I am Dafna’s younger brother. I am two years younger than her, and we grew up together in Montreal, Canada. She was my mentor and best friend, and I proudly watched her grow and blossom. The following are some of my reflections on her life’s history.
Dafna was born in Strasbourg (France) in 1936. Her official name at birth was Fernande and she was known in her youth as Nundi. The name Dafna was selected for her by her future husband Dov before they got married and she adopted it since she like the idea that it rhymes with the Hebrew word “Davka”.
In 1936, just as the Germans were about to invade, my father arranged for the family to leave Strasbourg for Paris (France) where they lived for 2 years. In June 1939, just 3 months before the outbreak of World War II, my father J.L. Gewurz arranged papers for his family to immigrate to Canada where we arrived in July 1939. I was born in Montreal in December 1939.
The family integrated quickly into a growing Montreal Jewish community which had just opened a new modern Hebrew school which taught English and French subjects in the morning and Hebrew subjects in the afternoon.
Dafna was a terrific student. From an early age, she showed her intelligence and her curiosity and loved studying. She was top of her class in primary school and on graduation, her Hebrew teacher wrote to her:
Dafna was fortunate to have many mentors.
In high school, she was deeply influenced by one of her English teachers, Irving Layton. Prof. Layton was a true intellectual and a very highly respected Canadian poet. Dafna was greatly impacted by the depth and breath of his thinking. He embraced her as an astute thinker and for her, he was an inspiration to deepen her learning and love of poetry.
Another great influence on Dafna as a teenager was Dr. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a well-known American Jewish philosopher. After high school, she attended a seminar in California sponsored by the Hillel Foundation at which Rabbi Heschel, who was also one of the leaders in the civil rights movement, was the scholar in residence. Dr. Rabbi Heschel had just written his well-known book, “The Sabbath”, which was the subject of the seminar, and which greatly impacted Dafna’s Jewish identity.
Later in life, Dafna was greatly impressed by the various groups she encountered during a sabbatical year she spent with her family in California in 1974. This was the time of the blossoming of the Gestalt movement which was founded by Fritz Pearls who lived in California at the time. She was particularly influenced by Virginia Satir, a psychoanalyst in California who is credited with being the founder of the field of Family Therapy and who also wrote on organizational behavior. During this sabbatical year, Dafna and Dov were introduced to meditation and yoga, activities that became part of their lives but above all she was inspired by the relative new research into Gender and decided to put her academic focus on it.
After graduating high school at the Strathcona Academy in Montreal with first class honors and a 95 percentile, Dafna began her university studies at McGill University where she majored in Political Science and Sociology. At McGill, Dafna was active in the debating society in which she was a star performer but she made her true impact as President of the Hillel Foundation on Campus. It was at this Hillel that Haim Herzog had the famous debate with the historian Arnold Toynbee on his thesis that the Jews were a fossil people.
Hillel was the centre for Jewish students to gather during lunch time to meet, learn and eat. Dafna reorganized its educational program and brought in a diverse group of renowned speakers to address the students at lunch on a variety of Jewish topics. Dafna was given special recognition for her creative leadership while at Hillel.
Dafna received her Bachelor degree with first class honors in 1958 from McGill University and then went on to spend a year studying in Israel at the Hebrew University.
In Israel, at kibbutz Dalia at the dance festival, her heart was captured by a true sabra, a lover of the land and the orah of the people. My brother-in-law Dov Izraeli was different from the doctors or lawyers my father thought Dafna would marry. But he was very special, a deep creative thinker who lived by his values. Dafna recognized the many qualities that were Dov and fell deeply in love with him. Dov then came to Canada with Dafna to study and meet her family. In 1960, they got married in Montreal and in conformance with Canadian style, her sabra husband wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie and a top hat to his Chuppah. He quickly became an integrated part of our family and added a very special dimension to it.
After two years of Dov’s study for an MBA in New York, it was time to move back to Israel and so they did. I remember the farewell party we made for them. As part of the entertainment, I was asked to write a letter which I thought my mother would write to a friend of hers in Israel about Dafna’s aliya which went like this:
Dear Idik,
Did you hear the news? Dafna is moving to Israel. So sad. I was such a good Zionist. I sent my daughter to Hebrew schools, I sent her to Hebrew camps, I sent her to Zionist camps and now they take my daughter from me!
When I read this letter to my mother’s friends in the afternoon, they all shed a tear for my mother, but when I read it to my sister’s friends in the evening, they laughed and enjoyed the tale.
Though Dafna moved to Israel, we remained very close. She wrote long letters describing her day-to-day life and did so in a humorous fashion. Dafna always had a great sense of humor which is something we shared. She had a joke for all occasionsWhenever we heard a new joke worthy of telling, we would call each other long-distance and share our new discovery. These were very fond moments. These were the days before the internet.
Dafna was a mentor to my children whom she enriched with her wisdom. One day, she asked my son Zev, who was in Israel at the time, to pick something up for her. My son said he was sorry but he did not have the time to which she answered: you have the time, this is just not a priority for you. This is a message my son thinks about throughout his life.
In 1967 after a few years in Israel, my sister Dafna decided she should get a PhD in Sociologylooking at the roll of women in factories. So, she, Dov and her young family moved to Manchester, England where Dafna received a PhD in Sociology. Manchester was a great time for her family. Dafna and Dov had 3 children, Leora, Haim and Sharona, who were all under 10 during their years in Manchester. She loved her children very much and her years in Manchester were a great time for family bonding as they toured and explored the English landscape. Each of her 3 children was very different from each other, though each was very special in their own right. Dafna was very liberal and open in encouraging each to find their own way.
After she received her PhD, I began to sense her attraction to feminism. She began to see the world through the lens of a feminist. The questions that seemed to be on her mind were the ones that affected women’s rights and activities.
I experienced this the most on one of her visits to Montreal. It so happened when she was there, I was asked to be a guest speaker at a real estate conference and I proudly invited her to listen to me at the luncheon. At the luncheon, we sat at a table with two women and two men. When I finished, I asked her how she enjoyed my speech only to realize she did not hear a word. Her interest was to question the women at the table on all kinds of subjects relating to their work, their studies and their goals. I was disappointed that she missed listening to my “insights”, but loved her, appreciated her political evolution and was very proud of her for who she was.
Dafna continued to deepen herself in gender studies and after Tel Aviv University told her that articles about gender are not academic she moved to Bar Ilan University where she was appointed to teach gender . But Dafna wanted Bar-Ilan to have more than just a few lectures on gender, she wanted to create a complete gender department, but the university did not have the resources. I then suggested to Dafna that perhaps we can help make it happen.
My sister Dafna, like I, was fortunate that my father was a successful entrepreneur who had privileged us with some capital. Dafna never used her capital and insisted on living on the salaries of both her and her husband Dov, who was a professor of Business Administration at Tel-Aviv University. When I suggested to Dafna that we use part of this capital to fund the center for Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan, she was very excited about the idea. That was where he heart was. She discussed it with the then president of the University, Prof. Moshe Kaveh, who after much discussion and negotiation with Dafna gave his consent and blessings. But Dafna did not want anyone to know the capital came from her, so the center was named for our parents, Rachel & J.L. Gewurz.
After Dafna passed away, we felt it only appropriate that the name of the department at Bar-Ilan be changed to the Dafna Center in her honor. The university agreed and the name was changed.
Dafna learned she had terminal cancer only six months before her passing. From that time on, she focussed all her energies on finishing things she started and transferring the work that had to be done to the right people. I never heard her complain or bemoan her situation. She mustered all her energies to make sure she left things as best she could. She assigned people to take over her courses and chose Tova Cohen to succeed her as Chairwoman of the Department. I remember well her instructing Tova of how she wanted her to guide herself as the person occupying the Chair of the Department. She did not leave a stone unturned.
A few weeks before her passing, she called together the President and Executive of the New Israel Fund to meet at her house. At that time, we knew her days were few. It was an emotional evening. The cancer had spread and she could hardly walk. She sat everyone around the table and she was at the head. In a loud and clear voice, she advised them that she wanted to use her capital to set up a Gender Fund to subsidize and encourage new initiatives of young feminists in whatever area. She was very clear on who should head this Fund and who the directors should be. She had a paper drawn up and wanted them to sign it that evening. There was total silence as everyone looked at her with amazement and total admiration. To watch her and to listen to her blew my mind. My sister influenced me by the way she lived but transformed me by the way she handled her death.
To make sure Dafna’s name is not forgotten at the university, my wife Brenda and I funded the construction of the park outside of the Gender Building, which is called “The Dafna Gardens”. It is a beautiful place to relax and reflect.
Dafna died too young. She had so much to give to gender theory and to individuals being educated in the field. Her shiva was a testimony of the deep truth of the tragedy of her loss. Each night at the shiva, different professionals and PHD students got up to tell impactful stories of how she influenced their lives. Her impact was transformative on the many she thought and dealt with. It certainly was on me, her younger brother who loved and admired her and was so proud of what she achieved in her short life.