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Alphonso (Alfie) Theodore Roberts was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines on September 18, 1937. He attended St. George’s Anglican School and St. Vincent Boy’s Grammar School. Roberts was awarded a scholarship to study at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad and Tobago where he was selected to play cricket internationally for the West Indies cricket team. He later stopped playing cricket as his interests in politics and education grew over sports. He worked as a civil servant in St. Lucia between the years 1958 and 1962 and moved to Canada at the age of 23 to study at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (Quebec), where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Political Sciences. He later obtained a graduate diploma in Public Administration from Carleton University.

Roberts was involved in several community organizations in Montreal. Significantly, he was a founding member of the St. Vincent and Grenadines Association of Montreal. He also helped establish the International Caribbean Service Bureau and was a member of the Emancipation 150 Committee, which organized the Emancipation 150 Conference. After working for 20 years at the administration department of SIDBEC, a steelworks company in Montreal, Roberts decided to return to his studies and registered at Dawson College as a full-time mature student in the Political Science program.

Roberts was a political activist. Along with contemporaries like Franklyn Harvey and Rosie Douglas, Roberts organized conferences and events that supported several major political movements in the Caribbean. These events also brought renowned Caribbean thinkers and writers - including C.L.R. James and George Lamming - to Montreal.

During the independence of St. Vincent 1979, Roberts submitted a proposal to the government highlighting the importance of adding the smaller islands to the country’s name. His proposal was accepted by the government, renaming the country St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Alfie Roberts was Married to Patricia Cambridge with whom he had a daughter and two sons. He died in Montreal on July 24, 1996.

Alexander Robertson was born in 1907 in Thorburn, Nova Scotia. He married Angela Julie Baccanale of Montreal in 1943. They had four children: Jennie, James, Anthony, and Alexandra. He died September 10, 1986 in Montreal.

At age 18 he travelled to Vancouver, where he graduated from business college. Through the 1930s he worked as expediter, foreman, and service and production manager, first in Halifax, and from 1935 in Montreal. In 1941, he enlisted in the naval reserve at HMCS Donnacona Montreal RCNVR and left the next year for the regular Navy as a Petty Officer Writer, stationed at Stadacona, Halifax. In 1943 he was drafted on a destroyer leading a convoy to Ireland. After the war he returned to Truro, Nova Scotia. He moved to Montreal in 1949, and worked in the textile industry. He worked in the payroll department of Royal Victoria Hospital from 1967. He retired in 1972 and then did two more years of volunteer work in the hospital's credit union. After that he devoted most of his time to his hobbies.

As a child he had piano and violin lessons, and as a teenager he played banjo and organized an orchestra that played at school dances and socials. During the time he was in the Navy, Alex became interested in jazz and started what was to become a major collection of jazz recordings. His research in Montreal newspapers led to a chronology of musical performances, including jazz, in Montreal between 1913 and 1970. For four decades he researched the record industry, specializing in American jazz recorded in Canada. He compiled the Canadian Compo Numericals, the Apex 8000 Numerical, the Canadian Gennett Series 9000 with the history of the Starr-Gennett recording company, and the Rare Canadian Aurora Label from Victor Masters. It and the Gennet series discographies were published in Record Research . By compiling the company discographies he was able to determine the origin of the recordings in his collection, distinguishing those recorded in the studio in Montreal from those pressed from master tapes recorded in the United States. Thus he identified well known American musicians who recorded in Montreal using pseudonyms. The Discophile Society called Alex Robertson a discographical scientist.

Ira Robinson is a professor of Judaic studies in the department of Religion and Cultures of Concordia University. He received his BA in Humanities from the Johns Hopkins University in 1973. Robinson obtained his M.A. in Jewish History from Columbia University in 1975 before becoming a lecturer at the department of Religion of Concordia University in 1979. Harvard University awarded Robinson his Ph.D. in 1980. He was promoted to the Associate Professor rank in 1984 and was the Graduate Program Director of the M.A. in Judaic Studies from 1984 to 1991. He sat on the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Science from 1990-1991 to 1997-1998. Robinson was elected chair of the department of Religion in 1989, a position he would keep until 1997. He was finally promoted Full Professor in 1993. Robinson would be promoted Graduate Program Director again, from 2000 to 2009. Robinson was inducted into the Provost’s Circle of Distinction on May 30, 2013. He was designated Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2022. Ira Robinson published more than 15 books and over 50 articles. His research interests are Canadian Judaism, Orthodox Judaism in North America, Hasidism, Judaism and science and Jewish mysticism.

• Ira Robinson obtained his first award, the Louis L. Kaplan Prize in Hebrew Literature from the Baltimore Hebrew College, in 1970.
• He was awarded the 1986 prize in the non-fiction category of the Kenneth B. Smilen Literary Awards as the editor of Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters.
• In 1988, Robinson chaired the 3-day event Yiddish Montreal symposium, underlining Montreal as a world centre of Yiddish literary creativity.
• He was elected president of the Canadian Jewish Historical Society (now the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies) in June of 1994.
• Robinson was the president of the Jewish Public Library in Montreal from 1996 to 1998.
• The Koffler Centre for the Arts in Toronto’s Jewish Book Awards Committee granted Robinson the Prize for scholarship on a Canadian Jewish subject for the book ‘Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century’ in 1995.
• Robinson was instrumental in the creation of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies in 1999. He has acted as a director for the institute in 2005-2006, and 2012 to
• He chaired the Canadian Jewish Studies Researchers’ Forum held March 2001 in Montreal.
• In 2002, Robinson was elected to the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society.
• Robinson was awarded the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award in 2013 for his continuous support of Jewish Studies.

Samuel Abraham Rochlin was born in Cape Town July 9, 1904 to Isaac Gershon Rochlin and Dora Rochlin (nee Daniller). His parents moved from Rostov on Don in South Russia to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1896. They later moved to Cape Town where Samuel and his brothers Harry and Israel were born.

Rochlin, a historian, archivist, and researcher, witnessed the development of socialist and labour movements and the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa. Rochlin was a member of the Young Communist League in South Africa in the 1920s. Later he was involved in the Zionist movement, working for the Zionist Federation in Johannesburg and on the Zionist Record in the 1930s. He was also the first archivist of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), where he worked from 1947 to 1961. Rochlin is renowned for his research into South Africa’s Jewish settlers and was the chief research specialist of the South African Jewish Historical Society. Rochlin died November 14, 1961. In 1986 the SAJBD archives was renamed the S.A. Rochlin Archives in his honour.

Joseph (Joe) Roizen, television and video engineer, author, and consultant, was born from Russian emigrants on September 9th, 1923 in Kishinev, Romania. His father Berl (Boris) and his mother Brana (Betty) had previously escaped from Russia. The Roizen family emigrated to North America a few months later. They ended up at the end of the 1920s in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, in the Laurentians area (Québec) where Boris was treated for tuberculosis and where their second child Molly was born in 1930. Sometime after the father’s death in 1935, the family moved to Montreal.

Joe attended the Ste. Agathe Protestant Elementary School and then, in Montreal, the Baron Byng High School at the end of the 1930s. His main interests were in the sciences and electronics. He attended also evening courses in electricity at the Montreal Technical Institute. He then attended Sir George Williams College in 1941 and 1942 where he was the photographer of various student activities. Some of his photographs appeared in the 1942 SGW College yearbook. It seems it was during this period that he developed a lifelong love of photography. With the war’s out break he became the rear-seater radioman in testing Helldiver carrier fighterbombers at Fairchild. After the war he started companies that he was forced to abandon. He ended up working at Trans-Canada Airlines, in radio.

Joe married Gisela Holl in 1943. They had three children: Ron (b. 1943), Peter (b. 1946), Heidi (b. 1958). The family moved to California in 1948, where Joe worked first for Pacific Mercury and later on for Ampex. For this company he participated in the videotaping of the 1959 exchanges between Nixon and Krushchev in Moscow, known as the Kitchen Debate. Joe and Gisela divorced in the 1960s. In 1971, Joe founded his own company, Telegen. The same year, he married Donna Foster. Joe and Donna leaved in Portola Valley, California.

Joseph Roizen was a prolific author whose articles have been published in many trade publications (e.g. Electronics World and Radio-Electronics). He also contributed chapters to technical books (e.g. Videotext: the coming revolution in home/office information retrieval / edited by Efrem Sigel, 1980).

Joe Roizen died on March 1, 1989, while attending a meeting of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Paris.

Dr. Lorna Roth graduated from Sir George Williams University with a B.A. in Sociology (with Distinction) in 1972 and with a Diploma in Communications in 1974. She pursued her studies at McGill University and got a M.A. in Communications in 1983. Meanwhile, she had joined Concordia University in 1979 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies. She became assistant professor in 1994 and completed her PhD. in Communications the same year at Concordia. She served as Graduate Program Director of M.A. in Media Studies from 2001 to 2002, and Chairperson of Department of Communication Studies from 2002 to 2005. She became Professor in 2013.

Lorna Roth is the author of numerous articles and book chapters related to minority communications and cultural rights, especially on Aboriginal media development in Canada. In 2005, she published Something New in the Air: The Story of First Peoples’ Television Broadcasting in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press) which was the first broad and integrated overview of the history of First Peoples television broadcasting, up to and including the creation of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) in 1999.

Lorna Roth was active in the Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies (ACUNS) as Concordia Council member of its Northern Studies Committee (member since 1993 and Chair between 1994 and 2015). From 2007 to 2013, she was a member of the Montreal Life Stories Project team at Concordia, run out of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, which produced oral histories of 500 Montrealers who emigrated to escape from mass violence and conflicts in their home countries. She has been a Fellow in the School of Community and Public Affairs since 1993 and in the Simone de Beauvoir Institute since 2007.

In 2003, in recognition of her work as a groundbreaking educator, she was awarded the YMCA’s Woman of Distinction Award in the education category. In 2013, she was inaugurated into the Provost’s Circle of Distinction.

Lorna Roth is presently working on an e-manuscript called Skinvisible: Race, Colour Technologies and “Intelligent Design,” which explores the ways in which skin colour is imagined, embedded, and colour-adjusted over time in products and visual technologies that have a sense of flesh as central to their design. Her focus is on what happens when manufacturers recognize that not all skin is “light/white.” A range of essays from this manuscript have already been internationally circulated and are considered foundational to opening up a new trajectory in cultural and visual studies.

On May 1, 2019, the Concordia University Senate, conferred on Dr. Roth the designation of “Distinguished Professor Emerita,” in the Department of Communication Studies in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the field, department, faculty, and university.”