{"id":33936,"date":"2019-12-20T03:43:58","date_gmt":"2019-12-20T11:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=33936"},"modified":"2019-12-18T12:40:12","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T20:40:12","slug":"many-milestones-for-wosk-in-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/12\/20\/many-milestones-for-wosk-in-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Many milestones for Wosk in 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Yosef Wosk, right, with Max Wyman, 2017. (photo by Fred Cawsey)<\/u><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Yosef Wosk Poetry Initiative at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, which began in 2009, marked its 10th year with a celebratory gathering of artists and poets and with the publication of a commemorative book earlier this year. In addition, the Yosef Wosk Poets\u2019 Corner, along with the adjacent Poet Laureates Garden, was inaugurated on the newly renovated top floor of the downtown central Vancouver Public Library \u2013 it was named in recognition of Dr. Yosef Wosk\u2019s decades-long support of the VPL.<\/p>\n

Wosk was an early major donor to the redevelopment of the eighth and ninth floors and the roof of the central branch of VPL and was asked to serve as honourary chair of the VPL campaign in 2018\/19. The architect for the renovations, as for the library itself, was Moshe Safdie, while Cornelia Hahn Oberlander designed an extensive garden to complement her roof garden that crowns the award-winning structure.<\/p>\n

In the library world, Wosk \u2013 who has established more than 400 libraries on all seven continents over the past 20 years \u2013 was able to fund more than 50 new initiatives in 2018\/19, including 20 libraries in remote Himalayan villages and 37 in Jewish communities throughout the world.<\/p>\n

As a writer and publisher, Wosk\u2019s work has appeared in a number of publications. Most recently, these include having curated and written the preface for Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal<\/em>, featuring photographs by Gidal from Wosk\u2019s and the Israel Museum\u2019s collections (Gefen Publishing, Jerusalem and New York, 2019). He also initiated and funded a biography, written by Christopher Best, of Faye Leung, the effervescent pioneer in the Chinese and real estate communities, affectionately known as the Hat Lady (Warfleet Press, 2020).<\/p>\n

Wosk\u2019s essay \u201cOn the Wings of Forever\u201d was published in the online Ormsby Review<\/em> this year in collaboration with the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. The editor\u2019s preface notes that: \u201cWith prose as profound and learned as it is clear and accessible, here Wosk examines and appreciates the role of museums and museum workers in the digitizing modern world. It\u2019s not gloom \u2019n\u2019 doom. Instead, he outlines what he calls \u2018a stirring vision, one of innovative technology on a human scale, heart-centred and soul-sized.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In collaboration with the Canadian Museums Association, Wosk helped transform the President\u2019s Award into the President\u2019s Medal; he also commissioned the medal and wrote the introduction in the booklet that accompanies the honorific, which was first awarded in 2019.<\/p>\n

The province-wide Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing in the Arts, which was inaugurated by Wosk in 2017, formed an alliance this year with the VIVA Awards (the Shadbolt Foundation), which will begin in 2020.<\/p>\n

In academia, Wosk was reappointed this year as an adjunct professor in humanities at Simon Fraser University and completed four years as a Shadbolt Fellow at SFU, where he was recently named a Simons Fellow.<\/p>\n

During the year, Wosk served on 11 boards in the Jewish and general communities in areas such as education, medical research, museums, libraries, literature, business and the arts. These boards have included the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Schara Tzedeck Cemetery Board, CHILD Foundation, Museums Foundation of Canada and Pacific Torah Institute. He was also an ambassador for the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale and is completing a second term with the B.C. Arts Council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Yosef Wosk, right, with Max Wyman, 2017. (photo by Fred Cawsey) The Yosef Wosk Poetry Initiative at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, which began in 2009, marked its 10th year with a celebratory gathering of artists and poets and with the publication of a commemorative book earlier this year. In addition, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7778,5780,6460,9556,6377,2763,387,2092,4342,7614,1434],"class_list":["post-33936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-arts","tag-culture","tag-libraries","tag-max-wyman-award","tag-museums","tag-philanthropy","tag-poetry","tag-sfu","tag-simon-fraser-university","tag-vpl","tag-yosef-wosk"],"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\/33936","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=33936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}