Abraham Rogatnick

During the Battle of the Bulge, grossly underarmed against the advance of the 12th SS Panzer division, he narrowly escaped enemy attacks on three different occasions and was one of the few survivors of his unit.

In 1955, he and lifelong partner Alvin Balkind were invited to visit Vancouver by Harvard classmate, architect and Alderman Geoff Massey where they were hosted by Arthur Erickson.

The art critic John Bentley Mays, in a 1992 obituary of the curator Balkind, gave the NDG a place in Canadian history—crediting it with boosting the careers of Jack Shadbolt, Iain Baxter, Roy Kiyooka, Toni Onley, and Joe Plaskett, among others.

Rogatnick would then set the mood of the period with a socio-economic portrait of the day before moving onto a slide show that exalted the buildings without focus on the terms, names and dates that he suffered through in his didactic Harvard lectures.

His students include such internationally noted architects as Bruno Freschi, Bing Thom, Peter Busby and Paul Merrick.

Following his retirement from the Board, Rogatnick maintained frequent correspondence with many Vancouver artists and created a salon in which invited speakers presented their ideas on arts, culture and society.

Rogatnick was active in the politics of the city from supporting harm reduction drug policies, opposing the Ward system, electing Sam Sullivan as Mayor and advocating a renewal of the Vancouver Art Gallery at its current site.

[4] "I remember once an entire exam—this was in the days before he'd abandoned exams—was one question," said Bing Thom, the architect who would go on to design the Chan Centre at UBC and SFU's Central City campus in Surrey.