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On December 30, 1941 Winston Churchill visited Ottawa and made a passionate speech which greatly motivated Canadians. Below is a brief video I found on YouTube documenting this visit. My father, Leon Lipson, was somewhere in the crowd on Parliament Hill depicted in this video. He was a few days short of his 19th birthday (born Jan 5, 1923). He was so inspired that he was motivated to write a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, which appears below as well. Such an interesting piece of history!

ON April 3, 1957 Elvis Presley gave a concert in Ottawa, after having performed the day before in Toronto. While in Toronto, various news reporters tried but failed to get any sort of exclusive interview with him.

In Ottawa, my uncle Mac Lipson did manage to get an interview, and it is famous as one of the only audio interviews of Elvis outside of the USA. This interview appears all over the internet, including official Elvis websites.

Mac worked for CKOY radio at the time, although it seems this interview was also “claimed” by the CBC — presumably he was allowed to freelance his services to the CBC as well (or maybe just for this interview.)

I found a bunch of photos of the Ottawa concert, (which occurred 2 days after my 4th birthday 🙂 )

The famous audio interview by my Uncle is also below…

When we moved to Ottawa in 1965 we rented a house right on the border of the very upper-class Rockliffe neighborhood. Our side of the street was regular Ottawa, the other side started Rockliffe.

Rockliffe was interesting… Many huge mansions, and many international embassies and ambassador residences. To maintain a country feeling the streets were not paved, just crushed stone embedded in some sort of tar. No sidewalks at all. Busses did not enter Rockliffe, and it was illegal to hail a cab there (it had to be ordered by phone). None of that really affected us but it was interesting. In the autumn we could rake up all the leaves and burn them on the side of the road, but that was prohibited in Rockliffe!

The only schools nearby us were private and expensive. Besides, they were unlikely to accept Jews even if they hid that reason. So I was registered in the nearest public school, which was few miles away, which meant I had to walk several blocks and catch a public bus to get school. I was 12 when we moved, in grade 7.

The York Street public school that I went to was completely different from anything I had experienced. It was in a fairly poor area, and I quickly discovered that many of the kids would spend their lunchtimes shoplifting from nearby stores — and then bragging about what they got at recess time! Some of the boys also carried knives. I was in shock. I was likely the only Jew in the school as well. (Luckily we bought a house in the much more affluent and normal west end of Ottawa within a year, so I only had to endure this school for grade 7).

Truth is, I was exposed to some good things in that year. I had a great science teacher and since I loved science, I felt very comfortable in his class. I also made a couple of friends in that year, and joined a boy scout troop. The school also had a woodworking shop and I took that class and created a nice lamp 😁

Often during my lunch hour I would take the short walk to Rideau Street, where I would get an egg salad sandwich at the very Jewish deli called Rideau Bakery. Then I’d go to the old public library across the street, where I’d browse and read science books.

In 1967 the Queen visited Ottawa for Canada’s centennial celebrations. I went down to the area where her car was said to pass on the way to parliament hill, and got in place to get a good shot.

I waited until the car was perfectly framed, and took the one shot that I had time for. My camera was manual and by the time I advanced the film for another shot the car had moved too far.

Being that this was way before digital photography, I had to wait a few days to get my film processed … And was devastated to find that someone in the crowd had waved just as I took the shot, and ruined what could have been a great photo!

At least I have the memory of being there, and the queen is visible even if Prince Phillip has no face 😂

The photo is also a somewhat sad commentary on a changing world… Note the lack of any major security, and the Queen and Prince standing in an open convertible!

Below my failed shot is a photo I found online that shows them probably an hour later in the parliament building.

Although I barely remember even attending my high school graduation, I do have the official school photo taken for the yearbook.

Recently (2021) someone (thanks Susan Ostergaard!) found a photo of our whole graduating class (which I enhanced as much as I could). Although I was sure that I wasn’t a part of that posed photo — there I am, far left, top row!! Amazingly, I can remember a lot of names after over 50 years 🙂

Like any 60’s teenager, I liked music. I slowly acquired some half-decent stereo equipment, including am FM tuner, turntable, cassettte player, and a Dolby noise reducer (quite the piece of audio equipment in those days), along with a set of “Smaller” Advent speakers.

Now I wanted something to house them. So one summer I brought materials for a cabinet that I designed, and spent about a month building this cabinet, shown in the photos some years later in my apartment in Montreal while a grad student at Concordia University.

Eventually I added a reel-to-reel tape recorder which sat in the lower opening record-storage section. It was using this set up that I recorded many of Rabbi Motty Berger’s radio shows!

On about 1983 a Chabad shliach, Shlomo Laiken, had the idea to produce a Jewish art calendar for various US cities. Producing such calendar was of course possible, however in those years it was very difficult to compute the precise sunset times in order to be able to show candle-lighting times properly for each city.

Today, one click on a phone app and we have the precise time, even calculated based on our precise GPS location! But in the early 80’s there were no such apps, and computing power was very limited and expensive. The IBM PC was not even on the scene yet!

Shlomo was chatting with a friend, Rabbi Motty Berger (at the time shliach in Ottawa, Canada), and mentioned his challenge. Motty knew that I was in IT, and put Shlomo in touch with me.

I did some research and found out that it was almost impossible to find a program that could do such calculations with enough precision for our needs. The only place I could find was the Canadian Observatory, which needed this precision to accurately align their telescopes.

Upon contacting them, I was told that they would be willing to share their code with me, however it was quite complex and required significant compute power. Since I was working for Litton Systems in Toronto, in charge of powerful computers (for the time), I decided to accept.

Their program required some code changes to produce what we needed for a Jewish calendar… To calculate the precise time offsets for candle lighting and end of Shabbos or Yom tov. I made the changes, including formatting each page to show the city and data in a tabular form that would be easy to understand.

Such calculations are based on geographic coordinates, and in researching this, I discovered that the official coordinates of each city were based on the location of their city hall! To test whether or not this was a problem, I got coordinates of various locations and ran the program to compare calculated times. While the differences weren’t too significant for smaller cities, it turned out that if a large city’s Jewish community was far from city hall, there were times of the year when the calculations could be as much as several minutes off!

Without GPS (which didn’t exist) it was difficult to get accurate coordinates for any specific location. After much discussion, we decided the best we could do was to include a warning that for larger cities one should be very careful not to wait until the end of the 18 minutes to light (I think we suggested assuming 15 minutes to be safe), and should wait another couple of minutes to end Shabbos.

Not knowing whether I’d be able to produce this data easily in the future, I decided to run a full 10 years charts for each of the cities (I think about 10) that Shlomo wanted to cover. As I recall, the program was very complex because it also did many other computations that we were not interested in, so it ran for over an hour for each city! Printouts were on standard fan-fold computer paper. At the end, I delivered a huge carton to printouts with 10 years of data.

While it was fun to be a small part of this new initiative, I imagine that within a few years new, faster programs probably made the printouts obsolete. However, until the GPS satellite system was created, I believe that we helped publicize the possible inaccuracies of “standard” sunrise/sunset times in terms of Jewish observance.

I no longer recall the occasion, but I found myself back in 770 thirty years after the first time I was there. It was a major “event” (probably around Yud shevat) and the place was packed.

After wandering around a bit, marvelling at how so much was exactly the same after 30 years, a few young bocherim approached me and asked if I’d farbreng a bit with them. I laughed, explaining that I wasn’t a rabbi and really had nothing to share. But they insisted, saying something like “just your white beard qualifies you! Share some memories of being by the Rebbe!” When I told them that this was my 30-year anniversary of first entering 770, they became even more insistent.

So I reluctantly agreed, and sat with them for about 30 minutes, sharing what I could. They ate up every word like it was a delicacy ; I guess just hearing a few unique anecdotes of another person who had been by the Rebbe in the 80’s was very significant to them.

Someone snapped a (poor quality) photo with their cell phone and sent it to me …

(I’ve set the post date to the date of this image, but I believe the actual date was close to yed shevat in 2006 — the image date shows the correct year but definitely not the correct date )

In 2010 I was contacted by N’shei Chabad to ask if I would take a video of a speech that the Rebbe’s doctor, Ira Weiss, had agreed to give for their annual convention in New York.

Since I knew Dr Weiss personally, and although I had done almost no video work, my pro camera was capable, I readily agreed.

We arranged a time, with Dr Weiss preferring to do it at his home in Skokie, a few blocks from where I lived.

The house was simpler than I had expected — in fact much looked like it probably had been unchanged in many years. The dining room, however, looked very nice, and this is where Dr Weiss wanted to record his talk.

As I set up my lights, camera, and off-camera microphone, Dr Weiss surprised me with a little — but never before shared — story. He started by pointing to his beautiful inlaid-wood dining table, and saying “You know, the Rebbe bought this table for me.”

(I didn’t record his story, so this account is my paraphrasing of it…)

“On one of my regular visits to check on the Rebbe in the years following his heart attack, the Rebbe asked me what was new in my life, as he always did. He showed a real interest in my life, my wife and kids. On this occasion it happened that we had been considering the purchase of a new dining room table, so I shared that with the Rebbe.”

“He said that was very good, because it would make it more pleasant for me to have guests on Shabbos. However I explained that we were hestating because the table my wife liked was quite expensive and I felt that it was too fancy for our simple dining room. The Rebbe asked how much it was, and that was the end of that conversation.”

“I didn’t think much more about it until I received in the mail a note from the Rebbe, saying that the table my wife had picked out went perfectly with our dining room — which of course he had never seen! He said that he wanted us to get that table, as a gift of appreciation from him… And there was a check enclosed for the exact amount!”

“So we purchased the table, but then had doubts because whereas the table top was made with beautiful inlaid wood, our dining room looked old and shabby. I decided that perhaps we should replace the carpet, which was the original carpet from when we bought the house. “

“So we had someone come in to pull out the old carpeting, and discovered to our astonishment that there was a hardwood floor underneath — with a border of inlaid wood that looked much like the table! We had the floor refinished, and suddenly the table looked perfect in that room — exactly as the Rebbe said it would!”

I felt very privileged to hear such an amazing story first-hand. Especially one which Dr Weiss said he hadn’t shared.

In the video, Dr Weiss is sitting at that very dining room table.

In 2016 I was contacted by JEM (Jewish Educational Media) to ask if they could hire me as a photographer to take some pictures for an upcoming book. The book was a compilation of first-hand stories of encounters with the Rebbe, to be called “My Story.”

The stories to appear in the book were based on live interviews, however they wanted to do a story from Rabbi Levi Bukiet in Chicago, and they had been unable to get together to do the video interview.

Levi Bukiet was a friend of mine, and it sounded like a worthwhile project, so of course I agreed. Since they had already interviewed him by phone to get his story, what they really needed were just some pictures of him that looked like they were taken during an interview, one of which would appear with his story.

So on the day that Levi was going to come over for the photo shoot, I arranged a section of our library, moved a plant into the corner by the bookcase, and set up my lighting.

Since Levi was not a professional model, I suggested that he should just tell me his story and let me shoot as he spoke. My feeling was that this would give the most natural appearance of photos taken during an interview.

Although I expected that he would tell me the story he had told JEM, the amazing story he chose to tell me was one that he would have liked to have published but was not the story that JEM had chosen to publish.

A few of the photos from the photo session are below, as well as the officially written up story that Rabbi Buckiet told me that day. As far as I know the story was not published, mainly because it was second hand, as told to him by somebody else. It is, nonetheless an amazing story of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

When I sent the images to JEM, they asked me what they owed me, and I told them that I was glad to contribute these images and thus somehow participate in this valuable book. When the book came out, I was surprised to find that they had actually acknowledged me as assisting them, something I did not expect, but definitely appreciate.