Rosalie Silberman Abella

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA, 1950.

“Tata, what’s wrong?” four-year-old Rosalie asked as she went to meet her father at the door of their small apartment. Jacob Silberman’s shoulders were slumped and his eyes were sad. He sat down and took her onto his lap. “The Canadian government will not allow me to practice law until I am a citizen. But I cannot wait so long.” He stroked his daughter’s hair. “Do not worry, little one. I will find another way to support our family.” Rosalie put her hand into her father’s hand. “Tata, when I grow up, I will be a lawyer too.”

Although Rosalie’s parents didn’t dwell upon their experiences during the Holocaust, Rosalie came to understand what those experiences meant to them and how she herself was shaped by them. She later recalled, “I realized that what seemed so normal to me was in fact extraordinary, and that the real miracle was how people who had lived through what my parents had lived through could provide so normal a home.”

She felt she had an obligation to repay her parents for the efforts they made to rebuild their lives. Rosalie worked hard at her piano lessons and her schoolwork. By the time she was ten years old, she was known as a piano prodigy, winning many awards and appearing regularly on television, which in those days was a new sensation. She was one of the youngest graduates of the Royal Conservatory of Music, having earned a diploma in classical piano at age eighteen. She also graduated from high school with one of the highest grade averages in the province of Ontario.

Rosalie attended the University of Toronto (UofT), where she earned a BA in 1967.

While she was there, she met her soon-to-be husband, Irving Abella, who became a noted Canadian historian. They got married in 1968, and their first son, Jacob, was born in 1973. Rosalie’s beloved father, Jacob, had passed away in 1970, just before Rosalie graduated from the UofT law school. Soon afterwards, she opened her own law practice where she accepted all kinds of cases—family, civil, and criminal. In 1975, when Rosalie was only twenty-nine years old, she was appointed a judge in the Ontario Family Court. Some of her friends advised her not to take the position and told her that Family Court was a “dead end.” They thought she should wait for better opportunities. But Rosalie didn’t hesitate. She thought, “People like me—female, Jewish, immigrant, refugee—weren’t exactly being appointed to the bench in droves…. After all, immigrants live for opportunities, not entitlements.” pointed a judge in the Ontario Family Court. Some of her friends advised

Rosalie became Canada’s first Jewish woman judge and the country’s youngest ever, and she was pregnant as well! Zachary, their second son, was born that year. Perhaps she wondered how she would manage such a high-stress job along with the responsibilities of motherhood. She was always grateful that she had help from her mother and could also hire caregivers. Over the next seven years, sitting in her high seat in the courtroom, Rosalie learned to “look at people in front of you from their eyes and not from the top down.”