TORONTO — Over the past 27 years, Julia Koschitzky has given some 150 speeches as a high-level lay leader of the Jewish community in Toronto and internationally.
Julia Koschitzky [J. Michael LaFond photo]
Prompted by the death of her mother to sort through her own files, she ended up going through her speeches and culling about one-third of them to include in a book primarily meant for family and friends.
It’s Been My Privilege, published recently by Malcolm Lester in a run of just 500 copies, spans the years 1983 (when she wrote her speeches in longhand) to 2010 (by which time she’d switched to the computer), in approximately 230 pages.
“The whole theme is the centrality of Israel,” Koschitzky told The CJN in a recent interview at her home.
A former chair of the Keren Hayesod world board of trustees, Koschitzky made her first major foray into voluntarism at Associated Hebrew Schools, which her four children attended.
It was serendipity that drew her to the greater Jewish community, when she was invited to a brainstorming session on how to involve Orthodox women in United Jewish Appeal.
“Had I said no, or found an excuse, I would have missed out on the most glorious moments of Jewish history,” she said. “I’ve seen the good and the bad, and the ugly and the beautiful.”
In one of her speeches in the book, Koschitzky recalled seeing former U.S. president Bill Clinton take a bow tie from a waiter and personally affix it to then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s shirt collar, after he noticed that Rabin didn’t have the requisite neckwear at a black-tie event. It was evident to Koschitzky that the world leaders’ relationship “went beyond the ‘correct’ formal exchanges.”
Other historic moments covered in the book include Israel’s 40th, 50th and 60th birthdays, Operation Exodus and Operation Solomon, several wars, and the Oslo accords.
Koschitzky begins with a foreword about her family background, which she also wrote about as a contributor to Rosalie Sharp’s 1997 book Growing Up Jewish: Canadians Tell Their Own Stories.
Born in Cardiff to German-Jewish parents who fled Berlin after Kristallnacht, Koschitzky, née Podolski, came to Canada in 1948 at age four with her parents and sister. After six years in Montreal, they settled in Toronto.
Serendipity also played a role in Koschitzky’s life when she was a young teenager. “My parents gave me money to take piano lessons,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘This is a waste of money. I do not have a musical ear.’ I told my parents I’d rather take that money to find an elocution teacher.”
Although she has forgotten her teacher’s name, she can still recite by heart the words to Theophilus Thistle, the same tongue twister that Colin Firth recites as King George VI in the movie The King’s Speech.
Seeing the movie recently, Koschitzky, who won a public speaking award as a student at Northern Secondary School, had a sense of déjà vu, she admitted.
Mid-interview, she retrieved a worn black book filled with carefully hand-written elocution notes, and leafed through it. “Many of the exercises were the same [as in the movie],” she said.
At one time, Koschitzky, who married her husband Henry at age 19, considered a career in radio or television.
“I never planned my career in Jewish communal life. It just kind of happened.”
In retrospect, reading the speeches was “an out-of- body experience.”
She recalled travels to South Africa, South America and Europe, including a speech she gave in Berlin and her awareness of how fortunate her parents were to escape when they did.
As well, she said, seeing the revival of Jewish life in the former Soviet Union – and remembering the first wave of Jewish immigrants – was “incredible” and served as a type of closure for her. Through her work, she said, the Jewish world has become her extended family.