Sheila Levy, 74 Nunavut, 1978-2020
for all Nunavut called Kamatsiaqtut, which is the Inuktitut word for “thoughtful people who care.” I had been a volunteer with the Ottawa Distress Centre when I was in uni- versity, which was likely why I was asked to assist. I’ve been overseeing the project for 35 years, and now I’m training others to make sure it continues in the spirit that it began: with volunteers living in Nunavut who “help people help themselves.” My husband and I feel that it’s our obligation as humanis- tic Jews to live up to the concept of repairing the world by listening more, talking less,
A fter five years of living as a married couple in Toronto, Ont., my husband and I wondered if we should go on an ad- venture together and try something new. And there it was: a newspaper ad for edu- cational teaching opportunities across the Northwest Territories. We thought we would do it for two years. It ended up last- ing four decades. I had Jewish relatives on my father’s side but my mother’s father was an Anglican min- ister, so that ended up being my parent’s way of life. Judaism, though, was a part of my heritage I felt connected to; when I met a Jewish man in Miami Beach, Fla., who be- came my husband, it was also part of ac- cepting that connection for myself. We mar- ried at a Unitarian church in Ottawa, Ont., but we gravitated to the Oraynu Congrega- tion in Toronto, as it felt comfortable and right to me to have a formal, secular-human- ist conversion. The jobs in N.W.T. brought us to a com- munity of about 1,200, close to the Arctic Circle. We were amazed by the landscape when we first arrived in Pangnirtung. My husband had never seen a mountain, and here we were living in a fjord at the base of a mile-high mountain range directly on the Arctic Ocean. We stayed in Pangnirtung for four years; our first child was born there. By the late 1980s, we had moved twice more, spending two years in Gjoa Haven, Nuna- vut, and three in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and had two more kids. In the late 1980s we moved to what was then called Frobi- sher Bay: in 1999, when Nunavut became its own territory, the name was changed to Iqaluit as a part of Inuit reclamation of place names. We found Jewish friends to celebrate holi- days with in all the communities we lived in, but we also developed a tradition of throw- ing a big annual Hanukkah party, to give everyone a taste of something Jewish. One year, our kids invited so many friends—many of whom were Inuit—that we had over 100 people in our home. Oraynu, in Toronto, was where our children all had bar and bat mitzvahs, although we also did have a b’nai mitzvah in Iqaluit for our twins. The hotel where we held it was
proud to be the first to host such an event. We connected with a butchery in Ottawa that sent us kosher food—although one of those deliveries spoiled when a freezer went kaput on a boat delivering our annual seal- ift, which at that time was how we got most of our food for an entire year.
It was from initially working at the school in Pangnirtung that I met and taught many young children. Some later died by suicide as teenagers. It broke my heart, because I remembered and understood them as bright and energized young people with so much promise at age the age of nine or 10. In 1989, I was invited to a meeting to talk about the root causes of suicide, and the next thing I knew I was starting a help line
and recognizing there may not be simple an- swers but there are thoughtful actions that go a long way. Our kids went south for university but are still connected to Nunavummiut (the people of Nunavut). My grandson Thomas was born in Iqaluit in 2014. A mohel flew in from Ot- tawa to do the brit milah . The biggest job I had that day was to make sure the food was as kosher as possible. n
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