By MYRON LOVE At 104, Besse Gurevich is the last of the original residents of Shaftesbury Park Retirement Residence. She may also be the oldest member of our Jewish community.
Although her vision and her hearing have diminished considerably, her mind and memory are still intact.  A few weeks back, this writer sat down with her in her suite as she recalled a life filled with highs and lows and her many  contributions to her community, both in Winnipeg and Fort William before that.
The daughter of Jack and Rebecca Avit, her life’s journey began in 1921 in a home on Carlton Street near Ellice Avenue, near her father’s furniture store.  He later operated a cap factory.
When she was ten, the family – she had two brothers and a sister – moved to Manitoba Avenue in the old North End. “My father had put a deposit down on a house on Scotia,” she recalls.  “But my parents didn’t feel that the neighbourhood was Jewish enough.”
Her schooling included Peretz School and, like so many of her generation, St. John’s Tech (as it was known back then.)  “I was actually supposed to be going to Isaac Newton for high school,” she says.  We were living on the wrong side of the tracks for St. John’s.  After one day at Isaac Newton, I found a way to transfer to St. John’s.”
In 1940, 19-year-old Bessie Avit married Jack Gurevich, a young man from Fort William.  The wedding was marred though, by the sudden, untimely passing of her father.
Following the wedding, Besse moved with her new husband to Fort William where Jack Gurevich worked in retail clothing sales.  “We lived in Fort William for 20 years,” she says.  “Our three children (Judy, Richard and Howard) were born there.”
She recalls that there were about 200 Jewish families – including her sister and one of her brothers for some years – in town, during the time she lived there. “We were very well known in the community,” she recalls. “I was involved in everything.”
Her community activism continued after the family’s return to her home town. While Jack went to work as a salesman for Western Glove Works, Besse became an indefatigable community volunteer. At one time or another, she served as vice-president of ORT, Hadassah and National Council of Jewish Women in Winnipeg. She was also a long time B’nai Brith member.
In the business world, the highlight of her career was the building of Linden Woods.  “I became involved in real estate development for a time,” she recalls. “I was hired by Genstar to develop Linden Woods.  The company estimated that it would take about 20 years to complete.  I got it done in two.”
She also taught hair dressing for a while. “I worked with many young Jewish brides,” she says.
Recent years have not been kind to Besse Gurevich. Her beloved husband, Jack, died in 2016 – after almost 65 years of marriage.  Older son, Richard, passed away in Vancouver in 2018 and, most recently –six months ago – younger son, Howard, followed.  She notes that there were 200 mourners at Howard’s funeral.
(Howard Gurevich was in marketing for many years before turning his talents to the art world. In recent years, he was best known for Gurevich Fine Art in the Exchange District and his support of local artists.)
Besse Gurevich celebrated her 100th birthday – which took place at the height of the Covid shutdown – quietly. 
While she used to enjoy reading. she is unable to do so any more. She can still listen to television.
And while she has few family members to visit her any more, she does have a group of friends interesting enough from the local theatre scene.  For many years, she was a close friend of the late Doreen Brownstone, one of the leading figures in theatre in Winnipeg for more than half a century.  Besse became part of the group that would visit Doreen every week and, since Doreen passed on three years ago, the members of the group have continued to visit Besse on a weekly basis.  

(June 8, 2024) Introduction: We received the following email from a young Jewish Winnipegger re the BB Camp controversy, which we’ve reported on extensively on this website. We thought it important to post the email as a separate piece rather than as an add-on to an article in which we printed other emails from readers expressing their disappointment at what happened to Jacob Brodovsky, the former co-executive director of BB Camp:

Dear Mr. Bellan,

Thank you for once again cutting through the noise with your April 23rd column, “What the sordid BB Camp affair says about our community.” Your clarity and courage in calling out our rush to judgment and our narrowing definition of “Jewish identity” are deeply appreciated, especially by those of us who feel increasingly alienated in Winnipeg.

I also want to share a troubling observation about one of the loudest voices attacking Jacob Brodovsky: theJ.ca. Their articles—bylines like “Ron East” or “TheJ.ca Staff”—are, in fact, almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence. They contain no verifiable sourcing, frequently hallucinate details, and appear to be little more than a far-right newsletter running smear campaigns under the guise of “journalism.” The entire BB Camp series reads like an AI trained on extremist talking points, regurgitated daily to bully our community into silence.

As a young Jew in Winnipeg, I—and many of my peers—are horrified by the transformation we’re witnessing. What was once a warm, progressive community is now dominated by:

Bigots and Bullies: Parents threatening to pull their kids unless the camp bows to extremist demands.

Florida-style Republican Judaism: A narrow, intolerant ideology portrayed as the only “true” Jewishness.

Collapsing Leadership: Our Jewish Federation leaders, including Jeff Lieberman, have shown they lack the vision or backbone to navigate this crisis.

We stand at a dangerous inflection point. Our community is on the verge of a total and irreversible fascist takeover—an outcome no amount of regret or retrospective apologies can undo.

Please consider reading firsthand accounts from community members who have bravely spoken out:

I know this letter is anonymous and won’t be published, but I hope you see it as proof that many of us are desperate for ethical, forward-looking leadership. Thank you again for using your platform to remind us what Jewish community should mean: diversity of thought, compassion for all people, and the moral courage to call out extremism—no matter where it comes from.

This was NEVER a community of far-right Israelis. This is a shame beyond words.

With gratitude and urgency,

A Concerned Young Jew in Winnipeg

Post script: We had heard from many different sources (who all asked to remain anonymous) that the Jewish Federation’s decision to force the BB Camp board to fire Jacob Brodovsky came as a result of pressure from one or more big donors to the Combined Jewish Appeal. We sent an email to Jeff Lieberman, asking Jeff whether the Jewish Federation’s decision to force the resignation of Jacob Brodovsky as co-executive director of BB Camp came as a result of a donor (or donors) to the Combined Jewish Appeal threatening to withdraw their donation(s) this year unless Jacob were fired. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that Jeff did not bother responding to my request for information.

The Jewish Federation used to advertise elections to its board in The Jewish Post & News for many years, but no longer does so (in the Jewish Post). Instead, it submits a slate of new appointees to its board to members of the current board to be rubber stamped. Is it any surprise that the donors who contribute the most money call the shots for the Federation (which is as its always been. The only difference is the Jewish Federation and the Winnipeg Jewish Community Council before it used to operate with a patina of democracy. Sadly, that is no longer the case.)

We would urge anyone on the Federation board who could give information about what led the board to force the resignation of Jacob Brodovsky to contact us. We would give full anonymity, as we have to the writer of the above letter.

-Bernie Bellan

By BERNIE BELLAN We are often asked by readers why we profile so many ex-Winnipeggers.
“Aren’t there enough Winnipeggers with interesting stories to tell?” is what a lot of readers ask us.
The truth is that finding interesting people to write about is the easy part; finding writers who want to take the time to interview those interesting people though, and then turning that interview into a well-written article is the hard part.
When I was the publisher of this paper I generally shied away from doing exactly that kind of profile. It was time consuming and, knowing how fussy many individuals are about what’s written about them, I always felt an obligation to let the interview subject vet what I had written – even to make changes if they didn’t like how some things came out.
I started to record all my interviews – few as they might have been, and then transcribe them using a transcription service on my Mac computer.
But, for quite some time I had refrained from conducting any interviews. Then I was contacted by someone at the Jewish Post office in the Gwen Secter Centre who told me there was a very nice woman who was going to be visiting Winnipeg soon – and this particular woman thought that I might have an interest in interviewing her.
I was told that her name was Francine Kurlandski. “Why does that name sound so familiar?” I wondered to myself. With my curiosity whetted I phoned the number Francine had left with the Jewish Post and said to her, when she answered the phone, that her name was very familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place her.
Francine answered: “Don’t you remember? I used to write a recipe column for the Jewish Post?”
It all came back. Of course, now I remembered, but didn’t Francine also have another name when she used to write for us? I asked.
“Yes, I was Francine Teller to start. Then, when I got remarried, I started using my new married name – Kurlandski.”
“But most of my friends in Winnipeg will remember me for my maiden name, which was Wise,” Francine added.
The daughter of Marion and Israel Wise and sister to Elaine, Francine, who was born in 1957, said she grew up in River Heights – at 756 Lanark to be specific. She attended, in order: John Dafoe, J. B . Mitchell, and then Grant Park.

Along the way, when she was 17 years old, Francine was also Miss Israel for the Israel Pavilion at Folklorama.

Francine had told me prior to the interview that her first career was as a nurse, so I asked her whether she had long had a desire to study nursing. Initially, she was unsure, but she says she “inherited the caring feeling that is so instrumental in nursing” from her father.
Israel Wise had a degree in social work, Francine said, and “worked for the province helping Indigenous people.” In addition, “he was also the youth director at the Shaarey ZedeK Synagouge and president of the General Monash branch of the Canadian Legion for veterans.” Francine’s mother, who worked for Technion Canada “also had a social service bent, so nursing was a natural fit,” Francine suggested.

Still, before eventually entering the Misericordia School of Nursing, Francine said her first love was art, a talent she now says “lay latent within her. “She recalls going downtown on weekends: “I remember going to the stores that had sold these little tiny beads – and that was so popular then. And I got into making beaded and feather necklaces.

“And then that led me into teaching myself how to do macrame, needle point and knitting. So, I loved all those crafty things. My parents had a cottage at Gimli. I remember loving to draw, and would go into the dock and sketch the boats and the birds. I loved all that.”

But, aside from her love of art, Francine found that enrolling in nursing school was a perfect fit for her. She remained a nurse until quite recently.
Francine was married at what we would now consider a very early age, when she was only 21. When she was 23 she and her then then husband moved to Toronto where Francine began “painting suede kippas with Sesame Street characters, also Ghostbusters, and I sold them to a couple of Jewish bookstores here.”
She began to study watercolouring in earnest, inspired, she said, by a trip she took to Israel where she saw the artists’ colony in Safed.

Francine noted that “once my children were in their teens, I had time to explore my painting. And that’s when I started a painting course from the city of. Toronto. I also connected with a group of artists in North York, and to this day, I belong to the Toronto Watercolor Society where I got to meet like-minded artists.”
Francine said she just recently retired from nursing after 45 years. The last 20 years of her career, she said, were spent working for another former Winnipegger, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz.

The mother of three sons, Francine explained that her home could be described as modern Orthodox. All three of her sons had the opportunity to study in Israel, she noted. Two of them studied at Yeshiva University while another one attended at Touro, in New York.
When the oldest was 18, she said, she took up painting more seriously.

I wondered though, about Francine’s cooking expertise. From where did that come?
“Was your mother a really good cook?” I asked.
“My whole extended family were good cooks, especially my late aunt, Karen Wise,” she answered.
In 1997, Francine noted, hospitals across Canada embarked on a downsizing campaign.
“I was on leave because I had a baby at that time. I really needed to bring in income. So, for extra income. I started to cook from my home… wholesome, nutritious food. I started a vegetarian food business, and did that for four years. And with that food business I thought I could teach cooking lessons, and write recipes for the paper.”

As a sidenote, I said to Francine that I didn’t remember when she actually wrote a cooking column for the Jewish Post, but when I checked our archives, it turned out that it was from 2010-14.
Francine’s food business lasted until 2003, until she began working for Rochelle Schwartz.
It was around that time that Francine started trying to enter some of her paintings in juried art shows. She continued to study art for a certain period with a private art teacher.
“Every course you take as an artist, you learn how to improve,” Francine observed.
“After I experimented with all kinds of different subjects I focused on portraits and Judaica art. I’ve always had a deep interest in the Jewish lifestyle.”
When it came to marketing her paintings though, once again Francine had to ” learn, even to put something on Instagram. It was all baby steps. And you’re doing this all by yourself. You don’t wanna hire someone to do it.”

Francine has had her art exhibited in many of the art society’s exhibitions and is working with Toronto’s United Jewish Appeal for a future showing.
You can imagine the excitement Francine must be feeling. If you want to see samples of Francine’s art you can check out her Instagram page. Just go to Instagram and look for @artistfrancine.