Name Cyril Leonoff | ||
Cyril Edel Leonoff (February 22, 1925) is the Founding President and Historian Emeritus of the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia.
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Biography
Cyril Leonoff was born to Jewish parents William Leonoff and Rose Leonoff (nee Brotman) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His grandparents on both sides of his family came to Canada from Eastern Europe, the Leonoffs from Nicolaiov, Russia and the Brotmans from the Polish town Bialykammin in Galicia. The Brotmans were among the first homestead families to settle in the farming colony of Wapella, Saskatchewan.
Leonoff attended schools in the north end of Winnipeg, where many of the students were Jewish. His Jewish education, however, was provided mostly by a private tutor. During his second year of classes at the University of Manitoba, he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and was stationed in Kingston, Ontario in the Signal Corps. Near the end of World War II in Europe, he was posted to the Signals Research establishment in Ottawa and was discharged in 1945 after V-J Day. He then returned to the University of Manitoba where he enrolled in veterans classes in Engineering.
In 1949, Leonoff and his wife moved to New Westminster, British Columbia, where he worked for the Rivers & Harbours Branch of the Public Works Department, before moving to Seattle to complete his post-graduate education in geotechnical engineering. They returned to Vancouver in 1952 where he took a job with the firm Ripley & Associates which eventually became Klohn Leonoff Consulting Engineers. Leonoff retired in 1985 and still resides in Vancouver.
Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia
Already a past president and board member of the Vancouver Historical Society, Leonoff and a small group of committed individuals formed the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia (JHSBC) in November 1970 during a meeting sponsored jointly by the National Council of Jewish Women and the Canadian Jewish Congress. Leonoff served as president of the JHSBC for five years and published his first book Pioneers, Pedlars and Prayershawls: The Jewish Communities in British Columbia and the Yukon in 1978.
During his nearly forty years of involvement with the JHSBC, Leonoff worked with little more than members' basements as storage, collecting archival material, photographs, and a prolific collection of oral histories from the Jewish community in British Columbia. As he explains, "I thought it important for our children and future generations to know Jews were among the first to arrive in B.C.[...] They came not only as pioneers, but as adventurers and played prominent roles as merchants and government advisors." In 2007, these years of collecting culminated in the opening of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia(JMABC).
After graduating from the Public History Program at Simon Fraser University, Leonoff also scribed many more publications, including: The Jewish Farmers of Western Canada for which he was awarded the Margaret McWilliams Medal of the Manitoba Historical Society, An Enterprising Life: Leonard Frank Photographs, 1895-1944 (Talonbooks: Burnaby, 1990), which won the B.C. Book Prize, the City of Vancouver Heritage Award, and the Alcuin Society Design Award, its companion book Bridges of Light: Otto Landauer of Leonard Frank Photographs, 1945-1980 (Talonbooks: Burnaby, 1997), Klohn Leonoff Consulting Engineers: A Dedicated Team, 1951-1991, Pioneer Jews of British Columbia, and most recently, The Rise of Jewish Life and Religion in British Columbia, 1858-1848.
In addition to his prolific writing on Jews in British Columbia, Leonoff was responsible for securing the JHSBC's acquisition of over 30,000 photographs taken by Otto Landauer of [1]. The collection documents the construction of Vancouver and British Columbia in the post-war era. Over 4,000 of the photos have been digitized and made available online and the collection remains one of the most significant held by the JHSBC at the JMABC.