Obituaries
DOREEN BROWNSTONE O.M.
Doreen Brownstone passed away peacefully at Riverview Health Centre on Friday, December 16, 2022. Doreen was predeceased by her parents, Jessie and Mark Stein, her sister, Laura Hoffman, her sons Michael and Jonny, and her daughter Sheila. She is survived by her grandsons Cole Brownstone and Kyle Reese Wunder, by her special “surrogate daughter” Patricia Hunter and her family—Zaz, Abbie, and Adele Bajon—and by her extensive “theatre family”. Funeral services were held graveside at Shaarey Zedek Cemetery on Sunday, December 18; pallbearers were Susanna Portnoy, John Bluethner, Harry Nelken, Mariam Bernstein, Daniel Thau Eleff and John Myers; honourary pallbearers were Joanie Sheps and Heather Pullan.
Doreen was born in Leeds, England, on September 28, 1922, and had a very happy childhood, describing herself as a tomboy and a show-off. She was no slouch academically, though, and won a scholarship to the prestigious Roundhay School for Girls, which was a great source of pride for her and her family. Doreen’s father was a tailor and was able to save money by making her school uniforms himself, which she wore with pride. As Doreen would often say as she shared her fond memories from her schooldays, “that school changed my life”. At 100 years old, she could still recite poetry she had learned in school, and if you spoke to her in French, she would proudly respond en français. And, importantly, it was there she learned to swim, earning many awards.
At the age of 19, inspired by the words of Winston Churchill (she could still dramatically recite most of his speech), Doreen enlisted in the Royal Air Force. She was very proud of her service and remembered it fondly; it taught her discipline and responsibility and felt like being ‘back at school’. She was on the RAF Halton swim team, competing with other stations. The RAF was also where she was introduced to acting when the division padre informed her that she had been cast in a play: “The rest is history”.
Doreen met Canadian Billy Brownstone during the war, married him in 1945 and immigrated to Winnipeg in 1946 where their three children were born. In Winnipeg, she joined the YMHA (Theatre) Players and was active in other amateur theatre groups where she first encountered John Hirsch as both drama teacher and director (as Doreen said, “He was our Theatre School”).
In 1957, when Hirsch and Tom Hendry founded the semi-professional Theatre 77, they included Doreen in the company. In 1958, Theatre 77 merged with Winnipeg Little Theatre, with Hirsch as artistic director and Hendry as business manager, to become the Manitoba Theatre Centre. Hirsch cast Doreen in MTC’s first professional production—A Hatful of Rain opposite Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent—and thus began her 60-year career as a professional actor, working for every professional theatre company in the city and for many across the country. She acted in over 100 plays, including a touring production of Driving Miss Daisy at the age of 83, the role of Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof seven (or was it nine?!) times, the last one a Yiddish production at the age of 89, and in Vigil at Prairie Theatre Exchange in 2013 at the age of 92 where she shamelessly showed off her agility by energetically doing toe touches on stage. The oldest working actor in Canada, she continued to do play readings and some film work. At 95, she appeared in the television series Channel Zero with actor Rutger Hauer.
Alongside her illustrious acting career, Doreen was also the beloved “Mrs. Brownstone, my swimming teacher”. Doreen maintained a forty-year career as a swimming instructor, teaching two and three generations of families to swim. She was known as Doreen, the actor, and Mrs. Brownstone, the swimming teacher to her legions of fans from both careers. It was impossible to go on an outing with Doreen and not get stopped a good many times by audience members who wanted to tell her how much they enjoyed a particular performance or by generations of kids who proudly recall her teaching them to swim.
Doreen always expressed how extremely lucky and blessed she was to do the two things she absolutely loved: acting and swimming. Doreen’s passion and vitality on stage and at the pool were a testament to her amazing dedication and creativity. She attributed her lifelong fitness to her years of swimming, and the mental sharpness she maintained up to the age of 100 years to her acting.
Doreen connected with so many and forged lifelong bonds with friends in her Pan card game group, her Taylor Avenue friends, swimming teachers and students alike, and her doting “theatre family”. In later years, these friends and her new Shaftesbury friends would meet at Doreen’s celebrated coffee klatch gatherings on Friday afternoons in the Shaftesbury Coffee Bistro. In winter, many of us came proudly wearing the colourful knitted hats she had made for us. She would hold court, looking classy with one of her signature pashminas draped over her shoulders.
Doreen always supported her fellow artists in times of joy and was there with a sympathetic ear and loving hugs in difficult times. She was a faithful friend and colleague and always made a point of seeing others’ work, taking special pleasure in their accomplishments.
Doreen was awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards from ACTRA, The Canadian Actor’s Equity Association, the Winnipeg Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre. In 2017 she was awarded the Order of Manitoba. She really got a kick out of seeing the letters O.M. after her name! She also received the Nellie McClung Foundation Trailblazer Award in 2021.
Doreen felt each day she was given was a gift. Her faith was a comfort and helped her through her many challenges in life. Doreen’s exuberance, chutzpah, joie de vivre, determination, generosity, and love fuelled and filled her long rich life. She is held in unparalleled esteem by all who knew her.
Doreen Brownstone, the Grande Dame of Winnipeg Theatre, has taken her final curtain call but will continue to be an inspiration to us all.
Doreen’s “theatre family” would like to thank the staff at Shaftesbury Park and at the Riverview Palliative Care Unit for their care and kindness, the Kenaston Superstore Pharmacy team, and a special thanks to her GP Dr. Kristen Creek for her exemplary, attentive care. Thanks also to all the friends and relatives, young and old, who spent time with Doreen. Their love, friendship and conversation meant the world to Our Doreen. Finally, thank you to our extended “theatre family”. There were so many of us who could be called upon to take Doreen to appointments, sit with her during a hospital stay, or just visit, who could be counted on in times of need, or pull together to fête Doreen, decorating the room in her favourite colours of pink and purple, the last time on September 28 for her 100th birthday. It takes a village and we have been so lucky to have ours. Special thanks to Stefanie Wiens and Angus Kohm for going above and beyond, taking care of many of Doreen’s needs. Stefanie’s medical knowledge and caregiving meant that everyone could rest easy knowing she was in capable and loving hands.
“In mind a constant thought, in heart a silent tear.”
Donations in Doreen Brownstone’s memory may be made to Jewish Child and Family Services,
The Actors Fund of Canada, or a charity of your choice.
Obituaries
MORLEY JACOBS APRIL 16, 1941 – JUNE 26, 2025

With deep reluctance to post his passing, our adored Moishe who fought to stay as long as possible, left us, in the early hours of June 26th; while his presence resides in memories, the activities he pursued in the purposeful life he lived, remain.
He never lost the use of his affable charming smile under his blue eyed gaze; an intent listener, even in his last days, who made you feel seen and heard. To be known by Morley was a privilege; to have been his friend often felt like walking with a prince of angels, when he spoke less and listened more.
Dr. J as his students over the years would tell you, he was the kind of mentor you could trust. His passion for excellence in education was intense and generous, inspiring his students with their own potential to realize a career.
A PhD in Biochemistry, Morley lectured in classes and labs at RRCC, where he connected one by one, year after year with a multitude of young people. Reaching beyond this, Morley successfully petitioned the provincial government and won the retention of the Biochemistry Department at RRCC, following which he expanded the opportunities for students on practicum in this field, through a Jobs co-operative program. In the Biology/Chemistry Departments at U of W, as the Co-op Coordinator, Morley developed the program within the province and beyond for graduate students in applied Sciences Degrees.
In subsequent years, he connected graduates of the RRCC course, who wished to continue in Biochemistry in a reciprocal agreement to earn and achieve a Bachelor Degree in Biochemistry at University.
For 13 consecutive years, between1989 to 2002, Morley served as an elected School Trustee in the Seven Oak School system. He was an educational activist working on multiple committees, knew the principals and teaching staff at each school, always searching for increasing student successand a long time proponent for Year-round Education.
Through those years, Morley attended dozens of schools, personally documenting results of their YRE programs.
Selected to serve as the chairperson on a variety of boards, including the Seven Oaks School Board, he took on each role with dedicated time, organizing, improving, and encouraging an elevated standard of public service. His days were filled well into the evenings, with volunteer work and on weekends when he decided to partner with like minded friends, he brought computer tutors and kids together with an early learning education opportunity.
Along with all of that work, Morley found time to run the Boston Marathon to raise funds for the I.L. Peretz School in 1978 was a long time member of the CIC and served as Mid-Canada AOAC President. A lifetime believer in blood donations, Morley was honored as a distinguished citizen with humanitarian recognition, for the number of donations he gave over the years. On retirement, he researched and developed a Greenhouse Nutrition project to improve food sourcing for Northern communities and in that same period, spent 8 years writing a book, he hoped would be a legacy for people to understand the biochemistry of nutrition, “The Guide: To Understanding Nutrition and the Body’s Response to Food”, which he published in 2018.
He was still busy enjoying his first years in his eighth decade, planning future trips, and long walks with whomever wanted to come along, staying fit and eating well on his early morning rise, when he would be proactively planning the day; he loved life.
He believed each day was the privilege to make choices that made a positive difference to the people you loved and the work that you did. Through all of those decades, the longest number of them, he spent as a playful guy with our adored kids and grandkids. In hundreds of family photographs, he was the playmate in any game, goofy in every dress up, airplane ride giver, stellar hide and seek player, breakfast every morning maker, unabashed Karaoke singer, and the guy you wanted when you needed someone to make things right.
Born in Portage la Prairie, the third child of Abraham and Rebecca Jacobs, in 1950, Morley
moved with his family to Winnipeg, his older siblings, brother Joe (OBM), sister Toba Isler (resides in Florida), settled in at 529 Rupertsland, where he made many lasting friendships over his lifetime. Raised with strong Jewish beliefs in an observant and caring family home, he studied at Talmud Torah, excelled at school, and acquired the foundations for community, family, honorability in character, and the value of knowledge.
Morley considered it fate that we met on his 18th birthday at a Rec-room party in 1956. Nine years later, we married at the Shaarey Zedek, on May 2nd, 1965.
Husband who treasured the miracle of us, who supported the fulfillment our mutual dreams, he was my person who stepped up in all of our critical hours, my trained Lamaze partner for the birth of our children; we were two young people, who raised each other higher as we grew older together. When we met it was instantaneous friendship and when we married, it was a bond of mutual adoration, with all of those glorious years together, sixty nine of them, whatever happened, our togetherness was a state of being that nurtured us all.
Beloved by his nieces, Pam Weinroth (Robert), Rhonda Kupfer (Sam), and nephews, Scott Jacobs (Heidi) and Mark Jacobs, for whom he was an active uncle, visiting whenever he could as they grew up and married, happily around long enough to play with their children.
Mahjong sit-in player for any game, Morley was a cribbage master, who did a daily Sudoku-chess and a cipher quiptoquote, while at the same time; he was a researcher par excellence who was able to make the most complex biochemistry understandable. Strong and agile, he was an athlete from youth, a track star and marathon runner, in high school a basketball player while through his life a huge fan of baseball and hockey, he was noted in his early teens as an avid ping pong player.
For all the years people knew him he was humble with his own notable achievements academically, but remained generous with intellectual sharing, correcting only with honorable concerns. It was his ease in praising and engaging in progressions that valued excellence, through all of his years, daily, Morley was the legacy of his smiles of confidence for others. Morley was a guy who frequented the pleasure of being forever joyous with children, and as every family pet could avow, he was the doted upon favorite.
His time here blessed everyone and everything, and we know he would hope to inspire that in others.
Etched into our collective family sharing of him, we are his memory keepers held to our own souls with enduring honor for how he conducted himself in his life, evermore: Children, Stephanie Jacobs-Lockhart and Morrison Jacobs; our son-in-law, Darwin Lockhart and daughter-in-law, Jennifer (Lisakowski) Jacobs; and our grandchildren, Jonah Samuel Lockhart, Elle Talia Lockhart, Adli Jayden Jacobs, Mazie Carolyn Jacobs, and me, Bev (Berkal) Jacobs, the woman who had the privilege of him for all of those years, nothing to mourn and everything to remember with joy.
Services were held at the Chesed Shel Emes, and the Shaarey Zedek Cemetery, officiated by Rabbi Matthew Leibl, attended by pallbearers, Morrison Jacobs, Adli Jacobs, Darwin Lockhart, Mark Makarovsky, Michael Meyers, and Mark Kogan.
Donations in memoriam may be made to a charity of your choice.
We know his spirit will continue to be a blessing for all, if there was a way his neshamah would find it; to be the valiant progenitor for a great renewal in this world, in peace, love and humanism.
Obituaries
ETTIE (EDDY) WERIER

Ettie Werier passed away in her sleep on July 25, 2025, at the Shaftesbury Park Retirement Residence in Winnipeg.
She will be hugely missed by her many friends and her family. Eddy was predeceased by her husband Lawrence, her younger sister Naomi (Wolfe), her older sister Sherry (Chochinov), her parents Max and Annie and her beloved grandson Koby.
Born Ettie Rubinfield in Ustryke Dolne, Poland in 1928, Eddy arrived in Winnipeg in 1931. She spent her childhood in the North End, where her parents ran a little grocery store on Alfred Avenue. She grew up to be a beautiful young woman with a warm smile and a quick mind.
She met Lawrence Werier, the love of her life, on a train ride to Winnipeg Beach. Eddy obviously wanted adventure, otherwise she would not have chosen Lawrence to be her beloved husband of more than 75 years, because he was always unconventional, but somehow this fit her perfectly. They were married in 1949 and started a family in 1952. While raising three children in River Heights, Eddy often travelled the world with Lawrence, visiting countless out-of-the-way beaches and dozens of countries.
Eddy had a quiet charisma. Maybe it was the mischievous sparkle in her eye or some droll bit of storytelling but all were attracted to her goodness, kindness and wit. Eddy was known for her intelligence, competitive spirit, and love for her family. She was an accomplished bridge player, and whether competing online or with her “bridge ladies,” she played to win, even on her last day. She was never an athlete, but at the age of 50 she took up tennis and became a force to be reckoned with until she retired her racket due to bad knees at the age of 85.
Eddy spent the last few years of her life enjoying the community at the Shaftesbury Residence and developed a strong and loving relationship with her companion and caregiver Tess Braun who is grieving the loss alongside the family, including Eddy’s surviving brother Jack Rubinfield. The family will especially miss the generous love and support she gave her children Kerry, Clifford and Jodie and their life partners Suzanne, Sabrina and Michael, and her grandchildren, Cynthia, Alex and Koby. Whether chatting with Grandma on Facetime or hugging her in her Shaftesbury suite, her family treasured the moments when we could come together in Winnipeg and bask in her smile. If you feel inclined to make a donation in Eddy’s memory, please choose a charity of your choice.
Obituaries
Dr. VELIMIR KON B.Sc., B.Ed., M.Sc., Ph.D. September 18, 1950-June 27, 2025

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Dr. Velimir Kon, or Shlomo, beloved husband of Branka and father of Deborah and Lea. Velimir was an accomplished teacher and academic, and he was renowned for his intellectualism, humility and humanity.
A gentle soul who was always sociable and who genuinely loved people, Velimir was equally at home in the university classroom as a professor and as a secondary school Biology, Chemistry and Math teacher in Northern Ontario (Big Trout Lake) and Manitoba (God’s River, Berens River). Velimir made a difference to many First Nations students throughout a career that spanned decades. He was dedicated to his students, colleagues and family. An adept and talented pianist, Velimir enjoyed the arts and of course Jewish humour. He was an avid shul goer and supporter of Israel and enjoyed his duties in shul as a Kohayn. Velimir was a man of faith who was able to fuse his love of science and Judaism.
Born in Croatia, Europe (the former Yugoslavia) to Shoah survivors Rose (Rochel, ne Lederer) and Arnold Kon (Ariel), Velimir immigrated to Canada with his wife and girls in 1988, making many personal sacrifices along the way to ensure a peaceful and safe life for his family. Adaptability and optimism characterized Velimir. Known for his heart of gold, Velimir touched the lives of all who had the privilege of knowing him. A love of Jewish values, family values and life-long learning and education characterized Velimir. With his charming, outgoing and friendly personality, Velimir welcomed everyone into his life and into our home.
His kindness, humour, generosity and goodness will be deeply missed by his family and friends in Winnipeg, Victoria, B.C., Guelph, ON, Osijek, Croatia, Belgrade, Serbia, Los Angeles and Boston, U.S.A., and Israel, Jerusalem, Haifa and Karmiel. Baruch Dayan Haemet.
A traditional funeral was held on June 30, 2025 at the Hebrew Sick Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can still be made to Chabad Lubavitch of Winnipeg, B’nai Brith or the JNF.
Velimir will be forever missed and cherished by Branka, Deborah and Lea.