Joel Goldenberg

Sakharvov remembered

By Joel Goldenberg on January 7, 2010

On Dec. 14, 1989, law professor, rights activist and now Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler was on his way to Moscow to have dinner and a discussion with renowned Soviet human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, when he called his wife Ariela during a stopover in London.
“She said ‘you won’t be able to have dinner with Dr. Sakharov,’” Cotler recalled, his voice breaking and halted. “’He died this morning.’ Instead of having dinner with Andrei Sakharov, I attended his funeral.”

Wiesel in Montreal: “You are not alone! Somebody cares.”

By Joel Goldenberg on October 1, 2009

Individuals should never think there is nothing they can do to help solve society’s ills, professor, Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told an audience of more than 2,200 at Théâtre St. Denis recently...