We love building things. It’s something that Haim has done in his general construction career, and as a couple, our passion among others is raising our family in the larger community. Whether it’s a home, a family legacy, or an entire community, it takes determination. We learned this from our friends and relatives, all of whom were community builders.
Mardi: My great-grandparents came to Canada fleeing pogroms during the mid-1880s. When they arrived, Toronto wasn’t the friendliest place for Jews either—but compared to the shtetls, it was paradise. Their generation were the hard workers and the framers of our Toronto Jewish community. By the time I was born, we had amazing institutions like Mount Sinai, where my mother and I volunteered for many years. There I learned the beauty of giving tzedakah and giving back to the community.
Haim: My parents survived the horrors of the Holocaust. My father survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz mostly because of his determination and being a shoemaker by trade, which made him useful to the Germans. Although he lost most of his family, surviving had given him a second chance. My parents found each other in a displaced persons camp and restarted their lives in Israel, where I was born, and where their generation helped build Israel from the ground up.
When Haim and I met in Toronto, we quickly realized that we shared the deepest value of community which our families inspired in us. It was natural then that community would become a big part of our marriage. Helping to build our community started with volunteering, followed by philanthropic giving. Once you learn to enjoy giving, it becomes second nature to help your community. Funding our donations through the Jewish Foundation is a great tool for doing so.
Giving back is only one part of our legacy. Our amazing children are a part of it, too. We taught them what we had learned from those who came before us and from our peers in the community, and we are thrilled to see them demonstrate it with their volunteer activities. The wider community is also important and we are so proud to have multiple generations of military service in our family: my father Dr. Murray Cornish who served in WWII as a dentist; Haim, who served in Israel; and our son Dr. Jonah, who served in the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan as a medic. It is one more way we have worked hard to give back to the community we love—to be the shoulders upon which future generations of Jews can stand, as they build something beautiful, beyond what we can imagine.