Winnipeg fiddler, family being sued

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/01/2010 (5987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Local Métis entertainer Sierra Noble and her family are being sued for an unpaid loan by the executor of the estate of a concentration camp survivor who helped finance the young performer’s fledgling career.

Noble, a local fiddle prodigy and budding singer-songwriter who opened last summer for Paul McCartney at his Halifax concert, was named in a statement of claim filed in the Court of Queen’s Bench at the end of December.

Noble, her mother, Sherry, sister, Brook, and another sister identified only as T in court documents are alleged to owe $55,800 to the estate of Leon Kinsbergen, who died a year ago at the age of 95.

The documents don’t state the reason for the loans but a friend of Kinsbergen said Sherry Noble had convinced Kinsbergen to support the career of her daughter, who would have been 15 at the time.

Lawyer James G. Harley, executor of the Kinsbergen estate, alleges in court documents that between April and December of 2005, when Kinsbergen was 92, Sherry asked Kinsbergen to provide her and her daughters with a series of small loans. Kinsbergen gave the four Noble women a series of cheques, ranging in size from $300 to $5,000, almost every other week.

Harley said the cheques were either a loan made to Sherry Noble or a loan made to all four women and had to be repaid without interest.

Harley alleges he asked Sherry Noble to make good on the loans in July, 2009 but she refused.

The allegations have not been proven in court.

A statement of defence has not been filed by the Noble women. When contacted by the Free Press, Sherry Noble said she wasn’t aware of the legal actions and when asked about her relationship with Kinsbergen she hung up.

Sierra Noble could not be reached for comment and a publicist for Noble’s record label refused to comment on the legal action.

Kinsbergen was a founding member of the Mineral Society of Manitoba, who established a local reputation for creating jewelry in his basement workshop. According to an obituary that appeared in the Mineral Society of Manitoba newsletter, Kinsbergen had been an accomplished pottery maker in Holland before the outbreak of the Second World War.

A Jew, he and his family were imprisoned in a concentration camp where his first wife and two daughters were killed. After the war, Kinsbergen remarried and moved to Manitoba.

The alleged loans were made following the death of Kinsbergen’s second wife in 2003. A family friend said Kinsbergen’s friends and family intervened in late 2005 and persuaded Kinsbergen, who was in ill health at the time, to stop giving money to the Noble family.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca