OLYAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-02-20 published
PEARLSON,
Rabbi
Jordan
On Tuesday, February 19, 2008. Loving father of Joshua
PEARLSON,
Nessa PEARLSON, and Abigail
PEARLSON-
OLYAN. Devoted Grandfather
of Rayna PEARLSON and Zachary
OLYAN. Dear brother of Melvin of
Boston, Stanley of Connecticut and the late Harrison of Boston.
Rabbi PEARLSON was the Founding Rabbi of Temple Sinai Synagogue.
He will be sadly missed but fondly remembered by all his family
and Friends. At Temple Sinai Synagogue, 210 Wilson Ave (East
of Bathurst) for service on Thursday, February 21st at 1: 30 p.m.
Interment Temple Sinai Section of Pardes Shalom Cemetery. Shiva
55 Ravenscroft Circle. Memorial donations may be made to Temple
Sinai Synagogue 416-487-4161.
O... Names OL... Names OLY... Names Welcome Home
OLYAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-02-27 published
Rabbi built congregation with warmth, chutzpah
For 40 years, he worked to build Toronto's second-largest Reform
synagogue and smooth relations among the faiths
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Toronto -- Jordan
PEARLSON once trained as a lawyer, but he ended
up a rabbi. Asked later in life how the two positions differed,
he proffered a typically talmudic response: "I now have a client
with whom I can consistently agree."
A stalwart of Toronto's Jewish community and a bridge-builder
to members of other religions worldwide, Rabbi
PEARLSON served
for 40 years as spiritual leader of Temple Sinai, the city's
second-largest Reform synagogue, and helped grow its membership
from 14 to 1,600 families.
Internationally, he twice held talks with Pope John Paul II,
financed kilns for ceramics produced by Ethiopian Jewish women
in Addis Ababa, developed the first multifaith service for the
Queen and Prince Philip, and took part in interreligious consultations
in Mauritius, Nairobi, Athens, Rome, London, Geneva, Amsterdam,
Prague and Baltimore.
At home, he was recalled for his keen mind and compassionate
ways.
"He was brilliant and inspirational from the bimah [the raised
platform in synagogues where the Torah is read] and wise and
warm in person," noted Temple Sinai's senior rabbi, Michael
DOLGIN.
"He was able to merge [those and] draw people in. People said,
'I want to be part of a community led by this man,' and when
they met him, they felt at home."
Once described by a mourner as "the divine interventionist in
our grief, with the wicked twinkle of Groucho Marx," Mr.
PEARLSON
was studying pastoral psychiatry at New York's Bellevue Hospital
when the dean of his seminary asked him to help out a small group
of Jews in the northern Toronto suburb of North York.
"It wasn't on the map but they knew it was there because they
had postmarks that said it was," he once told the Toronto Star.
He answered the call, moving north in 1954 while still a rabbinical
student. There were no hotels then in North York, so he had to
be billeted with individual families. Among the first locations
offered to the fledgling congregation was Asbury and West United
Church.
Temple records unearthed for a commemorative weekend honouring
Mr. PEARLSON in 1995 found the following entry in the October 4,
1954, edition of Time magazine: "One night last week, the doors
of Asbury Church were thrown open. Near the altar rested an ark
bearing the lighted tablet of the Ten Commandments. The Sabbath
candles of the Jewish service glowed near the centre of worship.
In a brief welcome to the temple members, Pastor Hunter extended
the best wishes of his congregation. Rabbi
PEARLSON responded
with thanks for the 'profoundly sensitive manner this gesture
of goodwill was made.' "
Two years later, Temple Sinai was constructed on Wilson Avenue.
"We built with a $25,000 loan from Holy Blossom Temple [Canada's
largest Reform congregation] and $425,000 of pure chutzpah,"
Mr. PEARLSON would recall. He was ordained in 1957, and within
a year, membership had zoomed to 367 families.
The congregation paid off the loan and a bank mortgage. Over
the years, to meet the pressures of growth, the temple's facilities
were enlarged and a school added. Like other Toronto synagogues
of the day, it grew with its surroundings, becoming an integral
part of a Jewish community that saw healthy growth in all its
denominations - Orthodox, Conservative and the liberal Reform
movement.
Mr. PEARLSON was born in a Boston suburb to immigrant parents.
His father, Jacob, arrived from Lithuania, served in the U.S.
artillery in the First World War and later ran a tiny tailor
shop. He was a devout Jew and one of the most influential figures
in his son's life.
"Deep inside my gut was a love I identified with my father's
love of Judaism," he once said.
It was a love leavened with respect for others. "He once told
me that he would rather I did not send his grandchildren to full-time
Jewish day schools," Mr.
PEARLSON told the Star. "He said, 'They
are going to live in the gentile world. We will see that they
get plenty of Jewish studies, but you make damn sure they know
how to live with their neighbours.' "
His mother, Frieda, was a native of Poland who came to America
as a child. Although she could speak only Polish and Yiddish
at first, she grew up in upper-crust Salem, Massachusetts., and
acquired a "perfect Boston Yankee accent she never lost," her
son remembered.
He studied engineering at Tufts University on a government program
and earned a certificate in military engineering but couldn't
find work because engineering firms weren't hiring Jews. So he
toiled in the clothing trade as a cutter's assistant while studying
electronics and math at Boston University, until rheumatic fever
sidelined him for a year. Temple records note that during his
illness, he had to be pulled around in a little red cart. But
the interval afforded him the opportunity to read, and books
of all genres poured into the household to stimulate his mind.
Because his illness kept him from being drafted, he was hired
by Associated Press to work in radio and wire photos, and was
later transferred to the agency's New York office. Unhappy with
the job, he returned to Boston and worked his way through Northeastern
University as an economics and psychology major while supporting
himself as a shoe salesman, Boston Globe copy boy and confirmation
teacher at a local synagogue. During the summers, he coached
swimming.
He went on to Northeastern's law school. "Shortly before being
called to the bar, however, he developed a distaste for the law,"
noted the 1995 program that honoured Mr.
PEARLSON's four decades
of service. "He had discovered that the man he was working for
was politically powerful and was receiving unwarranted favours
from one of the judges. Jacob
PEARLSON had instilled in his sons
a tremendous moral sense. He had taught them what was right,
and this was not their way."
So it was back to school for a divinity degree and ordination
from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. "My father was an academic
junkie," said his daughter, Abigail
OLYAN. "He could read a book
in less than an hour and lecture on it for two."
He also reached out to Christians at a time when Jews as a rule
did not. Toronto then was "very much a British colonial outpost
where people had a particular place on the social ladder, and
there was no question that the Orange Lodges ran the city," Mr. Pearson
said. "Just about everybody knew where they stood ethnically
and religiously on that social ladder."
Yet, he persisted. "There was no open dialogue, he used to say
to me," recalled his daughter. "He never understood why there
was this harsh division in a country that was becoming so multicultural.
Dad just really felt that conversation, open interfaith dialogue,
was critical so the past could never be repeated. He felt that
you can't keeping doing the same things and expect a different
result."
Prior to his many meetings at the Vatican with Roman Catholic
officials and the two with Pope John Paul, Mr.
PEARLSON would
bone up on his Catholic theology. "That's a cutting-edge effort,"
remarked Father Damien
MacPHERSON, director of ecumenical and
interfaith affairs for Toronto's Catholic archdiocese. "Jordan
had an endeared sense of the Roman Catholic Church, and of the
Pope. He had a great appreciation for [John Paul's] initiative
and efforts in Catholic-Jewish dialogue."
Indeed, the rabbi was heartened that the former pontiff took
anti-Semitism so seriously. "He loved the experience," his daughter
related. "Every time he would go abroad, he was thankful that
the cardinals and the Pope and his people were very concerned
about anti-Semitism. He said this Pope really felt the heartache
of what had happened during the Holocaust, especially when there's
so much Holocaust denial."
He was the Canadian go-to man for several religious groups, including
the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations,
which negotiates with the Vatican; the World Council of Churches
the African Council of Churches; and the Orthodox Christian Communities
of the Eastern Rites. He was the only rabbi to give the Chancellor's
Lecture in the history of the lectureship at Queen's University's
school of theology.
At his synagogue, he pioneered non-sectarian nursery school programs
for special-needs children, and started study and prayer groups.
He was voted an honorary citizen of Metropolitan Toronto.
He was saddened, however, by the cracks that crept into Canadian
Jewry.
"There was a time when the key Orthodox leaders could sit down
with the Conservative and Reform rabbis in a single rabbinic
fellowship," he said in 1995. "That disappeared about a decade
ago. Unfortunately, the Israeli impact has bled over into a divisiveness
on that front as well."
Jordan PEARLSON was born September 2, 1924, in Somerville, Massachusetts.
He died in Toronto on February 19, 2008. He was 83. He leaves
his wife of 49 years, Geraldine (Goldstein), brothers Melvin
and Stanley; children Joshua
PEARLSON,
Nessa
PEARLSON and Abigail
Olyan; and two grandchildren.
O... Names OL... Names OLY... Names Welcome Home
OLYAN - All Categories in OGSPI