LILLIAN’S LASTING LEGACY
She helped veterans and orphans amid a strong wave of anti-Semitism
Margo Roston, left, and A.J. Freiman stand in the Army Officers’ Mess, once the Somerset Street mansion of their grandparents, A.J. Freiman and his wife, Lillian, who led Canada’s first poppy campaign in the 1920s. She Also worked tirelessly on behalf of war veterans and their families, the Canadian Jewish community and Ukrainian orphans. A plaque will Be unveiled on the front lawn to honour her on Thursday.
Before a respectful crowd on Thursday, on a small front lawn on Somerset Street, a plaque will be unveiled for Lillian Freiman, who died in 1940 at the age of 55, long enough ago to be largely forgotten.
Bloodless, bronzed words will stare toward the sidewalk, while her real imprint lives all around us in a city, a country, made better.
Freiman led our first poppy campaign in 1921, and the red symbols of remembrance were made by hand — sometimes by blind war veterans — in this very house on Somerset, near Elgin Street, now an Army Officers’ Mess. Within a couple of years, poppies were being made in the hundreds of thousands, and she continued to chair the city’s annual campaign until she died.
That was the easy part. Freiman, the daughter of Ottawa’s foundational Jewish settler, Moses Bilsky (1829-1923), was a nationally prominent philanthropist at a time when antiSemitism was rampant in the country. Before Canada had a “safety net,” she was called upon time and again by mayors and prime ministers in times of crisis.
“This lady was a dynamo,” says Dan MacKay, 70, a former Army Officers’ Mess president and its unofficial historian. “Her motto was ‘Doing good by stealth.’”
The Mess, built in 1891 in the “city mansion” style, was home to Lillian and her husband, A.J. Freiman, from 1913 until his death in 1944. A grand place it was, home to the couple, their four children (one adopted), seven servants, a couple of staircases, a billiard room and a wonderful wood-panelled showpiece.
A.J., of course, was a household name because of his landmark department store on Rideau Street. While he owned the shop, she delivered the goods, quietly going about saving the world.
During the First World War, she took an interest in military families that would become a lifelong mission.
MacKay said on weekends the grand house became a drop-in for Jewish soldiers and their friends based in Rockcliffe. This was just a start. In a room where officers today enjoy a pre-meal barley, Freiman had the furniture hauled away and 30 sewing machines set up so volunteers could make blankets and clothing for the troops overseas.
Her biographers say she was called upon in 1918 by the mayor to lead the city’s effort in the influenza epidemic, caring for the sick in a Catholic boarding house on Sussex Drive.
“It was Friday night (sabbath), so she walked to city hall and, for the next five weeks, virtually lived in an office there,” wrote her granddaughter Betsy Rigal, 84, detailing how Freiman supervised the work of 1,500 volunteers who managed the epidemic.
And she was only getting warmed up.
As the war ended, she led a veteran’s association that would evolve into the Royal Canadian Legion, and founded Canadian Hadassah, travelling across Canada to raise funds for social causes. To this day, there are Hadassah chapters bearing her name.
“It was the greatest fundraising drive ever mounted by Canadian Jewry and set a new standard for charitable giving,” writes Rigal, who, as child, lived with her grandparents on Somerset.
MacKay, meanwhile, has amassed a binder of material on Freiman. He pulls out a photo showing men eating in a warehouse building on Wellington Street in the 1920s. “What she ended up doing is every night from the mid-1920s until her death, she fed 450 unemployed, destitute veterans.”
At Christmas, she led an effort to fill 5,000 stockings for families dealing with absent military men, he said.
And this at a time when A.J., one of the city’s most prominent businessmen, was excluded from joining elite society clubs, and Jews faced institutional barriers everywhere.
“Here we have a Jewish woman in the 1920s and ’30s, when we’re turning back boats, and we have rampant anti- Semitism, and she’s on national boards.”
(Indeed, Lillian’s grandson, also called A.J., now 74, pointed to the infamous Tissot case, in which an Ottawa police officer tried to organize the city’s Christian merchants into boycotting Freiman’s flagship store and driving Jews out of town.)
“Did I mention the orphans?” MacKay asks. After the war created thousands of parentless children in Europe, Freiman led a high-level effort to bringing 146 Ukrainian orphans to Canada, and she and A.J. adopted one themselves.
“For many years she kept in touch with these children, who continued to call her Mama Freiman, including Gladys, who became a member of the family,” Rigal writes. (In 1930, a national women’s publication referred to her as “Mother of the Jewish people of Canada.”)
“I think she’s an amazing example of what women can do,” said Freiman’s granddaughter, Margo Roston, a retired Citizen writer. In the family lore, Lillian was not above marching into the Freiman’s store and grabbing coats, hats and mittens to help the destitute who, through the grapevine, arrived at her door.
In 1934, she was awarded the Order of British Empire, the first Canadian Jew to receive the honour. Her funeral was attended by hundreds, including the mayor and former prime minister Mackenzie King, who witnessed a poppy-covered casket being carried into a hearse.
There is more, a lot more, about Lillian Freiman. “The amazing thing I learned when I started doing research 10 years ago was nobody knows her, not even the legion,” MacKay said.
But bronze is heavy, memories fade and even ink runs out.