Basya Hunter: A Woman For All Seasons

From the Holy Blossom Archives Committee 

Basya Hunter: A Woman For All Seasons

by Michael Cole, Holy Blossom Temple Archives

In April 1951, Basya Hunter, Supervisor of Hebrew at Holy Blossom, wrote a letter to the Temple’s Board of Trustees asking for a raise in pay.

My job has not been part-time. I meet with staff and students on Saturdays, holidays and evenings … I devote four mornings a week to preparation (at home). I am at Temple from four to five afternoons a week for regular working schedules or rehearsals, plus regular Sunday mornings … Unless I am given a wage commensurate with the time spent and the responsibilities carried, I cannot continue with this position.

At the next meeting of the Board, Basya’s request was granted without discussion.

Basya’s responsibilities at Holy Blossom were indeed many and varied. Not only was she head of the Hebrew Department, she was also responsible for Confirmation (an onerous task, involving working with individual students on their contribution to what, in those years, was a large, well-rehearsed production), and she was in charge of programming for Hanukkah and Purim.

However, with all of her contributions to the educational side of Holy Blossom’s life (and she was the assistant principal and then principal of our Religious School in the early 1940s), it is as a director of drama, both of students in the Religious School and then with Temple Players, for which she is most remembered. During the 1950s and 1960s, she directed Temple Players in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, All My Sons, and Death of A Salesman. (A socially conscious woman, Basya was attracted to Miller’s dramas.) Temple Players also mounted a play based on the Thomas Mann novel, Joseph and His Brothers and another, The World of Sholom Aleichem, based on tales of the Yiddish story-teller.

In February 1977, Basya’s own play, Johannes and the Talmud, opened at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. The play was based on the life of Johannes Reuchlin, according to a column in The Globe and Mail, “a 16th century German scholar and Christian who steadfastly defended the right of Jews to practise their religion.” The play took Basya twelve years to write and went through nearly twenty drafts. The same Globe article noted that Johannes was widely acclaimed in religious circles, if not among professional critics. Notwithstanding the critics, the play was remounted twice in Toronto, first at St. Michael’s College in 1979 and then at the Leah Posluns Theatre in 1988.

Born in 1911, Basya Zavin grew up in a tenement on New York City’s Lower East Side, one of seven children. As a young girl, she directed her friends in plays on the city’s streets. At age eighteen, she went to Russia to study drama with Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Stanislavsky was the inventor of ‘the method,’ a theory of acting according to which actors are encouraged to discover their characters’ inner emotions and motivations. As adapted by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler in New York, ‘the method’ produced such stars as Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. Basya brought method acting to a group of amateurs at Holy Blossom!

On the ship taking her to Russia, Basya met Peter Hunter. They later married and had one son, David. Peter was an interesting person. His devotion to and later disillusionment with the Communist Party and Soviet Russia is the subject of a fascinating memoir, Which Side Are You On, Boys?

Basya’s work in establishing the Canadian theatre scene was remarkable. She taught such luminaries of Canadian drama as William Shatner, Robert Goulet, and Toby Robins, first at her own Arts Theatre and then at Ryerson (now TMU).

I knew Basya; she and my mother were good friends. I missed the years when she worked in Holy Blossom’s Religious and Hebrew School, and I was too young to be involved in Temple Players. At one visit to our home, Basya told me of her discovery of the teaching skills of a young German immigrant. He was Heinz Warschauer, who succeeded her as Principal of Holy Blossom’s Religious School and went on to a legendary thirty-year career as the Temple’s first Director of Education.

Basya died in 1997. Few people at Holy Blossom are around today who remember her, but Basya’s legacy to Temple in so many areas is still felt.

(The Archives Committee receives inquiries regularly. We invite you to contact us about this or other areas of interest at archives@holyblossom.org. We are always interested in learning and sharing more about our remarkable history. We also encourage you to examine the archival displays in the Schwartz-Reisman Atrium.)