Dr. George Robbins Family
George Robbins was born in 1900 as Gdalyah Rabinovici in Vas Louie, Romania. The youngest of Abraham and Toba Bella Ravinovici’s seven children, he immigrated to Calgary with his parents and sister Rose in 1906, having been sponsored by brothers who arrived around the turn of the century.
Gdalyah’s teachers at Mount Royal Elementary School renamed him George Edward, after the English kings. His surname became Rabinovitz. William Aberhart, later Premier of Alberta, was one of his teachers.
George attended secondary school at Western Canadian Boys’ College, now Western Canada High School. He studied medicine at McGill University, and later, studying in New York, Bern and London, became an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.
Dr. George Robbins was a well-known and respected physician in Calgary – one who flew to remote oilfield sites to perform emergency surgery and who, in the late 1930’s, introduced contact lenses for medical use in Alberta.
He studied tropical eye diseases in Palestine and, while there, was a delegate in 1925 at the opening of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. A strong supporter of Jewish education, he later initiated a family memorial scholarship which is presented annually to this day.
George Robbin’s first wife, Harriet, died in 1937 after only one year of marriage. In 1946 he married Lillian Saper of Winnipeg. They had one son, Tobin, and three daughters: twins Jacqueline and Joyce, and Dorothy.