This interview is part of a series highlighting NIFC ‘Legacy Society Members’ and their stories. Here we feature Hugh Furneaux and his late wife Penny Fine (z”l).
You recently made a generous gift to NIFC in honour of your late wife Penny. Tell us about yourself and her.
I have two eras in my life–‘Before Penny’ and ‘After Penny’. Before Penny, I was raised in the Anglican faith and all I knew about Israel as a kid was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jews, Judaism, and Israel were not part of my life at all. I met Jews for the first time at age 17, when I enrolled in the Commerce and Finance program at the University of Toronto. I was married the first time soon after graduation, had two kids, taught secondary school, and moved into educational publishing in the 1970s.
The After Penny era began in the mid 70s when we came together after our respective marriage breakdowns. Penny grew up and attended Jewish Day School in Montreal. She spent every summer of her youth and teen years at Jewish summer camps. Irwin Cotler was one of her camp mates. These experiences had a profound impact and planted the roots of her Zionism.
In my early years, I was totally ignorant about Israel but the Yom Kippur War happened the same year I met Penny. I couldn’t understand what she was so passionate about–it was a war in another part of the world, so why her obsession? She told me if she hadn’t met me, she would have made Aliyah.
In 1978, we had our first child. Penny hadn’t been inside a synagogue for a long time, and I had left Christianity behind years before. But there was no question we’d bring up our daughter as Jewish. As it happened, Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto ran a Jewish Information Class in 1982 and I signed up.
I became a Jew by Choice in 1983, and had my Bar Mitzvah in 1996. After I converted, we joined Holy Blossom, and were members there for 30 years.
In 1989 I started my own marketing company in contract publishing, working with banks and packaging companies to develop customer newsletters. I retired from what had become a very successful enterprise by 2007. The company was sold in 2015 and as a result I now have money enough to make donations to NIFC.
Looking back, what was your relationship to Israel growing up and do you have any special connections to it?
My relationship with Israel was zero growing up — I knew nothing about the place before I met Penny. We raised our family in Toronto and never thought about moving there.
Then, we made our first visit to Israel in 2010. Our guide took us from the bottom to the top. I was blown away by the modernity, sophistication and accomplishments of the country, juxtaposed against its history and heritage.
A year later, in 2011, we signed on to an NIFC tour which went beyond the superficial sights. That’s when we saw firsthand organizations that NIFC supported. My strongest memory from that trip was when Breaking the Silence took us to Hebron. To this day I remember two teenage IDF soldiers harassing a 14-year-old Palestinian kid about his ID and the imbalance of that relationship was so stark. It was after that I made my first significant donation to NIFC.
As time went on, Penny’s support for Israel never wavered in the slightest. After we joined City Shul in 2013, she established an Israel Engagement Committee there–to help members learn more about the country’s contemporary culture and people—beyond the politics of the place. She vigorously and passionately headed up that initiative until the month before she died.
Looking at today’s Israel, how would you describe your connection to Israel and its society at this current moment, after two years of war and finally a ceasefire and return of the hostages? What was important to Penny over these past two years?
It was through the 2010s that Penny developed a strong relationship with the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) and she became one of its larger Canadian donors. We visited Israel again in 2018 and 2019. Because of Penny’s financial support for IMPJ, we were able to visit both established and new Reform congregations from Haifa to Jerusalem and throughout Israel’s interior, all of which were benefiting from her philanthropy.
To say Penny was distressed about the current war is an understatement. She worried about what might happen to Reform Judaism and organizations like NIFC, which she feared could be marginalized. She was also very concerned about whether Israel would be able to recover its heart and soul after the war in Gaza. She was very troubled by the loss of the Israel she grew up with.
Who or what inspired you and Penny to believe that NIFC’s work can make a real difference on the ground in Israel? What gives you hope?
For both of us a major foundation point was our 2011 NIFC trip to Israel and meeting with beneficiary organizations and later witnessing NIFC’s small victories. Back in Canada I increasingly witnessed NIFC raising its profile as an effective organization making a grassroots difference in Israel. We kept our hope alive because the alternative was unthinkable. You don’t abandon people continuing to fight just because things are going badly. You get in there focusing on specific opportunities relevant to the grassroots.
The Jewish people over millennia have many precedents for suffering defeats and suppression, but also revival, renewal and overcoming. The Jewish people have continued and there’s something in the Jewish soul that just won’t quit.