Judy Feld Carr

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, CANADA, 1945.

Judy Leve was taking the shortcut home from school. Suddenly, a group of five or six older kids surrounded her. They began calling her, “Dirty Jew!” and throwing rocks at her. Judy ran home crying. Her face was dirty, her lips were cut and swollen, and her front teeth had been knocked out. That night at the Passover seder, Judy had to eat chicken soup through a straw. She never forgave the kids who had bullied her.

family moved there, the main industries were logging and nickel mining. Judy remembers Sudbury as an “ugly, small, dark town; where the soot from the chimneys turned the snow black.” few

Judy Feld Carr was born in Montreal on Dec. 26, 1938, to Jack Leve, her Russian-born father and Sarah (née Rives), who had been raised in Brooklyn, New York. They met at a wedding in Montreal and after they were married, lived in Montreal for a few years. When Judy was five years old, one year after her brother Alexander was born, Jack Leve decided to move the family to Sudbury. He was a fur trapper and trader, and needed to be closer to his work.

In the 1940s, Sudbury was a small town in northern Ontario, with a population of fewer than 2,000 people. When the Leve

Judy at 7 months with her mother and father in North Bay, ON; Auschwitz survivor and neighbour, Sophie, with Judy’s son Alan in Sudbury, 1962 ;

Jack traded furs with Indigenous trappers, so he often had to be on the road or in the bush for long periods of time. While he was away, Judy’s mother and grandmother took care of the children. The Jewish community in Sudbury and other towns in northern Ontario was small—consisting of only about 30 families—but Judy’s mother was involved with a Jewish women’s group called Hadassah and she made some close friends. At the same time, Judy made friends with Jewish children from the other small towns nearby. While Judy was growing up in Sudbury, she often had to face antisemitism; she was called names and even beaten up. Her father stood up for Judy with the school principal and teachers whenever she was bullied. He also taught her how to fight, to shoot a gun, to paddle a canoe, and to catch and fillet fish. Judy decided she would work hard at school, get good grades, and show her teachers and fellow students that she could succeed, in spite of their insults.

Many years later, after Judy’s secret work smuggling Jews out of Syria became known, Itzhak Shelef, the former Israeli ambassador to Canada, said, “I believe her childhood molded her. Anyone who’s been to her region, especially in the days of her childhood, knows it was a tough place to live in and especially to grow up in as a girl.