{"id":25008,"date":"2017-06-30T03:48:04","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T10:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=25008"},"modified":"2017-06-29T22:32:27","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T05:32:27","slug":"pivotal-role-in-pier-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2017\/06\/30\/pivotal-role-in-pier-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Pivotal role in Pier 21"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ruth Goldbloom stands in Nation Builder Plaza in front of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. (photo from CMI at Pier 21)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The museum at Pier 21: National Historic Site opened on Canada Day, 1999. Built to commemorate the almost one million immigrants who passed through Halifax\u2019s Pier 21 between 1928 and 1971, it was renamed the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and designated as a national museum in 2011.<\/p>\n

But back to June 30, 1999, the day before it all began. There was a luncheon for the people who had helped turn a shed on the water into a comprehensive museum. Chief among them was Ruth Goldbloom, without whom the museum likely never would have been established. Goldbloom was chair of the Pier 21 Society from 1993 to 1999, and remained active on the board afterward. In 2004, she created and chaired the Pier 21 Foundation, a role that she maintained until just before her death in 2012.<\/p>\n

Also present at the luncheon was Rosalie Silberman Abella, who passed through Pier 21 in 1950 as a 4-year-old refugee. In 2004, she became the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.<\/p>\n

At the luncheon, Silberman Abella shared two stories. Her parents were married in Poland the day that the Second World War broke out, she said. Her infant brother was killed, and her father\u2019s side of the family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Her parents spent four years in concentration camps, but both survived. In 1946, Silberman Abella was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was their way of proving to the world \u2013 and themselves \u2013 that their spirit was not broken,\u201d she said in her speech, referring to her parents.<\/p>\n

After years of trying, the Silbermans were granted entry into Canada. Silberman Abella\u2019s father, a lawyer by trade, was not permitted to practise law in Canada until he became a citizen \u2013 but he couldn\u2019t wait the five years it would take to become a citizen to work, as he had a young family to support. So, he became an insurance agent, and inspired his daughter to go into law. He died just before she graduated.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he knew somehow it would turn out alright for his family because he was confident in Canada\u2019s generosity,\u201d said Silberman Abella at the lunch. \u201cAnd how generous it has been! The child my parents had to rebuild their hearts in Germany in 1946 became a judge in Canada in 1976. Remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canada Day, she continued, is her birthday. And what better present could there be than coming back to Pier 21?<\/p>\n

\u201cI will never forget how lucky we were to be able to come to Canada, but I will also never forget why we came,\u201d she said. \u201cThese are the two stories which complete me \u2013 one joyful and one painful \u2013 and which merge in the next generation into a mother\u2019s irrevocable gratitude to a country which has made it possible for her children to have only one story \u2013 the joyful story, the Canadian story, the story that started at Pier 21.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every immigrant has their two stories, at least, from before and after coming to Canada. And countless many of these stories would have been lost to time, a bit more detail lost with each retelling, were it not for the efforts of Goldbloom.<\/p>\n

Goldbloom was born Ruth Schwartz in New Waterford, N.S., on Dec. 5, 1923. She was known for her family\u2019s hardware store and for her tap dancing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis sense of charity and giving back to the community \u2013 at all the community fundraisers and anything, she would always dance at those events, so the spirit was always in her,\u201d said Carrie-Ann Smith, chief of audience engagement at Pier 21.<\/p>\n

Smith was one of Pier 21\u2019s first employees. She started working there in 1998, before the museum opened, and continued working with Goldbloom until Goldbloom passed away.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe just stayed, she just kept volunteering. She was constantly here. She never had an office, we always moved her around,\u201d said Smith of Goldbloom. \u201cI miss her so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea to turn Pier 21 into a national site started with J.P. LeBlanc, founding president of the Pier 21 Society. LeBlanc was a retired immigration officer with the modest goal of acquiring an Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada plaque to put on the outside of the old Pier 21 building. Before he could complete his goal, however, he developed bone cancer. Around that time, he attended a Dalhousie graduation ceremony where Goldbloom was giving the convocation address.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the \u201980s, when people really weren\u2019t looking back and thinking of Canada as a country of immigrants,\u201d said Smith. \u201cAnd that was the theme of [Goldbloom\u2019s] talk, that we as a country have never really thanked our immigrants. [LeBlanc] knew that he was going to get much sicker, and he was really taken with what she said and how passionate she was about honouring the immigrants that built Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

LeBlanc asked Goldbloom if she would take over the Pier 21 Society, and she did. She began fundraising almost immediately, and decided that a simple plaque wasn\u2019t enough. For years, she worked to create the museum. She traveled the country on her own money, raising awareness and funds about the project, and used her knowledge to lobby the government.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Halifax hosted the G7 Summit. Traditionally, the summit\u2019s host city receives a gift and, for Halifax, it was a promise from then-prime minister Jean Chr\u00e9tien to help build a museum at Pier 21. The deal was, if Goldbloom could raise $4.5 million, then the municipal, provincial and federal levels of government would work together to match that donation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounds so modest now,\u201d said Smith of the $9 million that brought the museum into being.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
The Wheel of Conscience commemorates the voyage of the St. Louis, whose 937 Jewish refugee passengers were refused entry into Canada and other countries in 1939. (photo from CMI at Pier 21)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When it opened, the museum contained exhibits about the history of immigration in Canada, as well as a database of more than one million immigration records. Smith remembers the very first person who ever asked for an immigration record.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I showed her the record, she started crying,\u201d said Smith. \u201cI just didn\u2019t realize how profound the impact of that [immigration record] collection was going to be. Her husband had just died days before, and she wanted to make sure she had the original European spelling of his last name on his grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marianne Ferguson is another woman who received a surprise on the first day the museum opened. (See \u201cMaking Canada home<\/a>.\u201d) Ferguson had come through Pier 21 in March 1939, a Polish immigrant who had escaped Europe months before the start of the Second World War. While the pier was put to military use during the war, Ferguson volunteered there once it reopened, helping refugees get settled in Canada.<\/p>\n

By 1999, Ferguson was an established member of the Halifax Jewish community. She would always ask Goldbloom to help her out at shul, but Goldbloom was too busy. To make it up to Ferguson, Goldbloom planned a surprise for her on the opening day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to the pier, I didn\u2019t know what to look for,\u201d said Ferguson. \u201c[Goldbloom] said, \u2018I\u2019m not going to tell you, you have to find it yourself.\u2019 And I didn\u2019t know, what am I looking for?… I had my son Randy with me that day, he says, \u2018Oh, come here, here\u2019s something from you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a quote from an essay Ferguson had written in 1942 as a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Canada: \u201cEveryone asked them to take us with them, but that, too, was impossible.\u201d The essay can be found on Pier 21\u2019s website. The \u201ceveryone\u201d refers to Ferguson\u2019s extended family, all of whom died in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Ferguson only had kind words to say about Goldbloom, calling her \u201cthe heart of Pier 21.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldbloom would prove that multiple times over the years.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy about 2002, 2003, it was getting pretty rough to pay the bills,\u201d said Smith. \u201cIt was just really a shed on the waterfront, one of the windiest spots in the country, and it was expensive to heat and light \u2026 when you\u2019re a National Historic Site, we had that status by then, that just means they can\u2019t tear down the building. That\u2019s all it means, it didn\u2019t come with any funding.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, Goldbloom decided to set up a foundation to raise money for the museum. Instead of going door-to-door and asking a million people for $7, she decided to ask seven people for $1 million. These people would be called \u201cNation Builders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen she had the six Nation Builders, all of her friends chipped in and made her the seventh Nation Builder,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThat allowed us to have an endowment. That\u2019s what she wanted \u2013 that security for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year, to celebrate Canada\u2019s 150th anniversary, the museum is putting on a special exhibit called Canada: Day 1, which looks at what the first day in Canada is like for arriving immigrants. Since Goldbloom was born in Canada, she never had that experience. But, as she would regularly point out, the only indigenous people in Nova Scotia are the Mi\u2019kmaq \u2013 almost everyone living in Canada can connect their history to an immigrant at some point. She dedicated much of her life to commemorating immigrants\u2019 contributions to this country and her story is inextricably entwined with that of Canadian immigration and Pier 21.<\/p>\n

Alex Rose<\/strong> is a master\u2019s student in journalism at the University of King\u2019s College in Halifax. He graduated from the same school in 2016 with a double major in creative writing and religious studies, and loves all things basketball. He wrote this article as part of an internship with the<\/em> Jewish Independent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruth Goldbloom stands in Nation Builder Plaza in front of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. (photo from CMI at Pier 21) The museum at Pier 21: National Historic Site opened on Canada Day, 1999. Built to commemorate the almost one million immigrants who passed through Halifax\u2019s Pier 21 between 1928 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[356,5875,7203,7202],"class_list":["post-25008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-immigration","tag-pier-21","tag-rosalie-silberman-abella","tag-ruth-goldbloom"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}