Steakhouse owner was ‘a gentle, honest mensch’
Some 500 mourners attended the funeral of Gilbert (Gibby) Rosenberg on Sunday, and it seemed almost everybody there had a story of how the well-known restaurateur had touched their lives.
Rosenberg, 86, the co-founder of Gibby’s steakhouses in Old Montreal and St- Sauveur, died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Westmount on Thursday. He leaves his wife of 56 years, Soryl Shulman Rosenberg, as well as four children, four grandchildren and his sister, Phyllis.
An avid sailor who circled the globe in his yacht, a skydiver who did 48 jumps and a motorcyclist who rode a Honda Gold Wing, Rosenberg did things most people only dream about. But above all, he was “a gentle, honest mensch who did good for others,” said Rabbi Adam Scheier of the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, where Rosenberg was a lifetime member.
Nadine Rabinovitch, 57, came in from Toronto to pay tribute to the kindly former neighbour who took her under his wing when she lost her father to cancer at 16.
“I feel I’ve lost a father,” she said. Gibby, as he was known to all, encouraged her to develop her tennis skills by driving her to the Côte de Liesse tennis club early in the morning to practise, recalled Rabinovitch, whose family and the Rosenbergs were neighbours on Vendôme Ave. in Notre-Dame-deGrâce in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“I had to wake him at 6 in the morning so he could take me to play tennis.
“I don’t know anybody else who would do that,” she said.
When her father was hospitalized, Rosenberg would bring him his favourite food, scampi, from his restaurant, she recalled.
And when her mother became a widow, he would often invite her to dinner at the Rosenberg home, where there was always room for one more, whether it was a neighbour or friends of his children, Rabinovitch said.
“He just took them under his wing and cared about them. It felt so good to be in his company,” she said. “You were not judged.”
Rosenberg’s unique blend of practicality and kindness is hard to describe in words, acknowledged his daughter Dawn in a eulogy at Paperman’s funeral home.
“It’s very difficult to write about a man who lived such an extraordinary life in such a quiet, unassuming way,” she said.
“He was a mentor, a mensch, a kind person with a twinkle in his eye,” his widow, Soryl Shulman Rosenberg, said in an interview.
“Everyone who knew him liked, respected and admired him.”
Over the years, Rosenberg provided
and served Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner at the Old Brewery Mission.
But it was above all one-on-one that he helped people, Shulman Rosenberg said.
“Compromised people, he took them out to dinner,” she said. “People would come to him for help and advice. He was a people guy.”
Rosenberg ’s passion for sailing began in his teens when his family started summering near Ivry-surle-Lac in the Laurentians. He later race daY Flyer on Lac St-Louis before graduating to a 51- foot Morgan yacht with a fireplace and waterbed that he sailed in Florida, Shulman Rosenberg said.
Raised near Université de Montréal and later in N.D.G., Rosenberg attended classes in science and engineering at the former Dawson College on the South Shore, which McGill University established in 1945, before entering the family business, an office- and restaurantsupply company.
In 1969, he and two partners started a restaurant in St- Sauveur.
“It was not his style to name anything after himself,” but his partners convinced him that Gibby’s would be a great name for a restaurant, Shulman Rosenberg said.
In 1972, he opened a second Gibby’s in a historic former stable in Place d’Youville in Old Montreal.
His burial took place at the Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery on Mount Royal.
Contributions in Rosenberg’s memory may be made to the Chez Doris refuge for homeless women, as well as MAZON Canada, a Jewish organization that fights hunger.