Holocaust survivor dedicated himself to community

'He helped hundreds of people, financially, morally, in every way,' his only son remembers

Misha Wajsman was remembered this week as a Holocaust survivor who dedicated himself to perpetuating memory and improving the lives of others.

Wajsman, who died in the hospital this week at age 91, was born to a prominent family in the city of Lutsk, then part of Poland, now in western Ukraine. His father, Pinchas, was president of Mizrachi and a major sugar beet producer and sent Misha to college in Warsaw. He was studying pre-law there when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939.

After a lull in the fighting, Misha Wajsman returned to Warsaw to resume his studies, but when the Germans pushed east to invade the Soviet zone of influence he fled and ended up in the Soviet Union. He never saw his father or only sister again, both of whom perished.
He joined the Red Army as a junior officer in its transportation section and served until war's end. An avid athlete, in 1947 he won the Moscow table tennis championship at the Dynamo Sports club.
He and his wife, Dora Alperin, who lived in the neighbouring Polish town of Rovno, emigrated here from France in 1959. She died in 1995. Misha spent most of his working life as a sales manager in the wholesale meat business.

Wajsman and survivors from the same area established the Montreal branch of the Federation of Wolynian Jews. At its height, this self-help organization had a membership of 600 Montreal families. With survivors in New York and Los Angeles, they created a museum in the town of Givatayim, east of Tel Aviv, called Hechal Wolyn, a two-storey museum decided to the memory of Jewish life in the towns and villages they had abandoned.

"Every village has a room and there are files on many of the families who lived there," said his only son, Beryl Wajsman, editor of the Suburban and founding president of the Institute of Public Affairs, a social advocacy agency."His life was davke (committed) - you do because you've got to be engaged. He helped hundreds of people, financially, morally, in every way." Wajsman financed the translation into English of Yad Vashem's "Holocaust of Wolynian Jewry".
In the early 1960s, he saw two women crying at the Jewish cemetery on de la Savane Rd., his son said. They were bemoaning the lack of a monument with names of relatives and their towns, so they could recite prayers for the dead.He was instrumental in getting the monument built, as well as a memorial outside Lutsk where about 17,500 people were murdered by German soldiers.
He was also active in the campaign in the 1970s to allow the emigration of Soviet Jews and other pro-Israel campaigns, and was a vice-president of the Jewish Community Council. "Misha was not a prisoner of the past, he always lived for the future," Rabbi Reuben Poupko of Beth Israel Beth Aaron Congregation told a funeral service Thursday at Paperman & Sons. The campaign for Soviet Jewry was "a passion of his life" and he avidly supported Israel Bonds and Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, Poupko said.
Wajsman attended the Zichron Kedoshim Synagogue, which includes several merged congregations and the Anshei Ukraina - the congregation of families from Ukraine and what was once eastern Poland.

"He was a secular man, but traditional and loved cantorial music," Beryl Wajsman said. The family in Poland prayed at the so-called fortified synagogue of Lutsk (rebuilt after the war but no longer used as a house of prayer). That is where he heard some of the greatest cantors of the inter-war years and became a connoisseur of cantorial music, recalled Rabbi Avrohom Jacks of Congregation Zichron Kedoshim. Wajsman is survived by Beryl and daughter-in-law Nancy.

James Morton
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