Features
What’s with the Jews of Winnipeg and psychiatry?
By GERRY POSNER As I was reading through the book “Healing Lives” by Eva Wiseman, one section grabbed my attention and indeed one line in particular on page 424. It seems that as many as 20 percent of the Jewish medical graduates from the Faculty of Medicine in Manitoba went into psychiatry. That means one out of every five chose this area to pursue a career. How unusual is that? Or is it?
What was the attraction of these students to psychiatry? What was wrong with cardiology, rheumatology, or any of the myriad of other “ologies” available? There had to be an explanation somewhere.
The first thing to do was to identify just who these people were. In Eva’s book she lists the following names of those who qualified for inclusion in her book as they had practiced at least five years in the Province of Manitoba, categorizing them by gender: In no particular order, the males named were: Harvey Chochinov, Philip Katz, Bill Bebchuk, Harry Prosen, John Matas, Lawrence Katz, Will Fleisher, Murray Stein, Manny Matas, Neil Mowchun, Michael Eleff, Stanley Yaren, Dane Hershberg, Mark Lander, Fred Shane, Robert Steinberg, Murray Schacter, Gary Altman, Shalom Coodin, Mark Etkin, Daniel Globerman, Steven Kremer, Mathew Lander, Sam Lazareck, Louis Ludwig, Brian Malchy, Joshua Nepon, Eytan Perl, Jack Perlov, Mark Prober, Jeffrey Reiss, Jeremy Sawyer, Leonard Schwartz, Jose Stelzer, Max Sucharov, Simon Trepel, Eric Vickar, Jeff Waldman, Eric Vickar and Ken Zimmer.
The females were: Sheila Cantor, Marcia Fleisher, Adrian Kettner, Alla Kirshner, Cara Kroft, Gail Lavitt, Debra Lander, Mirtha Lopez-Fisher, Sara Rusen, Fran Steinberg, and Rivian Weinerman.
But then there are the many Jewish individuals who left Manitoba after graduating here and who entered the field of Psychiatry. Try these names out for size. In alphabetical order they are: Howard Book, Ron Braunstein, Ed Brown, Cliff Corman, Len Elkin, Richard Finkel, Paul Garfinkel, Richard Hershberg, Mayer Hoffer, David Klass, Molyn Leszcz, Len Leven, Morton Menuck, Sam Ozersky, Richard Popeski, Mel Prosen, Paul Remis, Barry Richmond, Gary Rodin, Richard Stall, Irv Tessler, and Sheldon Zipursky. There are no doubt more than that and I hope this article might draw some more names out. What all these names had in common was that they were Jewish men who graduated Medical School in Manitoba and who later entered Psychiatry. There had to be a reason for it or maybe more than one.
Of course, the usual line you hear is along the lines of “I could not stand the sight of blood so that eliminated most of the rest of the areas of medicine and thus psychiatry seemed clean and clear of that issue”. I pay little attention to that possibility. There may have been a handful like Morton Menuck who would say that psychiatry was his destiny. It seems doubtful to me that this was true for very many on this list of names. The best way to get an answer, if any, was to ask a bunch of them. And I did. The answers were all over the lot. I refer to some of these responses below.
For Harry Prosen, he made a kind of history as he was likely only the second Jew in Manitoba to become a psychiatrist, following in the footsteps of John Matas. And clearly he was a success at it, not for just himself, but in assisting others. For a few, psychiatry was not the first choice but always lingered in the background. That background was often highlighted by the presence of a mentor of sorts, the way Harry Prosen was for Mark Prober. Prober actually did a few years in internal medicine but Prosen’s “probing” and Mark’s wife, Marilyn’s pushing, ultimately tilted Mark Prober into psychiatry. He says it was the best move he made short of marrying Marilyn.
For David Klass, it was just this: “My reason: upon crossing the US-Canada border on my way to an internal medicine residency I heard something like a voice saying ‘you should be a psychiatrist’. Since I seem to be somewhat impressionable I took that directive and completed the first year of internal medicine and became a psychiatrist.“
There were some who said that it satisfied a parental inclination. Some parents and indeed some in this physician group were of the belief that psychiatrists and psychoanalyst were God-like figures whose abilities allowed them to help mankind. And then there were those that felt there was a deeper meaning in a behaviour or words, even from the most banal dinner conversation. Was that a Jewish quality per se? I doubt the answer can be known, but I would be willing to put some money on that desire to self- examine as being a particularly Jewish characteristic and a trigger for Jews to enter into psychiatry. Perhaps status had some influence on a few as there is an aura about the psychiatric field.
When I interviewed Molyn Leszcz recently for a previous article he provided me with some other possible reasons for the rush into psychiatry by Jewish boys. He wrote to me with the following possibilities:
• “Lots of immigrant children; some were children of survivors – hence an impetus for education and then medicine; psychiatry aligns with the Jewish tradition of applied wisdom to deepen understanding, recognizing the complexity of behaviour – viz. the Talmudic approach of “on the one hand and on the other”.
• Rabbis were the first psychiatrists and our tradition has long recognized the presence of depression and the need for support from the community – many rabbis are pastoral counsellors and many psychiatrists incorporate spiritual approaches – there is a long intertwining – I used to joke with my late father-in-law Rabbi Rappaport z”l that we would be happy to switch professions.
• Our Winnipeg communities were small and insular; you needed to belong/fit in and – hence the further interest in human behaviour.
• What is well documented at large is the pursuit of mental health training as a way to continue a healing process – at one end – Tikun Olam and at the other end, the “wounded Healer” whose work is to continue a reparative process from early life in an adaptive response to family illness, trauma and suffering – viz the immigrant/survivor story. “
Ron Charach offered that he was attracted to psychiatry from his own personal involvement with the late Dr. Philip Katz, of whom he spoke in glowing terms, even referring to him as the original Dr. Phil (although these days that might not be so complimentary). And he made this other salient observation:
“Whether or not we had Holocaust survivor parents, many of us had relatives with some degree of emotional disorder; often these were our favourite relatives! The very presence of such people in your family tree often bequeaths on to you a high level of sensitivity (as a psychiatrist/poet I have an unlisted-number amount of sensitivity,) which can make you very good at empathizing with the tsuris of others. It certainly heightens your awareness of other people’s emotional issues, just as you are all too aware of your own.”
Paul Remis observed that he entered medicine initially in part because of his close attachment to three friends: Morton Stall, Sam Corman and Arnold Popeski, all of whom along with Remis were to be in the same class in medicine at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 1963. Sadly, Corman and Stall were killed in a car accident in June of that year. Remis graduated, was uncertain where to go and ended up in Africa working there before concluding psychiatry was for him – a very personal choice and indeed almost in opposition to his family. What really struck home with Remis and linked him to his three buddies and psychiatry was that all three had younger brothers: Richard Popeski, Richard Stall and Cliff Corman, all of whom chose psychiatry as their specialty.
In the end, nobody knows for sure what made so many Winnipeg men pick psychiatry. Let’s be clear that there was nothing in the water in Winnipeg that caused it. But let’s also be clear that I could not write this same article about nephrology.
Features
History of a Holocaust Survivor Turning Eighty
By HENRY SREBRNIK On July 19, I turn 80 years old. This is indeed a milestone, but for me, an even bigger one was just being born. My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I found out just a few months ago that, technically, so am I. My parents were from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born in 1945. By 1943 most Jews in the city, including their own families, had been murdered by the Nazis, at Treblinka, and after the uprising in the Jewish ghetto, my parents, by now married, became slave labour in a major Nazi munitions plant, the HASAG-Pelcery concentration camp, in the city.
The Russian army liberated Czestochowa January 16-17, 1945, and I was born July 19, six months later. You can do the math. My mother was emaciated and didn’t even know she was pregnant, but another month, and it would have been obvious, and she would have been killed. (I never asked how this happened but found out when listening to her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995. The men and women were housed in different barracks, but one night the Germans were delousing one of the buildings and allowed married couples to sleep together in the other.)
In 1945 the 9th of Av fell on July 19, and the Jewish world had just gone through our worst period in history. I was born in a makeshift hospital at the Jasna Gora, the famed Pauline Catholic monastery in the city. The actual city hospital had been destroyed in the fighting. It is home to the Matka Boska Czestochowska, (“the mother of God”), a very beautiful and large icon of Mary and the baby Jesus. Other women giving birth were surprised and one said, “Ona jest Zydowka” (She’s a Jew). So, though I am a proud Polish Jew, this could only have helped! The doctor who delivered whispered to my mother that he was Jewish but added that he wanted it kept quiet because he wasn’t going to leave Poland. It also took awhile for a mohel to come to the city for me.
The next few years were spent in Pocking-Waldstadt, a DP camp in the American zone in Bavaria, Germany, and then on to Pier 21 in Halifax and Canada. We lived in Montreal, though at home we were to all intents and purposes in Czestochowa, Jewish Poland.
As I was packing up my books in May because we all had to vacate our offices for the summer due to repairs in our building, I came across a book that I had never read – I don’t even recall where I got it — by the Polish historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records 1944-1947 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Chapter 5 is comprised of “Lists of Jewish Children Who Survived,” in alphabetical order. I am listed on p. 146 (Heniek Srebrnik, 1945). I sent in a form to the Claims Conference in New York informing them. So, at age 80, I’ve become a Holocaust survivor! Compared to that start, the next decades have been easy street! As the Aussies say, “no worries! But the Jewish world has grown darker. Like many others, were I to write a memoir, I’d call it From Hitler to Hamas.
I grew up in Montreal, and have lived in Calgary and Charlottetown, as well as London, England, and four American cities. But I’ve only been to Winnipeg twice, in 1982 and, more dramatically, the weekend of Sept. 7-10, 2001. I presented a paper on “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” to a conference on “Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905-1960,” organized by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. I left the morning of Sept. 11. An hour into the flight to Toronto we were told all airplanes had to land at the nearest major airport. I spent the next three days in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with fellow passengers. We mostly watched the television reporting on the 9/11 catastrophe.
Though an academic, I have always written for newspapers, including Jewish ones, in Canada and the United States. Some, like the Jewish Free Press of Calgary, the Jewish Tribune of Toronto, and the previous version of the Canadian Jewish News, no longer exist, which is a shame. Fortunately, the Jewish Post still does.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Why Prepaid Cards Are the Last Refuge for Online Privacy in 2025
These days, it feels like no matter what you do online, someone’s watching. Shopping, streaming, betting, even signing up for something free—it’s all tracked. Everything you pay for with a normal card leaves a digital trail with your name on it. And in 2025, when we’re deep into a cashless economy, keeping anything private is getting harder by the day.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want every little move tied to your identity, prepaid cards are one of the only real options left. They’re simple, easy to get, and still give you a way to spend online without throwing your info out there. One card in particular, Vanilla Visa, is one of the better picks because of how widely Vanilla Visa is accepted and how little personal info it needs.
Everything’s Online, and Everything’s Tracked
We used to pay for stuff with cash. Walk into a store, hand over some bills, leave. No names, no records. That’s gone now. Most stores won’t even take cash anymore, and the ones that do feel like the exception. The cashless economy is here whether we like it or not.
So what’s the problem? Every time you swipe or tap your card, or pay with your phone, someone’s logging it. Your bank saves the details. The store’s system saves it. And a lot of times, that data gets sold or shared. It can get used to target you with ads, track what you buy, where you go, and when you do it.
It’s not just companies either. Apps collect it. Hackers try to steal it. Some governments keep tabs too. And if you’re using the same card everywhere, it all gets connected pretty fast.
Why Prepaid Cards Still Matter
Prepaid cards are one of the only ways to break that chain. You go to a store, buy one with cash, and that’s it. No bank involved. No name. You just load it up and use it. And because Vanilla Visa is accepted on most major websites, you can use it just like any normal card.
You’re not giving out your real name or tying it to your main account. That means when you pay for something, it’s not showing up on your bank statement. It’s not getting saved under your profile. You’re basically cutting off the trail right there.
Why Vanilla Visa Stands Out
There are a few different prepaid card brands out there, but Vanilla Visa is probably the most popular. You can grab one at grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies—almost anywhere. And once you’ve got it, you can use it on pretty much any site where Vanilla Visa is accepted.
No long setup. No personal info. You don’t need to register it under your name. You just pay, go online, and spend the amount that’s on the card. When it runs out, you toss it and move on. No trace.
This makes it great for anyone who wants to sign up for a site without attaching their real identity. People use it for online gaming, streaming, subscriptions, or just shopping without giving out their main card info.
The Good and the Bad
There are some solid upsides to using a prepaid card:
- You don’t need a bank account
- You don’t give out your name or address
- It’s easy to budget since you can’t spend more than you loaded
- Most major sites take them, especially where Vanilla Visa is accepted
But there are a few downsides too:
- You can’t reload the card. Once it’s empty, it’s done
- You can’t use it to get money out, like at an ATM
- Some cards have small fees or expiration dates, so don’t let them sit too long
- A few sites want a card tied to a name and billing address, which doesn’t work here
- If you lose it or someone steals the number, you’re probably not getting the money back
So yeah, prepaid cards aren’t perfect. But if privacy is the goal, they’re still one of the few things that actually help.
Real Ways People Use Them
Let’s say you’re trying out an online casino. You don’t want your bank seeing it. You don’t want it on your statement. You walk into a Walgreens, buy a Vanilla Visa with a hundred bucks in cash, then use it to make your deposit. Done. The casino sees a card, but not your name.
Or maybe you’re signing up for a new subscription. Could be a video platform, a magazine, whatever. You don’t want it auto-charging your main card every month or sharing your info with advertisers. Use a prepaid card, and it stays off the radar.
Even if you’re just buying something from a site you don’t totally trust, using a card that isn’t tied to your real money is a smart move.
Will These Cards Still Be Around?
That’s the thing people are starting to worry about. Some stores have started asking for ID when you buy higher-value prepaid cards. And there’s talk in some countries about requiring people to register cards before using them.
Governments don’t like anonymous money. Companies definitely don’t. There’s a chance that in the future, prepaid cards will be harder to get or come with new rules.
But for now, they still work. You can still walk into a store with cash and walk out with a prepaid card. And as long as Vanilla Visa is accepted at the places you shop, you’ve got a way to stay private.
Bottom Line
If you’re living in 2025 and trying to protect your privacy online, prepaid cards are one of the last easy options. The cashless economy makes it almost impossible to pay without leaving a record, but prepaid cards break that pattern. They don’t ask for your name. They don’t track your habits. And they don’t leave a trail if you use them right.
They won’t fix everything. They don’t keep you completely invisible. But they give you a level of control that’s hard to find now. In a world that wants to watch your every move, that still counts for something.
Features
Winkler nurse stands with Israel and the Jewish people
By MYRON LOVE Considering the great increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada over the past 20 months – and the passivity of government, federally, provincially and municipally, in the face of this what-should-be unacceptable criminal behaviour, many in our Jewish community may feel that we have been abandoned by our fellow citizens.
Polls regularly show that as many as 70% of Canadians support Israel – and there are many who have taken action. One such individual is Nelli Gerzen, a nurse at the Boundary Trails Health Centre (which serves the communities of Winkler and Morden in western Manitoba). Three times in the past 20 months, Gerzen has taken time off work to travel to Israel to support Israelis in their time of need.
I asked her what those around her thought of her trips to Israel. “My mother was worried when I went the first time (November 2023),” Gerzen responded, “but, like me, she has trust in the Lord. My friends and colleagues have gotten used to it.”
She also reports that she is part of a small group of fellow believers that meet online regularly and pray for Israel.
Gerzen is originally from Russia, but grew up in Germany. Her earliest exposure to the history of the Holocaust, she relates, was in Grade 9 – in Germany. “My history teacher in Germany in Grade 9 went into depth with the history of World War II and the Holocaust,” she recalls. “It is normal that all the teachers taught about the Holocaust but she put a lot of effort into teaching specifically this topic. We also got to watch a live interview with a Holocaust survivor.”
What she learned made a strong impression on her. “I have often asked myself what I would do if I were living in that era,” she says. “Would I have been willing to hide Jews in my home? Or risk my life to save others?”
Gerzen came to Canada in 2010 – at the age of 20. She received her nursing training here and has been working at Boundary Trails for the last three years.
“I believe in the G-d of Israel and that the Jews are his Chosen People,” she states. “We are living at a time of skyrocketing anti-Semitism. Many Jews are feeling vulnerable. I felt that I had to do something to help.”
Gerzen’s first trip to Israel was actually in 2014 when she signed onto a youth tour organized by a Christian group, Midnight Call, based in Switzerland. That initial visit left a strong impact. “That first visit changed my life,” she remembers. “I enjoyed having conversations with the Israelis. The bible for me came to life. Every stone seemed to have a story.”
She went on a second Midnight Call Missionaries tour of Israel in 2018. She went back again on her own in the spring of 2023. After October 7, she says, “I couldn’t sit at home. I had to do something.”
Thus, in November 2023, she went back to Israel, this time as a volunteer. She spent two weeks at Petach Tikvah cooking meals for Israelis displaced from the north and the south as well as IDF soldiers. She also spent a day with an Israeli friend delivering food to IDF soldiers stationed near Gaza. She notes that she wasn’t worried so close to the border.
“I trusted in the Lord,” she says. “It was a special feeling being able to help.”
Last November, she found herself at Kiryat Shmona (with whom our Jewish community has close ties), working for two weeks alongside volunteers from all over the world cooking for the IDF.
On one of her earlier visits, she recounts, a missile struck just a few metres from the kitchen where the volunteers were working. There was some damage – forcing closure for a few days while repairs were ongoing, but no injuries.
In January, she was back at Kiryat Shmona for another two weeks cooking for the IDF. She also helped deliver food to Metula on the northern border. This last time, she reports, there was a more upbeat atmosphere, “even though,” she notes, “the wounds are still fresh. It was quieter. There were no more missiles coming in.
“Israelis were really touched by the presence of so many of us volunteers. I only wish more Christians would stand up for Israel.
“It was really moving to hear people’s stories first-hand.”
She recounts the story of one Israeli she met at a Jerusalem market who fought in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, who was the only survivor of the tank he was in.
“This guy lost so much in his life, and he was standing there telling the story and smiling, just trying to live life again,” she says. “The people there are so heartbroken.”
Back home, she has been showing her support for Israel and the Jewish people by attending the weekly rallies on Kenaston in support of the hostages whenever she can.
She is looking forward to playing piano at Shalom Square during Folklorama.
Nelli Gerzen doesn’t know yet when she will be returning to Israel – but it is certain to be soon. “This is my chance to step up for the truth,” she concludes. “I know that supporting Israel is the right thing to do. When I am there, it feels like my heart is on fire.”