De Sola was part of a long line of prominent scholars and rabbis. The sixth child of David Aaron De Sola and Rebecca Meldola, he was born in London, where his Spanish and Portuguese relatives had come via Amsterdam in the early 19^th century. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Raphael Meldola, was the Chief Rabbi of London’s Sephardic congregation, Bevis Marks Synagogue. His father was an author and hazan in the same congregation. His wife, Esther Joseph, was the daughter of Henry Joseph, the patriarch of one of Canada’s most prominent Jewish families.

De Sola was educated at the City of London Corporation School and received personal instruction from his father and Louis Loewe, a respected Oriental scholar. In 1847, he moved to Montreal after being offered a position at Shearith Israel. He served as the rabbi for this Orthodox Sephardic congregation for the rest of his life. De Sola established their Sunday school and opened a co-ed private Jewish day and boarding school. Despite being part of the Sephardic community, he also maintained close contact with Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and went out of his way to support their schools and organizations, too.

De Sola was a renowned scholar and educator. In 1848, soon after his arrival in Montreal, McGill offered him a job as a lecturer in Hebrew and Oriental literature, subjects which he taught there for the rest of his life, along with courses in Spanish and Philology. De Sola’s interests were eclectic and wide-reaching: botanical and zoological references in the Bible, profiles of prominent Jews, medical studies on rabbinical dietary laws, and the history of the Jewish communities in Persia, England, Poland and France. In 1858, McGill made him an honorary doctor of laws – the first Jewish minister to receive this honour in England or North America.

In addition to being a university professor, de Sola was a frequent speaker at organizations such as the Montreal Mercantile Library Association, the Montreal Literary Club, the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal and the Natural History Society, which he was President of from 1867-68. His talks and sermons were often reprinted in Jewish periodicals and the press, including in Isaac Leeser’s The Occident, the first Jewish periodical published in the US. Memorably, at the invitation of President Ulysses S. Grant, de Sola opened the US Congress with prayer in 1873 – the first British subject, and the first Jew, to do so.

As a philanthropist, De Sola was instrumental in founding the Hebrew Philanthropic Society in Montreal to care for the poor, sick and needy, as well to assist recent immigrants. He helped establish the Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society (1863), the Ladies’ Hebrew Benevolent Society (1863) and the Yod Beyod/Jewish Mutual Aid Society (1872). He was also a tireless organizer for relief funds in support of Jews as far afield as Morocco, Persia, Palestine and Russia.

De Sola died in New York City in 1882, while visiting his sister, and was buried in Montreal. His son Clarence was a leading Canadian Zionist, and his son Meldola was a prominent scholar and exponent of Orthodox Judaism in North America. De Sola was admired in Canada and around the world for his prolific work as a spiritual leader, a teacher and a writer. He is remembered as one of his time’s leading Orthodox Jewish voices.

Learn more: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_de_Sola
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/abraham-de-sola/ 
http://imjm.ca/location/1092

Bronstein was born Naomi Segal in Montreal. Her father was a textile merchant and her family had a comfortable life in Outremont. From a young age, she expressed outrage at the injustices faced by impoverished, sick and/or orphaned children. At just 17, she married Herbert Bronstein, a knitting mill sales manager who was also highly idealistic. They raised 12 children together, 7 of whom were adopted (from Vietnam, Cambodia, Ecuador and Canada). Through her tireless activism, Bronstein ultimately helped 650 other children also find adoptive families in Europe and North America.

Bronstein’s work with international adoptions began in the 1960s. After having three biological children, she and her husband started looking into adopting a fourth child, and were dismayed by the conditions of orphanages in the developing world, and the bias against international adoptions in Montreal. She began working with war orphans in Vietnam and helped organize “Operation Baby-Lift,” to transport over 100 of them to families in North America. Tragically, the cargo plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. Bronstein was supposed to have been on the plane, but gave up her seat at the last second.

This traumatic event only solidified Bronstein’s commitment to aiding children around the world. During Cambodia’s brutal civil war, she opened an orphanage in Phenom Penh called Canada House. Following a devastating earthquake, Bronstein established Casa Canada in Guatemala City, which provided medical care for poor children. Back in Ottawa, she worked with Healing the Children Canada, an agency that provided specialized medical care in North America for children from the developing world. At the time of her untimely death from heart problems, at 65, she was living in Guatemala and working out of a bus that had been converted into mobile medical units.

Bronstein was awarded the Order of Canada in 1983. La Presse chose her as a “Person of the Year” in 1985. In 1997, she was awarded the Royal Bank of Canada’s $250,000 humanitarian award (she donated the prize money to humanitarian causes). A documentary about her work in Vietnam, called A Moment in Time: The United Colours of Bronstein, was released in 2001 and received a nomination for a Gemini Award that same year.

Raphael was born into an Orthodox Jewish family of Polish decent, the Rafalskys, one of at least seven children. In his youth, he made frequent trips between his hometown, Nakel, and Berlin, where he studied at the Academy of Arts. He was strongly influenced by his teachers Karl Begas, a genre/historical scene painter, and Johann Eduard Wolff, a portraitist.

Raphael quit his studies in 1956, when his father got sick. After his father’s death, Raphael decided to immigrate to North America. He arrived in New York City in 1856 and stayed there for four months. Then, in 1857, he moved to Montreal, where one of his brothers was, and stayed there for the rest of his life.

Raphael was well known for his portraits, including many prominent Canadian figures like Dr. Louis- Édouard Desjardins, Dr. Aaron Hart David and the Rev. Abraham de Sola (who performed his marriage). His portraits of Governor Generals were said to have hung in the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Raphael was also noted for his lively landscapes, which depicted the lives of aboriginals and French Canadian settlers. One of his most famous paintings is Immigrants at Montreal (later changed to Behind Bonsecours Market, Montreal), which shows the painter in a bustling market scene, with luggage in one hand and a candelabra in the other; it now hangs in the National Gallery of Canada.

To support his art, Raphael taught at both English (the High School of Montreal and the Art Association of Montreal) and French institutions (the Sisters of St. Anne in Lachine and their associated convents), even setting up his own private school for drawing and painting in 1885. The other significant part of his income came from commissioned portraits. He also worked at a photography studio, restored paintings for churches and convents, and was an anatomical illustrator for medical journals and physicians’ teaching aids.

Raphael was active in many professional organizations, such as the Art Association of Montreal, the Ontario Society of Artists, the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal, and the Council of Arts and Manufacturers of the Province of Quebec. He was a founding member of the Society of Canadian Artists and a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was invested as a freemason in 1864. He was also a charter member of Temple Emanu-El in Montreal in 1882.

Raphael married Ernestina Danziger in 1865. They had nine children. One of them, their son Samuel, went on to become a professional artist in NYC.

Katz invented, innovated and hand-crafted a wide range of medical devices: one of the first fetal monitors, a scanner-printer to detect radioactive iodine uptake in the thyroid gland, infant incubators, and a high-speed contrast injector for angiography, etc. He operated these new devices in countless clinical procedures. Notably, using his own original heart-lung bypass machine, he was the perfusionist for Canada’s first successful open heart surgery, and for thousands of subsequent operations.

Katz served as the first chief of the Diagnostic Devices Division and Evaluation and Standards Division in the Bureau of Medical Devices in Ottawa. At Health Canada, he established ground-breaking legislation with regards to medical devices.  His team’s discovery of hazards in blood collection led to international recalls of tainted equipment and saved countless lives.

Katz was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Member Emeritus of the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, which he helped to found. He received the Order of Ontario and the Living Legend Award from the World Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons. He was also a decorated WWII Veteran, who was an officer in the British Army, in the American Zone, and assisted the Jewish Brigade—the only military unit in the Allied forces to serve as an independent, national Jewish military formation.

Katz met his wife, Ruth Gottlieb, when they were both on their way to work on kibbutzim in Israel in 1949. They married in Montreal the following year. Over the course of their 65 year marriage, they had four children: Michael, Geoffrey, Floralove and Shelley.

Gonzales was born and raised in Montreal. He is the younger of two sons born to Jewish immigrants from Hungary who fled during WWII. His brother, Christopher Beck, is a prolific film composer who has scored major films like The Hangover.

Gonzales taught himself how to play piano at the age of three. He was educated at Crescent School in Toronto and then trained as a classical pianist at McGill University. In 1999, on a whim, he moved to Germany, where he began performing under his stage name, hoping to boost his career. In Berlin, he played piano in bars to make ends meet. He later moved to Paris, and now makes his home in Cologne.

Gonzales is celebrated for his pop-inspired classical music. Among the many artists he has collaborated with are Drake, Jarvis Cocker, Feist, Daft Punk, Peaches, Boys Noize and Domo Genesis. He is also a member of Puppetmastaz, a Berlin-based hip hop group.

Gonzales received a Grammy as one of 21 musicians, producers and contributors featured on Daft Punk’s album Random Access Memories. He made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for playing the longest concert by a solo artist: 27 hours, 3 minutes, 44 seconds. His best known song is “Never Stop,” from his 2010 album Ivory Tower, which was used in a commercial for Apple’s original iPad.

Lawrence Bergman

Lawrence Bergman is a Canadian notary and the former Minister of Revenue of Quebec.

Born in Montreal, Bergman graduated from Sir George Williams University and from Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law. He worked as a notary from 1965 until 1994, when he was named Minister of Revenue in the Quebec government. He was first elected to the National Assembly as the Liberal representative for D’Arcy-McGee in 1994. He was re-elected five times, sometimes winning more than 90% of the eligible votes, until his retirement in 2014. In 2003, he was named Minister of Revenue by Premier Jean Charest and served in that capacity for four years. In 2008, he served as the President of the Cabinet Caucus.

The recipient of multiple awards, including the Jerusalem Prize and the décoration du Rayonnement culturel de la Renaissance française, Bergman has also served on the boards of multiple organizations, including several synagogues and a B’nai B’rith Lodge. He is a member of the Jewish Community Council of Montreal and an advisor to the Department of Religious Studies of McGill.

Marc Gold

Marc Gold is a senator, lawyer, academic and community leader.

Son of the late Judge Alan B. Gold, Chief Justice of the Quebec Superior Court, Gold earned his undergraduate degree at McGill, his LL.B at the University of British Columbia, and his LL.M from Harvard Law School. He is considered an expert in Canadian constitutional law, was one of a handful of academics asked to provide training for federally-appointed judges in constitutional law, and has worked as a law professor at both Osgoode Hall and McGill.

Gold is a former Vice President of Maxwell Cummings and Sons, a position he held for 23 years, and has been an active and integral member of the community of Quebec for many years. Amongst his numerous roles, he is the former chair of the non-profit organization Ensemble pour le respect de la diversité, which provides education against discrimination in schools in Quebec and Canada. He served on the Board of Directors of Université de Montréal for 16 years and was named administrateur émérite in recognition of his service to the university in 2016. He also sits on the executive committees of both the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Centraide of Greater Montreal. Within the Jewish community, he is a former President of both the Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA and Federation CJA.

Gold is a part-time member of the Parole Board of Canada. In 2016, he was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Senate as an Independent.

Yoine Goldstein

Lifelong Montrealer Yoine J. Goldstein is an internationally-respected lawyer, academic and former Senator, especially known for his work dealing with issues of insolvency.

He earned a BA (1955) and a BCL with honours (1957) from McGill. In 1960, he received a LLD from Université de Lyon, and he was called to the Quebec Bar in 1961. He went on to become the senior and managing partner of the Montreal law firm, Goldstein, Flanz & Fishman.

In 2005, Goldstein was appointed to the Senate as a member of the Liberal caucus. He served as the Vice-Chairman of the Banking, Trade and Commerce Committee and was appointed special counsel to the Senate Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce. He is the Founding Director and member of the National Executive Committee of the Insolvency Institute of Canada, as well as the Founder and Quebec Chairman of the Quebec Section on Bankruptcy (Canadian Bar Association). In addition to his legal and political positions, Goldstein has served the Jewish community in numerous leadership positions, including as President of Federation CJA (1995-1997). He currently works with McMillan LLP in Montreal as a Senior Counsel Member on the Advisory Board.

Goldstein has been honoured with the Lord Reading Law Society Human Rights Award (1992), the Lord Reading Law Society Service Award (1998), the Bar of Quebec’s Order of Merit (2001), The Bar of Quebec’s Advocatus Emeritus (2007) and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012).

Anthony Housefather 

Montreal-born Anthony Housefather worked in municipal politics for several years before becoming a Member of Parliament for Mount-Royal.

Housefather became Vice President of the Liberal Party of Canada and then councillor for Hampstead. In 2000, he served as President of Alliance Quebec for one year before being elected as councillor for Cote-St-Luc-Hampstead-Montreal West. In 2005, he became mayor of Cote St-Luc. In 2015, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Mount Royal, replacing the retiring Irwin Cotler. He has since been named Chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

Leo Kolber

Leo Kolber has had a long, diverse career, culminating in being appointed Senator for Victoria, Quebec between 1983 and 2004.

After receiving his law degree from McGill University in 1952, he became involved in Bronfman family ventures, including as President of a family holding company for Samuel Bronfman’s children, as well as the Seagram’s purchase of a stake in DuPont. In fact, Kolber has been referred to in books and articles as the “non-Bronfman Bronfman.” In 1987, Kolber founded the Cadillac Fairview Corporation, one of the world’s leading real estate developers – responsible for the Eaton Centre, among other projects. Since then, Kolber has gone on to hold a number of positions, including on the boards of TD Bank and MGM, and was President of the Jewish General Hospital.

He entered the political world when he became the chief fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Canada, and eventually was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 1983. He has also held the position of Chair of the Advisory Council on National Security.

In 2007, Kolber was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kolber has also been an important philanthropic figure in Montreal and Canada, and has been significantly involved with Federation CJA.

Lionel Perez 

Lionel Perez is a Montreal lawyer, businessman and municipal politician.

Perez holds law degrees from Université de Montréal and Osgoode Hall and also has a BA in political science. His legal documenting service, which he developed before entering politics, is highly respected. He was first elected in 2009 and has remained an elected member of the borough ever since, including a one-year stint as mayor of Cote-des-Neiges-NDG. As an Orthodox Jew, he was outspoken against Quebec’s attempt to regulate face veils.

Lazarus Phillips

Lazarus Phillips was a Canadian lawyer and senator.

After serving in World War I, Phillips graduated with a law degree from McGill. He was senior partner at Phillips and Vineberg. In 1943, he lost his bid to be elected federal member of Parliament for the riding of Cartier, to Fred Rose, Canada’s only communist MP, although he performed better than the CCF’s David Lewis. He has served as President of United Talmud Torahs, as well as Director of the Royal Bank of Canada. He was named to the Senate in 1968 and retired two years later.

Mindy Pollak 

Mindy Pollak is the first Hasidic female city councillor in Montreal’s history.

Born and educated in Montreal, Pollak co-founded Friends of Hutchison in 2011 to facilitate encounters and discussion among Hasidim and their neighbours in Outremont. She entered municipal politics at the tender age of 24 in her home borough to continue her work on communal relations. Fluently bilingual, she was elected as the Borough Councillor for the Claude Ryan district in 2013. In response to a reporter’s question about the image of Hasidic women as docile and shy, Pollak asked, “Do I seem meek to you?”

Jacques Saada 

Jacques Saada is a Canadian teacher, businessman and politician.

Born in Tunis, Saada spent his adolescence in Paris and arrived in Montreal in 1969. He was a linguistics and translation teacher prior to his entrance into politics as school commissioner. He became President of the Liberal Party, and was elected to Parliament for the riding of Brossard-la Prairie in 1997. In 2003, then Prime Minister Paul Martin assigned Saada a cabinet position and made him responsible for the House of Commons, democratic reform, economic development Canada and la Francophonie. He retired from public life and was named President and Chief Executive Officer of the Quebec Aerospace Association until he stepped down in 2011.

Learn more:

http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org/blog/?p=3878
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Phillips
http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/jacques-saada/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/orthodox-jews-question-scope-of-quebec-bill-that-could-ban-face-coverings/article4330395/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Perez_(politician)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Housefather
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/we-spoke-with-mindy-pollack-about-being-montreals-first-female-hasidic-city-councillor-781
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Kolber
http://www.jgh.ca/en/BioKolber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bergmanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bergman
http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/liberal-lawrence-bergman-steps-down-birnbaum-to-run-1.1719367 
http://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/ex-mna-lawrence-bergman-lauded-20-years-service
http://www.mcmillan.ca/yoinegoldstein 

The actress (born Edith N. Schearer) lived a comfortable life in Canada until the age of 10, when her father, who suffered from manic depression, lost his construction company and the family became impoverished. Her mother took her and her sister Athole first to New York City and then to Hollywood, pursuing a career in the film industry.

Brimming with talent and determination, Shearer won small roles in movies for Universal Studios, before finding her footing at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). She was a successful actress for three decades, known for playing strong, sexually liberated and/or noble women. Her movies included many comedies and period dramas. While she began her career working in silent pictures, she was able to transition to “talkies” in the 1920s.

Although Shearer was one of the biggest film stars of the 1930s, her reputation waned after her retirement in the 1940s. Her career experienced several revivals, however: in the 1950s, when her films were sold to television; in the 1970s, when her films had theatrical revivals; in 1988, when Turner Network Television started broadcasting her films; and in 1994, when Turner Classic Movies began showcasing her films. In the 1990s, several high-profile books came out that reframed her as an early feminist icon (such as Mick LaSalle’s Complicated Women).

Shearer was of Scottish and Irish descent. She converted to Orthodox Judaism in 1927 to marry producer Irving Thalberg, who was the head of MGM Studios at the time. They had two children together. Even after Thalberg’s untimely death in 1936, Shearer continued practicing Judaism for the rest of her life.

Shearer was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Actress in 1930 with The Divorcee. In recognition of her myriad contributions to the film industry, she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2008 and given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

After earning his PhD in Computer Science from McGill University, Bengio pursued his postdoctoral studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at AT&T Bell Labs in the US.

He is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal, and Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He is also Co-Director of the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms and NSERC-Ubisoft Industrial Chair.

Bengio is Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and Associate Editor for the Neural Computation journal.

He is the Scientific Director of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO), a strategic alliance between Université de Montréal and its two large affiliate schools, École Polytechnique and École des hautes études commerciales (HEC). IVADO has also partnered with McGill University. In 2016, the Federal Government awarded IVADO $93.5 M over seven years. This marks the largest grant in Université de Montréal’s history since its establishment at the end of the 19th century.

In fall 2016, along with Jean-François Gagné and Nicolas Chapado, Bengio launched a start-up incubator in artificial intelligence called Élément AI. Through their world-renowned work on learning algorithms, Bengio and his team are attempting to provide computers with the capacity to acquire operational knowledge by learning from examples.

With over 300 scientific publications to his name, Bengio is a pioneer of deep learning — a set of automatic learning methods in artificial intelligence.

His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He is an internationally sought-after speaker.