Features
Jewish school system grad’s new app revolutionizes real estate industry
By MYRON LOVE Five years ago, long time tech developer Matthew Amihude, along with his business partner Simon Fiore, created a new app that has greatly simplified an important part of real estate sales.
“I’ve been in the software business for more than 30 years,” says the Chief Technology Officer of Forward Form Solutions, creators of the new software “Fintracker.”
“I get three or four people a month approaching me with ideas for new apps. Generally, such apps are already available on the App Store or Google Play.
“About five years ago, though, a friend of mine who is in real estate asked me about creating a new compliance app for realtors.
“The issue,” Amihude explains, “is that every time a realtor is engaged by a client to buy or sell a piece of property – even in cases where the transaction fails – the agent is required by law to identify the clients and fill out forms reporting on the interaction.”
Before Fintracker’s app, realtors filled out the forms using pen and paper, Amihude continues, a time –consuming process. The new app automates the process – quickly scanning the client’s ID, creates an elecronic record, and relays the document to the agent’s office in seconds.
A major advantage of the Fintracker technology is that each client receives a secure personalized ID.
“We have over 45,000 clients across Canada now and are growing largely by word of mouth,” Amihude reports. “We just signed up four new brokerage firms last month – each with 1,500-2,000 member agents.
“We have one or two competitors in this field,” he adds, “but no one else offers the full range of services that we do.”
The son of Avraham and Ethel Amihude got in on the computer business on the ground floor, so to speak. From a young age, the Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate graduate was fascinated by computers. He recalls that he bought his first computer almost 40 years ago with money he received for his bar mitzvah.
“Growing up, I wasn’t thinking about a career in computer technology,” he notes. “At university, I was considering either medicine or dentistry. Computers I still viewed as a hobby.”
On the side though, he was already operating a computer consulting business with a partner that soon superseded his earlier career ambitions.
“This was in the late 80s and early 90s,” Amihude recalls. “We were helping people set up modems, showing them how to use Netscape and email. Before I knew it, my hobby had become a full time business.”
The software wizard’s first official company – founded in 1995 – was Web Wizards, a developer of software solutions for a diverse base of customers and industries.
Along the way, Amihude added Keystone Assessment Services serving the insurance industry – and Kavana Health Inc., a health and wellness company that manufactures health and wellness products.
With the success of Fintracker though, Amihude decided to sell his majority share in Web Wizards. “I found that I was focusing too much on the management side at Eeb Wizards,” he says. “Whereas what I really love to do is software development. With Fintracker, I have been able to get back to that again.”
(He still owns a minor stake in the company, but is no longer involved in the day to day operations.)
With his previous company, he notes, he was working with a staff of 25 at its peak pre-Covid lockdown – and that staffing is still around 20. At Fintracker, by comparison, he has a complement of four – two developers him, and a business partner who handle all the sales and marketing as well as customer support.
“We are anticipating the need to add two more employees over the next few months,” he reports.
While software development is Amihude’s career, the other great passion for the father of four is basketball. He is proud to report that the 1989 MHSAA (Manitoba High School Athletic Association) championship JosephWolinsky Raiders team – of which he was a member – was inducted into the Manitoba Basketball Hall of Fame last June.
Amihude adds that he also coached basketball at Gray Academy for a time – and he still plays basketball regularly on a weekly basis with the same core group of friends he’s had for the past 35 years.
Features
The greatest escape
Author’s father survived Holocaust with grace, joy intact
By MARTIN ZEILIG Former Winnipegger Bernard Pinsky grew up listening to his father Rubin Pinsky’s stories of his childhood in Poland and his time spent living in the forest, where he survived the Holocaust after fleeing a Nazi work camp in 1942.
“My father’s stories didn’t make the Holocaust scary for me as a child,” Pinsky says.
“He told me about scavenging for food in the forest, learning what berries and roots he could eat, making baskets and other things from birch bark and twigs, learning the animal sounds, etc.”
Pinsky, who lives in Vancouver, will speak at the Winnipeg launch of his book,Ordinary, Extraordinary — My Father’s Life (Behind the Book), on Sunday — the anniversary of Kristallnacht — in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The program will feature a conversation between Pinsky and Belle Jarniewski, executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre. The event is presented by the centre in partnership with Jewish Child and Family Service and the philanthropic Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, for which Pinsky, a retired lawyer and community leader, is the chairman.
Of his father, a former yeshiva student, Pinsky says, “He was not a particularly successful businessman in Canada, although we didn’t feel poor; we had what we needed. I saw how hard he worked, how positive he was, how he provided for his family despite not knowing any English or French when he came to Canada in his 20s.
“Despite his being an ordinary man, I realized that his life had taken an extraordinarily difficult route, which he overcame to create a normal, ordinary life for himself and his family.”
Pinsky wanted to honour his father, so for his 72nd birthday in 1996, he wrote a manuscript about his life as a gift.
“He was very happy to get it, but by then he had some mini-strokes (TIAs) and I doubt he ever read the whole manuscript,” Pinsky says via email.
He also sent the manuscript to some relatives, including Melvin Fenson, a Winnipegger and former partner of Walsh Micay law firm, who had made Aliyah (immigration of Jews from the diaspora to Israel) in the 1970s.
“Melvin read the manuscript and said that it contained some good information about the Holocaust and Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial museum to the victims of the Holocaust) might accept it for their archives,” Pinsky says.
The manuscript was submitted in 1997 and Yad Vashem said it would be included in its catalogue, but nothing happened for a decade.
Then, in 2007, Pinsky received a letter from a history teacher in Djatlovo, Belarus, who was hoping to translate the manuscript into Russian.
It turned out to be the same town as Pinsky’s father grew up in — prewar Gzetl, Poland.
“I went to Djatlovo in 2012 and saw both the incredible work that the teacher, a Russian Orthodox woman, and others like her were doing to create memorials to the Jewish community that perished in the Holocaust, and I saw the small museum in that teacher’s high school that she had created based on my work.
“She said she did it because she is religious and preserving the memory of the Jews, who were now all gone, was the right thing to do.”
At the time, Pinsky was a lawyer with a busy practice and planned to finish the book when he retired. However, at 67, he moved on to a new job at a charitable foundation that also left him little free time.
Finally, his wife pointed out that, since it seemed likely he would work long hours for the rest of his life, the time to finish the book was “now or never.”
He spent evenings and weekends in 2023 finishing the book, had it edited and self-published it.
“Ordinary, Extraordinary is the survival story of Rubin Pinsky and some of Rubin’s immediate family,” he says. “But it is also the story of what Rubin did with his life after the Holocaust, his attitude towards life and his ability to pick himself up and to live life fully after every one of life’s blows, mostly with determination and with joy.
“His life could be an example of what people can endure in life and still be fulfilled and happy.”
Pinsky will offer one copy of the book to each family attending the event at the Berney Theatre. Register at 204-478-8590 or jewishheritage@jhcwc.org.
Features
“Sharing Shalom” – new children’s book explores how children deal with antisemitism
While her peers dance, swim, or practice martial arts outside of class, Leila attends Hebrew school twice a week, an act that makes her feel “connected to her grandparents, her aunts and uncles,” writes debut author Danielle Sharkan.
Illustrator Selina Alko (Stars of the Night), working in collage and thick swathes of jewel-tone acrylic paint, shows faces of relatives past and present, layered with texts of liturgical music and prayers.
When Leila arrives at the synagogue one day and finds it vandalized, she’s told that “Some people think we’re different, and they don’t like that.” She worries about how she’s perceived by others, not wanting “anyone to see she was Jewish”- In her anxious state, even her bagel lunch feels like a giveaway. But the more Leila tries to blend in, “the more she noticed the way her friends stood out,” and when she sees community members helping to repair the damaged synagogue, she embraces her identity once again.
The creators address an act of antisemitism with candor and sensitivity, reassuring readers that one can belong to multiple communities without hiding one’s beliefs or identity. Characters are portrayed with various abilities and skin tones.
An author’s note and glossary conclude. Recommended for ages 4-8.
About the author: Originally from Chicago, Danielle Sharkan now lives by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. When she’s not eggsploring the area with her two kids, she enjoys yoga, hiking, chai tea lattes and eggsperimenting in the kitchen. She’s eggstatic to introduce the world to Ellie the Eggspert, next March.
Sharing Shalom
By Danielle Sharkan, illus. by Selina Alko.
Holiday House, $18.99 *32p) ISBN. 978-0-8234-5556-0
Features
“No Jews Live Here” – new book tells poignant story of Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust
Review by JULIE KIRSH (former Sun Media News Research Director)
In 1950 my parents made the decision to leave Hungary, the country of their birth and ancestors. Both were Holocaust survivors. My father survived Auschwitz and was liberated from Buchenwald. My mother hid with false Christian papers in Budapest during the war. Most of their families perished. Coming to Canada without language, money or family support took courage. I am the lucky recipient of their strength, optimism and resilience.
In journalist John Lorinc’s book, No Jews Live Here, his parents and maternal grandmother, Ilona, arrived in Canada in 1956, the second and larger wave of Hungarian refugees. Many were Jewish Holocaust survivors.
Hungary was unique in the east European countries. Lorinc provides an excellent historical overview of Jewish life in Hungary before World War Two.
However the author emphasizes that freedom to succeed in Hungary came at a cost. Lorinc explains why many Jews became Christian converts. In Budapest, an enclave for a thriving Jewish population, Jews constituted 5% of Hungary’s total population. By 1941, over 17% of Budapest’s Jews had converted.
Lorinc’s grandparents who came from wealthy Jewish families converted in the 1920s. However it is important to note that the converts were not saved from the mass deportations in Hungary in 1944. Jews and converts died together in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Over the course of less than 3 months, with the complete cooperation and enthusiasm of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie, 440,000 Jews were murdered. Lorinc’s grandfather was ordered to join a forced labour unit. He marched off wearing a white armband signifying that he was a converted Jew.
One of Lorinc’s poignant stories is his own father’s history as a slave labourer in the copper mines of Bor in Serbia. Often the labourers, of which many were middle class Jewish Hungarians who had never held a tool other than a writing pen in their hands, were starved, tortured and killed. The Hungarian overseers were especially cruel, according to Lorinc’s father.
Chapter 10 is titled Aftermath and although the Russian army liberated the surviving Hungarian Jews, the horrors of the Red Army soldiers are described relentlessly. Women and girls were raped. Looting was prevalent. Lorinc relates that it was not unusual for a Russian soldier to have 4 or 5 watches on his arm.
Ilona, ever the resilient survivor, along with other survivors in Budapest came up with creative ways to feed her family and at the same time, wrangled with legal authorities and her in-laws for the return of their farm and property. The feud between Ilona and her mother-in-law became much more than logistical. It was tangled with betrayal, grief and financial desperation, a classic family conspiracy theory.
In 1956 after the revolution in Hungary, Lorinc’s parents along with many other Hungarian refugees found themselves in Vienna. Choices to leave Europe were dependent on how easy it was to get an exit visa. The entry gates to Canada had been opened and the lineup at the Canadian embassy permitted applicants to stand in a foyer instead of waiting outside.
Toronto in the mid-50s was a “closed” city on Sundays. Even the swings in playgrounds were chained up to discourage children’s use. Italian men were hounded by police to prevent gathering on the sidewalks of Little Italy.
Like many other immigrants, Lorinc’s parents found jobs and gained a foothold in the security of Canadian life.
The author explains that as a child, he and his sister were baptized at a United Church, a classic “just in case” move for the still traumatized survivors.
Then at age 10, Lorinc’s father told him that he was Jewish but didn’t explain why this was a secret. The need to understand Jewish history in Hungary was planted at an early age.
The author goes on to describe his family’s life in the Toronto suburbs of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
A frequent visitor at the family home was his grandmother Ilona, colourful, dramatic and stubborn. She was consumed with “vanities and accusations” and insisted on wearing high heels and fashionable clothing well into old age. Ilona deeply harboured old family disagreements over ownership of the farm in Hungary.
Ilona’s obsession with her fading looks and the family history of betrayal never left her. Hungarian “Jewish Christmas” with Ilona became a battlefield of wounds and grievances.
After she died, Lorinc reflects that her stubborn character still influences his own world perspective, blurring the line between the life of the author and his grandmother’s story.
Lorinc recounts in detail the need for conversion and hiding one’s Jewishness in an historical context. Before the war, Hungary’s Jews looked the same and had the same freedoms as non-Jews. Seeing themselves first as loyal Hungarians didn’t save converted Jews from persecution and the gas chambers. In fact Lorinc argues that conversion contributed to anti-Semitic theories.
Finally Lorinc and his wife make a trip to Bor, the mine and labour camp where his father was interred. The author’s dedication to telling the story of his family’s tragedy and survival is admirable. Readers will find themselves savouring every word, looking within their own family history as part of the saga of human survival.
No Jews Live Here
by John Lorinc
(Coach House Books), 2024