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Some things you may not have known about seniors and COVID-19

seniors coronavirusBy HARRIS GULKO
The coronavirus causing COVID-19 was confirmed to have reached Canada on January 27, 2020, after an individual who had returned to Toronto from Wuhan, Hubei, China, tested positive. Because seniors are so vulnerable to COVID-19, health officials have asked people 70 years of age and over to self-isolate at home. But, after three months at home, most want to go out into the world again. It is discouraging for seniors to see people of other ages resume activities. They feel excluded. Still, they want to be safe.

 

Covid-19 is exacerbating loneliness, especially among seniors. But even before the onset of this terrible virus, many older people were experiencing an epidemic of social isolation and depression. One study found that loneliness is as dangerous to one’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It can lead to dementia or Alzheimer’s, heart disease, a weakened immune system and a shorter lifespan.
Until now, the loneliness epidemic has been fought with programs like Meals on Wheels, the formation of senior centers, etc. But in the era of COVID-19, Meals on Wheels have barred physical, and thus social, interaction. Many centres where seniors could find assistance and companionship have had to close, forcing older adults to become homebound without the benefit of the socialization they previously enjoyed. This is having a serious physical and mental effect on many of them.

“Older adults are wondering if their lives are going to end shortly for reasons out of their control,” said Dr. Linda Fried, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “They’re wondering if they’ll be able to get the care they need. And most profoundly, they’re wondering if they are going to be cast out of society.”
Especially vulnerable during this pandemic are older adults who have suffered previous trauma. Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, has seen this happen to several patients, including Holocaust survivors.
As Canadians continue to isolate, many are gaining empathy for the reality seniors face. The deaths of dozens of seniors in Canada from COVID-19 – especially in retirement homes – have been an unfolding horror for anyone who may have doubted how serious the coronavirus pandemic really is.
Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and University Health Network in Toronto, says COVID-19 has shown Canada how much more needs to be done to protect seniors’ health and well-being. “Now we’re seeing what many of us in the hospitals knew would eventually start happening — people would start dying,” he said. But, in addition the risks to physical health, both Sinha and Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, note that the protective measures of physical distancing and isolating seniors — who are already at heightened risk of loneliness and feelings of depression — can take a toll on their mental health. “Staying connected has never been more important,” Tam said, encouraging Canadians to keep in touch with loved ones through phone or video calls.
Many seniors also don’t have people they can rely on to bring essential supplies to their door — and can’t afford store delivery services. These are areas that non-profit agencies are trying to address. The federal government has pledged $9 million to the United Way — which funds community-based charitable organizations across the country — to help vulnerable seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic

Prime Minister Trudeau pledged more help for vulnerable Canadians struggling with the coronavirus crisis. The money will fund supports to help seniors self-isolate safely, with a focus on those living in low-income or precarious housing conditions, said United Way spokesperson Anita Khanna. Services will include delivering groceries, picking up and dropping off prescriptions, providing transportation to medical appointments and “friendly-check in phone calls,” she said. Seniors can also call 211 in most areas across Canada to access information and support.
The Old Age Security (OAS) program, which provides most Canadians over 65 with a modest pension, is at the top of the list of financial support for seniors. In addition, the federal government offers the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which can substantially improve the quality of life for low-income seniors

Seniors Minister Deb Schulte said that seniors who qualify for Old Age Security (OAS) will be eligible for a one-time, tax-free payment of $300, and those eligible for the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) will get an extra $200. Those eligible for both will receive $500. Schulte said seniors are facing extra dispensing fees for prescriptions, added costs for grocery delivery services and taxi fees when they might normally take the bus. “It’s all small amounts, but it adds up,” she said
As COVID-19 continues to sweep through long-term care facilities, Ontario and Quebec are struggling hard to contain outbreaks — while British Columbia and other provinces have managed to keep infections under control. Experts say that’s because B.C. took swift, coordinated and decisive actions to stop the transmission of the virus, such as providing adequate protective gear and financially supporting front-line staff to restrict their movement between sites. There have been 111 deaths in long-term care facilities in B.C., including hospitals, compared to more than 2,500 in Quebec and 1,500 in Ontario.

In conclusion, what wearing a mask does and what it does NOT do: Wearing a non-medical mask is a way to cover your mouth and nose to prevent your respiratory droplets from coming into contact with others or landing on surfaces. BUT there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons can prevent the wearer from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.

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New biography of Carole King explores the musical genius of America’s most successful female singer-songwriter

Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN

Carole King (born Carol Klein in 1941) is arguably the most successful female singer-songwriter of all time. With over 75 million record albums sold and with 118 songs that she either wrote or co-wrote, King’s prolific and fabulously successful career has been the subject of several books and numerous articles, including her own memoir, published in 2012, which was titled “Carole King: A Memoir.”

Jane Eisner

Now, in a soon-to-be-released book, titled “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move,” journalist Jane Eisner takes a fresh look at King’s life, including her two most recent marriages (which King tends to gloss over in her own memoir, according to Eisner) to two men who were abusive to King, both physically and mentally.

Eisner herself has had a very successful career, having worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years in various positions, including as a reporter, editor, and executive. Later, she spent 10 years as editor of The Forward, a leading American Jewish newspaper (which has now transitioned to an online version only and can be read for free at forward.com.)

The book is the latest addition to a series of books produced by Yale University Press titled “Jewish Lives.” According to the Jewish Lives website, “Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity.
“Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences.
“Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.”

In Carole King’s case, however, King has given very few interviews over the years and Eisner was not able to speak to King directly. In explaining how she approached this book, Eisner writes: ” I’ve taken on the challenge to write an interpretive biography of a musical icon who is brilliant, accomplished, and complicated.
“This book was quite a journey. Though I’ve admired her music since Tapestry was released, I wanted to understand it from the inside out. To do that, I studied piano for two years, which enabled me to dissect her musicality and describe what musicians call the ‘Carole King chord.’
“Carole King was her own kind of trailblazer — she often led recording sessions in a studio full of men as she defied expectations of what a woman can and should do. I can relate. Often being the only woman in the room deeply shaped my outlook, too. It made me aware of the stories we weren’t telling and the perspectives that escaped our attention; it also made me try hard to pay it forward, and to help younger women achieve their own professional dreams.
“Ambition and anxiety, accomplishment and regret – all those conflicting emotions have laced through my personal and professional lives. That’s one reason I was drawn to write about Carole King. She faced that juggling act from the highest levels in her field. ‘My baby’s in one hand, I’ve a pen in the other,’ as she memorably wrote.”
I hadn’t realized that Eisner did not have a background in music until after I finished reading her biography of King. That makes what she has produced all the more admirable, as a great many parts of the book dissect the song writing experience in great detail. In fact, if you don’t know how to read music (which, I admit, I myself don’t), you will probably be at a loss trying to understand many parts of this book. Eisner aims to do her best to explain the genius that lay behind KIng’s best works – and how incredibly varied her style was.
Anyone who has seen the Broadway musical about King, titled “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” would have an appreciation for just how gifted King was. As Eisner explains, King’s musical talent was on clear display from a very early age. Her mother, Eugenia (née Cammer) discovered that young Carol (who added an “e” to her name when she left home when she only 17 to try to forge a career in songwriting, and changed her name from Klein to King) was very gifted musically already by the age three. Eugenia taught Carol piano herself, including music notation and proper note timing.
In Eisner’s account of King’s childhood, her early years come across as very happy. The book’s introductory chapter delves into both Carole’s mother’s and father’s family histories, going all the way back to Europe in the 1800s. King’s father, Sidney, was a firefighter in Brooklyn, where the family lived but, along with several other Jewish firefighters, Sidney purchased land on a lake in Connecticut called Lake Waubeeka. Young Carol loved her summers spent in what were very rustic conditions – and Eisner suggests that early childhood experience played a pivotal role later in King’s life when, after having achieved fabulous success – beginning with the release of her seminal album, Tapestry, in 1971 – soon to be followed by a prodigious number of other albums, King threw it all away and went to live in the Idaho wilderness – with two different husbands in succession, as mentioned, who both treated her cruelly.
Since King has remained largely silent about what led her to take such a major shift in her life – when she was still only in her 30s, moving away from the vibrant music scene of Los Angeles, where King had produced her greatest work, only to virtually cut herself (and three of her four children) from the world, Eisner uses her reportorial skills to pore through previous accounts of King’s life (including, of course, King’s own memoir), along with first hand interviews of many of the individuals who played key roles in King’s life, to try to understand how King could have changed gears so dramatically.
Eisner also refers to King’s younger brother, Richard, who was intellectually disabled and shunted off to live in an institution when he was only three. Since King rarely referred to him, Eisner speculates that King was somewhat traumatized by that experience – and that it might have played a role in the trauma that surfaced later in her life when she entered into marriages to two different – and abusive men – along with the trauma she endured when she found out her first husband, Gerry Goffin, had been unfaithful to her.
Since this book is part of a series called “Jewish Lives,” Eisner spends a fair bit of time examining how much being Jewish meant to Carole King – when, in her early years, for instance, she met Gerry Goffin, who was her first husband and first songwriting partner – and whom she married in a typically Jewish ceremony. After she was finally able to put the disastrous marriages to her last two husbands behind her, King once again returned to her Jewish roots, albeit in a spiritual form, but not with any particular involvement in the Jewish community, per se.

Recent photo of Carole King


As Eisner writes toward the end of her book, “Throughout her very long career, King has displayed an anguished and conflicted attitude toward the public celebrity expected of her as an iconic musician. The yearning for privacy and the consequent fear of exposure, gripped her early on. Even though she had performed as a child, and sought the spotlight as a teenager, she often recoiled from it as an adult, especially as a mother. She complained about being so far away from her family when she was touring – indeed, wrote the definite song about just that experience – and yet grew to relish live performance with the same zeal and affection as she did when recording in a closed studio.”
The Broadway musical about King ends with the dissolution of her marriage to Goffin. Anyone who would have seen that show and might have been curious about what happened next in King’s life would find the answers in “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move.” Eisner notes that King’s second husband, Charles Larkey, was also Jewish and, like Goffin, was introduced to King through music, as Larkey was an accomplished musician who collaborated with King on many of her albums. But Larkey was five years younger than King, and Eisner speculates that the age difference played a major factor in their growing apart.
As talented as King was, she was also very much a devoted mother who was determined to stay at home with her children – two born while she was with Goffin, and two with Larkey. Eisner describes King’s initial reticence about playing her music in public – and the gradual ease she felt playing in front of larger and larger crowds, culminating in a concert in Central Park in 1973 with over 100,000 people in attendance.

“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move” is not meant to be an exposé of any sort. It’s written in a very professional, reportorial style. Eisner’s years of newspaper experience shine through, as she tells a very compelling story of genius punctuated by frequent heartbreak. Of course, anyone who has listened to Tapestry or some other of King’s albums of that era would be well aware that she fully used music to express her emotion. But Eisner also analyzes some of King and Goffin’s early – and greatest songs, such as “Up on the Roof,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, ” to show that King was a musical genius from the very beginning – and that she knew exactly how to elicit an emotional response to her most heartfelt songs.
“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move” is set to be released September 16, according to information available online, but you can pre-order the book from a number of different sources.

“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move”
By Jane Eisner
Yale University Press
Set to be released Sept. 16, 2025

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Attention snowbirds: Palm Springs condo for rent available immediately through April

Beautiful pool side 2 bedroom 2 bathroom condo with attached 2 car garage located in the beautiful Cathedral Canyon Country Club. 3500 usd per month.

For more information contact James at 204-955-2484

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Haifa University launches $60 Million ‘Home Again’ Campaign to help rebuild war- devastated northern Israel

Canadian Friends of Haifa University Executive Director Ariel Karabelnicoff

By MYRON LOVE In early July, Haifa University announced a new campaign to help rebuild the war-devastated communities of northern Israel.  The “Home Again” campaign aims to raise $60 Million for regional recovery  – and the Canadian Friends of Haifa University is set to do its part.
“We at CFHU hope to raise $1-million or more from our donors  across Canada toward the campaign,” reports Ariel Karabelnicoff, executive director of Canadian Friends of Haifa University.
In an earlier interview that was published in this newspaper last year, the former Winnipegger – now in his third year with CFHU – noted that the University of Haifa is among the largest universities in  Israel, but is also the youngest.  Fully accredited in 1972, he said, the university has an enrollment of 18,000 students – with a student body that reflects the diversity of Israel’s population.  About 40% of the students come from the Druze, Circassian and Arab communities and – among the Jewish students – there are many whose families are from Ethiopia.
The University of Haifa, Karabelnicoff added, also boasts the highest percentage among Israeli universities of students who are the first generation in their families to attend university.
The new initiative, he reports, aims to “restore and revitalize the north through science, innovation, and data-driven research rooted in community priorities and focused on real-world outcomes. “
While the campaign, Karabelnicoff points out,  was originally conceived to address the cascading crises that first began on October 7, 2023, the urgency has become even greater due to  direct missile strikes on Haifa and surrounding areas during the short war with Iran in April.
“The devastation brought mass displacement, overwhelmed public services, and deepened strain on communities already struggling to recover from months of conflict,” Karabelnicoff notes. “The campaign now represents not just regional recovery, but a cornerstone of Israel’s national resilience strategy for the post-conflict era. “
Karabelnicoff quotes University of Haifa President Professor Gur Alroey as stating that “in this moment of national crisis, when Israel’s northern communities have been tested like never before, University of Haifa is stepping forward to turn trauma into transformation. What was already a crucial mission of recovery after October 7 has become an existential imperative following the devastation of recent weeks. We are not just restoring what was lost, we are building the foundation for Israel’s long-term future—something stronger, more resilient, and more just.”
In the aftermath of October 7, Alroey reports, Hezbollah rockets devastated northern towns, triggering the largest internal displacement in Israel in decades. More than 68,000 people—families, farmers, and seniors—became refugees in their own country. Today, less than half have returned home. As Iranian long-range missiles threatened the north, communities faced not just a security crisis but a comprehensive breakdown in public health, education, employment, and social cohesion. In rural and peripheral areas, rehabilitation beds are scarce, mental health services are overwhelmed, and economic life has ground to a halt.
Karabelnicoff  notes that the Home Again campaign is offering a coordinated, data-informed strategy, anchored in real-time research, local partnerships, and measurable programs across three core pillars.
The first is a multi-front recovery strategy – led by emotional and physical rehabilitation specialists affiliated with the university – for one of the region’s greatest invisible burdens –  trauma. 
“PTSD has surged by 33% among residents,” Karabelnicoff reports, “with children and parents bearing some of the deepest scars.”
Simultaneously, he continues, northern hospitals are ill-equipped to meet rising demands for complex rehabilitation care. The university is addressing both gaps. 
The university is addressing this issue through mental health teams operating rapid-response networks – including the establishment of 24/7 hotlines and mobile therapeutic units. As well, the university’s Cheryl Spencer Nursing School is training more frontline responders to assess and manage trauma – and a proposed Community Rehabilitation and Research Center, spearheaded by Dr. Hilla Sarig Bahat, would merge academic research with hands-on clinical care—the first model of its kind in Israel.
The second focus is aimed at restoring economic stability and regional capacity in the north.  With unemployment in the north spiking nearly 50%, Karabelnicoff points out, “the university is launching targeted workforce initiatives designed to meet immediate needs and build long-term regional capacity. These include specialized training programs for nurses, educators, trauma specialists, and environmental rehabilitation professionals. Additionally, discharged soldiers are being offered re-skilling opportunities in sustainable marine industries tied to Israel’s northern coastline, connecting economic recovery to national resilience.”
The final prong in the University of Haifa’s new initiative is focused on investing in community futures through real-time legal aid clinics, AI-assisted social service platforms, and coexistence-building programs that will bring Jewish and Arab residents together in the workplace.
“The university is working to restore both public trust and strategic cohesion,” Karabelnicoff says.  “Researchers are partnering with kibbutzim, regional councils, and national ministries to revitalize schools, renew cultural life, and strengthen the social fabric at a time when national solidarity is dangerously frayed.”
For readers interested in contacting Ariel about supporting this new Canadian Friends of Haifa University initiative, his email address is ariel.karabelnicoff@haifa-univ.ca.

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