KATZ o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-29 published
A champion of Canadian textile workers
By Barbara
SILVERSTEIN,
Special to The Globe and Mail Wednesday,
October 29, 2003 - Page R5
A pioneer in the labour movement within Toronto's once-vibrant
garment industry and an early advocate of basic social-welfare
programs has died at the age of 105.
As a union activist, William (Velvl)
KATZ survived blacklisting
in the 1920s to establish the embroidery local of the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union and later went on to co-found the
Labour League, a Jewish radical left-wing mutual-benefit society
that later evolved into the United Jewish People's Order.
"He was a man of integrity, intelligence and idealism," said
his daughter Ida
ABRAMS. "He held... an exacting moral standard.
If he gave his word, he meant it."
Mr. KATZ, who died in April of heart failure, was born in 1897
in a small Polish town just north of Krakow. He and his three
younger siblings were raised in the sheltered communal life of
Hasidism, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect. Mr.
KATZ studied at
a religious school and later apprenticed as a cobbler and had
almost no exposure to the secular world until 1918, when he fled
to Germany to avoid military conscription. In 1997, he told the
Canadian Jewish News that his life changed dramatically. In Poland,
the only books were religious, he said. "Suddenly there were
books on every subject imaginable."
By all accounts, Mr.
KATZ became caught up in the intellectual
fervour ignited by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. "He thought
communism would bring an end to anti-Semitism and all other forms
of discrimination and injustice," said Ida
ABRAMS. "He believed
the revolution was just around the corner."
In 1920, a cousin who was suddenly unable to travel offered Mr.
KATZ a free boat ticket and he arrived in Toronto with the address
of the relatives of a German friend. Mr.
KATZ became their paying
boarder. In the course of his stay, he courted their daughter
Bluma and married her in 1922. Two years later, he brought his
brother Ben and then his sisters Lil and Eva to Canada. Similar
efforts to bring his half-sister Esther failed and she did not
survive the Holocaust.
Around that time, Mr.
KATZ quit shoemaking and turned to the
garment industry where he took up union organizing. Eventually,
his reputation as a "lefty" alienated bosses and by 1924 he was
unemployed. Ida
ABRAMS recalls vivid memories of May Day parades
she attended with her father. "People marched with banners and
flags and sang union songs. There was always the threatening
presence of policemen on horseback."
His job problems ended in 1930 when Mr.
KATZ became a partner
in a modest embroidery shop on Adelaide Street. Although he was
an employer himself, he continued to support the efforts of the
labour unions. In those years, Mr.
KATZ campaigned for basic
social-welfare programs -- such as old-age pensions and unemployment
insurance -- through the Labour League Mutual Benefit Society,
a Jewish radical socialist organization he co-founded in 1926.
Mr. KATZ had initially belonged to the Workmen's Circle, an established
left-wing Jewish proletariat benefit society but in the mid-20s
it ruptured over ideological differences. Mr.
KATZ was among
a radical group that broke away to establish the Labour League
which, in later years, even ran political candidates. In 1945,
the league was renamed the United Jewish People's Order.
In its formative years, the Labour League established several
cultural institutions that still exist today: the Morris Winchevsky
School, the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir (formerly the Freedom Singing
Society), and Camp Naivelt, a collective of 90 cottages near
Brampton, Ontario The camp was a popular venue for folksingers
Pete SEEGER and Phil
OCHS performed there -- and it was where
the Canadian folk group The Travellers got its start.
United Jewish People's Order flourished until 1956, when Mr.
KATZ learned of the atrocities of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
and disenchantment set in. Instead, he supported institutions
in Israel, and the preservation of Yiddish culture. Through this
he became Friends with Canadian Yiddish poet Simcha
SIMCHOVITCH,
whose latest book Toward Eternity: Collected Poems, is dedicated
to Mr. KATZ.
Mr. KATZ, whose wife died in 1972, leaves his daughter Ida
ABRAMS
and his sister Eva
GANTMAN.
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