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June 17, 2011
Jewish living on the Prairies
Calgary’s Glenbow Museum is collecting more cultural objects.
IRENA KARSHENBAUM
Every person has their idea of what constitutes an adventure. Some would consider a trek through Tibet as being pretty exciting. Others a shopping trip to Milan. Personally, visiting the archives of a museum is my idea of fun. Having loved museums all my life, I was thrilled when I was invited to see Calgary’s Glenbow Museum’s Jewish cultural collection.
Lorain Lounsberry, senior curator of cultural history at the Glenbow Museum, was my tour guide. Walking through the massive warehouse it quickly became apparent how much work Lounsberry had to do to prepare for my visit. It was no simple matter of walking into the archives and just finding objects and materials. The location of the items had to be researched in advance, given the vast size of the collection.
Among its many collections, Calgary’s largest museum houses about 100,000 objects that tell the story of how Canadians live their daily lives. The cultural history collection covers several ethnic and religious groups, including about 200 items from the Jewish community of southern Alberta.
Items are archived according to how they were used. Lounsberry started me off under the category of “faith” and I first got a look at a tallit belonging to Israel Ziselman. There are also tefillin, kippot and pharmacist Gerry Nep’s B’nai B’rith cap.
The most amusing item belonged to Boris Rochman, who, after having served in a hard labor camp in Siberia, managed to come to Calgary in 1957. Eventually, he bought Harry’s News and successfully invested in other real estate ventures. He donated one of his tie clips with the following letters: YCDBSOYA. What does it mean, I asked Lounsberry? We laughed at the answer she gave: “You can’t do business sitting on your ass,” she said.
So true.
Other practitioners of the YCDBSOYA-adage were the Cohen brothers, who brought Sony to Canada after the Second World War. Harry Cohen settled in Calgary and he, along with his wife, Martha, became major philanthropists. In fact, they were the first couple to receive the Order of Canada together. The archives holds a few items owned by the generous couple, including bronzed ballet slippers, which they received in 1987 in honor of their support of Alberta Ballet.
The oddest item that I saw that day belonged to Jacob Switzer. To avoid military service in the Russian army, he damaged his own hearing and had to use an ear horn for the rest of his life. It is believed that Switzer bought the item in Warsaw sometime around 1916. From the vantage point of a 21st-century technology, it’s difficult to imagine sticking something into your ear that resembles a trumpet.
Loving clothes and accessories, my favorite items are the handbags once owned by Marcia Goldberg, who was a driving force behind Calgary Hadassah-WIZO and National Council of Jewish Women for nearly four decades, starting in the 1920s. A few of her luxurious pieces have been left with the museum. I could almost see Goldberg stepping into her car in her lace-up boots, purse in hand, dress shimmering, wearing a fur coat, and driving to the Palace Theatre to hear violinist Jascha Heifetz perform.
There are also many connections to the Jewish prairie farming experience, something that’s close to my heart. The museum holds the original, and now very fragile, parochet (Torah ark curtain) from Beth Jacob Synagogue in the Sonnenfeld Colony in Saskatchewan. Ladies of
Rimon Calgary, a Jewish needlework guild, used this original parochet to create a replica that is now used by Little Synagogue at Calgary’s Heritage Park. The parochet was once owned by Sam Frohlich of Edmonton, who also donated the Torah ark from the Sonnenfeld Colony to the Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project.
Lounsberry explained that the museum is open to collecting more items, however, it accepts only about five percent of artifacts that are offered. “The item has to fit into the collecting plan to guide the growth of the collection, to keep it focused and it must be based on human history. Sometimes people are quite surprised as to what we do collect and don’t collect,” she explained. Lounsberry added that the key to acquisition is, “the story behind the item.”
If you have an object that you would like to have considered for Glenbow Museum’s cultural history collection, contact Lounsberry at 1-403-268-4152.
Irena Karshenbaum is the founding president of the Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project Society, a community project that donated one of the last surviving prairie synagogues to Calgary’s Heritage Park.
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