TORONTO – James C. Temerty sits down energetically at a large table that dominates an elegant, yet simple conference room.
“My wife’s bringing another one,” he jokes, lifting a wrist to reveal a missing button from the sleeve of a crisp white shirt.
It is a humanizing gesture for a man who has not only become one of Canada’s most recognizable businessmen and philanthropists, but also emerged as a powerful force in Ukrainian educational and humanitarian circles. While other wealthy Ukrainians living in Canada and the United States have tended to focus their donor efforts closer to home, Temerty has through his patronage effectively become a bridge between his adopted and native homelands.
Not only has Temerty helped Canadians gain a greater appreciation of Ukraine’s cultural heritage through sponsorship of exhibitions exported to that country, he has also funded educational efforts in Ukraine which are expanding the horizons of a new generation of Ukrainians. He helped found and supports the business school at Kyiv’s Mohyla Academy and last year he gifted $1.2 million to Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) for Ukrainian-Jewish studies.
Along with these efforts, Temerty has been the principle backer of the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter Initiative, a privately organized multinational effort which hopes to deepen a broader academic and public understanding of the breadth, complexity and diversity of relations between the two peoples.
Success and clout have allowed Temerty to keep a promise he made to himself many years ago, which is to do community service.
“I made that promise to be able to imagine how I could do that,” he says in an interview held in his Toronto office. “I believe in giving back to the community and to the Ukrainian community. I give to the maximum that I can.”
He says he does not think about legacy.
“My life is my legacy. It’s what you do with a life,” he says. “I don’t think in those terms.”
Boasting more than four decades of business experience, Temerty spent 15 years with IBM, the computer company, and then built the world’s largest chain of Computerland franchises. In 1987, he established NorthlandPower, a Canadian company which develops and owns clean and renewable energy projects using thermal, wind, solar and hydropower technologies. In 2010, the international accounting firm Ernst & Young named him Canada’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
The beginning of Temerty’s Ukrainian consciousness began in a displaced person’s camp in Munich, Germany after World War II, where he lived with his family for a year.
“It was the whole beginning of the Ukrainian experience for a kid,” he says.
To that extent, Temerty’s immigrant story mirrors that of others in the Ukrainian diaspora. He grew up speaking Ukrainian, was active in his community in Montreal, a city in Canada’s Quebec province where his family eventually settled after the war and continued his involvement into his university years.
Yet unlike the majority in the Ukrainian diaspora whose ancestors come from what is today’s Western Ukraine, Temerty was born in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and is of the Orthodox faith. He comes from a long line of Cossacks, having traced his roots for many generations. His family escaped the war traveling west by horse and buggy in a caravan.
“This is the usual trajectory,” he says. “Hiding from the Nazis, hiding from the Soviets, even hiding from the UPA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” although the organization did try to recruit his father, who citing family declined.
Temerty’s mother lived through the Holodomor, Ukraine’s 1932-1933 Stalin-made famine which saw at least three million dead in large parts of today’s Eastern Ukraine. While the slow starvation of their ethnic brethren was mournfully shocking, that experience did not personally touch most individuals from the west. Temerty says the Holodomor was rarely discussed at home, although there is one story too personal to share.
His business success makes him an anomaly in Canada’s Ukrainian circles. Indeed, Temerty is one of only a handful of wealthy Ukrainians in Canada. The number is small enough to hamper the community’s growth and influence, even though some Canadian-Ukrainians have achieved prominence in politics.
“Ukrainians are very risk averse,” Temerty says. “It’s a problem. It’s a very big problem.”
They also don’t know how to ask for money, he says.
“It’s going to change, but here’s the thing. If it just changes to the extent that it becomes proportionate to our numbers, it’s not enough. I would rather we look to other communities where it’s disproportionate, like the Jewish community, like the Armenian community, like the Greek community. If you look at those communities you’ll find that the people who do business in those communities are in a higher proportion than the general population. That’s what you need to build a community.”
Along with his other philanthropic efforts, in 2001 and 2008 respectively, Temerty brought two highly-praised exhibits of Scythian and Trypilian culture from Ukraine to Toronto’s famed Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Ukrainians from all communities helped make the exhibits a huge success, he says. Now the museum hosts a regular Ukrainian day.
Temerty served as ROM’s chair of the board of governors from 2002 to 2009.
Despite his support for educational and cultural programs, Temerty says he won’t invest in Ukraine, which he visits three or four times a year.
In the mid-1990’s – his first trip to Ukraine came before the country gained its independence – Temerty became involved in a successful energy-efficiency project. Believing the country needed his expertise, he supplied equipment and services, and then in an all-too-familiar-scenario was raided.
He eventually reached a settlement with the people who took the assets.
“I will not do business in Ukraine,” Temerty says. “Good works, yes, but I’ve always had that.”
Temerty’s projects:
Temerty’s support for projects exploring
Ukrainian-Jewish relations comes at a time when scholars in Ukraine and
abroad are vigorously debating the country’s history, particularly its
nationalist movement and the role Ukrainians played during the Holocaust
in World War II.
The period remains highly controversial.
Ukrainians, particularly those hailing from the country’s west, are
often charged with collaborating with the Nazis, while others have been
recognized by the State of Israel as giving Jews safe haven, often at
the risk of their own lives.
More than 1.5 million Jews were
killed in Ukraine during World War II, many shot to death in ravines and fields
throughout the country during German occupation. This lesser-known
tragedy in history books has become known as the Holocaust by bullet.
“His
gift is inspiring because the study of Ukrainian-Jewish relations is
not an easy topic to explore,” Marta Kolomayets, Director of Programs
and Communications at the Chicago-based Ukrainian Catholic Education
Foundation says of the donation to Lviv’s UCU. It “underscores his
faith in the future generations of Ukrainians who will lead the country
in the 21st century…He is bold in his vision and committed to his native
land.”
Of Ukrainians and Jews, Temerty says “the two cultures
are inseparably intertwined… I would like for there to be an opportunity
for Jewish culture to flourish once again in [an] intertwined way in
Ukraine. The Nazis came in and killed more than 1.5 million Jews…We
still have a community. These people have a right to continue to live
and to be a very large part of the fabric of Ukraine.”
Temerty says he believes more needs to be done to educate Ukrainians about their past.
“School
systems should be doing more to expose their children to the horrors of
their history. These were joint tragedies, the Holocaust and the
Holodomor. These were joint tragedies and I don’t believe it’s
generally known.”
He does not skirt away from the question of Ukrainian complicity during the war, but says it is a complicated question.
“Of
course, there was collaboration, but was it ideological or was it of
necessity, because they had to survive and they had to provide for the
family. It’s very complicated. So my own view is, okay, it’s
complicated, but a million-and-a-half people died in the lands of
Ukraine in a horrible fashion. They were assembled, they were stripped,
they were shot, they were thrown into pits…It was awful.
“We
owe recognition of that. And I think when we finally do this … we will
then have become recognized as a European nation by our behavior. I
hope to see Ukraine in Europe, but to belong to the European club of
nations they have to come to see you as one of them. And that’s by our
behavior. We’re not showing them that.”
Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
