History teacher Emmanuelle Simony has passed away

In the sadness of the passing of Emmanuelle, we can warmly recognize her life. She has always been an example of a class act, with a core of steel forged in personal experience. Barriers made her taller and challenges made her stronger.

Her descriptions of her origins in Morocco resemble a fairy tale, from her Indigenous ancestors in the Sahara to the synagogue in Casablanca. I know also that her family fled here to raise Emmanuelle with a bird’s eye view from a hilltop road neighbouring St. Joseph’s Oratory. She was never allowed to have a bicycle, she would later say as she sped her momentum-powered wheelchair on Montreal sidewalks and streets.

Emmanuelle would never just ask Why? without adding Let’s… or We Must…!

Soon after starting at Dawson in January 2001, she sensed and then confirmed that many at Dawson wanted a winter study break.  She involved herself in a process that climbed over bureaucratic walls and made straight lines through procedural labyrinths. Deans fell to her force and logic as Dawson inaugurated its first March Break.

The biannual social gatherings of the History department started almost twenty years ago when Emmanuelle said she did not want to work in a department that did not have parties.

Believing in the need to offer students real inspiration from outside their ordinary lives, she was instrumental in starting the History travel course in 2008. The next year, Dawson students and teachers had the pleasure and honour of accompanying her to Greece and Turkey where, in the midst of an economic and political crisis, she guided their intellect and character, in what many called a life-altering experience.

Judging textbooks to fail to be accessible and engaging she made her own. First, an electronic version for the Centre Collégial de Développement de Matériel Didactique then co-authoring Histoire de l’Occident (Modulo 2012).

She faced her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis with an increasing activism about patients’ rights in both life and death. Her personal became political and her work lives on in the MUHC Health Innovation Forum.

In recent years, she sought beauty as she moved from Montreal to Essaouira, Cádiz, and Marseilles. She has returned to her ancestors’ caravan, never to be forgotten by those whose lives she has graced. Her grin that tilts into a never-ending smile will never leave.