An extraordinary life of service: Dunkelman’s early years
1913: Ben was to the manor born, heir to Tip Top Tailors. Home was an English mansion on the sprawling, 40-hectare Sunnybrook Farm, where Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre stands today. Dunkelman described the sumptuous estate as “a dreamland, a children’s paradise.” Summers were spent swimming and sailing on Lake Simcoe at the family’s Balfour retreat.
1920s: For all his father’s business acumen, Ben’s mother, Rose, was formidable in her own right as one of Canada’s pre-eminent early Zionists. Nicknamed “Madame Czarina” by friends and foes alike, Rose turned the Sunnybrook home into a transit station and hospitality centre for visiting leaders of the movement for Jewish colonization in Palestine. Among Ben’s earliest memories were stories about the “mysterious Land of Israel” from the likes of Chaim Weizmann, Louis Lipsky and Stephen Wise.
1931-32: The first withering hard work of Dunkelman’s life, as he traded luxury in Toronto for a year toiling in the orange groves of the fledgling Jewish settlement of Tel Asher, 50 kilometres north of Tel Aviv. “In Canada I had everything I could ask for — servants, cars, horses, spending money,” he would write. “Now here I was working long hours in the blazing sun, subsisting on less meat in a whole week than in a single one of mother’s meals.”
1939: As war descended, Tip Top Tailors ramped up to produce as many as 35,000 uniforms a week for the swelling ranks of Canadian volunteers. But not for Ben, whose initial attempt to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy was rebuffed. “The navy obviously considered that a Jew was not suitable company in the wardroom,” Dunkelman wrote. “It infuriated me that such habits of mind prevailed in a country supposedly at war against Hitler.”
1940: Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles — the storied militia regiment — were more welcoming, putting Dunkelman through the paces to become an infantry officer. After three years of intense training, Dunkelman approached D-Day with a secret weapon of sorts. His specialized training allowed him to apply precision artillery techniques to more rapidly deploy field mortars with swift, sharp aim. Those skills would serve him well in two wars.
1945: Promoted to the rank of major by war’s end, Dunkelman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. He was singled out for his innovative technique in concentrated mortar barrages, and for heroism in single-handedly taking out two German machine-gun posts in the battle of Balberger Wald. He was offered command of the Queen’s Own upon his return to Canada. Though he wore the regiment’s ring for the rest of his life, he declined, returning instead to the family firm.
1948: Dunkelman led recruitment in Canada, mobilizing Jewish volunteers to join the Haganah, a pre-Israel paramilitary organization. He was the first to arrive in the region,
making his way to besieged Jerusalem. He rose quickly through the ranks with the blessing of David Ben-Gurion (who in May that year became Israel’s first prime minister), helping break the siege and later commanding an army division to capture the upper western Galilee. “Ben’s Bridge,” on the Lebanese border, stands to this day in his honour.