MONTREAL — Mildred Lande’s death marked the passing of an era when scions and inheritors of great family wealth made giving back to their community an overriding purpose in their lives, family and friends suggested at her funeral at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim May 1.
Such was the case with “Milly,” as she was known, they said. She died April 28 at age 97.
The daughter of Abe Bronfman and niece of Seagram’s founder Samuel Bronfman, Lande was described as an “accidental trailblazer,” an optimistic woman with no airs or pretensions who treated all people with respect. She was also, they said, a person of resolute purpose who involved herself deeply in an array of Jewish and non-Jewish institutions and causes.
Lande had deep affection and devotion for “the Shaar,” Shaar Hashomayim, where she was a major benefactor and regular presence for more than 60 years, and where she remained active almost to her dying day.
The major reception hall at the shul bears her name, and Lande, a devoted practitioner of needlepoint, handmade many of the synagogue’s Torah covers.
She was also one of the first “multitaskers,” her son Eric said, and could be found on a regular basis in the Shaar kitchen, cooking for “the old people,” as she phrased it when she was more than 90 years old herself, or pitching in with spirit during the 1998 ice storm.
“She was here on every Shabbat,” Rabbi Adam Scheier noted.
After Bernard Lande, her husband of 57 years, died, the Shaar “became her greatest solace,” rabbi emeritus Wilfred Shuchat said.
He said Lande was especially responsible for a “long list” of programs developed at the Shaar, including its High Holiday supplementary service.
She also insisted on staying in charge of the “seating committee,” a comment that elicited laughter.
At the funeral, the Shaar choir performed her favourite liturgical selection, L’dor V’dor, and among the pallbearers was her first cousin, Charles Bronfman. Several grandchildren also spoke.
“You were her nourishment,” her daughter Ruth told those assembled.
Lande’s intrinsic sense of noblesse oblige is what caused her, quite unintentionally, to blaze a trail for women in the Jewish community.
In addition to becoming, in the early 1980s, the first woman president of the Shaar, an Orthodox synagogue by charter, Lande also served as the first female head of the Combined Jewish Appeal General Campaign of then-Allied Jewish Community Services, of the Israel Emergency Fund and its Women’s Division, of the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal and of Mount Sinai Hospital.
She also spearheaded a project to revitalize the Back River Cemetery, founded the Women’s Auxiliary at the Jewish General Hospital, and served in important positions at a number of non-Jewish institutions, among them the Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Quebec Heart Foundation, the Red Cross and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
It was at her Westmount home, however, where family members held reserved places at the Friday night dinner table, that, as another son, Neil, noted, the talk could also revolve around the Montreal Canadiens, a team she worshipped.
He said the telephone lines “would burn” when she would call him at home during a game and a goal was scored. Community leader Marvin Corber, a close friend for many years, described Lande as the “matriarch” of the Jewish community.
“Giving back was the philosophy she lived every day of her life,” he said. “‘Failure’ was not part of her vocabulary.”
Lande is survived by children Neil, Eric, Ruth and Margot, sister Ruth, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
