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September 5, 2003
Peretz alumni together again
Vancouverites join others from all across Canada for 90th anniversary.
MATT BELLAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Winnipeg
A little more than three years ago, Laurie Mainster started thinking
about holding an event that would make history.
A member of the board of governors of the now defunct I.L. Peretz
folk school in Winnipeg, he noticed that two groups of Peretz school
alumni applied successfully for grants that year from the Peretz
school trust fund that the board oversees. Each group had held a
class reunion and Mainster was impressed with the "terrific
time" they reported having.
Those two gatherings persuaded him it was time to hold a 90th anniversary
reunion for the whole school, a mainly Yiddish-language institution
that merged with the Hebrew-language Talmud Torah in 1983.
Mainster, a longtime advertising professional and Jewish community
leader, drew on his expertise in both areas. He took the lead in
setting up an administrative/planning committee that would eventually
have more than a dozen subcomittees and about 40 volunteers.
"I told them it would take three years to get organized,"
he said of planning for the event, which happened in three stages.
With the windup of the I.L. Peretz folk school's 90th anniversary
reunion in Winnipeg Aug. 4, he got a clearer idea of the historic
impact that gathering has had.
"The reaction we got from the alumni attending was overwhelming,"
noted Mainster, chair of the July 31-Aug. 4 event. "They thanked
us profusely."
About 250 guests from out of town attended a series of gatherings
of former students and some teaching staff. And 750, the most at
any single reunion event, sat down for the Saturday night dinner.
For Mainster, the most gratifying part of the five days was watching
Peretz school friends from decades ago meet again.
"People were saying, 'I hadn't seen someone in over 50 years
and we met again.' A guy put 20 names on his computer address book.
They're going to e-mail each other, starting an association they
never had before."
The gathering started with Thursday night registration at the Asper
Jewish Community Campus and a chance for old Peretz school buddies
to shmooze. It continued with a Friday night program at Congregation
Etz Chayim, highlighted by a sing-song of Yiddish favorites. Saturday
night, participants enjoyed a star-studded concert at the Pantages
Playhouse Theatre, featuring Peretz school alumni who've become
successful as U.S. entertainers, along with a local choir specially
organized for the event. Sunday saw the opening of a Jewish Heritage
Centre exhibit on the history of Yiddish and the role Peretz school
played in keeping that language and culture alive.
The reunion dinner that night featured an open mic, where alumni
and a former principal shared stories and songs from Peretz school.
The celebration continued Monday morning with a bus tour of Winnipeg's
"Jewish North End" and ended with a reception at the University
of Manitoba in honor of the Yiddish program started there only last
year.
Long lost friends repeatedly expressed joy at having the chance
to come together again.
Sharon Love, a member of the reunion's registration committee, talked
about that as she stood in line with hundreds, waiting to get into
the Saturday night concert.
"We met at Kelekis [restaurant] today," Love recalled.
"Some of the Simkin family (from here and out of town) were
also there having lunch."
For Love, it was especially moving to see alumni Chassie Winocur
Margolis and her sister, Layah Laks, both from California and over
80 years old, at the reunion with Layah's daughter, Esther Rubin.
"Thank you to Layah's daughter, who understood the importance
of enabling her to be here, and to make sure her aunt got here,"
said Love.
The Selchen family, longtime pillars of the Peretz community, was
one of many that showed up in force. Danny Selchen, a neurologist,
flew in from Toronto to join his brother, Moshe Selchen, a retireed
Talmud Torah/Peretz school principal, and their mother, Rivke, a
Winnipegger. Their aunt, Leah Selchen, flew in all the way from
Israel, especially for the reunion. Danny and Moshe's father and
grandfather served as presidents of the Peretz school; Rivke was
in the school's Muter Farein mothers' organization.
"I just found myself pretty much in tears a couple of time
because of the memories it brought back," Moshe Selchen said
of the reunion.
The five-day gathering "rekindled a lot of memories" for
Danny Selchen, too.
A "secular spiritualism ... permeated the atmosphere of the
school," he said. "A lot of us felt a passion about the
whole subject."
"We felt we had teachers like parents," recalled Hannah
Brownstone Hirt of Vancouver, a Peretz school kindergarten teacher
in the late 1930s. "Everyone cared about every child."
John Feld, another reunion participant, attended the Peretz school
in the 1950s with his late brother, Vic, his identical twin.
Now living in Toronto, Feld recalled the many Holocaust survivors
teaching at the school in that era.
"I jokingly called Peretz school the zeks milyon (six
million) school" said the former student, who describes himself
as a Marxist-Leninist. "I had a sense of the injustice of the
world, the persecution of the Jews.... One of the things I'm really
ashamed of – we were so mean to our teachers. Some of them
would hit us. One would pull your hair – and they would smoke
in the classroom."
The atmosphere at the school was so casual, teachers let Feld and
his best friend at the time, Brian Ostrowe, "marry" each
other in a ceremony on the school playground. Their Grade 5 classmates
helped plan the wedding.
As for Mainster and his committee, the reunion is over, but their
work isn't.
"We'll have a meeting in two or three weeks, once things settle
down," he said. "Personally, I'd like to see if we can
send out a newsletter to everybody, with input from everybody."
The committee also oversaw the publication of a reunion souvenir
book – edited by Sharon Chisvin and produced by Jewish Post
and News business manager Bernie Bellan.
A video of the whole reunion has been made and the committee is
considering producing a one-hour version of the concert alone.
"Peretz school instilled in its pupils this desire for community
events and love of the Yiddish language," Mainster said, summing
up why the five-day affair drew so many people from North America
and a few from other countries, too. "It was such a wonderful
institution."
Reprinted with permission from the Winnipeg Jewish Post and
News.
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