.
.
.
.
.
Nouvelles
Obituary: Victor Goldbloom '37
The Selwyn House community is saddened to learn that Victor Goldbloom ’37 died on the evening of February 15, aged 92.
Born in Montreal in 1923, Victor attended Selwyn House from 1931 to 1937. Afterward, he attended LCC and McGill, receiving his B.Sc. in 1944, his MD in 1945, his DipEd in 1950 and his D.Litt. in 1992.
Specializing in pediatrics, Dr. Goldbloom was assistant resident at the Babies’ Hospital of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York. In 1948, he married Sheila Barshay-Rothstein. Their sons, Michael, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Bishop’s University and former publisher of the Toronto Star and the Montreal Gazette, and Jonathan, founder and president of Jonathan Goldbloom & Associates, are also graduates of Selwyn House (1969 and 1972, respectively). Their daughter, Susan Restler, lives in New York. Victor, Sheila, Michael and Jonathan are all recipients of the Speirs Medal, the highest award given by Selwyn House.
Entering provincial politics in 1966, Victor was elected Liberal MNA for the Montreal riding of D’Arcy-McGee, and was re-elected in 1970, 1973, and 1976. He was the first member of the Jewish community to become a Quebec cabinet minister, serving the government of Robert Bourassa as Minister of State responsible for Quality of the Environment, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Minister of Environment. During his time in cabinet, Victor brought in the Environmental Quality Act and organized the Environmental Protection Service. In November 1976, he was placed in charge of the Olympics Installations Board. From 1991 until 1999, he was Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages.
In May of 2012, Victor was appointed by then Pope Benedict XVI to the Order of Saint Sylvester, an honour that is rarely bestowed up on a non-Catholic and has never been awarded within the Archdiocese of Montreal. Previous recipients include German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who was credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust. The award was given on the personal recommendation of Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, in recognition of Victor’s many decades of involvement in Christian-Jewish dialogue.
That same month, Victor received the Prix René-Chaloult from the Amicale des Anciens Parlementaires du Québec, an organization that recognizes the service of former members of the Quebec National Assembly.
Those laurels were added to a long list of honours, including: being named an Officer (later Companion) of the Order of Canada in 2000; being made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 1991; and receiving honorary doctorates from the University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, McGill University, Concordia University and the Université Sainte- Anne at Church Point, Nova Scotia. He received the James H. Graham Award of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 1996. In June 2009, the Quebec Community Groups Network established the Sheila and Victor Goldbloom Distinguished Community Service Award to recognize individuals who’ve made outstanding contributions to the vitality and understanding of English-speaking Quebec.
Throughout his public life, Victor has been described as someone who has brought people together and built bridges between Canada’s cultural communities. Between 1980 and 1987, he served as CEO of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. “We are a minority everywhere in the world except for Israel,” Victor told the Canadian Jewish Heritage Network in 2010. “The western world has been largely a Christian world. We were, for so long, excluded from participation in the Christian world.”
“When I was a student at Selwyn House, Christian-Jewish relations were limited and discriminatory,” Victor told Veritas in 2012. “Dialogue did not begin in Canada until 1947.” Since then, he says, Jews and Christians have made major achievements in understanding. The greatest challenge to relations today, he says, is “our respective perceptions of the Middle East and of the State of Israel.”
“When I was first elected to the National Assembly in 1966, it was the first time that more than one member of my community had served at the same time. In 1911, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier had made a commitment to the Jewish community of Montreal that the Liberal Party of Canada would always put forward a Jewish candidate in a Montreal riding. The same commitment was made at the provincial level. The barriers and the negative attitudes gradually disappeared in the aftermath of World War II and in the growing awareness of the tragedy of the Holocaust.
