Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father's Life. With Bernard Pinsky

Former Winnipegger Bernard Pinsky in conversation with Belle Jarniewski at the Winnipeg launch of his new book-Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father’s Life-at Berney Theatre, Asper Jewish Community Campus on at 2 pm on Sunday, November 10, coinciding with Kristallnacht. The event was presented by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada in partnership with the Jewish Child and Family Service of Winnipeg.
Pinsky, now a retired Vancouver lawyer and community leader, chairs the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, which works to find philanthropic opportunities in accordance with its vision, values, and priorities, and through the research efforts of its leadership and staff. The Winnipeg launch of Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father's Life is about Pinsky’s father, longtime Winnipeg resident and Holocaust speaker Rubin Pinsky z”l. Rubin fled a Nazi work camp in May 1942 and survived for more than two years in the forests of Poland, serving as a teenage Jewish partisan.
A former yeshivah student, Rubin Pinsky blew up trains, sabotaged telephone wires and killed Nazis and their collaborators. One time, he even finished off a timber wolf attempting to hunt a wild rabbit the starving partisans had called dibs on, so to speak-they needed the game for their own next meal.
The original manuscript was a biography of Rubin, focusing on his Holocaust experiences. More recently, Pinsky combined much of the original manuscript with his writings about his “roots” trip back to his father’s hometown of Djatvolo in Belarus together with other members of his family, including Winnipegger Lawrence. Prior to the Second World War, the majority Jewish population referred to it by the Yiddish name Gzetl. There, Bernard learned how a history teacher, Zhanna Nagavonskaya, had created a museum in her school. It commemorates the town’s sizeable Jewish community, which was almost entirely massacred by the Nazis. He emphasizes that amid stories of Holocaust survival, one must never forget that six million Jewish people perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Pinsky says that every story of survival, including his father’s, involved a combination of incredible luck, incredible skill, or circumstances in which something went right for them where it went wrong for most people.
The program will consist of a conversation between Bernard Pinsky and Belle Jarniewski, executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre. Pinsky will graciously offer one copy of the book to each family attending the event.
The event is presented by the Jewish Heritage Centre in partnership with Jewish Child and Family Service and the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation. We thank the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg for their support.