Edna Pleskin, 90, OBM

By COLlive reporter

Mrs. Aida Leah Pleskin (nee Droyan), whose family was instrumental in the establishing of the Rabbinical College of Canada and the Chabad community in Montreal, passed away on Wednesday, 27 Adar 5778.

She was 90.

The family of her husband, Seymore (Shimon Leib) Pleskin, were key supporters of the establishment of the Rabbinical College of Canada – Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim Lubavitch.

Her father-in-law learned in his youth in Lubavitch. He was one of the people that the Rebbe Rayatz sent a telegram to in 1940-1941, relating that there were 9 young rabbis in Shanghai that he would like to bring to Canada.

“Once the Rebbe asked him, he got busy, of course, trying to bring these 9 young men to Montreal,” Mrs. Pleskin recalled in an interview with for the legacy project of the Yeshiva’s director Rabbi Leib Kramer OBM.

“In the meantime, my father-in-law and the other men working to arrange it all learned that there were 20 others stuck in Shanghai from Mir and other yeshivas,” she said.

“My father-in-law got together some men he knew from different yeshivas, and they all went to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and worked it out so that they could bring the 29 young men to Canada.”

Two of them were Rabbi Pinchas Hirschsprung, who went on to become the Chief Rabbi of Montreal, and Rabbi Kramer who led the Yeshiva, Beth Rivka schools and Camp Pardes Chana for girls, thereby immeasurably contributing to Montreal’s Jewish community.

“My father-in-law helped them get started with the yeshiva in Montreal,” Mrs. Pleskin said. “He helped them find the place, and was very involved. In fact, on his tombstone it mentions his involvement with the yeshiva. All the planning for the yeshiva was done at my father-in-law’s house, and we maintained the connection with the yeshiva all the years.

“Some of the others of the nine who came we were also connected with, but the closest one was with Rabbi Kramer and his wife (Clara Kramer). I remember them at our wedding; he with a little bit of a reddish beard, it wasn’t yet grey – later on in life it changed – but at that time in 1953, he was a young man. Then we had our children, and the Kramers were always involved. We lived our life, but slowly we became more involved with Lubavitch because of the two of them.”

One example was with Shmura Matzah which Rabbi Kramer would bring each year to the Pleskins. “One year, there were one or two people near us, one was sick, and the other had some other problem, and I asked if I could have extra Shmura Matza for them,” she recalls. “From then I started distributing matzas to about 40 people. I brought them the Matzah. They had never seen this (Shmura Matza)…”

She is survived by her children Vivian Hirchberg of Toronto; Gitzy Zarecki of Montreal, Aliza Wrightman of Toronto, and Miriam Barshshet of Rechovot, Israel; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The family is sitting Shiva until Wednesday morning at 2980 Brighton Avenue, Montreal, QC H3S 1T8.

Baruch Dayan Haemes.