Memoir

Standard Knitting —My Grandfather's Sweater Factor

Published in the Jewish Post & News (Winnipeg, Manitoba), April 2, 2014

 I wish I had known my grandfather Moishe Hirsh Halparin (1883-1947). He died of a heart attack, at 63, two-and-a-half years before I was born. My parents named me in his honour: I have his first two initials – “M.H.,” which was his moniker. Our Hebrew names share the same letters, though different vowels (since I am female). 

By all accounts, M.H. was quite a character: clever, stubborn and rigid (his three sons called him “the warden”) but also honest, generous and kindhearted. With his father and younger brother, he fled the pogroms in what is now Belarus and settled in Winnipeg in 1904 ... (read full article) 

 

An Orchard in Israel: A Tribute to My Parents Moishe and Clara Halparin

by Lillian R. Mostow (née Halparin)
(as told to her daughter, Morri H. Mostow)

Published in the Endowment Book of Life, Jewish Foundation of Manitoba, 2011

I was eight years old when my parents took me to Palestine, in the spring of 1935. My father, Moishe Hirsh Halparin, had made a big score on the stock market, and decided to take my mother to Palestine to see the 75 dunam (18.5 acre) orange orchard in Ness Ziona that he’d bought in 1931.

My mother, Clara, refused to leave me behind because I was so much younger than my four siblings. We also planned to see my eldest brother, Bill, whom my father had sent to manage the orchard following Bill’s graduation from engineering at the University of Manitoba. Bill was fluent in Hebrew and would become quite competent in Arabic during his more than a year in Palestine ...(read full article).