2020-01-25_mlicoudis_Lea Rubinyi obituary.docx

Lea Rubinyi (née Hirsch)

b. March 27, 1924

d. January 20, 2020

Dr. Lea Rubinyi died peacefully at the age of 95 on January 20th, 2020 from viral pneumonia. A celebration of her life will take place at Mount Royal Cemetery on March 28th from 1 – 4. Lea will be missed by her immediate family - her daughter Kati, son in law Ewan, and three grandchildren Roland, Eve and George. Lea was also close to her cousin Anna Leppert, and her husband Detlef and their daughters Tania and Ilana, and their families.

Lea Hirsch was born in the small town of Torda, Romania, where her family ran a leather tannery and a wine bottling business. Prosperous until the depression, her father died of a heart ailment when she was nine, leaving Lea, her mother, older sister and younger brother under the devoted care of her uncle and his family. Lea grew up with cousins as close as siblings.

During the second world war, Lea was sent to live out of harm’s way in the Transylvanian countryside. Her older sister Eva, who lived across the border in Hungary with her husband and two toddler sons, was deported by the Nazis in a rail car and killed in a gas chamber with her young children. In the year the war ended, Lea’s beloved younger brother Paul was killed as a passenger on a motorcycle. This last in a series of traumas was a lifelong sorrow for Lea. By this time, Lea had begun her medical studies in Cluj, where she met Paul Rubinyi, a student of economics from Budapest, Hungary. After university they married in Budapest and started their new lives as idealistic members of the communist party, ready to build a new world after the darkness of the fascist era. While Paul worked in economic planning for the national government, Lea completed her training as a pediatrician.

By the middle of the 1950s, the political climate had become threatening and dangerous even to those who set out to build the new system. With two other couples, Paul and Lea risked their lives to cross the border into Austria on foot and sought refugee status at the Canadian embassy in Vienna. After a difficult winter crossing by sea, they arrived in Montréal in late 1956 with $14.

Once there, Paul and Lea were helped by a prominent French-Canadian family as part of a program run by the Catholic Church. Their first accommodations were in the basement of a rooming house on Saint-Mathieu street. Lea could speak French and with the help of her sponsors was able to secure a residency in pediatrics at Sainte-Justine Hospital, while Paul worked as a manual laborer, eventually attending accounting classes at McGill at night. Over the next years, Lea worked at Hotel Dieu and then in a new career in anesthesiology at the Hôpital Jean-Talon where she stayed until she retired.  Paul Rubinyi became an accountant and ultimately a management consultant at Ernst & Young and KPMG. Paul and Lea quickly moved from the rooming house to a series of duplexes, and eventually to a house in Town of Mount Royal. The couples with whom they fled Hungary also prospered. They were lifelong friends in Montréal.

Starting in the 1960s Paul and Lea enjoyed a very happy life of fulfilling work, friendship and love. They sponsored their mothers, Rezsin and Emma, to move to Canada and live with them, and in 1964 adopted a newborn daughter, Kati. Paul and Lea started to travel, visiting a new destination every year. They subscribed to the MSO and opera, and socialized with their close group of Hungarian speaking friends every weekend. They played tennis and skied cross-country, and took long walks around Parc Mont-Royal every Sunday regardless of the season. Lea’s life changed when Paul died in 1992, and she had to adjust suddenly to life as a widow. In 2000, she moved to an apartment in Côte Saint-Luc and in 2013 to the Place Kensington retirement home in Westmount.

Lea loved her time spent with friends and family but she was happiest and most in her element while she was at work. She thrived on the bustle of the operating room and the camaraderie of her colleagues. She enjoyed her patients and their families, who were almost exclusively also immigrants. Part of her job was to reassure and inform patients before their operations, and it was there that her skill as a doctor shined. Throughout her career Lea held firm in both her decision to become an anesthesiologist and her belief in the fairness of the Québec health care system in which she worked.Behind her lively sense of humor was a perceptive mind attuned to social justice. She was a very practical person yet was never interested in cooking or crafts. She loved beautiful clothes yet also prided herself on fitting into the smallest of parking spots. Lea was a devoted daughter, a loyal friend, and loving wife and mother. We will all miss her.