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February 12, 2010
Vancouver to Tel Aviv
Lawyer and CGA mix work and volunteering.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Morris Soronow lives his life by the adage, “Your work should be your love made real.” For him, a lifelong Zionist married to an Israeli, this means living six months in Vancouver and six months in Tel Aviv. For him, a community-minded lawyer, it means splitting his time between practising law and volunteering.
Soronow and Anney Keil have been married 17 years. They met in Vancouver. She came here after national service, explained her husband in a phone interview from Israel, but she “always came back to Israel every year because her parents and her grandparents, etc., were all here. It’s home, and it never stopped being home in her heart.”
As for his own love of Israel, Soronow said, “I came from a very Zionistic home and my life experience taught me and convinced me, back in the sixties, when [Egypt President Gamal Abdel] Nasser was out to destroy Israel ... [so soon] after the Holocaust, that we Jews need and will always need Israel as an insurance policy. So I came here right after I finished my BA in April of 1966, and I was here from about a year before the war in ’67 till a few months after the war, when I returned to Canada to study law.”
At that time, Soronow stayed on a kibbutz, having completed his undergraduate degree in Winnipeg, where he was born and raised. When he returned to Canada, he attended law school in Saskatchewan.
“In ’69, just as I was finishing law school, I came back to Israel and was here for almost five months to see if I’d ever be good enough to make my living with my mouth; that is, to be a trial lawyer in Hebrew. And I could see that I’d never be that good in Hebrew, so I came to Vancouver and was called to the bar ... in ’71, but often came back to Israel.
“I can say I was always involved in the Jewish community. All the years that I’ve been in Vancouver, since May of 1970, I was always active. I was one of the original members of Beth Tikvah and still am a member of Beth Tikvah.”
Among other volunteer work, he was on the board of Canadian Jewish Congress for many years and chairperson of the volunteer organization Sar El for about six years.
“Likewise, Anney spent a lifetime volunteering in the Vancouver Jewish community, whether it was with the synagogue or with ORT or Hadassah, Talmud Torah, so Anney was also very involved with volunteering,” said Soronow.
In Israel, the couple helps at the food bank, and Keil, who is a chartered general accountant by profession, also works with Hadassah and ORT there.
“I think that’s the only way to make the world a better place,” said Soronow about why he volunteers. “I think I’m very privileged. Our sages always said that your work should be your love made real, and I have two loves in addition to my family: practising law and volunteering in the Jewish community and in Israel. And I find it tremendously satisfying.”
Soronow is a civil litigator, which allows him to work remotely for such long stretches. “All I do is trial work, litigation, that is,” he explained. “Because of underfunding for the courts, we’re booking trials two to three years out, and I book all my trials for the period between May 1st and November 1st each year.”
Soronow comes from a family with many lawyers. “I had a childhood where all I heard about was interesting cases,” he said, “so then I decided to become a lawyer and I’ve enjoyed the last 39 years.”
Soronow makes about half of what he did 20 years ago, but, “As I said, your work should be your love made real, and so it’s worth it in the sense that I practise law and I volunteer and I love doing both. Anney and I made a decision a long time ago that we were prepared to have a more interesting middle age and a less wealthy old age, and probably we’ll have to work until we’re both 75. That’s because our income from only really working in a lot of ways six months a year is significantly less than we would have made otherwise.... If we’d worked full time until now, I’m sure we’d be a lot wealthier, but then we wouldn’t have enjoyed life nearly as much, so I’d have to say it’s absolutely been worth it.”
He stressed, “Taking time off to volunteer doesn’t have to be something you only do while you’re in university and then, for the next 40 years, you don’t do it, and then you do it when you retire. If you want to do it, you can always make time to do it.
“For instance, the Sar El program is a marvelous program, but there are many marvelous programs here. On the Sar El program – or on many of the other volunteer programs – you come here and you volunteer, say, for three weeks, which is the minimum you do Sar El for, and you really do make a contribution to Israel.... If there’s any way to work it out, there shouldn’t be a gap from 25 to 65, where you might give to charity but you don’t actually come and do it on the ground, so to speak. I was 43 when I started doing this, and I’m going to be 65 in a few months.”
Soronow said that he and his wife have always donated as much as they could to Jewish charities, but they felt “that wasn’t doing enough, so we decided to come here.... If you can,” he added, “give more, even if you can’t come to Israel.”
He said, “People think that the world Diaspora, whether you’re giving to JNF or ... a hundred different other charities, if you add up all the money that’s given by the whole of the world’s Diaspora to every possible cause in Israel – and that excludes Israeli bonds, because that’s not a gift, it’s an investment, but if you exclude that, it’s only once in the last 40 years that the amount that was given by the world Diaspora to Israel has equaled a half of one percent of the GDP. This last year, in 2009, it is estimated, I saw an article on this, that it’s about one-fifth of one percent of the GDP [that] was donated by overseas Jews to Israel.”
It was in the 1990s that the amount reached half of one percent, when world Jewry rallied to help Israel absorb the Russians who immigrated, explained Soronow.
“One of the things I can tell you, living here, that upsets Israelis is when they start getting all sorts of advice as to what they should do in the peace talks from overseas people who donate a half of one percent in money and less than that in blood,” said Soronow, referring to the soldiers who have been killed in combat.
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