100 Years of Sisterhood, Interviews with Past Presidents

Video Produced By: Ontic Media Inc, Evan Beloff.

Transcript

Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold: In a synagogue such as ours where there is designated space, different experience, for women in our sanctuary, in our prayer spaces, it is essential that we have ways to carve out opportunities for women’s voices to be heard in ritual moments. In moments of prayer, in moments of teaching Torah, and one of the most powerful things that we do on a Shabbat is Sisterhood Shabbat. I love Sisterhood Shabbat because we get to see a wide variety of women coming up to the bimah, sharing their insights, offering prayers, being able to give voice to women’s spiritual moments.

[HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN SISTERHOOD]

Nicole Kremer: How did I get involved in the Sisterhood? Actually, Milly Lande had asked me to translate some of the panels for the exhibitors in French.

Marjorie Kirsch: From the beginning I was a part of Laura’s presidency—Laura Roditi—and it was at the time when Lynn Eltes did the mishloach manot program.

Sheryl Shuchat: So, my inauguration began with my marriage. When I married Elliott, I was invited to partake in the Shaar, and it became my community and an avenue to learn Torah and develop wonderful friendships. It was way of giving back to institution that has given me so much.

Alice Lehrer: I got involved at a very busy time in my life, but when Rosetta Elkin took me for lunch and convinced me somehow to become president of the Sisterhood.

Rita Finestone: The late Jeanette Abrams, David Abrams’ mother, she co-opted me and insisted I had to be the next president.

Oro Librowicz: Well Sheryl Shuchat who was the co-president of Sisterhood at the time (2017), approached Enid and myself to see if we were interested.

Enid Backman: When Sheryl approached me my first reaction was “Sheryl, why? Why would I want to do this? It’s not my cup of tea.” “No, no, you’re gonna see, it’s gonna be fabulous. Oh, wait and see.” So, I went “ok Sheryl, I trust you.” Trust was the first step forward.

Farla Cohen: Rosetta Elkin who was a mainstay here in those days prevailed upon me to take this job.

[WHAT DOES THE SISTERHOOD MEAN TO YOU?]

Diane Cohen: Naomi Kassie was very involved. She was a friend of my mother’s and she called and asked me if I would get involved.

Nicole Kremer: Well, you know it’s a longstanding history. It represented steadiness for me.

Stephanie Oboler: I think it’s community, its drawing the rest of the synagogue into another group.

[WHAT PROGRAMS DID YOU FOCUS ON?]

Marjorie Kirsch: First I want to say, Sheryl thinks out of the box, and I do not, so we were a perfect match that way. She would suggest something and I’m like sure. Because I couldn’t visualize it.

Nicole Kremer: When I became Sisterhood president, I invited Richard Marceau, a Canadian politician who then became a Jewish activist, and we learned a tremendous amount.

Marjorie Kirsch: And we did a lot of art programs. [Addressing Sheryl] I’m going to let you talk about them because they were really your babies, but it honestly the best was working with Sheryl.

Sheryl Shuchat: Aw.

Nicole Kremer: It drew so much record attendance that actually the men asked me if they could attend the Sukkot luncheon.

Sheryl Shuchat: We had over 40 Shaar members display their works. It was sculpture, crafts, paintings, jewelry, it was a plethora of talent.

Stephanie Oboler: We used to do book club, we used to do lunches, we used to have—every month we used to have the Sisterhood meeting, it was fabulous! We used to have needlepoint, we—and everyone wanted to come.

Carole Zuckerman: And I’ve always had a love of decorating and renovation as well, so the table settings meant a lot to me. For we could create and ask for table-setters and auctioneers to offer and show some of the things that they had.

Lisa Gallant: But it was also a great community event to raise money for meals-on-wheels. It took us a year to organize, but it was just a fun community event.

Stephanie Oboler: Til’ the middle of the night!

Lisa Gallant: yeah!

[Laughs]

Stephanie: It was great.

Farla Cohen: I created programs studying the Bible, I had rabbis come in to talk, financial groups.

Alice Lehrer: We started Youth Shabbat and I had seen Youth Shabbat in other synagogues, and I felt that this was a great way to bring new families.

Rita Finestone: Well, since I knew nothing about Sisterhoods, my first, the first thing I did was to invite the presidents of all the Sisterhoods of every synagogue in Montreal, of all denominations to come to a luncheon to Shaar Hashomayim. We created a newspaper, and I forget the name of the newspaper, hopefully somewhere in the archives there is a name. But in the newspaper, we had a gossip column, and the editor of the gossip column was called Susie…what’s her name…Gantzermacher!

Carol Koffler: Well, I was very fortunate to be the Sisterhood president on the 60^th anniversary which is exactly 40 years ago. Sisterhood in the States had done a tapestry for their anniversary, so we discussed it before we went to sleep that night. And we said, well why can’t we do something like that? We finished the tapestry; it took a year. And we did, we went through many, many steps to get to the final product and we’re very proud every time we go up and down the stairs to the main sanctuary or down here to the reception floor to look at it and I always look at my two squares to see if they’re still there.

Judy Caplan: Two of the areas that were of particular interest to me were meals-on-wheels and mishloach manot. I took inspiration from my dear friend Sylvia Schneiderman in the volunteer Kosher cooking kitchen operated twice a week throughout the years.

Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold: I look forward every year to the Sisterhood Sukkot luncheon and I love walking around the Sukkah with the lulav and etrog, handing it to women who are eager. Everyone always [motions smelling the etrog] gives that smell of the etrog and they’re so eager literally to take hold of the holiday. People often ask me about the covers of the Torah, the mantle, and sometimes when I bring our pre-schoolers into the chapel, I show them that each one of these covers represents a different one of the holidays throughout our Jewish calendar. So, it’s an education tool really, in addition to kind of functioning as part of our Judaica, part of our ritual life in the synagogue.

Oro Librowicz: Sisterhood Shabbat, chaired by Esther Marovitch, those were so well-attended and the atmosphere was wonderful, joyful, like the Sukkah luncheons, by the way.

Enid Backman: Yeah, yeah.

Oro Librowicz: It was such a joyful atmosphere.

Rita Finestone: Somebody came up with the idea that maybe we should have a bridge game which was unheard of. So, my brother was the rabbi, so he was horrified! I mean, it was like thinking about having a gambling den or something like that!

[HOW HAS THE SISTERHOOD EVOLVED OVER THE YEARS, AND WHAT IMPACT HAS IT HAD?]

Rita Finestone: You see Sisterhoods in those days were created to raise money for the synagogue.

Carole Zuckerman: Oh, I think the Sisterhood at the early stages when we were on impacted the Shaar in that we had a wonderful and fabulous group of volunteers.

Stephanie Oboler: We used to get great speakers.

Carole Zuckerman: Mhm.

Stephanie Oboler: It was good.

Carole Zuckerman: I forgot that as well.

Lisa Gallant: When I was Sisterhood president, we had cooks and chefs come.

Farla Cohen: My goal really was to try and keep everyone together.

Carole Zuckerman: That was very important to us to do some charity work when we had some free time.

Stephanie Oboler: But I think it was social as well! We laughed, we cried.

Lisa Gallant: We laughed, we cried,

[Laughs]

[FONDEST MEMORIES]

Alice Lehrer: My fondest memories are of the synagogue being full of many people, many young people. Feeling the camaraderie of achieving some important goals.

Carole Zuckerman: It was really our Shaar Hashomayim family when we were here, we felt extremely comfortable, I really did feel like it was my home.

Farla Cohen: Well, the fact that the women were involved. They were interested and that we raised a lot of money.

Carol Koffler: And I’m still here!

Judy Caplan: I’m proud of my time volunteering in so many areas at the Shaar. And it is my hope that as a community we find new ways to engage the many people eager to become involved in our congregation.

Michaela Meltzer: I became the Sisterhood president in 2019 and we did two in-person programmes and then Covid hit and the world shut down, and the Sisterhood shut down, and the shul shut down. So, we moved our programming online – so the last two years everything’s been online. And—the Sisterhood being such an integral part of Shaar Hashomayim it was really important that we did some programming online and it was just a way to connect people, make people feel part of a community when everyone was so alone and isolated. So, we’re really proud of the last two years of programming and I just look forward to passing the baton to the next generation and so we can thrive for another 100 years of Sisterhood!

[Music plays]

[L’dor V’ Dor may we go from strength to strength.]

[Credits roll]