef Men- delson) in Toronto, was a complete artist, self-taught in music and the visual arts, who reveled in idiosyncratic paintings and sang folk-blues for decades. The ever-colourful artist died on Feb. 7 at the age of 78.
more than a second. “It surprised me,” he said of his late-stage prowess. “I didn’t know I could do it.” Dr. Avinoam Chernick , a pioneering ob- stetrician-gynecologist and sex and relation- ship therapist, died May 8 in London, Ont. He was 88. Chernick fought for women’s rights and in the 1990s was among a handful of doctors in London who performed abortions, leading to the targeting of his family home and clinic. Obit writers are sometimes perceived as ghoulish, as when they prepare an obit prior to the subject’s death. Daily newspapers do this routinely, putting advance obits “in the can” in case a prominent person passes unexpectedly. I was about to do just that when Monte Kwinter died on July 21 at age 92 before I could begin. A Liberal MPP for 33 years, he became the oldest representative at Queen’s Park when he was near 82. My fondest memory of Kwinter was when he pub- licly opposed his own Liberal government’s re- scinding of the Equity in Education Tax Credit, a hugely popular measure that provided relief to parents of children in Jewish schools. His stance was brave, but Kwinter was eventually shuffled out of cabinet. I’ll leave the last word to my favourite obituarist, the hugely-talented Margalit Fox, who has retired from the beat at the New York Times . Obits, she once wrote, are “the journalistic genre that, more than any other, deals in the very stuff of life.”
“The journalistic genre that, more than any other, deals in the very stu of life.” — Margalit Fox
Joseph “Jerry” Gross
Joseph “Jerry” Gross was among the thin- ning ranks of machalniks, volunteers from overseas who fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. He died in Montreal on Jan. 14 at the age of 96. Gross was among 268 Canadians, most of them Second World War veterans like him, who joined with natives of British Mandate Palestine in the fight to secure the nascent Jewish state. He was jailed briefly for refusing to fire on the Irgun arms ship, the Altalena. Gross explained the reason for his derring-do thusly: “Be a Jew— that’s it.” “Lightning Lou” Billinkoff of Winnipeg, died March 14 at the age of 99 after a 10- year sprinting career that saw him become the fastest Canadian man in the 90-to-94 and 95-to-99 age groups. At the age of 96, he ran 50 metres in 15.67 seconds, beating the 2018 world record in his category by
Monte Kwinter
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