Philanthropist, scholar and art collector Yosef Wosk steps back in search of meaning

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For many years, Yosef Wosk’s schedule was filled with board meetings and appointments to support the arts and social services. Giving and mentoring was a job in itself for the Vancouver-based scholar, art collector, author, poet, philanthropist and rabbi.

But then about two years ago he dropped off the many boards and organizations he’d given so much of his time to. He needed to clear his mind from so many emails and so much noise. Now he feels most fulfilled at home in his personal library surrounded by precious books and art. He seldom uses a cellphone.

“I was at the end of a social or communal consciousness in terms of responsibility, serving on boards. And how much time do I have left? I really felt it was the last or second-to-last chapter of my life, and I’ve been putting off the writing. I published a few things over the years, but I had not dedicated myself.

“I kept saying, ‘the time will come, there’s still time.’ The mind, however, fools us, and before you know it, time is gone.”

At 73, Wosk says he is entering a new phase, a more deliberate one in which he writes for hours a day, creating and curating a meaningful body of work. He’s also cataloguing his art collection, some of it displayed in a gallery in his 10,000-square-foot, 1913 heritage mansion in Vancouver’s old-money neighbourhood of Shaughnessy. Much of the art is in storage, so he’s working on another gallery for the property, which will sit adjacent to a sculpture garden.

The reckoning with mortality, and what he wants to do with his time, has been an ongoing process. Earlier, Wosk also sold off the properties that his father Morris J. Wosk worked hard to obtain and owned for decades. It was a difficult decision.

Morris, with his brother Ben, built their fortunes first from a chain of appliance stores, Wosk’s Furniture & Appliances. They also developed hotel towers and apartment buildings. Morris focused on the real estate side of the business and became a high-profile philanthropist who received the Order of Canada. He donated approximately $50 million during his lifetime, including $3 million to Simon Fraser University, which named one of its downtown campus buildings in his honour.

As a scholar, his son Yosef spent years teaching at SFU, but he also inherited his father’s philanthropy gene.

“It’s part of the Jewish tradition also, to give. That’s one of the fundamental teachings,” he says. “But my father was very generous, so that both encouraged me and gave me permission; it set a model, a standard. He had four children, and he never put pressure on my sister and brothers to go into the business. If we wanted to, it was up to us. As long as we lived a good life, and we were responsible and succeeded in what we did, he supported us.”

Like his father, Yosef is a high-profile Vancouverite who has received the Order of Canada, among the many other accolades that fill his voluminous-and-growing curriculum vitae. For his many community contributions he has also received the Order of B.C., the Freedom of the City (a high honour given by the city of Vancouver) and honorary doctorates.

After his father died

His siblings had wanted to liquidate their father’s real estate assets after Morris died in 2002. Wosk, however, was able to hold onto some of it. “It got really messy, as these things often do,” he says of the process. And then, three years ago, he decided to sell the remainder of his father’s real estate business. “It tied up a lot of capital.”

A long-time assistant and team of people help him manage his wealth and run the Yosef Wosk Family Foundation. But he will also sometimes just write someone a cheque with a cover letter expressing gratitude for their work, if it so inspires him.

He says he doesn’t have a head for business. “It’s all wizardry to me, and yet I have managed a lot of programs in the community. I’ve been on many boards, served rabbinic congregations, and managed family funds, buildings and investments.

“Some people call me smart, but I know smart people. I may be up there, but not on the level of really smart people. But I do really enjoy being creative, and part of that maybe comes out in an art collection or the house. And as I got older, I have allowed myself to enjoy being creative, or having an original thought.”

Satisfying an interest in pop culture

He may have been raised in a traditional family, but that did not constrain his appetite for pop culture.

He is working on books about the ongoing restoration of his house and his art collection. He owns many Picasso, Rembrandt and Chagall etchings and lithographs that sit amongst an Andy Warhol and a deep photography collection that includes original prints of Madonna and Marilyn. He has a special edition of Ulysses signed by James Joyce and Henri Matisse, who illustrated it. He also has a signed first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Booksellers contact him when they have something he might like.

In his backyard he has a 13-foot-high bowling pin that he salvaged from an alley that has since been torn down. He has commissioned a major panel artwork by celebrated Haida Gwaii carver James Hart that is many years in the making, and another from China’s famous Ai Weiwei. He will add a Fernando Botero sculpture to his garden next year.

A ‘review of his life’

Like many people with a history of inter-generational trauma and rootlessness, he has been sifting through the family archives. He calls this review of his life and his parents’ lives a cathartic experience. It’s also a practical effort: The SFU archives department is interested in the Wosk family documents for its collection.

His mother was born in eastern Poland, which is now Belarus, and his father was born in Odessa. They fled persecution as children with their families. His mother, who became a gold medal violinist, moved to Edmonton; his father’s family settled in Vancouver in 1928, in what was then a Jewish community on the city’s east side. His father and his family spoke only Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian, but they quickly learned English. Morris dropped out of school in Grade 6 to help with the family business, which was peddling pots and pans out of a wagon.

The family started selling refurbished appliances, then began offering new ones. They opened their first store on Granville Street in 1932. A Jewish man, also a recent immigrant, walked into their store one day and told them they needed to go across the street to the bank and get a line of credit to grow their business. They didn’t even know such a thing was possible. He took them to the bank and co-signed for them so they could borrow $100. To this day, Yosef Wosk has his accounts with that bank.

The business grew to a dozen stores and became a major retailer in Vancouver. Yosef has memories as a child watching his father proofread their appliance advertisements for the daily newspaper. By then, they were well off.

Then a search for meaning

Wosk became fascinated with other religions and studied Hinduism, Buddhism and mystical shamanism. He earned his B.A. in religious studies and, in a restless mood, he moved to Jerusalem in 1972 to live like a monk for three years in a traditional yeshiva. Later in New York he earned a master’s degree in education, then a master’s in theology at Harvard Divinity School. He obtained two PhDs, in religion and literature, and psychology.

In his search for meaning, he travelled the world, including expeditions to the north and south poles — he compares it to “a fool on the hero’s journey” — and like any other youth of his generation, he experimented with meditation and psychedelic drugs.

“I didn’t want to be a rabbi,” he explains. “But it helped ground me with my wandering mind, and it helped me intellectually, spiritually, physically, emotionally and in every way. There were tremendous struggles in that, too.”

The struggles are inherited, as they so often are among persecuted groups of people.
“A lot gets transmitted, even by cellular memory. There’s a certain way of looking, the paranoia, the survival, and asking, ‘What does success mean?’

“And being normal. Do we have to hide out? Or do you try and prove yourself, and do you have to work twice as hard, or 10 times as hard, to prove yourself and feel part of the society?

“Life has felt somewhat precarious, and yet I am filled with gratitude.”

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