|
|
Nov. 1, 2013
Four generations of Peretz
Annual banquet on Nov. 17 honors Harold and Seemah Berson.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
This year’s Peretz Centre of Secular Jewish Culture annual banquet honors Harold and Seemah Berson. The poster for the Nov. 17 event features made-up captions, with Seemah “saying” that the Peretz community is throwing the couple a party, Harold asking if he’s invited and bemoaning a lack of anything to wear, and Seemah encouraging him to come anyway. Those who know the couple will be able to hear their voices, the possibility of such an exchange being very real. Married for 57 years, and involved with Peretz for that long, or longer, in Harold’s case, the comfortable joviality reflected in the poster suits the honorees.
The Bersons are a four-generation Peretz school/centre family. Harold’s parents were among those who founded the Peretz in 1945, and not only have Harold and Seemah long been part of the Peretz community, but so have their sons – David, Josh, Saul and Adam. Josh and Saul’s children had their b’nai mitzvahs there as well.
But that’s not the beginning of this story.
Seemah was born and raised in Calcutta. Though she arrived in Vancouver in 1954, she had left home two to three years earlier, traveling to England with a friend and the friend’s mother. Seemah returned to India, worked and saved; meanwhile, her friend moved to Vancouver. Seemah came here via the East Coast, stopping in New York to join in the wedding of another friend.
After only one year here, Seemah said she was “already making tracks to leave.” She was intending to travel to San Francisco to catch a steamship to Sydney, Australia, where she had friends with whom she could stay. It would be another several decades, however, before she (with Harold) would make it to Australia, as she met Harold before she could carry out her plans.
Harold was born in Calgary and came to Vancouver with his family when he was a boy. “There was a bit of a Yiddish renaissance in Calgary in the twenties,” explained Harold, who said that it was his mother who introduced his father to this renaissance after they were married. (His father was originally from Montreal; his mother, from Surazh, Russia.)
“When he was about six years old, he and his parents moved here with his brother [Morris], who was eight years older than him, and his brother used to go to the Peretz school in Calgary,” explained Seemah. “This was not the same kind of Peretz school as here.... The Peretz school came about here in ’45/’46, right after the war. These guys came in ’36 or ’37.”
Harold and Seemah met in late 1955. When his parents returned to Vancouver after the Christmas holidays that year, “we had already gotten to know each other well enough,” said Seemah. “We met at a square dance – we’ve never been square dancing since, that’s the joke.”
At the time, Seemah worked at Sweet Sixteen. She went to the dance with co-workers and friends she knew from the YWCA, where they were living (including Arlene Jackson, who has long been involved with Peretz, as was her husband, Soli z”l – Seemah introduced the two after she met Soli, because, she said, she knew Soli was perfect for Arlene and, it seems, he was).
“We had nothing else to do,” said Seemah about that night in November 1955. “It was a Saturday night, so three or four of us went and that’s where I met Harold. And, the rest, as they say, is history.”
Seemah later expanded somewhat, saying, “His mother and father came back in January or something like that from their holidays and, as my friends say, they came home to find a daughter-in-law practically on their doorstep, which is shocking for somebody from the Old Country. Anyway, we decided to get married in June [1956].... As Harold says, ‘I know my mind, I know what I want, you know what you want, what the hell [would we wait for]?’”
Seemah became involved in Peretz because Harold was involved there. “My parents were looking for a place where I could meet up with Jewish people,” explained Harold of what Jewish groups were active in the city when he was younger. “And there was the Jewish Community Centre on Oak and 11th and, in fact, that’s where the Beth Israel Synagogue met and where I received my bar mitzvah.” He later became involved with AZA (Aleph Zadik Aleph, the male youth branch of B’nai B’rith International, the female counterpart being B’nai B’rith Girls [BBG], the two in the mid-1940s becoming the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, which since 2002 is no longer part of BBI and is now known simply as BBYO).
“When he was that age, the end of his high school and beginning of university, he was taking care of and leading a couple of youth groups on Sunday morning, when I met him, at Peretz,” said Seemah. “After Sunday school ... the kids would be there, they’d bring a lunch or whatever and then he’d do activities with them.... They used to go here and there and do things.... They’d put on little plays, and he wrote plays for them. He was very active with the youth group.”
Harold said that his university experience was a disaster, as most of his friends, who were in AZA, were a year older than him. He wanted to skip Grade 12, therefore, and took summer courses that allowed him to do so. “I was so green. Actually, it was a bad mistake,” he said, lamenting the few years he feels he wasted, “not going to courses.”
Harold’s father was a manufacturers’ representative, and Harold went to work with his father. B.C. Directories Ltd. lists Harold as a salesman with H. Berson Agencies starting in 1952. He was a manufacturers’ agent for 20-25 years, he said, returning to university in the early 1970s.
Seemah returned to university to get her degree a couple of years after their youngest son, Adam, was born in 1963. She was taking anthropology at the University of British Columbia in 1972/73 when, a year or so later, she said, Harold woke up one morning and said, “I’m going with you.”
Harold started teaching after having attained his degree and doing his practicum in England.
“It was a very chaotic time in our lives,” said Seemah of this period. “If you look at the Bulletin in 1975, three of us in the family graduated: David graduated from high school, and Harold and I got our BAs. And then he went off there [to England] and he came back ... and I went off on a scholarship to India, and I had my heart attack over there. This is the same year, and Harold had to turn around and go to England to meet me at the airport there. They forklifted me onto the plane. So, it was a hectic time, the kids were all at home, they were going to school. I guess I was doing too much and, in those days, I smoked and he smoked....”
“Ah, the good old days,” quipped Harold.
In addition to all four of Harold and Seemah’s sons going to the Peretz school, both have been involved in numerous capacities at the centre over the years, including Harold as principal of the school and Seemah as president.
“In those days,” Seemah explained, “people at Peretz and UJPO [United Jewish People’s Order] were a community of people. Our social lives and our volunteer lives were all together. I mean, there was no way that I would have a party without inviting all of these people, or anyone else [would]. You went to social events with them, you went to movies with them, you had affairs at the Peretz that all of you worked with and contributed to. We were a busy people.”
Muter Farein was the Yiddish-speaking parents group to which Harold’s mother belonged, and the PTA was English-speaking, for the next generation of Peretz parents, including Seemah. “We didn’t do Pesach and Rosh Hashanah in those days,” she explained, “but we had banquets, we had parties, we had fundraisers, we had Fraytik tsu Nakht, not Frayitk, Ergetz Vu, we called it when Benny Chud was there, you know, Ergetz Vu, like on a Saturday night, [when you had] nowhere to go, you find a place to go, so you come. And we had people who came to speak, we had lots people ... and [we had to] feed them as well.” Harold recalled the choir singing, “120 kids up on the stage with Claire Klein [Osipov] conducting.”
About the future of the Peretz Centre, in light of what the Bersons have witnessed themselves, but also in light of the recent studies that have cause many in the larger North American Jewish community to be concerned about the future of
Jews and Judaism, Seemah noted, “Synagogues today, like Or Shalom [Renewal] and the Reform [Temple Sholom] ... they are accepting intermarried people and there is a place for them. Once upon a time, there was no place for them, so Peretz was there. Of course, they don’t even have to be that religious to belong to [those synagogues] ... whereas when we had as many people at Peretz, it was because, if you wanted to have a bar mitzvah at Schara Tzedeck [Orthodox], well, you can have it on a Tuesday, you know, four years down the road, it was that bad.”
Seemah expressed concern about Peretz’s future. “Saul and Josh sent their children to Peretz, but David’s kids grew up in Israel, Adam never had kids,” she said. “You look at all the people who were the bedrock from my generation ... [their] kids out-married or in-married, or whatever, became religious.”
Harold pointed out that earlier demographic studies conducted in the United States seemed to have benefited the Peretz Centre in that the local community leadership began to view the Peretz as a place to attract Jews who otherwise would have left the fold, or as a place particularly suited to being an entry point for Jews wanting to become more involved in Jewish life. He also noted that their eldest son, David, is currently working with Ben-Gurion University to raise funds here, “so they must know something about trends of populations to go that route. Maybe they see a backlash in the eastern United States and Canada. They went up to ... Gabriola Island, Camp Miriam, our kids ... namely David, are involved, and they’re helping out with the camp to see that it [keeps] going.”
Looking back at some of the family history captured in the Jewish Western Bulletin, the Bersons have contributed much to this community. Harold’s mother, Fannie, was involved in several groups, including the Women’s Progressive Club and Peretz’s Muter Farein. His father, Hymie, donated to various funds – notably, the War Chest and the Welfare drives – as well as being on boards, including that of the Vancouver Jewish Administrative Council. Both Harold and his brother were involved in any number of organizations and activities, from theatre groups to the Young Judaeans, community food drives and Camp Sholem.
Seemah was active both in her Calcutta Jewish community and here. She is a published author, including I Have a Story to Tell You (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010) and more than one children’s book, as well as being an artist (soapstone carving, stick-making and painting).
“So, my children, who are involved in things organizationally, come by it [naturally],” said Seemah.
Both the Bersons feel that they have lived a life true to their beliefs and to whom they are as people.
“It was a struggle,” said Harold, “but if you’re a believer, the struggle doesn’t count. It’s being a believer that’s important.”
Reservations to 604-325-1812 are required for the Peretz Centre Annual Banquet on Nov. 17, 6 p.m., with entertainment by Saul Berson and Friends, Judy Nicol-Smith, and Claire Klein Osipov and Wendy Bross Stuart. Tickets are $48 before Nov. 3, $54 Nov. 4-13; $25 for b’nai mitzvah grads under 25.
^TOP
|
|
