Scholarship@Western

For Michael Biderman, who attended Hebrew school and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah here, the B\u27Nai Moses Ben Judah Synagogue congregation was like family

Carbonneau, Elizabeth

Tran, Leanna

My name is Michael Biderman, and I and my family were members of the B’Nai Moses Ben Judah Synagogue here at the northeast corner of Horton and Colborne. And this is where I went to Hebrew school, and this is where I was Bar Mitzvahed.
Everybody knew everybody else. You weren’t a family, but you were a family. It was just part of the family that was B’Nai Moses Ben Judah Synagogue.
One of the founding families in the city, at least from the B’Nai Moses Ben Judah family, was the Silverstein family. My parents were friendly with several of the kids, and the grandmother lived with them on Chalmers. And I can remember (because my parents were very close with this family) that we would go visit, and you know, say hello to this bubbe, which is Jewish for “grandmother,” Bubbe Silverstein. And we were so close that, at the synagogue I was at, there would be a Chanukah party, and the original tradition was to give money as a present. But I remember Bubbe Silverstein would give Chanukah geld to all of the Hebrew school. And everybody would get a – I think it was a – silver half-dollar. And because we were like family, we got a silver dollar. [laughs]



English

Story 34 Michael Biderman Interview

Matthew Trueman recalls hopping over construction zone fences to photograph the demolition and final days of the South Street Hospital

Anderson, Katie

My name is Matthew Trueman. I am a London based artist.  You are currently standing on the former site of the South Street Hospital.
So South Street Hospital I just found it on one of my wanderings. And the landscape just made for excellent photos. It was this very massive completely abandoned structure by the time I found it. It had the river on the one side and this big beautiful cliff, and all these big mature trees. And the architecture was just sort of insane because this clearly was built for the posterity, and it was modernized over and over again, but the different add-ons reflected the architecture of the periods. You had this jumble of architecture. I just kept kind of visiting it over and over again.  And it wasn’t until it started getting torn down that I realized that I was the only person who was either brave or dumb, probably the latter, but dumb enough to hop over the fences and just wander around this place and take photos.
As the building got torn down you get these insane juxtapositions of inside and outside. This rough tangled exterior of bent rebar with these calm neutral colours of the pastels that coated the inside of the building. I realized that this sort of scene is being taken away; you can never build it again.
It was January, and they must have torn out the entire interior of the building. So you have these mountains of old personal objects, like desks and chairs, and I think that was really important because it gives you something to relate to when you look at the photographs, where you can picture yourself sitting at one of these desks, because everyone sat at one of these generic wooden office desks before. There’s just a mountain of them all jammed together in front of this massive relic of a building.
It wasn’t really about me or my photos or any one person building the hospital, it was just this organism that developed and everyone sort of had a hand in it. Even if you just drove by, you imprinted it into your psyche as this large building that makes up part of the London skyline. I think it reflects the lived experience of everyone who interacted with it.  And really, everyone in the neighbourhood knew about the hospital, even if they were fortunate enough not to have to go there. It was also just part of this sort of infrastructure of the neighbourhood. I felt like the hospital had existed for so long and evolved for so long it was kind of like that, like a tree in a park. It feels like it is a community tree.
I got permission from the hospital to be on the property for the final days of the demolition and talking to the different people from the hospital, I did get a real sense that a lot of people, this hospital was very meaningful for them.


Story 27-1 Matthew Trueman Interview

Joan Sam believes the Fugitive Slave Chapel belongs to the whole community, and has a vision for people to come together and tell its story in different ways

Bjornstad, Katrina

I am Joan Sam. I am a mother, a wife.

I am not actually inside the Chapel, but I am outside. The church itself, now moved to Grey Street, was actually built in 1847 for a safe haven for the fugitive slaves and also to help settle all the Black community and the refugees who lived in that area.

I had a vision. Instead of just tell the story of slavery, why don’t I just turn this in a very positive way, where everybody can be involved. The church is the history of London. It belongs to everyone of us. It’s not me being Black, it’s not me being Asian or you being white or whatever, it’s London history. So I decided to start reaching out to the community. I have this picture of where we can all come together and tell the story in a beautiful way if you write a song, a poem, a hymn, draw the chair, paint the chair, whatever you feel like doing. I hope the project can be on display just to touch the lives of the community in a positive way and not just look at the chapel as this raggedy, broken frame. I want them to see community at work. That’s the beauty, that’s what Canada is.


Story 17-1 Joan Sam Interview

Beryl and Noam Chernick remember their wedding day and reception at the B\u27Nai Israel Synagogue

Beryl: My name is Beryl Chernick.

Noam: And my name is Noam Chernick.

Beryl: I am standing in front of B’Nai Israel Synagogue, now known as the First Church of the Nazarene. We married here at the end of June of 1958. It was 90 degrees in Fahrenheit [laughs]. There were many guests – 

Noam: –like, two or three thousand.

Beryl: My mother had invited everybody! We got married at two in the afternoon so that everyone could invite everybody’s everybody. And then we had sort of a reception that included being outside and inside. Because it was a Friday, it was the Sabbath in the evening, and so we had a dinner in the auditorium for the family and out-of-town guests. Immediately after the ceremony, the bride and groom have a time called yichud, which means that you’re apart from other people. And we had been fasting, and we were served this amazing chicken soup, which we ate in the Rabbi’s study, and there’s a picture of us eating in the Rabbi’s study before they left us alone. [laughs]


Story 23 Beryl & Noam Chernick Interview

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/hearhereopening/1001/thumbnail.jp

Recker, Christian

Executive Director Speaking at Launch

When they were children, artists Paul Peel and Mildred Peel were set artistic contests by their father

Tovey, Mark

Yes, that was the habit of John Robert Peel to set assignments to Paul and Mildred: drawing assignments. And one that is recorded, he told them to go and draw a picture of two boys fighting and the reward for the one he liked best was actually to be a Jew’s Harp he’d brought back from from the local novelty store.
And, when the drawings were completed he preferred Paul’s, and he took a rather male chauvinistic view of Mildred’s contribution because he teased her by saying only a girl would draw two boys fighting but pulling each other’s hair. And that struck me as a rather unfair reason for denigrating her drawing compared to Paul’s, but I’m sure there were occasions where Mildred fought back and won the gift, the prize, for something else that she had drawn in these little contests.
And of course this was a valuable training for the children to see that it was worth putting effort into really creating something that fulfilled the mandate, the specification. And, of course, they were producing works for customers, so why not do exactly what the customer asked for?


Story 4-1 Pamela Glew Interview

The surprising place the finish carpenter got his tools from

We had one new house in our 51 years of marriage. And we lived there for I think two years, three years maybe. And I distinctly did not like it. So ever since then we've lived in an old house you know just that feeling of you're going back to another era and you find it very comforting to live in an old house and old houses have a lot more charm in my opinion than new houses. In the back of the house we did a complete renovation and it had been student housing for a period of time so students they were pretty hard on the house so when we looked at the moulding, a lot of the moulding really had to be replaced because it was so chewed up.
The contractor was also a finish carpenter. So there is a wonderful story about how he found the tools and had the moldings made. When he found a guy up in I think Ilderton, Lucan or Ilderton anyway who had gone around funeral homes you know closed their doors. This guy bought up all their cutting tools because in Paisley and places like that the funeral director made the caskets and then to keep people busy they made moldings for houses they made trim for the outdoors and so on.
And so our contractor found this guy and the guy rummaged through and said "I've got the cutting tools". He was able to duplicate the boards exactly. See these are 16-inch baseboards and all the molding around the doors that had to be replaced and even molding on the outside of the house they were able to cut and fit exactly the way it was. It was quite amazing actually.


Story 8-3 David Bratton Interview

New homeowners contend with a difficult situation

I was looking for an older house because new houses don't interest me and never have. And the real estate agent mentioned that she had one available up in north London on Sydenham street. She unfortunately was a little hesitant to show it to us because there were some problems with the owners of the house and the sale of it. It involves a divorce and the wife in the divorce was the owner of the house and in order to get her husband that she had to sell the house but the husband wasn't keen to leave and he did have a gun in the house over the fireplace and our real estate agent was very hesitant to go into the house or to bring us into the house.
But I said nope we'll go, she said well I'll check it out to see if he's home or not home. If he's not home, we can go in and I said okay fair enough. But he was not home and we so we came in and I probably wasn't more than three feet inside the front door when I announced to her I want this house.
We took possession of the house on the, about the 22nd of December. We had the key and wanted to get into the house but the keys would not open the lock. So we tried the back door only to find that there was no lock in the back door but on the inside there was a huge deadbolt that had been pushed over. Now it was a barrel barrel lock when you push the tumbler over and there was no way short of breaking down the door that you're going to get in there. So I said well maybe he's out doing something, he's coming back he's having breakfast or something. So we borrowed a snow shovel from our neighbours next door and started shoveling the walk. After about an hour there was still no return of this man. So I thought this is not a good situation. I borrowed a coathanger from the neighbour next door and eventually by poking through the hole where the yellow lock had been, with a bent coathanger, I was able to snag the bolts locking it, pull it back and get the door open. So we finally get into the house and the first thing I did in the next 5 minutes was flew over to a hardware store over here just about a block and a half away and buy two new locks. So what he had done, he had come back either really late Friday night or had come back really early Saturday morning and had changed the locks. So he put his own lock on so that whoever bought the house couldn't get in. So that was an interesting introduction to our new home.


Story 6-2 John Doe Interview

Martha Murray tells a story about her grandfather Ken Murray\u27s trip to Chicago

Story 3-1 Martha Murray Interview

Reg Quick tells the story of exploring the dark storm sewer on Colborne Street with other children in the community

Campbell, Sean

Western University 
Scholarship@Western 
Hear, Here Oral History Interviews Hear, Here London 
2019 
Story 28 Reg Quick Interview 
Sean Campbell 
Western University 
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/oralhistories 
 Part of the Digital Humanities Commons 
Citation of this paper: 
Campbell, Sean, "Story 28 Reg Quick Interview" (2019). Hear, Here Oral History Interviews. 41. 
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/oralhistories/41 
Reg Quick’s story comes from the London Public Library’s Oral History Heritage project. 
______________________________________________________________ 
I remember, for instance, the storm sewer that was built on Colborne Street. It was a new sewer 
built at the time, and us kids used to get in the entrance where it came into the river down there. 
And we’d walk up two or three blocks, y’know? It was nice and clean, y’know, and we were 
small. But it would be pitch dark, you’d take a lantern of some sort. I don’t think we had 
flashlights then, I don’t remember them. We used to have some of these lamps, lanterns that 
almost looked like the railroad man had or something. We’d go up there and I remember one 
time we got up there, must have been up three or four blocks up the street. We heard this kind of 
a roaring noise and we thought the river, the water was going to come to us. Instead of that, it 
was somebody opening up one of the manhole covers. Of course, we dodged back to it. One fella 
swiped some pigeons one time and he kept them down there. Then of course, it got to be used so 
we never saw them. 


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