TMU alumnus celebrates family’s resilience this Rosh Hashanah

This year, Rosh Hashanah takes place from sundown on Monday, September 22 to sundown on Wednesday, September 24. To mark the beginning of the Jewish New Year, Toronto Metropolitan University alumnus and respected media creator Allan Novak celebrates the enduring gift that is family, their resilience and their stories.

In Allan’s own words:

Rosh Hashanah is a time of reflection, a pause between what has been and what is yet to come, and this year, that reflection feels especially profound for me. I’ve just completed making and touring festivals with Crossing the River, a 30-minute documentary about my mother, Anne, her sisters Ruth and Sally, and their brother Sol. To me, they were my humble and modest family, but in 2022, they were identified by the Shoah Foundation as the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor siblings.

For me, this wasn’t just a film. It was a personal journey deep into the heart of my family’s story, one that spans nearly a century, from a small town in Poland to the frozen reaches of Stalin’s Siberia, to their new life in Winnipeg. It’s a story of unimaginable loss and equally unimaginable survival, carried on the backs of tradition, family closeness, and a stubborn, almost defiant optimism.

Rosh Hashanah invites us to consider resilience. In Jewish tradition, the blast of the shofar (rams horn) is both a wake-up call and a call to remember. As I pieced together 100 years of surviving photos and ephemera, as well as 40 years of my own personal archives, I realized I was answering that same call; waking myself up to the depth of my family’s resilience and ensuring their story would not be lost to time.  

Growing up, I thought my family was ordinary — warm, funny, close-knit. But as I revisited their wartime memories, I saw how extraordinary they were. Four Jewish children ripped from their home, surviving years of exile in Siberia, holding fiercely to each other, and then building new lives in Canada. All this was done without losing their joy or their traditions. That resilience is, to me, the essence of Rosh Hashanah: the belief that renewal is always possible, even after the most trying of times.

Photo 1: The Fink siblings. From left, Ruth Zimmer, Sol Fink, Sally Singer and Anne Novak. Their story spans nearly a century — from Poland to Siberia to their new life in Winnipeg.

Photo 2: The Fink siblings in Poland, 1932. Clockwise from top left: Anne, Sol, Sally, Ruth and Eli. Instead of escaping to Siberia with his siblings, Eli chose to remain in Poland with his grandparents. They and other relatives were sent to concentration camps where they died.

My mother, who passed away three days after the film premiered at Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts in New York, always celebrated the Jewish New Year with care. The table was set with her best dishes, the apples and honey laid out, the blessings recited and the ever present gefilte fish, made sweet from freshly caught Lake Winnipeg pickerel, and often supplied by local Indigenous fishermen. These rituals were never just about food or formality. They were a way of affirming, We are here. We remember who we are. We begin again.

Completing this film feels like my own Rosh Hashanah offering. It is a gift to my family, to the Jewish people, and to anyone who wonders how life can go on after unthinkable hardship. The answer, I’ve learned, is simple: you hold on to your people, your traditions, and your belief in renewal.

May the New Year be sweet, and may we all cross our own rivers with courage.