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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to vow to observe all the Mitzvot both during the conversion process and forever after on pain of having the conversion rescinded.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.
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Rachel Fish, leader in combating antisemitism in academia, this year’s Kanee Distinguished Lecture series speaker
By MYRON LOVE The Jewish Heritage Center of Western Canada would seem to have hit another home run with the announcement that Dr. Rachel Fish, a leading voice in tackling anti-Zionism and Jew hatred in North American academia, is this year’s guest speaker at the JHCWC’s upcoming annual Sol and Florence Kanee Distinguished Lecture – which is scheduled for Thursday, April 30, at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue.
The theme of her timely lecture will be“How the Academy Has Created a Fertile Ground for Antisemitism,” a topic in which she is well versed. Fish has an impressive resumé. She is the co-founder of the nonprofit “Boundless,” a think tank partnering with community leaders across North America to revitalize Israel education and take bold collective action to combat antisemitism. She also serves as Director for The Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism; is an associate research professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies; and teaches Israeli history and society at The George Washington University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
In the past, she has served as Senior Advisor and Resident Scholar at the Paul E. Singer Foundation in New York City and Executive Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, where she trained the next generation of academics in the field of Israel Studies. She has also served on the faculty at Brandeis University, George Washington University, and Harvard University. She has has written articles for several publications in the mainstream press and academic journals, and co-edited the book “Essential Israel: Essays for the 21st Century.”
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Fish a couple of weeks ago. My first question to her was how she finds the time to do all that she does. Her response is that there are not enough hours in the day. Her multiple activities remind me of an expression I heard once years ago while I was a member of a short-lived Jewish international development group – “if you want to make sure something gets done, you give it to the busiest person you know.”
Fish observes that she has been explaining Judaism to non-Jews all of her life. “I was raised in Tennessee in a place called Johnson City in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains,” she recounts. “My parents were originally from Ohio. There were very few Jews where we lived. My family spent a lot of time teaching our neighbours, teachers in my school and others we associated with about Jews, our practices and the State of Israel.”
She recalls – as early as 2001 when she was studying at Harvard’s Divinity School, that she was noticing what she describes as a “strong undercurrent of anti-Israel feeling and Jew-hatred”.
“I was determined to pursue a career in higher education,” she notes, “in part because I believe that education matters, because I derive oxygen from teaching, and I particularly enjoy dealing with complex issues. As well, I appreciate the opportunities that teaching at the university level gives me to share what I have learned in public forums such as the Kanee Lecture.”
Ideally, she observes, a professor should not – as much as humanly possible – be sharing her political or personal opinions in class. Higher education should be about creating a space where students can debate freely and challenge each other’s ideas. Instead (as I am sure many readers are aware), too many educators are focused on indoctrinating their students in the teacher’s beliefs – with students with dissident opinion facing hostility and risking ostracism.
Too many universities have become ideological monocultures where critical thinking is discouraged and there is a litmus test for new hires. She cites a FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) report in which an overwhelming majority of the faculty at many leading universities share a leftist – anti-Israel, anti-Christian and anti-Conservative worldview.
That is particularly true with Ivy league and other elite universities in both the United States and Canada – and especially in their liberal Arts and Humanities programs. Much of the anti-Zionist and antisemitic atmosphere – such as the takeover of university quadrants in the wake of October 7 – has been created by outside agitators and foreign funders – notably the oil rich Islamic sheikhdom of Qatar.
“Where you have universities with strong administrative leadership,” she points out, “the level of hostility to Jewish students and threats of violence have not been allowed to take root. It has only been the case where the administration and the board are weak.”
So why, I asked her, do so many Jewish students not seek out alternatives to these compromised campuses?. She responded that some Jewish students have chosen to enrol in universities in the southern United States where there is a more welcoming environment.
But many Jewish students, she observes, continue to enrol in leading universities such as Harvard and Yale, Cornell and UCLA (or York or the University of Toronto in Canada). Many Jewish students still share the belief that being identified with being affiliated with a top flight university will benefit their future careers.
Sadly, she further points out, this poison has filtered down to the K-12 level. Many university education departments have graduated numerous indoctrinated teachers who have taken control of school boards and administrations and seek to impose their vile doctrines on susceptible young minds.
Nevertheless, there are a great many state and lesser known universities that provide a more welcoming attitude to Jewish students.
Rachel Fish suggest that, for too long, North American Jewish communities have been complacent and not recognized the danger in our midst. She does see some hopeful signs though. She has observed that more and more communities, parents and student s have woken to the danger and begun to fight back.
“It’s difficult,” she acknowledges. “It can feel overwhelming. But we have to keep chipping away and not just let the other side win.”
The Sol and Florence Kanee Distinguished Lecture series was inaugurated by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada in 2006 to celebrate Sol Kanee’s 95th birthday. In welcoming the audience to that first lecture, lecture series co-chair Harold Buchwald paid tribute to Kanee, who died on April 23 at 97, as a man who “cast a giant shadow” on world Jewish history in the second half of the 20th century. The former resident of Melville, Saskatchewan, who spent almost all of his adult life in Winnipeg, Kanee was a leader in the development of Israel and the Free Soviet Jewry movement as well as a macher in our Jewish community and across Canada.
I would encourage readers who may be interested in learning more about the current state of antisemitism in academia – and want to support the JHCWC to go online at jhcwc.org for further information or to order tickets. The price of admission is $50.
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Young tech entrepreneur Adam Fainman gathering accolades locally and internationally
By MYRON LOVE Winnipegger Adam Fainman is taking the world by storm. In fewer than three years his new AI start-up – Moonlite Labs – has attracted thousands of users in 550 cities in 95 countries world wide.
As he explained in an interview in the Winnipeg Sun last June, Moonlite Labs is “a creative content platform designed to make multimedia storytelling radically more accessible. With a few prompts,” he noted, “users can generate professional grade videos, animations, voiceovers, talking avatars, music-reactive visuals, and more.”
On Tuesday, February 24, the young entrepreneur garnered his newest accolade when Winnipeg-based North Forge, Canada’s only start-up incubator, accelerator and fabrication lab, gave Fainman its DARE Emerging Innovator Award at a reception at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada.
“I dedicated the award to my zaida, Jacob T. Schwartz,” Fainman says, noting that his zaida was a prominent computer scientist and professor of Computer Science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, and founder, in 1964, of New York University’s Department of Computer Science – which he chaired for 16 years.
At the awards evening, Fainman adds, he had the opportunity to meet many of the movers and shakers in the industry here.
The son of Shane and Rachel Fainman began his life in Toronto. “My father is from Winnipeg, my mother from New York. They met in the Sinai Desert at a music festival.”
The family moved to Winnipeg in 2006 when Adam was in high school. After graduating from the University of Winnipeg Collegiate he went on to earn a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Winnipeg.
“Performing was always my first love” he says.
Post university, he began a career as a rapper, beatboxer, and producer under the stage name Beatox, touring across Canada and central Europe with his rare ability to combine story-telling and singing.
In 2015, he enrolled in a two-year digital media and design program at Red River Community College. After graduation, on the encouragement of a University of Toronto professor, he continued his studies in Toronto earning a Masters Degree in Music Technology and Digital Marketing.
“During the Covid shutdown,” he recounts, “I began experimenting with AI and producing music videos combining music, story-telling and animation. I posted them on social media sites such as YouTube and TikTok. They went viral, garnering millions of views. People were asking me if I could help them with creating similar videos. I saw there was a gap in accessibility to this technology, so I decided I should create a platform as a solution”
“A friend of mine, Brayden Bernstein was involved in the tech scene in Winnipeg, saw the success I was having on TikTok and gave me some advice on how to go about this” Fainman continues. “As well, a few colleagues from the University of Winnipeg expressed interest in building a solution together.”
Wanting to create a platform that would make it easy for others to replicate what he was doing, Fainman sought out resources in Winnipeg that might be able to help him.
He pitched his idea first to NRC-IRAP (National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program), Canada’s leading innovation assistance program for small and medium-sized businesses,
“They loved the concept and traction I was getting, and agreed to help fund us,” Fainman says.
His next stop was North Forge – in 2024 – where Moonlite joined their Ascent Program and was matched with mentors.
In early 2025, Moonlite Labs made its official debut at the Manitoba AI Innovation Showcase where the new company was greeted with an award. “It was a massive confidence boost,” Fainman told the Sun in that earlier interview. “It was our first time sharing with the public what we’ve been up to for the last year. To win the award… that was very, very rewarding.”
Last June, the company made its presence known on the international stage at VivaTech 2025 in Paris — Europe’s largest startup and tech conference, with over 180,000 visitors.
Moonlite was selected as one of TechCrunch’s Top 30 Startups of the Year, a shortlist that included only two Canadian companies.
“Getting the AI Showcase award, getting into VivaTech, being selected as one of the top 30 startups of the Year by TechCrunch, that was pretty crazy,” Fainman told the Sun.“Backed by ScaleAI, Moonlite joined Canada’s official delegation at VivaTech, which had special visibility this year with Canada named Country of the Year at the conference.
“We had a massive space. The French president came through our whole area. It was the craziest thing,” Fainman recalled. “Everyone had their phones. It was like a mob… then we’re like, oh my God, it’s the French president. People were freaking out.”
As per the Sun story, Fainman was given two days to showcase Moonlite, with a booth for both the platform’s business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) offerings. But the most personal moment came on stage, where he delivered a presentation showcasing his journey from beatboxing artist to tech founder.
With Moonlite Labs growing exponentially, Faiman and his team of eight are hoping to become as ubiquitous as Adobe and Canva. “My ultimate goal is to help as many people as possible to create professional-grade videos and ultimately share their stories,” he comments.
He himself, he adds, is hoping to get back to live performances as well. “I recently appeared at Festival du Voyageur and I have just completed my 4th studio album. I can’t wait to use Moonlite for all my videos and world building” he reports.
Readers who might want to try Moonlite for themselves can go to https://moonlitelabs.com
You can get in touch with Adam Fainman at adam@moonlitelabs.com
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Richard Morantz and Sheree Walder fund new MBA degree, annual real estate symposium, at Hebrew University
By MYRON LOVE Last October, the husband and wife team of Richard Morantz and Sheree Walder donated $1 million towards the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue’s ongoing capital campaign. Last month, the couple followed up with an equally generous donation – this time to the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, to establish a new degree program in real estate through the Hebrew University’s business school.
“We are long time supporters of the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University,” notes Walder, who is a lawyer and former partner in the firm Myers LLP.
“We had funded some smaller projects at the Hebrew University, adds Morantz, the president and CEO of Globe Property Management, one of Canada’s leading privately-held residential real estate firms.
(Globe was founded in the 1920s by Richard’s grandfather, Morris. Richard became the company’s sole shareholder in the mid-1990s after buying out his father Saul, and his siblings. Under Richard’s leadership, the company has expanded steadily and strategically, acquiring and developing real estate almost every year for the past three decades. Over the last 30 years, he has built an impressive and diverse portfolio, which includes over 8000 residential and commercial properties, particularly notable given that Globe remains privately owned and independently operated.
“Two years ago, we approached the (Hebrew) University about doing something more impactful. Since I am a businessman in real estate, we wanted to work on a project with the business school.”
The first fruits of the relationship between Richard and Sheree and the university was the establishment the annual Richard Morantz Real Estate Symposium in the Hebrew University Business School (HUBS) MBA Program.
“I was able to attend the most recent symposium in November,” Morantz reports. “I wanted to see for myself how this was working.”
Morantz also used the occasion to arrange – with the help of CFHU executive director (and former executive director of the JNF office here) Rami Kleinmann – a meeting with HUBS officials about building on the symposium and creating a new MBA program at the university.
The Richard Morantz Major in Real Estate and Finance, in the words of Business School President Dr. Orly Sade, “will, together with traditional academics, feature non-academic practitioners and leaders in all aspects of the real estate industry, providing students an opportunity to expand their professional networks, while gaining real-world industry insights and bridging the gap between theory and practice.
In a press release issued on February 24, Seade added that “this investment is a defining moment in the evolution of the school. The importance of an academic discipline focused solely on the real estate sector has significantly increased, owing to an understanding of the sector’s unique position in the global economy and international finance. HUBS consistently ranks within the top five business schools in Eurasia & the Middle East. The addition of this major will further elevate HUBS academic offerings, and the annual symposium will help expand the Hebrew University and Israel’s footprint as a global hub for intellectual exchange in the sector, drawing diverse professionals from around the world, fostering cross-border collaboration, increasing visibility, and contributing to the potential to attract top-level investors.”
Kleinmann further pointed out that “Richard’s comprehensive industry knowledge, combined with his dedication to Israel and the University, has resulted in an innovative academic program that, combined with the Symposium, is setting a new benchmark for industry education. We are all extremely grateful and look forward to the outcomes.”
As reported in the Jewish Post in relation to the couple’s donation to the Shaarey Zedek, Morantz noted that it was the Hamas-led assault on Israel and subsequent tsunami of antisemitism worldwide that prompted Richard and Sheree to consider stepping up and contributing to the Shaaray Zedek campaign in such a magnanimous way.
“I have never been a religious person,” Morantz remarked. “While I may be more secular, I strongly believe in the traditions of Judaism. I had a charmed upbringing in the 60s and 70s in River Heights. It is not the case that I experienced no antisemitism, but those experiences were very minimal. Post-October 7th, I found myself, for the first time in my life, having to judge every situation and every person I came across before divulging the fact that I am Jewish or discussing Israel. I came to the realization, during the process of considering this donation, that a primary driver for us is that this synagogue is a safe place for Jews, where we can comfortably be ourselves.”
Walder pointed out that, while her mother’s large family were Jewish pioneers, her father was a Romanian Holocaust survivor, with almost no family after the war. “Family matters a great deal to us,” she said, “in addition to strongly agreeing with Richard that the tragedy of October 7th and continuing and growing antisemitism are big drivers for us in making these donations.”
“There will be an event celebrating the new MBA program at the Hebrew University’s Board of Governors meeting in June,” Morantz says. “We are looking forward to attending.”