By Michael Regenstreif
The Soloway Jewish Community Centre (JCC) began a series of “community conversations,” October 17, with an extraordinary evening featuring the Honourable Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada, one of this country’s most accomplished and impressive individuals.
Guided by moderator Adam Dodek, a University of Ottawa law professor and a member of the Soloway JCC board of directors, Abella talked about her life, her family and her work with wit, humour and emotion, displaying an astonishing memory as she recalled people, incidents and cases – even the minute details of cases and case law (whether she was involved in them or not) – with ease.
Abella was born in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany in 1946. Her Polish Jewish parents had been married in 1939. Her father, Jacob Silberman, a lawyer, was liberated from Theresienstadt, while her mother, Fanny, had survived several Nazi camps and was liberated from Buchenwald. They were reunited after the war. In the DP camp, her father represented the legal interests of fellow residents.
When the family came to Canada as refugees and settled in Toronto in 1950, Silberman discovered he was ineligible to practise law because he was not a Canadian citizen. He became a successful insurance agent, but young Rosalie determined then she would grow up to become a lawyer. One of the most poignant and emotional moments of the evening came when she discussed the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the provision that only citizens could practise law in Canada. Wiping a tear away, she said she wished her father, who died in 1970, had still been alive to see that day.
Also a classical piano prodigy, she graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1964.
By then married to historian Irving Abella – who would later co-write the essential book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, and serve as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress – Abella graduated from the University of Toronto law school in 1970 and established a practice in civil and criminal law.
In 1976, at age 29, Abella was appointed a judge of the Ontario Family Court, where she broke ground as the first Jewish woman to become a judge in Canada, the youngest ever judge in Canada and the first pregnant judge in Canadian history.
Her later judicial appointments – among many other accomplishments – would include the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992 and the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.
Abella was the sole commissioner of the federal government’s 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment. In her report, she coined the term “employment equity” and conceived the equity strategy of removing barriers to employment faced by women, aboriginal peoples, visible minorities and the disabled. A Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 1989 added Abella’s recommendations to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – and those recommendations have also been subsequently adopted by the governments of several other countries.
The stories and anecdotes Abella told kept the full house enthralled. She was particularly inspired when she talked about her parents and how they built new lives for themselves in Canada after surviving the Holocaust. Relatively late in life – after she was widowed – Abella’s mother became a successful real estate agent in Toronto.
Abella said her parents, who lost their first child in the Holocaust, never allowed the tragic events they lived through cast a pall over their lives. The Silberman home, she said, was the happiest of anyone she knew growing up.
Abella said she feels very much a part of Ottawa’s Jewish community, noting that her grandchild attends the Soloway JCC’s Ganon Preschool. She also took great pride in mentioning that her two sons, Jacob, who was in the audience, and Zachary both grew up to become lawyers.
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