Local News
A taste of Limmud 2020
By MYRON LOVE
Limmud Winnipeg celebrated its tenth anniversary on the weekend of February 29/March 1 with quite possibly its best attendance to date. Close to 400 members of our community had more than three dozen sessions to choose from, with presenters from across Canada, New York and Israel joining local speakers and facilitators in providing a smorgasbord of topics both secular and religious, cultural and culinary.
As usual, this writer indulged in a representative sampling of what was on the menu, balancing local and Israeli issues with some religious study as well as delving into Jewish history. And, while each session could make for an entire feature on its own, space considerations leave me to focus on the highlights.
So let us begin the journey.
The first session that I attended was a presentation by former Winnipegger Jack Frohlich, who made a aliyah in 1989 and who, for the past 18 years, has been teaching conversion classes under the auspices of the National Centre for Conversion. He also works closely with the Beta Israel (Ethiopian) community.
Frohlich delivered two presentations – the first discussing the challenges facing Ethiopian Israelis and the second talking about the controversial issue of conversion in Israel. There is much misinformation concerning conversion in Israel, Frohlich pointed out.
My own understanding was that Reform and Conservative conversions are not recognized in Israel and – much to my surprise, there have been Orthodox conversions in North America that also aren’t recognized in Israel. The reality is that the only conversions officially recognized in Israel are those which are approved by the Dayanim (rabbi/judges) associated with the National Centre for Conversion.
As Frohlich noted, even a conversion by a rabbi in solidly Haredi Bnai Brak would not be recognized.
He pointed out that while Reform and Conservative conversions may not be recognized or the converts considered Jewish, they are still welcomed under the Law of Return with all the benefits that come with it.
Then there is the occasional report that converts have to vow to observe all the Mitzvot both during the conversion process and forever after on pain of having the conversion rescinded. Not true, Frohlich said. Once one is accepted into the Jewish community, the individual can life his or her life the same way those who are born Jewish do.
“Becoming a Jew is a two-sided coin,” he said. “It is a two-for-one deal. You are adopting a new religion and you become part of the Jewish People.”
While the original Law of Return applied only to Halachic Jews born of a Jewish mother, he noted, in 1970, the government expanded the Law of Return to include anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent – even though the individual would not be considered Jewish per se.
Of the Russian immigrants who came to Israel in the 1990s, Frohlich pointed out, about 50% were not halachically Jewish.
He reported that Israel registers about 2,500 conversions a year with most of the converts being women. “Weddings often follow,” he said.
Quite a number of Filipinos (Filipinas?) and Arab Moslems are among the converts, he noted.
And the government and the rabbinate continue to make the conversion process easier, he added. In recent years, all fees have been removed and a more flexible approach has been adopted for the learning process.
“Most students are pleasantly surprised by their ulpan/educational experiences,” Frohlich said.
He reported that about 80% of conversion applicants are approved the first time they appear before the Bet Din with the remainder often approved following a few more months of studying.
From Israel, we travel back to Winnipeg to hear the story of Shimon Segal. The 33-year-old criminal lawyer began life with the deck stacked against him. He has succeeded in life through his own inner strength and the love and support of David and Glenda Segal and their sons, Devin and Ryan.
Segal was born into a strictly Orthodox – but dysfunctional family. Over his first few years, he was imbued with Orthodox practice and tradition and a strong Jewish identity. The middle of three children, he recalls a lot of arguing in the home.
He began his schooling in the Hebrew Bilingual program at Centennial School in the North End. After Grade 2, he recalled, the family moved south, where his parents became less and less observant and opened a grow-op in their home. “The house was always moldy and dirty,” he remembered.
While attending Brock Corydon’s Hebrew Bilingual program, he made some friends among his classmates -, in particular, Devin Segal.
The Jewish Child and Family Service first stepped into the family situation when he was seven. He noted that his mother was abusive and his father disinterested.
When he was ten, his parents split and he found himself back in the North End in a group home where he was the only Jewish kid. “I was living a double life,” he recalled. “I was taking the bus to Brock Corydon every day. At the group home, I started smoking cigarettes and marijuana and wearing gang clothes to try to fit in. I would show up at school smelling of cigarettes. I didn’t fit in anywhere. While I remained close to my friends at Brock Corydon, most of their parents didn’t approve of their sons hanging out with me.”
The exception was David Segal. “My dad (David Segal) began to be involved in my life when I was ten,” Shimon said. “He took an interest in me. He would take me fishing sometimes. There was no sense of judgment. I relaxed when I was with him.”
For a short time, Segal was housed with foster parents Barry and the late Marsha Weber, to whom he is also grateful. The Webers took in foster children for short periods of time.)
At the age of 12, he was returned to his birth mother for a time. That didn’t work out. He spent some time in the Manitoba Youth Centre and with a Christian foster family who sent him to a bible camp. “They were only in it for the money,” he said of those foster parents.
“I began spending more and more time with the Segals,” Shimon said.
After several excruciating weeks with the Christian family, he was returned to his birth father who, after a short time, locked him out of the house.
That was when his life really took a turn for the worse. He ended up living on the street in Tuxedo. “I tried Osborne Village, but it felt too dangerous,” he recalled. “In Tuxedo, I felt safer. I slept wherever I could – partially-built buildings, a friend’s mother’s station wagon, even in the Assiniboine Forest for a time.”
It wasn’t long after that David and Glenda Segal invited him to move in with them permanently and become a member of the family. “David and Glenda became my dad and mom and Devin and Ryan my new brothers.”
He added that he has kept in touch with his own birth siblings – a brother and sister- and that the Segal family has included them in family gatherings.
The love and support from his new family, Shimon said, enabled him to rekindle his inner Jewishness and feel part of the Jewish community again.
Over the last ten years, Segal has been able to earn a law degree. He has married and become a father. And he has given back to the community and, through his legal work, other vulnerable people.
“Thanks to the Segal Family, I have been able to live a normal life,” he said.
“What the Segal Family did for Shimon was amazing,” said Randee Pollock, the Jewish Child and Family Service’s Adoption, Fostercare and Rescue Co-ordinator. “Our goal is to keep families together – but that is not always possible where there are mental health or addiction issues or perhaps there has been a death in the family.”
She reports that the JCFS currently has 15 Jewish children in care with nine foster homes and three places of safety available to house them. “We are always in need of more Jewish families who are willing to open their homes to children in our community who are in need of shelter,” she noted.
From Winnipeg, we again pack our bags for our third port of call as we follow Rabbi Mark Glickman, the spiritual leader of Reform Congregation Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary, as he travels the world in search of the lost story of the Cairo Genizah.
Glickman is the author of “Sacred Treasure – the Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic”. (He also delivered a talk at Limmud in 2016 about his follow-up book, “Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish books”.)
Glickman’s research took him to archives at Cambridge University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York – the world’s two largest repositories of Genizah documents – and, accompanied by his son, Jacob, to the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which was the original repository of the Genizah.
So, you might be wondering what a “genizah” is? As Glickman pointed out, we are a People of the Book. Under Jewish Law, it is not allowed to throw out sacred books. The proper way to dispose of them is burial in a Jewish cemetery. But they have to be stored somewhere until they can be buried. In my own synagogue, the genizah – or storage space – is a cupboard downstairs. For many centuries in the old Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, it was a space – a hole in the wall in the women’s section upstairs.
The current Ben Ezra Synagogue, Glickman reported, was built in the 11th century on the banks of the Nile, replacing an earlier shul which was destroyed by flooding. In the Middle Ages, he noted, Egypt was home to a large and influential Jewish community one of whose most prominent members was the great Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon (aka Maimonidies aka the Rambam).
There are a number of Western characters associated with the discovery of the treasure trove of documents that were stored in the Ben Ezra genizah. The first outsider to appear on the scene was one Simon Von Geldern, a German Jewish adventurer and Orientalist who moved in Bedouin circles. He visited the Genizah, but took nothing from it.
Then there came a Rabbi Jacob Saphir, a dealer in Jewish documents in Jerusalem, who heard about the Genizah from Van Geldern, dropped in, and brought back about 1,000 documents for sale. Next was Abraham Firkovitch, a member of the breakaway Karaite sect – who came in search of documents of historical interest to the Karaite community.
In the 1880s, Elkan Nathan Adler, a prominent member of England’s Jewish community – and son and brother of Chief Rabbis of England, visited and left with more than 6,000 documents (as possibly a Torah cover).
The scholarly interest in the Genizah, Glickman noted, began in 1996 when Rabbi Solomon Schechter – then teaching at Cambridge University, had an encounter with an unusual colleague. Twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson were Semitic scholars and travellers who had recently returned from an expedition to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. Among the documents they brought back was one in a language that the two multi linguists didn’t recognize. They asked Schechter if he could help. He recognized it as a tractate for the book Ben Sira, a book of wisdom that had not been included in the Talmudic canon. The book at that time was only known from a Greek translation.
“The last person to have seen that book in the original Hebrew was Saadia Gaon over 1000 years before,” Glickman noted. “The document was from the Ben Ezra Genizah. Schechter – very excited by this find – quickly arranged to visit the genizah and subsequently transferred close to 200,000 documents to Cambridge for translation and study.”
The documents – 300,000 in total – consisted not only of religious material but also letters, business records, medical prescriptions and the other detritus of every day life. Among the documents that Glickman highlighted was the oldest piece of Jewish sheet music (composed by an Italian Catholic priest who had converted to Judaism), an early Hebrew reading primer and the last letter that Maimonides received from his beloved younger brother, David, before the businessman was lost at sea en route to India.
Over the past 20 years, Glickman reported that advances in computer technology have made translating the documents and connected fragments much easier. He noted that the Freidberg Genizah Project was established in 1999 as a non-profit international humanities venture established by philanthropist Albert Friedberg of Toronto to promote and facilitate research of the material discovered in the Cairo Genizah. Under the aegis of the project, all of the genizah materials are in the process on being inventoried and put online.
Glickman completed his presentation with a video of himself peering into the now empty genizah.
And we conclude with a little Torah study led by Rabbi Yosef Benarroch, spiritual leader of the Adas Yeshurun Herzlia Congregation. His question: Does being religious make you a better person?
In contemplating the question, Rabbi Benarroch first turned to the story of creation, noting that while the Lord commented after each of the first five days of creation that work was “good”, He does not say the same about His creation of mankind. Rather, the Torah says that the Lord “created Man in his image”.
So what does that mean? Benarroch quoted Torah and referred to several rabbanim – including Rabbi Akiva, Rambam and the late modern sages, Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel – as well as talmudic commentaries and their interpretations. One suggestion that Benarroch made is that of all G-d’s creations, man is the only one that can also create.
And while G-d doesn’t have an “image” in the way that man does, He does have attributes that can well be emulated – being slow to anger and quick to forgive, compassionate, gracious and merciful – attributes that are part of a prayer shul goers sing on Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot before taking out the Torah and at Selichot in the days leading up to the High Holidays.
So, while engaging in regular religious practice itself doesn’t determine good or bad behavior, Rabbi Benarroch concluded, attempting to model your life after the qualities exhibited by the Lord – in His image – will, without a doubt make one a better person.
Local News
One of Canadian and American television’s greatest producers of all time: Perry Rosemond – a true North End boy, who never forgot his Winnipeg roots
Introduction by BERNIE BELLAN Perry Rosemond was a well- known television producer who grew up in the North End of Winnipeg before moving to Toronto and establishing himself as one of Canadian television’s brightest talents in the 1960s, later to go on to even greater success in the US before returning to Canada in the 1980s.
Rosemond passed away in Toronto on August 20 at the age of 89.
In August 2020, Gerry Posner interviewed Rosemond for the Jewish Radio Hour. I contacted Rochelle Zucker, the longtime producer of that show, to see whether she could send me an audio file of that interview – which she was able to do. Following is a complete transcript of the often hilarious interview Gerry did with Perry Rosemond:
Gerry Posner: Welcome to the Jewish Hour radio show. This is Gerry Posner, and I’m delighted to be back on the radio once again with a guest whom I believe you will find interesting and informative. So today I feel very fortunate to have on the show a real Winnipeg legend, a man who has made his way in the world of the arts, and that is no small achievement. He has been a big name in the field of entertainment as a writer, a director, a producer for many years. I speak of Perry Rosemond. Perry, welcome to the Jewish Hour radio show.
Rosemond: Thank you, Ger.
Posner: I imagine you might have even listened to this show when you were a youngster.
Rosemond: Well, I have to tell you that my grandmother would call us every Sunday when I was about seven years of age, and she would say, “Turn on the French station at 1 o’clock and you’ll hear a very beautiful program.” And that was Noah Whitman’s show. And here I am, a mere 73 years later, on the show. Remarkable.
Posner: Well, I’m glad you made it. Tell me something, Perry. Who were your parents?
Rosemond: My parents were Max and Mona Rosemond, two of the most beautiful-looking people on the face of the earth, and where is genetics when you need it? But we lived in my grandmother’s house. You called it your grandmother’s house, even though there was a grandfather there. But she ruled the roost. And there were 14 of us in a house that wasn’t that big. But my dad was a clothing designer. My mother was a showroom model. And my mother wore a girdle, but she was never fat. And I later learned in life that the reason she wore the girdle was so that when the buyers in the showroom pinched her, it didn’t hurt as much. Those were my parents.
Posner: Well, where was the house that you grew up in?
Rosemond: The house I grew up in was at the corner of Manitoba and Andrews in North Winnipeg.
Posner: So you spent quite a few years there.
Rosemond: Oh, yes. I spent quite a few years there, but we moved. My parents were sort of upwardly mobile, and we moved from Andrews and Manitoba to Lansdowne Avenue. That was an improvement. Oh, my goodness. I had my own room.
Posner: Were there more of you than just Perry? I mean, were there siblings?
Rosemond: No, there was just me. But I was surrounded by cousins who were as close as brothers and sisters, really. And we stayed close for our entire lives. So there was a huge, huge sense of family at 193 Andrews.
Posner: Who would these cousins be?
Rosemond: My cousin Sonny and my cousin Mickey.
Posner: Both Rosemonds?
Rosemond: No, they were on my mother’s side.
Posner: What was her (maiden) name?
Rosemond: Magid.
Posner: MAGGOT. Really? Okay.
Rosemond: And Sonny and Mickey were four years older than me and exploited me at every opportunity. My uncle Dave Rosemond used to manage the Beacon Theater in Winnipeg.
Posner: In the North End.
Rosemond: Yes. And they would go to the Beacon Theater with me and get in for free because of me and still take my 10 cents that my mother gave me for the popcorn. So their mission in life was to exploit Perry Rosemond.
Posner: And you remember it, too.
Rosemond: I do indeed. I do indeed.
Posner: So you went to school where?
Rosemond: William Whyte School.
Posner: And then did you go to (St. Johns) Tech?
Rosemond: I went to Aberdeen and then to Tech. And at William Whyte School, I would go to sleep at night and pray to wake up Ukrainian so that the daily beatings would stop. But it was 50% Ukrainian and 50% Jewish.
Posner: Yeah, you knew what it was like to be a Jew.
Rosemond: Absolutely.
Posner: Did you do any studying in Hebrew or Yiddish?
Rosemond : I did. I went to Hebrew school. And in those days, I sounded like Georgie Jessel, for God’s sakes. In those days, I can’t believe I said that. If you’re going to cut anything, cut “in those days.” Please, Ger, do me a favor. But in those days, the instructors were measured by how much pain they could inflict on the students.
Posner: And you had a bit of that.
Rosemond: A bit of that. I was once thrown against a radiator by Mar Gross, and I still bear the pains to this day.
Posner: But you weren’t a product of Cantor Brownstone’s choir.
Rosemond: No, that was Alan Blye, and he was my friend and my roommate when I moved to Toronto to become an actor.
Posner: Who were some of your buddies in Winnipeg growing up? I guess Blye was one of them.
Rosemond: Blye was very close. Bugsy Lavich was very close, very close, and probably the leading bookmaker of his generation.
Posner: He’s well-known.
Rosemond: Indeed, and remains today my closest and dearest friend. And whenever I think about Bernie, I say to myself, how advantageous is it to have a friend who is the smartest human being in the world? I mean, if I need to know anything, he knows it. He knows it.
Posner: Did you go to university in Winnipeg at all?
Rosemond: I went to the University of Manitoba, and that’s where I got the bug to go into theater because I was Troilus in “Troilus and Cressida.” I was Cassius in “Julius Caesar,” and I was hopeless in the classroom. But it just took me by storm. It really did. And I ended up going to Toronto.
Posner: Well, just hold on a second. Were you not involved in some fashion in the creation of the MTC, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, in its very early days – with John Hirsch?
Rosemond: I was a founding member of the Manitoba Theatre Centre with Gordon Pinsent and Len Cariou – who went on to win a Tony, and Donnelly Rhodes, who went on to be a terrific influence in theatre in Canada. And I was one of the founding members. And you know what was strange, Gerry, is that I thought, boy, if this guy John Hirsch is in Winnipeg, what must they be like in New York or the West End in England? And I never met his match. But boy, could he intimidate me. I was in a play, “Death of a Salesman.” I was playing Bernard, and he came up to me and he said, “Mr. Rosemond, don’t you think you ought to reconsider your interpretation of that lawyer you’re playing?” And it would have been a fair note, except it was given to me after dress rehearsal. I’ve never seen a man customize performance the way he did — everybody got exactly what they needed. He was beyond brilliant. He went to his demise as my mentor and my idol and my friend.
Posner: So he was your introduction to the world of arts.
Rosemond: Absolutely. And strangely enough, we hooked up later when — oh, many, many years later — when he was head of drama at CBC, and he brought me back from Los Angeles to create the program “King of Kensington.”
Posner: When you made that decision somewhere in the ’50s, you’re in your, I guess, 20s, and you make a decision, “I’m going to move to Toronto, and I’m going to go into the arts as a career.” Your parents must have looked at you like you were out of your head.
Rosemond: Do you know, Gerry, it was funny, because beyond the initial beating about the head and shoulders that my father laid on me, they never stopped supporting me. They stood by me, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. 100% support. Let me chart my own course.
Posner: But the odds were stacked against you. Come on.
Rosemond: Oh, tell me about it. I mean, it was about 15 minutes before I realized I wasn’t a very good television actor. I remember sitting in the basement of 42 Bedford Road in Toronto with Gordon Pinsent, who was my other roommate, with Alan Blye, and we were watching a guy who stole a part from me. He was playing the part I was born to play. And I watched it for about 10 minutes, and I said, “You know what, Gordon? He’s better than I would have been.” And Gordon said, “Perry, get out of acting. You don’t have the ego for it.” And I’d been sneaking in and out of control rooms all this time, Gerry. So I got bitten by the behind the scenes. And that’s where I headed.
Posner: So you actually gave up the acting. You went into production.
Rosemond: Exactly, exactly.
Posner: Well, maybe you were fortunate that that happened early on in the career. In your career, as I gather, you’ve touched the lives of some pretty big names. Tell me if I’m wrong here. Dick Van Dyke?
Rosemond: Yes. Len Cariou, Cloris Leachman, Julie Andrews, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Donnie and Marie, Johnny Cash, and the list goes on.
Posner: How does this all come about?
Rosemond: Oh, Johnny Cash. That was the best time of my life. Two years in Nashville. I’ll tell you how it came about. Johnny wanted documentary elements in his variety show, and I had trained in both in Canada. So I wasn’t the best documentary filmmaker, and I wasn’t the best comedy variety producer, but the fact that I could do both got me the job directing his show. And when they introduced me to him — it was during the hippie era, so I had the long hair and the whole nine yards.
Posner You weren’t exactly a feature presenter. You didn’t present well.
Rosemond: No, I didn’t present well because Johnny said, “Where are you going to film this week?” And I said, “I’m going to Hazard, Kentucky to film coal miners.” And Johnny said, “Perry, if you go into Hazard, Kentucky on a Saturday night with that long hair and them bell-bottoms, they’re going to kill you.” So this whole Hollywood invasion of middle America was absolutely hysterical. But the show was a big hit.
Posner: Give me the career path. You came here (Toronto) in the ’50s.
Rosemond: OK, I came here in the ’50s, late ’50s, as an actor. Right. Shared a room with Gordon Pinsent and Alan Blye. Right. We were very competitive, but Alan really won because he had a role on a continuing starring role on one of the big variety shows. And if I’m not mistaken, he actually declared Gordon Pinsent and me as dependents on his 1959 tax form. So he definitely was the more successful of the group. Then I went back to Winnipeg in 1960, and I applied as a production assistant. And there were no openings, but there were producer-directors that had quit, and so they gave me a job as a producer-director.
Posner: So I get this is at CBC in Winnipeg, correct?
Rosemond So I got 4,200 bucks for the year, and I did Metro News and a talk show, and then I did a show called “Red River Jamboree,” which was fully sponsored by Kraft Foods, always in the top ten. And, Ger, I’ve been going downhill ever since.
Posner Well, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t know hardly that, based on what I’ve read about you. I’d say you’re climbing the ladder, and you’ve climbed to the top. And then, so how long were you back in Winnipeg?
Rosemond: I was back in Winnipeg until ’63. What happened was I was doing this variety show and I looked eastward and the third best variety producer at CBC in Toronto was a guy by the name of Norman Jewison. And so I thought, oh, my God, I’m never going to get to Toronto, which was Mecca, as a variety producer. So I went to my supervisor and said, “Look, I want to do children’s programming. My heart is with the children.” And so I got transferred to the children’s department in Winnipeg, took two kinescopes under my arm and headed to Toronto, and got a transfer to children’s programming in ’63. ’63 to ’68 Toronto, ’68 to ’85 Los Angeles.
Posner: But what were you doing in LA?
Rosemond: Well, I came out of the Cash show and did Bill Cosby’s show. You might not have heard of him. He hasn’t been in the news much these days. But I did Bill Cosby’s variety show, and from then, Donnie and Marie (then) a situation comedy called “Good Times.” But what happened is I had three shows going in Canada at the same time. I had “Bizarre” on CTV. I had “Tom Jones” on Global TV, and I had “King of Kensington” on CBC. So I thought, well, what am I doing in America?
Posner: So back you came to Canada?
Rosemond: Back to Canada, where I’ve been since ’85.
Posner: Now, in those years, those five years that you alluded to, that you were doing work in children’s programming, you were pretty involved, from what I gather. You did some work on “Children of the World?”
Rosemond: Yeah, that’s probably something of which I’m most proud. It was a series on children in developing nations, and it drew an audience of over 600 million people just in audio-visual distribution.
Posner: Wow. And if I had to say, what’s the number one thing you’ve accomplished? That would be it?
Rosemond: That would be it.
Posner: Really?
Rosemond: Absolutely.
Posner: I understand it won (something called the Japan Prize). I mean, I hadn’t heard of this, but I gather it’s pretty significant. The Japan Prize is (for) the best children’s program.
Rosemond: That’s correct.
Posner: So, you know, that’s saying something. That’s a long way from the North End.
Rosemond: Well, you know what we say. They say, how come there’s so many great people from the North End? And my answer is always the same. It’s a deep and abiding desire to get the heck out of the North End.
Posner: Now, I think, correct me here, in some fashion, not only did you do this program that won this prize, “Children of the World.” But you also were connected, and maybe you can tell me how, to “Mr. Dressup” and “The Friendly Giant?”
Rosemond: That’s right. I was head of children’s programming for a period of time and worked with Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant. Friendly Giant, I remember once being in a room with him, and I was giving him some notes, and he turned around and he walked away from me. I thought, well, that’s rude. And then I looked, and a group of schoolchildren had come into the studio. And he was deathly afraid of being seen as anything but a giant. Which he was, by the way. He was a gigantic personality.
Posner: Well, you were the executive producer of those shows, right?
Rosemond: Correct, correct, yeah.
Posner: And in some way you got connected to Sesame Street, too?
Rosemond: That’s right. I was living in Los Angeles, and they asked if I would come back and Canadianize Sesame Street.
Posner Canadianized Sesame Street? I didn’t know there was a Canadianized version.
Rosemond: Well, what we did was we took out the Native American segments and the Spanish segments, and we substituted them with Native Canadian and French. And then gradually we took over and did our own version, a Canadian version of Sesame Street. Again, very gratifying. Back to Winnipeg to do it — that was my blackmail. I said, I’ll come back and do it if I can do it in Winnipeg, because I like the graphics artists in Winnipeg, and I felt I’d get a better product.
Posner: Okay, that’d be what, sometime in the ’80s?
Rosemond: That would have been earlier. That would have been in the ’70s.
Posner: Wow. Well, you kept up your links to Winnipeg.
Rosemond: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Posner: Now, so you’ve had children’s programming. And you also got into, I gather, documentary and public affairs.
Rosemond: Right, yes. “The Way It Is.”
Posner: “The Way It Is” was the Sunday Night flagship show. That was the big show on CBC Sunday night, wasn’t it?
Rosemond: That’s right. It was the big show on CBC Sunday night, and I worked with an executive producer called Ross McLean. I didn’t last too long on that, Gerry. I remember Ross had a very constructive way of winning arguments. We had one argument. And I can’t even remember what it was about, but he won it hands down by throwing a Coke can at my head. And I took a hike, and I never came back to “The Way It Is.”
Posner: That’s the way it was.
Rosemond: That’s the way it was, right.
Posner: You also did what you call profiles for CBC’s “Telescope,” with Oscar Peterson, Arthur Haley, Gordon Pinsent, Glenn Gould, Donald Sutherland. I mean, that was another big show.
Rosemond: Yeah, and that was my entrée to the United States because I became their man in America. And thus I did Donald Sutherland in Hollywood while snooping around for work and Eddie Albert from ‘”Green Acres” and all of the expatriate Canadians who were living in Los Angeles. And that gave me a foothold because I could look for work and still pay the rent. My Canadian qualifications counted for nothing in America. You were zero. Zero. And I was starting from scratch at age 30, and I had to have some kind of income to get things going.
Posner: And then somewhere along the line you got — you oversaw the production, I’m not sure exactly, of “Hockey Night in Canada.” I’m guessing you never even played the game.
Rosemond: I was on the third line of the Chicago Blackhawks in the miniature NHL, you know, and probably the worst ever third liner in the history of Manitoba’s miniature NHL hockey. But here’s the deal with that. When I wanted to come back to Canada, I couldn’t just come back as a freelancer because when they brought me in from America, I was the big American producer that they were bringing to Canada. If I was going to be in Canada, you know the deal, the expert’s always 100 miles from home.
Posner: That’s right.
Rosemond: So I had to have a foothold. So I had worked with Don Ohlmeyer Productions, and they were consulting to Hockey Night. And they wanted to take over Hockey Night. And Don suggested that I come up from America to put them in the hockey business, which I did. And I also started other shows for this company, Molestar Communications, which were more in the entertainment business and more to my liking, like the Juno Awards, I’d escape for a month or two, or a syndicated series called “Starting From Scratch,” which I shot in Montreal. So I would leave the administrative behind and jump back into the trenches whenever I could.
Posner: You know, it’s okay you didn’t play so well in the third line in miniature. You did a little better, I would say. Now, you mentioned David Steinberg. And you produced his show, CTV’s “David Steinberg Show?”
Rosemond: Yes, that’s right.
Posner: Did you even write for that show?
Rosemond: I wrote for it.
Posner: How many scripts would you have written for?
Rosemond: We did one season only, but we had an incredible guest list. David grew up a block away from me, and we knew each other forever. And I’ve done so much with David, and I admire him so much. And David attracted a huge guest list of John Voight and Ethel Merman and Milton Berle, and he also was able to bring out John Candy for his first show and Martin Short and Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty and all of those people.
Posner: No, I don’t think David Steinberg’s memories of Winnipeg are as warm as yours are. They are kind of, you know. I’m quite surprised to hear you say that because I think in the beginning maybe, you know, when you were a young kid you hate where you came from. Maybe there was some of that. But now he cherishes it.
Rosemond: He does. I also had a lot of clout in being able to, if I may say so, book enormous talent because we had Marty Short and Andrea Martin, and I was able to book Howie Mandel, because I gave him his first shot in America on Norm Crosby’s “Comedy Shop.” And I got to tell you this really boring story, but I’ll try to make it quick.
Posner: Okay.
Rosemond: My partner and I on Norm Crosby’s Comedy Shop could veto any act that appeared on the show. So Howie’s manager was Saul Holliff’s nephew, and Saul was Johnny Cash’s manager, who was very good to me on “The Johnny Cash Show.” So he said, could you put my act on? And I said, send a tape. So he sent the tape of Howie, you know, with the faucet on the forehead and the diaper and God knows what else. And before we were 15 seconds into it, my partner Joe Sigmund raised his hand and he said, “I veto.” I said, “Joe, it’s Saul Holliff’s nephew’s act. We’ve got to put him on. Let’s tape him. We won’t use it.” And six months later, to make a long story even a little longer, Phil Kives from Winnipeg of K-Tel came to order a DVD from us. And he said, “make sure that you put on the DVD the kid with the diaper.”
Posner: Okay. You know, I’m just barely starting and we’ve got to finish this. Tell me, Perry.
Rosemond: Yeah.
Interviewer: What’s the story? Are you into retirement mode or you’re still going at it?
Rosemond: My dream is that it’s “ready camera.” I want Ingmar Bergman to shoot this, by the way. My dream is “ready camera one” and aneurysm, and in slow motion my head starts to descend to the console and I’m dead before I even hit it.
Posner: You’re still working. Still working. And I guess you still connect to Winnipeg.
Rosemond: Absolutely. I was there several times to do specials in Winnipeg, and I still would go back today, especially with the tax credits.
Posner: Perry, it’s a joy to have you. I tell you, we barely scratched the surface, and I appreciate your taking the time to come and do this.
Rosemond: Can I tell you, and I say this in all honesty, you are one terrific interviewer.
Posner: Well, thanks very much. I enjoy doing it.
Post script (added by Bernie Bellan): Some of the things that Gerry omitted from his interview were that Rosemond also produced the terrific documentary, “When Jews Were Funny,” which was named best Canadian Feature Film at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival.
As his obituary on the Benjamin’s Parrk Memoria Chapel website also notes: “In 2003, Perry was appointed a member of the Order of Canada, a national recognition for a career that entertained, educated, and made Canadians laugh.
“But Perry never measured his life by accolades, he measured it in smiles. He lived to spread laughter and joy. It was his way of making people feel seen and valued. He will be dearly missed and forever loved.”
Local News
From a ‘pie in the sky’ idea to 2,400 young hockey players
By BERNIE BELLAN I didn’t used to cover sports for The Jewish Post & News except for the odd occasion.
For years we could count on the late, great Harvey Rosen to comb the waterfront, looking for any sports story that might have the least connection to anything Jewish. Harvey would even go into visiting teams’ locker rooms during Winnipeg Jets games and, if a player had a name that sounded Jewish, inquire whether that player might be Jewish.
Then, for a few years, we added well-known sports writer Scott Taylor to the mix. Scott offered quite a different perspective, looking for stories about athletes that went far behind the scenes to uncover details that other reporters might have missed.
With both Harvey and Scott gone from our pages, I’ve occasionally found myself filling the sports void. These days, however, I tend to wait for an interesting story to find me.
And that’s exactly what happened with Wheatland Hockey.
Recently, my neighbours Elliot and Linda Katz mentioned that they knew of a Jewish couple who had started a hockey development program in Winnipeg. The couple, Rich Hechter and Rachel Wolfenson, had apparently started Wheatland Hockey only about 16 months earlier.
I subsequently learned that, in that short time, more than 2,400 young hockey players had gone through Wheatland’s various programs.
That number got my attention.
So, I contacted Rachel and Rich to find out what they had created — and why.
It started with a gap
The idea for Wheatland began, as Rachel described it to me, as “this little pie in the sky idea that we were going to have a spring development program in the spring of 2025.”
They started with about 50 kids spread across three age groups.
Sixteen months later, Wheatland has grown into a broad hockey-development organization offering programs for players from U9 through U15, along with specialized programming, female hockey, spring and summer teams, events and high-performance opportunities.
But the numbers aren’t really the story.
The story is why they thought Wheatland needed to exist in the first place.
Rich and Rachel felt there was a gap between traditional minor hockey and the highly specialized — and often expensive — training programs available to elite players.
There were plenty of opportunities for kids to play hockey. But what about the player who needed to improve one particular part of their game? What about the U9 player whose parents had no idea what skills their child should be working on? What about the player who wasn’t an elite athlete but had the potential to become a much better hockey player with the right instruction?
That was the space they wanted Wheatland to occupy.
As Rachel explained it, some families come to Wheatland knowing exactly what their child needs.
“They might know that the kid’s gap is power skating,” she told me. “They might have a great shot and great stick handling, but they’re not strong skaters.”
Other families arrive with a much less specific question.
“They’re new U9 families,” Rachel said. “Their kids have been spat out of the Timbits world and into the U9 world and they don’t know what to focus on.”
That’s where Rich comes in.
‘Pedagogy on ice’
Rich brings an unusual background to hockey coaching.
He is currently taking a one-year sabbatical from his role as vice-principal of Brock Corydon School, the Winnipeg school often known as the only public school Hebrew bilingual program in North America. For many families in Winnipeg’s Jewish community, Brock Corydon is where they know Rich best.
Before becoming a vice-principal, he worked as a high school teacher and as a university professor in the Faculty of Education. He has also spent more than a decade coaching youth hockey.
This year, rather than stepping away from education, Rich is using his sabbatical as an opportunity to continue learning, writing, and growing as a coach and mentor while devoting more time to developing Wheatland Hockey.
That additional time will also allow Wheatland to extend its reach beyond Winnipeg through a new initiative called “Wheatland on the Road”.
Over the coming year, Rich will travel to rural Manitoba communities including Manitou, St. Laurent, Lundar, Steinbach and Elm Creek to lead coaching and mentoring sessions for local players and coaches.
The initiative reflects Wheatland’s belief that access to quality coaching should not depend on where a young player lives. It also gives Rich an opportunity to work directly with local hockey communities, sharing ideas and helping coaches develop their own approaches to teaching the game.
For Rich, education and hockey aren’t separate worlds.
Rachel described his approach as “pedagogy on ice.”
The idea is simple: coaching isn’t just about showing a young player how to execute a skill. It’s about understanding how that player learns, figuring out what they need, and creating an environment where they can improve.
That educational philosophy is evident in the way Wheatland approaches development.
Its programs focus on areas such as skating, puck control, shooting, passing and receiving, positional play, defensive skills, checking, hockey IQ and tactical understanding.
But the organization also talks openly about developing confidence, resilience and character.
The Wheatland philosophy is summed up on its website as building “skills, character and excellence — on and off the ice.”
And that distinction is important to Rich.
The objective isn’t simply to produce better hockey players.
It’s to help young people become better learners, teammates and competitors.
A Jewish leadership team in an unlikely business
There is also an irony at the heart of Wheatland’s success.
We are not exactly the people known for our sporting prowess, and none of the people leading Wheatland played in the NHL. Yet, the organization is run by Rachel and Rich, with Ryan Paul, Eleni Wener, Avi Walker and Dustin Roitelman in senior leadership roles.
That may be unusual in the hockey world, but it is also part of what makes Wheatland distinctive.
This is not a business built around former professional players leveraging on their own playing careers. It is being led by people who believe deeply in the values Wheatland has developed — and continues to develop.
They believe in teaching young people how to learn, how to work with others, how to persevere and how to contribute to their communities.
In that sense, Wheatland’s leadership team reflects the organization’s broader philosophy: hockey expertise matters, but so do education, mentorship, organization, empathy and a commitment to making the game more accessible.
The fact that this group has helped build a hockey organization serving thousands of young players from across Manitoba is, in its own way, pretty remarkable.
Making hockey and coaching accessible
Perhaps the most important word in Wheatland’s philosophy is accessibility.
“Accessibility is one of our guiding principles,” Rachel said. “We believe that all kids should have the opportunity to get on the ice, regardless of socioeconomic conditions.”
For Rich and Rachel, accessibility means more than making hockey available. They believe that good coaching should be accessible, too.
That commitment is reflected in Wheatland’s “Pay-What-You-Can” program, which helps ensure that financial circumstances do not prevent children and families from participating in quality hockey programming.
For Rachel and Rich, the program is one way of giving back to the broader community. They believe that hockey — and the opportunity to learn from good coaches — should be available to as many young people as possible, not limited only to families who can afford the full cost of specialized training.
That doesn’t mean Wheatland is trying to be everything to everyone.
Rather, the idea is that a family shouldn’t need to have an elite-level hockey player — or an elite-level hockey budget — to access good coaching.
The organization keeps its groups relatively small. A typical session might have four or five players, while a larger session could have as many as 20, with several coaches on the ice.
The result is that a player who shows up to a smaller session can end up receiving something approaching a semi-private lesson without the family having to pay a premium for that experience.
And, Rachel noted, if only a handful of players show up for a session, “they would get the benefit of a semi-private class for a very inexpensive cost.”
Building coaches, too
Wheatland’s emphasis on development doesn’t stop with the players.
The organization has also created a Junior Coach program, through which some of its younger participants have an opportunity to begin learning how to teach the game themselves.
Five of Wheatland’s junior coaches are under the age of 15.
That’s significant because it reflects another part of Rich and Rachel’s philosophy: hockey development isn’t simply about producing better players. It’s about creating people who can contribute to the hockey community.
The organization’s coaching staff also includes experienced coaches with backgrounds in player development, athletic development and hockey education.
The same philosophy is at the heart of Wheatland on the Road. By working with coaches in rural communities, Rich hopes to help build local coaching capacity so that players can continue benefiting from quality instruction long after his visit is over.
Hockey as a bridge between communities
One of Wheatland’s most memorable recent initiatives involved a visiting Israeli hockey club.
The visiting players took part in two on-ice sessions with Rich and Ryan. After changing out of their gear, the young players then visited Rich at Brock Corydon School, where they met with grade 5 and 6 students.
For the players from Israel, the experience offered more than additional hockey instruction. It gave them an opportunity to connect with Winnipeg students through a shared language — the language of hockey — while also learning about one another’s communities.
For Wheatland, the sessions demonstrated how hockey can create meaningful connections that extend well beyond the rink.
Rachel and Rich
While Rich is the face of Wheatland on the ice, Rachel’s role is largely behind the scenes.
A Senior Investment Advisor with TD Private Wealth Management, Rachel brings an entirely different skill set to the organization, overseeing operations and communications and helping ensure that families have a positive experience from the moment they register.
The division of responsibilities seems to work. Rachel brings the organizational perspective needed to turn an idea into an operation. Rich brings the educator’s perspective to player development.
The broader leadership team brings additional experience, energy and commitment to the values that guide Wheatland.
And somewhere along the way, that little “pie in the sky” idea became something considerably larger.
More than 2,400 kids have now gone through Wheatland’s programs in just 16 months.
That’s a lot of hockey players. But when I asked Rachel what she thought accounted for that kind of growth, her answer wasn’t really about hockey.
It was about giving families something they were looking for.
“We teach people first, we teach hockey second,” is the philosophy Rich and Rachel have adopted.
Perhaps that’s why Wheatland has grown so quickly.
Because for all the talk about hockey development, what they are really trying to develop is something bigger: young people who feel supported, challenged and capable of getting better.
And through initiatives such as the Pay-What-You-Can program, Wheatland on the Road and its work with visiting teams, Wheatland is also showing how hockey can be both accessible and a bridge between communities.
If the first 16 months are any indication, there are a lot of Winnipeg families — and perhaps many potential community partners across Manitoba — who were looking for exactly that.
For more information about Wheatland Hockey, visit Wheatland Hockey.
Local News
“Fiddler on the Roof”: First ever joint production between Winnipeg Jewish Theatre and Rainbow Stage is a smash hit
By BERNIE BELLAN You really can’t go wrong by mounting a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” – and Rainbow Stage has proven that four previous times: in 1971, 1977, 1984, and 1993.
What each of those productions had in common though – aside from the fact that they were solely Rainbow Stage productions, was that each time the star role of Tevye the milkman was played by Cliff Gardner who, in his day job, was the program director at CJOB radio.
I can’t remember how many times I saw Fiddler at Rainbow State previously but, after a while it wasn’t quite the novel experience it was the first time I had seen it there.
But now – as a result of a very creative idea, “Fiddler on the Roof” has been brought back to Rainbow Stage once more – but this time as a co-production with the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.
The idea for mounting a joint production came from WJT’s artistic director, Dan Petrenko who, as Myron Love noted in an article for The Jewish Post this past February, had observed that “ Because of the times we’re living through, and particularly the growing antisemitism in our communities and across the country, I felt there is a need to tell a story that celebrates Jewish culture on the largest stage in the city – to reach as many people as possible.’ ”
Myron’s article went on to say that “Last year, WJT approached Rainbow Stage with a proposal for the co-presentation of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Rainbow Stage management was really enthusiastic in their response, Petrenko said.”
In my own profile of Dan Petrenko, which I wrote in April 2023, when he first came to Winnipeg, just after having been hired as the WJT’s new artistic director, I noted that “Dan was born in Israel, the son of Jewish parents who had moved from their hometown of Odessa in Ukraine.
“A formative influence in his life, he says, was his grandmother, who had been a pianist in Ukraine. She had aspirations early in her life to study in a music conservatory, but the antisemitism that was pervasive in the Soviet Union prevented her from achieving that ambition. Instead, she had to travel all the way to Siberia in order to obtain training to become a pianist.”
After re-reading my own article about Petrenko in preparation for writing about the new production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” now on at Rainbow Stage until Sept. 13, I couldn’t help but note the parallels in Petrenko’s own life and the story that is at the heart of “Fiddler,” which is one of Jews having to cope with antisemitism in their native Ukraine and finally being forced to leave their home community of Anitevka – for parts unknown.
While “Fiddler” has so many dimensions – from its story of persecution, of girls being kept from studying because of age old taboos, of marriages being arranged, to notions of democracy – and socialism, starting to be espoused in the late 1800s in Eastern Europe – it’s the music that really drives the show.
I don’t have to remind anyone how timeless the songs from “Fiddler” have become. There have been documentaries produced, both about how the Broadway show came about and later, how Norman Jewison crafted a quite different approach to telling the story of Tevye the milkman in his brilliant movie adaptation of the Broadway musical. There have also been several books telling the story how three geniuses: Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein, and Jerry Bock, combined to create something that is as timeless in its own way as any musical could ever be.
But, what can you say about the WJT-Rainbow Stage co-production of “Fiddler'” that couldn’t possibly avoid using superlatives? Playing to a sold-out audience on opening night, Wednesday, September 9, even though there was a slight chill in the air as the evening wore on – and certainly mounting a show at Rainbow Stage in September is a chancy proposition – the evening was one of pure magic.
I don’t know who came up with the idea of having the orchestra play behind the performers – as opposed to the usual practice of having them play in the pit in front of the stage – but it was sheer genius to do that. I’ve often attended Rainbow Stage and been frustrated that the singers’ voices are drowned out by the musicians’ instruments – but not this night.
Each note sung could be heard clear as a bell – even from the children who played Tevye and Golde’s youngest daughters.
The performances were universally excellent – all the way from Daniel Kash as Tevye and Debbie Maslowsky (a name very familiar both to WJT and Rainbow Stage attendees) to everyone else in the cast. It would be unfair to single out anyone in the cast for special praise; they were all so good, but if there was one moment that was absolutely thrilling above all else, it was when the opening note to the Russian song “Za vashe zdorovye” (to your health) in the famous tavern scene that culminates with “To Life” was belted out.
And, having the Rusalka Ukrainian dancers perform only added to the evening’s excitement. The exuberance they brought to the wedding scene was a demonstration of how combining the talents of one of Winnipeg’s most exciting dance troupes with many Winnipeg performers who had previously appeared either in WJT or Rainbow Stage productions was a demonstration of just how much talent there is right here in Winnipeg.
Sadly, by the time this is published this version of “Fiddler on the Roof” is only scheduled to be performed two more times: Saturday, Sept. 12, at 7:30 pm and Sunday, Sept. 13, at 2:00 pm. Tickets had been going fast as of the time of publication, but if you want to check with the box office, the number is 204-989-0888
