The CJN: February 4, 2022

WEEKLY PRINTABLE EDITION

FEBRUARY 4, 2022 / 3 ADAR 5782

MARCI SURKES on keeping the pieces in place for Justin Trudeau / page 5

CANDLE LIGHTING TIMES MONTREAL

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THUNDER BAY WINNIPEG SASKATOON EDMONTON VANCOUVER

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NDP drop a candidate due to street scandal

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Looking at Doug Ford from the Jewish angle

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Jonathan Kay’s book about screen business

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Marvin Gord: a centenarian who stepped up

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Swastikas and other symbols of hate displayed at Ottawa protest aren’t just offensive—they’re dangerous, says Andrea Freedman, CEO of Ottawa’s Jewish Federation

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n Thursday Jan. 27, I was honoured to participate in a commemoration event at the National Holocaust Monument that was live streamed on Facebook to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. That night in my remarks I said, “this week, sobering statistics were released on the state of Holocaust knowledge. Approximately one-third of students surveyed were not sure the Holocaust happened, or thought it was exaggerated or fabricated. Meanwhile, 42 percent of students said they had unequivocally witnessed an antisemitic event, and these were by and large not Jewish students. Some who decry vaccine mandates, continue to egregiously invoke the Holocaust.”

At the time, it did not occur to me that less than 48 hours later, swastikas would be on the streets of our nation’s capital. The presence of swastika flags, allusions to Nazi ideology, the continued appropriation of the yellow star to make the deeply offensive and grossly inaccurate comparison between the victims of Nazism and government health measures is not only egregious, it is dangerous.

It would be easy to dismiss those in the crowd flying a flag of hate as an “isolated incident,” or “radical plants” to take away from the protests’ core messages. The truth is that small numbers of radical haters are not the real issue. What concerns me most is the silence and passivity of other protesters who saw the Nazi symbols and said and did nothing. No media footage seems to exist of any attempts to remove these reprehensible symbols. The silence was deafening.

As Elie Wiesel said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” We may not eradicate antisemitism, but we can, indeed we must, push antisemitism and all forms of hatred back to society’s fringe and not allow it to be paraded on the streets of our nation’s capital.

Many Canadian flags were flying in Ottawa this weekend. Protesters marched with them and truckers festooned their rigs with them, and some Ottawa residents attached them from their cars in support of the protests.

However, it is an affront to all Canadians that the Nazi flag was flying in their midst. It is surreal that racist groups like the National Socialist Black Metal (Aryan black metal) movement felt suffi-

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ciently emboldened to proudly wear their jackets at the protests.

It is not hyperbole to say that right now our society stands at a precipice. What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

We the Jewish people have become a litmus test for how much hate a society will tolerate, and I am so sorry to say we have reached a breaking point, as evidenced by this weekend’s ugly events.

We know what is needed. Good people must speak out, our government needs to mandate and standardize Holocaust education, criminalize Holocaust denial, and tackle online hate, to name just a few of the needed steps. Governments should be applauded for the actions they have taken to date, even as more are urgently needed.

Make no mistake, the actions that ordinary citizens and our governments take today, will define our country for generations. n

Former Ajax mayor Steve Parish dropped as Ontario NDP candidate for defending a Nazi’s namesake street / Lila Sarick

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ntario NDP candidate Steve Parish, the former mayor of Ajax who defended naming a street after a Nazi officer, will not represent the party in the upcoming provincial election, leader Andrea Horwath has announced.

“The NDP’s vetting process gave us confidence that Mr. Parish does not hold antisemitic views. However, our party is committed to naming and correcting injustice, and vowing to do better—and as a candidate he has not met the mark,” Horwath said in a statement released Jan. 31.

“Specifically, Mr. Parish has not denounced the decision to have a street named after a high-ranking German officer in the Second World War. Perhaps most importantly he has not demonstrated that he understands why that is harmful.”

Parish’s nomination garnered media attention and controversy when it was revealed that, in 2007, while he was mayor of the community east of Toronto, he had presided over the naming of a street for Hans Langsdorff, the commander of a Second World War Nazi warship.

In 2020, the question of the street name was raised again and Parish, then the former mayor, spoke at the town council meeting against changing the street name, despite opposition from the local Jewish community, including Rabbi Tzali Borenstein of the Chabad Jewish Centre of Durham Region and Holocaust survivor Max Eisen.

Last week, at his nomination meeting on Jan. 22, Parish acknowledged that the Nazi regime “was the most evil regime in the history of humankind.”

He continued, “Indeed, the terms genocide and crimes against humanity come that terrible part of our history. This caused pain to some people in the Jewish community in Ajax and beyond in Ontario, and for that, I am profoundly and completely sorry.”

The apology failed to quell the controversy, with Jewish advocacy groups pointing out that Parish’s statement failed to say whether he had changed his views, and insisting he should not have been approved by the NDP as a candidate.

Liberal and Conservative candidates in the riding also criticized the NDP’s decision to greenlight Parish’s nomination in the first place, given his record.

Even NDP members were appalled by Parish’s nomination.

Emma Cunningham, the former president of the Ontario NDP riding association in nearby Pickering-Uxbridge, said Parish’s nomination was the “final straw” and resigned her position, citing other cases where the NDP had failed to properly vet antisemitic candidates.

After Horwath’s announcement, Cunningham tweeted, “WE DID IT!!!!!! (Next step: make sure the @ndp and @OntarioNDP put measures in place in order to not have this happen again.)”

In her statement, Howarth thanked grassroots New Democrats and Jewish leaders who had met with her to discuss the issue.

“Their counsel has been invaluable in arriving at this decision,” she said in her statement.

“Our candidate team must be one that Ontario trusts to be leaders in the fight against antisemitism, and hate in all its forms—whether that’s in a synagogue in Texas or on the streets of Ottawa. Today, that means acknowledging and apologizing for our own mistakes, committing to do better, and moving forward.” n Lila Sarick is news editor of The CJN.

Doorstep Postings: Looking into Doug Ford’s future election prospects (from a Jewish angle) / Josh Lieblein

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n four months—Thursday, June 2, to be precise—Ontarians will head back to the polls to render judgment on Doug Ford’s government. Rest assured that Doorstep Postings will cover it all, with even more of the insider stories and campaign anecdotes that readers of The CJN came to expect during last year’s federal go-round.

But before I launch into my story of my close encounter of the

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Ford kind—and every politico worth their salt has at least one— let’s ease into things with a quick quote from our Jewish sages: “Every moment that a person shuts his mouth, he merits the hidden light that no angel or creature can conceive of.”

The sages were speaking about lashon hara, the practice of speaking ill of a person publicly. As we will soon see, they might have also been speaking about the sound and fury that follows the Ford clan like a tail.

You see, I was an early adopter of the “Bash the Fords as often as possible, as publicly as possible” model. I had a good reason, or so I told myself. After all, if Rob Ford (z”l) had demanded that you be thrown off a campaign because he was mildly inconvenienced, would you take it lying down?

The source of this mishap was a hastily installed phone system at the local campaign office. Transferring calls was more complicated than it had a right to be. When then city councillor Rob Ford placed one of his famous phone calls and asked me to connect him directly to the campaign manager posthaste, it went to the general mailbox instead of the CM’s personal voicemail.

That voicemail, in which he unleashed a terrifying storm of invective against me, was later played aloud to the boisterous laughter of the entire campaign team.

Rob Ford, who would later have bigger problems to deal with, likely soon forgot about this incident. But I didn’t. So when RoFo ran for mayor a year later, and it was made known through the usual channels that all loyal conservatives were to report for duty, I said, “Nothing doing.”

Instead, I found a campaign composed of anti-Ford conservatives, liberals, and other non-partisans.

The problem was, that campaign wasn’t that interested in actually out-campaigning him. Rather, they fundraised and spent a bunch of money, chased traditional media for a few measly column inches, and talked amongst themselves about how stupid, fat, racist and homophobic he was. Just you wait, they said.

Councillor Ford would melt down and he’d never become Mayor of Toronto.

Well, it’s coming up on a dozen years since all that happened.

Rob Ford’s brother is premier, and those who would replace him are still engaging in the same rageful, ineffective lashon hara. If they repeat enough times that Doug Ford is stupid, fat, racist, corrupt, incompetent and a bit of a dick, Ontarians will have no choice but to get rid of him.

Meanwhile, after two years of a pandemic that killed thousands in the province—and the countless lockdowns and reopenings—Premier DoFo is still flirting with majority territory.

In the intervening decade, I’ve learned a lot about why the Fords endure.

If I had to boil it down to one difference, it’s this: these people are willing to do what is necessary to win. Their opponents are mostly just willing to talk about it.

Indeed, the wisdom of our Jewish sages has proven itself as relevant today as it ever was. If everyone who hates Doug Ford would get to work instead of posting creative insults on social media, it’d amount to a lot of hidden light being merited, which sounds nice. n Josh Lieblein is a political campaigner turned pharmacist who lives in Kitchener, Ont.

An exit interview with Marci Surkes, the Jewish gatekeeper of the Liberal government’s agenda / Ellin Bessner

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arci Surkes remembers her Grade 6 class trip to Ottawa as being the first time the Montreal-raised lawyer got the bug to work in Canadian politics. Last week, she pulled the plug on fifteen years working on Parliament Hill as an advisor to former Liberal cabinet ministers and leaders including Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, and most recently to Justin Trudeau himself.

Surkes left politics for some peace and quiet, and to teach and write. But not for ever.

“I think anyone who’s been involved in politics or in political life knows very well that, a little like [the song] ‘Hotel California,‘ I think you can check out any time you like, but you never leave,” said Surkes from her Ottawa home on Jan 31. “It’s something that gets in you. It’s deep within the core of what you believe in.”

Surkes, 40, took the job as executive director of policy and Cabinet affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office right at the start of the pandemic two years ago. That meant being in charge of all the Liberal government COVID programs, including CERB, and files such as Truth and Reconciliation, and banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ persons. It was also her job to set the timetable when to introduce news laws into parliament.

But as the most powerful Jewish woman in the PMO, Surkes also had the ear of the prime minister on everything to do with Jewish issues. That made her the point person for lobbyists such as The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, which reported contacting her 139 times in the past year.

“There is no issue of concern to the Jewish community that I was not brought into to be part of that conversation, to weigh in to either run with, if appropriate, or at least to gauge my opinion on, certainly,” Surkes confirmed in a wide-ranging interview with The CJN Daily.

Antisemitism summit in July Last June, when the Liberals announced the government would convene an emergency antisemitism summit in the wake of a spike in hate towards Jews and Israel, Surkes’ fingerprints were all over the event. She had advocated for it to take place, despite what she admits was an unfortunate rollout of the initial announcement. It was leaked out at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon June 11, via Twitter, by Jewish leaders.

“I think the reality is that government is often dancing at multiple parties at the same time…and maybe in that instance, the timing wasn’t exactly the right timing in terms of reaching the audience that the government was attempting to reach,” Surkes said, referring to how the news came out on social media first

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from CIJA, then Irwin Cotler, and finally, from the government.

“But there was sort of no malice behind that. It’s just when things come together and when the information is ripe and ready.”

In the aftermath of the two-week war between Israel and Hamas in May, a deluge of antisemitic incidents and online hate had made Canadian Jews deeply uncomfortable in their own cities. Jewish groups began approaching her and other government members for a forum that was “desperately needed”.

The summit was held July 21, as a day-long online event, with Liberal cabinet ministers and the prime minister in attendance.

The four main opposition leaders were initially not invited to participate, except as spectators, and that came about only after they raised a stink. Not even the only Jewish leader of a federal party at the time, Annamie Paul, was on the early guest list.

Surkes acknowledges that was unfortunate.

“I really think that the community benefits when representatives from all parties acknowledge and work together on these critical matters. So that’s my personal view on those things,” she said. “I hate to see Jewish issues be used as a political football, I think. I just don’t think that serves any of us.”

Liberal commitments to the Jewish community The Liberal government took also took some flak from the Jewish community after Ottawa pledged $25 million towards Palestinian relief projects in the West Bank and Gaza. Some of the money was earmarked for UNRWA, which has espoused anti-Israel material and support for terrorism.

Yet Surkes remains proud of the summit, and the aftermath, including promised work which is still going on today.

The summit was “a pretty crucial moment” for deepening the Liberal government’s relationship and support for Canada’s Jewish community, she said.

She pointed to a long list of initiatives: • Renewal of the mandate of Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, professor Irwin Cotler, for a second term

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Increasing the pot of funds available for reinforcing Jewish buildings under the government’s Security Infrastructure Projects to $8 million in 2021-2022 Pledges Trudeau made at the Malmo, Sweden virtual conference in November 2021, to combat antisemitism and continue to support the IHRA definition of antisemitism

Truckers protest: Bill C-10 After turning in her secure office cellphone last week on her last day (she actually had to carry three cellphones with her during her tenure at the PMO, including her personal one and two from work), Surkes spent the weekend as a civilian as thousands of truckers held a protest on Parliament Hill. She watched as images of Nazi flags and protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier became public.

“From a perspective of somebody who’s been working in the security landscape [chief of staff to former Liberal public security minister Ralph Goodale], the right wing extremism and that ideology has taken hold in a way that is very damning and damaging to society as a whole, to the Jewish community, to other communities of colour, other ethno-religious communities in this country, it’s very disturbing,” she said.

One remedy that she expects will be introduced this term, albeit later than planned, is the revised online hate legislation covering Internet companies. It would have expanded the scope of what constituted hate in the Criminal Code to take into account social media postings, among other content. The Liberals tabled the bill during the last Trudeau administration, but it did not pass and received much criticism for putting too strong a limit on freedom of speech.

She expects the revised bill will be more acceptable, because the government held consultations over the summer and into the fall.

“It’s given the government more to think about in terms of how we broach social media platforms, what the responsibilities are, what law enforcement’s role is to take this stuff down and get it out into the trash,” she said.

Trudeau’s secret Jewish weapons If you watched Justin Trudeau’s greetings to the Jewish community which he delivered from Parliament Hill during an online national Hanukkah event on Dec. 1, he nailed the pronunciation of the words for happy holiday, or “Chag Sameach”. Marci Surkes takes a lot of the credit for teaching him “a thing or two” over the years.

“I’ve taught him how to pronounce Hebrew words properly with the appropriate Chhh at the end, so to speak,” she said, smiling.

However superficial that might seem, Surkes said it speaks to a deeper commitment to understand the Jewish community on other levels: from traveling to Auschwitz in 2016 with Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger, to his long friendship with Irwin Cotler, to his regular contact with Montreal Rabbi Adam Scheier of the Shaar HaShomayim synagogue.

“To this day, the prime minister thinks of Rabbi Sheier as his rabbi and trusted confidant and somebody who he turns to for wisdom and teaching and understanding,” Surkes revealed.

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Although Surkes did not have direct say over the Liberals decision to welcome Fredericton Green Party MP Jenica Atwin in the summer when she crossed the floor, she was well aware of the outcry from Jewish groups. Atwin had tweeted about the Israel-Palestinian situation in May, and called Israel an apartheid state, among other things.

“Obviously the [Liberal] party does recruitment of candidates. I will say only this. I certainly understand the concerns that have been raised about her continued presence in caucus,” Surkes said. “She is working, has developed relationships with the Jewish members of our caucus and is, I think, coming to a place of a better understanding of why the words that she used were not the right words.”

Lego tribute As the first week on civvy street comes to an end for Surkes, she admits it is a big adjustment—but a welcome one—to a slower pace since joining the PMO at the start of 2020. For the first time in a while, she’ll be around for the six-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son she’s raising with her partner Rabbi Dara Lithwick, an Ottawa lawyer and spiritual leader at a Reform synagogue, Temple Israel. She’s teaching a course at Carleton University’s school of public management, and lining up speaking engagements.

Surkes is not ready to write a tell-all book, just yet. Plus, she has some legal restrictions for now that prevent her from spilling government secrets.

“I am definitely interested in, at some point, having the opportunity to write about what I’ve experienced because I actually think it’s been a historic period for Canada and I’ve been right at the centre of it.”

Meanwhile, she can bask in the sendoff she received Jan. 25 from an Ottawa social media account known as @PoliLEGO. She’s shown as a yellow toy Lego figure in a red shirt and gray pants, standing at a podium in front of a photo of a government conference table inside Parliament.

“You haven’t made it in this business until you make it on @ polilego! Thank you for this wonderful surprise, and for continually showcasing the best of Parliament—humour, passion, and camaraderie. #cdnpoli” n Ellin Bessner is host of The CJN Daily.

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Jonathan Kay on the model Jewish immigrant who became one of New York’s vaudeville kings

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uring his early 20th-century heyday as a New York City showman, B.S. Moss (1878-1951) lived a professional life that was likely more intense than that of any modern movie executive. He found himself with more than a dozen theatres to stock with daily entertainment. Each hybrid show—part film, part live act—might involve hundreds of moving parts, from live dancers, jugglers, tumblers and musicians, to the technicians required to operate the still finicky and unreliable technology used to project films. Vaudeville content turned over rapidly, and critics could be scathing, taking pains to point out if a pretty actress looked overweight or a comedian seemed hung over.

Since many homes, businesses and hotels didn’t have tele-

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phones, merely getting hold of an actor or projectionist to fill an open date might take days. In one episode that made its way to a New York City entertainment columnist, a famous comedian touring the Midwest found out that he’d be starring in a B.S. Moss vaudeville show only after he saw his face staring back at him from an advertisement contained in a local newspaper.

Another complicating factor was the fragmented nature of the entertainment marketplace. The mass market was still in its infancy. Moss had to monitor and accommodate the particular tastes of each neighborhood in which he exhibited. New York City was a patchwork of immigrant languages. And what slayed the Irish might fall flat with the Germans. His publicity scrapbooks, some of them surviving in archives to this day, contain clippings in a dozen different melting-pot languages.

A dearth of quality films continued to present yet another problem. Even by World War I, the industry was taking its time about graduating from shorter novelty reels. Until the early 1920s, few Hollywood producers were making feature-length dramas. And when they did finally produce them in volume, another problem arose: the industry organized into vertically integrated anti-competitive trusts, which played their own movies at their own theatres so as to freeze out “independents” like B.S. Moss. It was a fundamentally anti-competitive arrangement that eventually would lead to a landmark 1948 Supreme Court judgment, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which had the effect of busting up Hollywood’s exploitative oldtime studio system.

And so Moss and his successors were required to navigate the industry’s vertically integrated, oligopolistic structure until well into the modern blockbuster era. The principal way of doing so was having enough seats in a circuit that the producers couldn’t ignore it. This made the struggle for market share all the more ruthless: You couldn’t get an audience without good films. And if you lost the audience, you’d lose the films, too. *** B.S. Moss’ life began in what is now the Polish town of Wisnicz.

He’d come to America as a small child, and began adulthood as a humble cloth sponger in one of New York’s many sweatshops.

Having achieved success and respectability in the entertainment business, he’d become a so-called “model immigrant,” and one who found his calling at a turning point in the history of North American Jewry.

Until the late nineteenth century, there had long been a relatively small, generally well-assimilated Jewish population in urban centers such as New York and Boston, making up a baseline community of about 300,000 in total. But these well-established Jews were completely dwarfed in number by the much poorer arrivals who showed up en masse during the last two decades of the twentieth century—men and women fleeing the anti-Jewish pogroms that tore through Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland.

The Warsaw pogrom, which took place just months after B.S. Moss and his family set sail for America in 1880, had played out in typical fashion: a fire scare at a crowded church had given rise to a deadly stampede which some claimed had been the deliberate work of pickpockets looking to prey on a panicky crowd.

When a baseless rumor spread that a pair of Jewish criminals had been spotted at the church, a mob attacked Jewish homes and businesses, and days of violence followed.

To the small, largely wealthy population of established American Jews, many of whose ancestors had come over from Germany generations earlier, these freshly arrived co-religionists could seem like migrants from another planet: tailors, peasants and laborers who grew up in ghettos or impoverished farming communities, often beaten down psychologically and physically within the semi-feudal societies of eastern Europe.

As Hadassa Kosak wrote in Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881-1905, many German Jews “regarded the East European immigrants as clannish, incorrigibly dirty in their everyday habits, overly inclined towards peddling, at best a source of social embarrassment, at worst a cause of antisemitism.” For their part, the new arrivals tended to re-

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ject the top-down bureaucratic oversight of established Jewish organizations in favor of the more informal, kin-based, landsmanshaft mutual-aid societies that grew out of their villages in the old country.

There was also a concern, foreshadowing more modern anxieties about Muslims, that the new arrivals would exhibit, in the words of one activist from the period, an excessively “rigid adherence to the rites of Judaism.” And so a sort of de facto segregation sprouted up within North American Jewry, with synagogues and civic institutions being dominated by either the old guard or the new arrivals. In most communities, this intra-Jewish cultural gulf wouldn’t be fully bridged until well into the twentieth century.

The divide between the two groups was not as simple as rich uncle versus poor cousin. Despite the massive gulf in wealth and refinement, the new arrivals brought with them a feisty capitalist spirit, a resource common to all waves of immigrants whose faculties are unleashed in lands of opportunity where they suddenly are unburdened by old-world tethers of faith, race and caste.

More generally, these Jews also brought with them a profound sense of the epic possibilities that the idea of the United States represented. Native-born Americans of the Gilded Age had witnessed numerous financial busts and panics, epic political scandals and the murder of two presidents within sixteen years, not to mention the Civil War, which had taken 620,000 lives (one in 50 Americans). Their America wasn’t the paradise that Hollywood’s largely foreign-born architects would encode in film.

B.S. Moss bridged the two Jewish worlds as a sort of perfect hybrid. On one hand, the historical record suggests that he spoke, dressed and wrote as a well-mannered gentleman of the era, essential qualities for a business manager seeking to lease and buy respectable theatres, raise capital and lure top talent into unproven new fields. On the other hand, he channeled the ambition, imagination, and patriotism of a man with humble roots, whose relationship with America remained in its honeymoon phase. This compound skill seems to have defined B.S. Moss’s personality. His entry in a century-old who’s-who volume called Distinguished Jews of America informs us that “Mr. Moss makes no pretenses…No frocks or frills about him; no affected airs…He looks down upon no one and treats everyone as his equal…a keen, intelligent and sober-minded man.” n Adapted, with permission, from Magic in the Dark: One Family’s Adventures in the Movie Business, by Charles B. Moss and Jonathan Kay. Published by Sutherland House.

Obituary: His shoes were made for walking: War vet Marvin Gord was a tireless fundraiser / Ron Csillag

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arvin Gord was determined to make a difference—one step at a time.

In 2020, the near-centenarian strode into virtually every headline and newscast in Toronto by announcing that he planned to walk one million steps to raise money and awareness for seniors’ care.

The “Marvin’s Millions” campaign was launched in the summer of 2020, with Gord’s lofty goal of raising $1 million—one dollar per step—by his 99th birthday on Dec. 31 that year.

This was catnip for media outlets, and Gord’s name and plan became an irresistible feel-good story. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and Toronto Mayor John Tory all joined in cheering Gord on.

Using his trusted walker, he estimated he would complete between 500 and 750 kilometers.

In the end, he exceeded his goal, walking 1.3 million steps, for a total of 991 kilometers.

His fundraising goal, however, fell short. He raised about $110,000 for the Baycrest Foundation’s SOS (Safeguarding Our Seniors) campaign for protective measures and medical equipment to safeguard residents, patients, and staff during the COVID pandemic; for equipment to treat patients remotely; and for patients and residents to connect with families.

His daughter, Lisa Hemi, said Gord regarded his achievement as “so ordinary. He really wanted it to help.”

Gord died at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital on Jan. 28, nearly a month after his 101st birthday.

He’d walked for years, averaging about three miles a day since surviving a heart attack in 1980.

“No matter what, I walk 20 miles a week,” he told a reporter in 2020. “If it’s not a nice day, I’ll go to one of the malls. It doesn’t matter whether I want to or not, I do it.” It wasn’t until he was 97 that he started to use a walker.

He challenged others to walk with him on his fundraising odyssey. “But you have to keep up,” he warned with a laugh.

He was inspired by English war veteran Tom Moore, who had raised money by completing 100 laps around his garden with the aid of a walker just prior to his 100th birthday.

“This guy has a garden just 25 metres long,” reasoned Gord, himself a Second World War veteran, in an interview at the time, “and it got him about 50 million bucks. So I thought ‘What the hell? I’m going to do about 20 miles a week, approximately,

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which is about 100 times what he does in a year. Maybe we’ll get a few million bucks too.’”

Gord was a polymath by any standard. Born in Toronto on the last day of 1920, he was a radar specialist for the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Air Force, in Germany, England and Italy during the war. He’d wanted to be a pilot but was disqualified for poor vision. It didn’t help that he was afraid of heights.

At war’s end, he studied at the University of Toronto and became a pharmacist. A dozen or so years later, he returned to U of T for a psychology degree, and then, at age 60, earned a law degree. He practiced law but did not like the work, and lasted about a year.

He was also an executive for large Canadian retail companies, including Simpsons and Peoples Credit Jewellers. At age 83, he completed the Canadian Securities Course, earning an A+.

On top of all that, he taught finance and human resources at Centennial College.

“The man is a Swiss Army knife of professional skills,” Baycrest once noted in a profile on Gord.

“I’ve had a million different jobs,” he said in the story. “But the best of the lot was as a college professor. I loved the kids and they loved me.”

Asked the secret to his longevity Gord told a reporter: “One shot of Johnnie Walker Black once a day.” To another journalist, he offered: “Just a gallon of Johnnie Walker Black a day.”

More soberly, he added: “I have no sugar and no salt in my diet and lots of fiber. It’s the way I live.”

Gord’s connections to Baycrest ran deep.

His grandmother, Yenta Maldover, was in the Ezras Noshem Society, which founded Baycrest’s predecessor, the Toronto Jewish Old Folks Home on Cecil Street, in downtown Toronto in 1918.

His mother, Eva Brownstone, volunteered for many years at Baycrest and was later a resident at its Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged. Gord’s wife, Nancy, was in palliative care at Baycrest and died in 2015.

Gord himself was not a resident but volunteered for Baycrest’s Brain Project memory clinic. According to the facility, he tested well.

“Thanks to Marvin’s Million, (Gord’s) children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will see how Marvin gave back to the community,” said Rafi Yablonsky, formerly manager of major gifts and donor development at the Baycrest Foundation, who told The CJN that he became “super close” with Gord.

“Everyone touched by him or his story will become upstanding citizens by following his example,” Yablonsky said. “Marvin was a remarkable man.”

Baycrest’s profile noted that in 2020, Gord directed a question about advice for the next generation to his grandson, Aaron Silver, who recounted his zayde’s words: “Don’t be afraid to take risks. You are only as good as your reputation and your word. Be generous with your time and money. And above all else, family is the most important thing in life.”

Gord is survived by three daughters, Lisa Hemi, Sharon Arbus, and Jemmie Silver; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren n With files from Susan Minuk Ron Csillag has written obituaries and more for The CJN since 1984.