My big, fat technology-enhanced grade school reunion

TORONTO — My kids, both students in their 20s, thought it was a bit strange – given my age – that I chose to open a Facebook account this past June.

Richard Borchiver, left, and Paul Truster catch up at the reunion.

By coincidence, I had received two simultaneous invitations to join the online social networking group.

Isabel Telfer’s students pose for a class picture in April 1966, and again in July 2009. Frances Tozman Kraft is in the third row from the bottom, beside her teacher, above, and in the middle row, second from right, below.

One was from someone I’d recently finished saying Kaddish with. The other was from a university friend with whom I’d been in touch sporadically. I welcomed the opportunity to stay connected with both of them in a new way.

As well, I knew that there was a Facebook group for my upcoming high school reunion next year, when William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute marks its 50th anniversary.

What I didn’t know when I joined Facebook was that my former elementary school classmate, Shelley Schlifer Camm, had already begun to organize a reunion of our Grade 3, 4 and 5 class at Wilmington Avenue Public School, now the south branch of the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. She had created a Facebook page for the upcoming event, and perhaps half a dozen of the 33 alumni of our class were on it when I joined. Shortly afterward, I learned of the reunion through a chance meeting with a former classmate.

Many of us were together from grades 1 through 6, and even through high school, but grades 3, 4 and 5 were pivotal years for us, both academically and socially. We were in an acceleration class, studying the curriculum for three grades in just two years, from 1964 to 1966, with the same teacher – Isabel Telfer – for both years.

By the time we met on July 12 for our reunion at Shelley’s farm about two hours northwest of Toronto, the original list of half a dozen alumni had grown to about 20 attendees, plus an additional four who were in the same Grade 6 class with many of us.

Someone even tracked down our Grade 6 teacher, whom we were all eager to see. She had planned to attend with her husband, who also taught at the school, but in the end, they were unable to be there.

We had had only one previous reunion, also organized by Shelley, in 1985. Many of us hadn’t seen each other since that first get-together, when we were joined by Mrs. Telfer. Our former teacher, who was then in her 70s, has since passed away.

For our reunion this summer, the Internet played a key role not only in helping us find each other, but in creating a sense of connection that I’m convinced would have been impossible otherwise.

Shelley’s original reunion page saw less and less action as we switched to e-mails, which were more inclusive of those who hadn’t joined Facebook.

Gradually, over a period of a few weeks, informational messages – updates on who had been found and who was attending, directions to the farm, and who was bringing what for a pot-luck meal – gave way to a large, exuberant group conversation.

I couldn’t wait to open my inbox. Regardless of how recently I’d checked it, there was always a spate of new e-mails waiting for me.

“I’ve been coming to work at 7:30 a.m., just to be able to read through all the e-mails!” confessed one former classmate, who requested anonymity in print.

We shared memories about our teachers, our experiences,  and each other, piecing together our childhood in the process.

Although there were some less-than-fond recollections of 1960s-style discipline, Michael Rotenberg, now an Emmy-winning motion picture and television producer and personal manager in Los Angeles, wrote to us that he thought Mrs. Telfer “was a great teacher who cared about imparting education and good habits to her students.”

Ron Savlov, an accountant, remembers being sent to the corner “for brazenly walking up to the front and sharpening a pencil during a social studies class.

“[Mrs. Telfer’s] mouth fell open and she merely pointed to the corner,” he wrote.

Michael, who couldn’t attend the reunion because of a family commitment, wrote that he “loved reading everybody’s retrospective thoughts, and through them I have learned a lot about myself.”

One woman apologized to another for having been mean to her at camp. Her words warmed my heart, although they weren’t directed at me.

I learned at the reunion that I wasn’t the only one who’d been hesitant about the possibility of seeing fellow alumni who’d been mean to them as kids.

But from what I saw in the e-mails, my classmates had become adults whom I was interested in spending time with, possessed of insight, warmth, humour and goodwill.

To accommodate one attendee who had become Orthodox, the reunion was rescheduled from Saturday to Sunday. Another classmate provided a separate barbecue and strictly kosher food.

Our childhood in 1960s Bathurst Manor, where only three of the 33 children in Mrs. Telfer’s class were not Jewish, gave us a common bond, although we discovered through our e-mails that we were a more diverse group, Jewishly, than some of us had been aware of previously.

Our classmate Tom Rebane, now a cardiologist, regretted that he wasn’t able to attend the reunion, but wrote in an e-mail, “Forget the history that bonds us, the spirit of character and warmth of personality displayed in your correspondence is reason enough to want to enjoy your company.”

He wrote that as a non-Jew, he didn’t feel like a minority “at all… except during Jewish holidays, when I felt very jealous of everyone else getting days off school.”

One thread of e-mail conversation touched on the appropriateness of our having recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning.

As a child, I didn’t know that it was a Christian prayer. I thought it was just a school prayer.

And, like some of my classmates, I didn’t realize until I was older that Jews were a minority in Canada.

Another topic of conversation was our participation in a song festival held at the Peoples Church in June 1965, when my class – or to be more precise, those of us who could carry a tune – sang a song called The Pigeons in the Market Square.

“You mean I wasn’t the only one who was told to mouth the words?” one woman wrote in an e-mail June 28. “What else will I learn at this reunion? Can’t wait.”

Karen Shenfeld, a Toronto poet who recalls much detail from the Mrs. Telfer years, reminded us in an e-mail that, “when we sing, the ‘r’s are soft ‘r’s, not hard. Example – feathers are not feathers, they are ‘feathus.’ ”

She also advised us, as the reunion approached, that “wh-en we greet each other, we mustn’t forget to blow on all those ‘w-h’ words… wh-at wh-en wh-ere… wh-ich must be pronounced distinctly from ‘w’ words like ‘we’ and ‘were.’”

As it turned out, we greeted each other with hugs, for the most part.  

My childhood friend Lynn Grader Mercer – an e-mail administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who lives  just outside Raleigh, N.C. – ran outside to meet me with a black-and-white snapshot from her seventh birthday party.

I, too, had memorabilia to share. The night before the reunion, I finally found my elementary school scrapbook, with all the valentines I had received from my classmates, as well as the Festival of Song program.

And despite the more than 600 e-mails that we had shared before the reunion, we didn’t run out of things to talk about when we met in person.

We posed for pictures, recreating our original class photos as best we could, and we sang The Pigeons, recording it for posterity on video.

Two nights after the reunion, a couple of us were going to get together for dinner with former classmate Michelle Shanker, a reunion absentee, to tell her what she had missed.

Instead, we ended up with a party of eight. Others had also expressed interest in being there, but were unable to join us. I think we didn’t want the reunion to end.

It took about a week until the flood of e-mails slowed to a trickle.

Two days after our get-together, I was temporarily blocked from sending any more e-mails as part of Sympatico’s anti-spam program.

I contacted a Bell Internet service representative immediately. “I just had a class reunion,” I keyed in. “The group e-mails are flying. They are not spam.”

Karen credited Jack Newton –  now the Calgary-based publisher of Where Canadian Rockies and the alumnus who travelled farthest to the reunion – for having generated much of the excitement.

Once he was contacted, Jack e-mailed to let everyone know he was booking flights. “Quick, someone please e-mail me the times for the reunion,” he requested in late June.

In a post-reunion e-mail, Ronnie Dale, now an accountant, shared his thoughts on the connection we all shared.

“We grew up in a predominately middle-class neighbourhood,” he wrote. “We were (and still are) nice people. Our values, established in our early years, are solid… We can all be ourselves. We laugh at the same things, and we cry at the same things. We were a family… It was fun to share, and hear the stories we are all familiar with.”

Shelley, in addition to hosting the reunion and initiating the idea in the first place, followed up with a survey.

Only one question – “Do you think you would attend another reunion?” – garnered a unanimous response. A resounding “yes.”

While 19 per cent thought we should wait a decade, nearly 80 per cent of us would like to get together again within the next five years.

Karen had already summed up the first reunion in an e-mail.

“Thanks again to Shelley for hosting us,” she wrote when she returned home that evening. “It was magical.”


For more photos from this special reunion, read the article in The Canadian Jewish News or download the Jewish Community Focus supplement online.

More Jewish Community Focus articles can be found in the supplement both online and in print