Yoine Goldstein.Courtesy of the Family
Yoine Goldstein did not like attention, not as one of the country’s pre-eminent bankruptcy lawyers, not as a champion of the rights of refugees or students drowning in debt and not as a leader of Canada’s Jewish community. He was under the radar, quiet and incisive, letting his accomplishments do the talking. He lived his life according to the concept tikkun olam, Hebrew for “heal the world.”
After prime minister Paul Martin, who appointed Mr. Goldstein to the Senate in 2005, left office, he spent a lot of time working in Africa. While there, one of his contacts wondered if he knew the Canadian who was working hard to supply Asian and African countries with needed medications that were hard to come by.
“I asked, ‘Who is that?’ and the reply was ‘Yoine Goldstein,’” Mr. Martin said. “I had no idea.
“Yoine really felt that as a lawyer, he had a responsibility to protect people,” Mr. Martin continued. “He made you feel close to him through his sense of values. He made you feel that he cared about the things that count.”
In 2013, when senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Mac Harb were in the headlines because of a scandal over their expenses, Jonathan Kay wrote a column in the National Post that prescribed a “few good Yoines” – experts in their field who quietly push through needed, well-thought-out reforms – to cure the Senate. He called on then-prime minister Stephen Harper to “go out and find them.”
The lone Canadian to have been elected a Fellow of both the American College of Bankruptcy and the American College of Trial Lawyers, Mr. Goldstein was so honest, if he forgot to declare a purchase when crossing the border, even a pair of socks, he’d get back in the lineup to do so, his son said.
Doron also recalled an incident in which his father was installing something on the roof of their family home and fell off, landing hard on his heels. “There was no cry,” the son said. “He simply limped into the house and quietly said he may have hurt himself. At the hospital, we learned he had hairline fractures in both ankles.”
Mr. Goldstein died on March 18 in Montreal of causes related to pulmonary hypertension, a condition he was diagnosed with about three years ago. He was 85.
His daughter, Dahna, said that what keeps coming to mind is her father’s love of puns and the way he told jokes.
“He just couldn’t get through one without laughing uncontrollably before he got to the punchline,” she recalled. “We’d all start laughing, too.”
Yoine Goldstein was born in Montreal on May 11, 1934, the youngest of Sam and Batsheva Goldstein’s four children. After the couple had emigrated from Eastern Europe, Sam made a living as best he could, at times as a teacher storyteller who went door to door, or a customs peddler who sold goods he got on consignment, or a Yiddish typesetter and jeweller. Batsheva was no-nonsense and tough, a champion bargainer who would do anything for her children.
Although money was scarce, somehow the family made do in an apartment above a store on Saint-Viateur Street in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood; reading was encouraged, as was music, and the children studied Yiddish, Hebrew and the works of Baruch Spinoza with a private tutor.
From a young age, Yoine, whose two brothers and sister never let him forget he was the baby, was a top student. After graduating from Baron Byng High School, he got a bachelor of arts from McGill University in 1955 and a bachelor of civil law with honours from the same institution in 1958. He then moved to France, where he studied for a PhD in law at the University of Lyon. His parents scraped together $5 each month to send him so he could pay for food, a meagre income he augmented by giving private lessons in Hebrew and Bible studies.
In 1960, he returned to Montreal after completing his doctorate and he was admitted to the Quebec Bar the following year.
For years, he was the senior and managing partner of the Montreal law firm Goldstein, Flanz & Fishman, specializing in insolvency, bankruptcy and commercial litigation. He worked long hours and was often absent when his children were eating dinner.
“I’d force myself to stay awake and wait for him to get home,” Dahna said. “We’d pass time in the kitchen and he would make me a drink, warm milk with a splash of grenadine, to help me sleep.”
In tandem with his practice, from 1973 to 1997, Mr. Goldstein also lectured in the faculty of law at the French-language University of Montreal. He was barely able to speak French growing up, but he made sure to learn it because he knew he had little future in Quebec if he did not.
As a senator from August, 2005, to May, 2009, he made his mark as an extraordinarily capable humanitarian, introducing and sponsoring bills to protect refugees in Canada, relieve students of debt from their student loans and add a human-rights clause to the Investment Canada Act whenever a foreign investment is to be reviewed. In a tribute on Mr. Goldstein’s obituary page, Frank Chalk, a history professor at Concordia University and the director of the university’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, wrote: “Yoine’s remarkable accomplishments as a member of the Canadian Senate stand as a testament to what one highly motivated, truly decent, focused and wise person can do to repair the world while working close to the centre of political power.”
Mr. Goldstein also lived by the concept of tikkun olam when it came to his own community, as president of various charitable groups, as vice-president of the Jewish National Fund and as a legal counsel and board member for a host of Jewish organizations. It was his way to give back to those who had helped his family when they were in need.
It was his way to help the world.
He leaves his wife, Elaine Goldstein (née Rapkin); children Doron and Dahna; daughter-in-law, Sarah Altschuller; grandson, Ezra; and sister, Mindel Shore.