Advance founder, Arnold Frieman, dies

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This article was published 07/04/2019 (2434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Advance Electronics founder and philanthropist Arnold Frieman has died.

Notice of his death was posted on the electronic billboard outside the Advance store on Portage Avenue on the weekend.

“Founder and past president, mentor and friend,” it says next to an image of Frieman, who was a Holocaust survivor and former pilot in the Israeli Air Force during the War of Independence. He arrived in Winnipeg more than 60 years ago to start a new life with barely a dime to his name.

He opened Advance in 1962. Today it is the largest independently owned retail electronics store in Western Canada.

Many of his family members were killed in the Holocaust, according to a biography by the University of Manitoba last year when it bestowed Frieman with an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Frieman was born in Sátoraljaújhely, Hungary, in 1928, one of six children in an Orthodox Jewish family. The town didn’t have a Jewish secondary school so Frieman was sent to live with relatives and attend school in Budapest.

He was in Budapest at age 16 when he heard that Jews outside the Hungarian capital were being rounded up and deported. He headed home hoping to save his family, only to find them all gone. His parents, two brothers, three sisters and maternal grandfather had been shipped to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Two of his sisters survived.

Frieman spent several months in a forced-labour camp “before making a miraculous escape,” the U of M biography says.

He was living in a displaced persons’ camp in northern Germany after the Second World War when he was selected by a Norwegian commission and taken to Oslo where he studied electronics. He would use his skill in electronics serving as an air force volunteer in the Israeli War of Independence.

He moved to Canada from Norway in 1951 at age 23. He was supposed to head to an arranged job in Ontario but the allure of the Wild West he’d read about as a child caused him to make a quick change of plans and try Winnipeg instead.

The Winnipeg Jewish Agency helped him settle and make friends, including Minnie Heft, who encouraged him to go to university and even gave him a $1,000 gift for support.

He devised a unique way to support his studies, according to the local Jewish Post & News. “He drove to American wrecking yards to buy car radios, fixed them up and sold them across Western Canada out of the trunk of his car.”

He met his future wife, Myra Thompson, in January 1960, the year he graduated, and they married that same year. Their daughter Nona was born the following year and daughter Gina 17 months after that.

Frieman was unhappily employed following graduation and Myra encouraged him to start a business. So they bought a small television repair shop. Within a dozen years, it went from a two-person shop to a business with 170 employees.

Arnold and Myra supported many civic, provincial, national and international organizations and institutions, including in Israel. He has donated to an array of organizations, from arts groups such as the Winnipeg Symphony Organization and Manitoba Opera, to grassroots causes. He helped make possible the premiere of I Believe, a Holocaust Oratorio for Today.

“(Frieman) was well respected in both the Jewish and general community,” said Elaine Goldstine, Jewish Federation of Winnipeg executive director. 

Goldstine said Frieman would go on to become “a philanthropist and visionary.”

“He had a love for Israel. Most of all a family man. He will be missed,” she said. 

His many contributions to his alma mater included support for the U of M-University of Szeged Partnership, which funds exchanges between scholars in Hungary and Manitoba.

Frieman has been recognized with numerous honours. In 2006, he was inducted into the Order of Manitoba.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca