Many Montrealers know Tommy Schnurmacher as a journalist, a radio talk-show host and a political commentator. Since 1996, he has been host of The Tommy Schnurmacher Show, a talk show airing weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon on CJAD 800. He is smart and well-informed and opinionated: The tagline on the station’s website describing his show calls it controversial and compelling – and it’s decidedly both.

What many do not know about Tommy, though, is that he was born in Budapest, Hungary – and that when he arrived in Montreal with his parents in 1957, following the revolution in that country, they were helped by Jewish Immigrant Aid Services. “We left in 1956 after the confusion of the revolution,” Tommy recalled. “We left in the middle of the night, drove to the countryside and were taken across the border into Austria,” he recounted.

The family had left with few possessions. “We figured there was no point in bringing gold or silver because the streets were paved with them,” he recalled, tongue in cheek. Tommy, a small boy at the time, said he was was given the choice of two toys: his little toy mandolin or his wooden streetcar. “I chose the mandolin – and started to play it when we were crossing the border,” he recounted. “So they broke the mandolin over my head – and I had a headache and no toys.” The family traveled to Montreal from Vienna, arriving in 1957. “And JIAS was nice enough to provide us with blankets,” he said.

He said he did not remember details of the blankets, such as the colour. He was, after all, a small child. “But I am sure my mother still has them since she throws nothing out,” he quipped. In 2008, JIAS, Jewish Family Services and Jewish Employment Montreal merged to become a single agency known as Ometz. But the agencies brought to the merger their own stories and histories: The forerunner of JFS was established in Montreal by community leaders 150 years ago, for instance. And JIAS, established in 1922, has helped hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants to establish new lives in Canada – Tommy and his parents were among them.

Tommy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University and a journalism degree from Carleton University. For more than 15 years, he wrote a daily entertainment column for the The Montreal Gazette and, for a time, was the paper’s society editor. He has written a book on Quebec politics, Canada is not a Real Country, published in 1996. He got his start in radio at CHOM-FM, doing reviews of movies and plays. Tommy has several other notches in his professional belt: As his bio at cjad.com states, he hosted a cross-country radio show with former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, for instance, and played the part of an orchestra conductor in a 2000 sci-fi comedy starring Leslie Nielsen. Tommy was master of ceremonies at a JFS/JIAS fundraiser in 2005 – the screening of a film called Gloomy Sunday, a romantic melodrama set in Budapest before and during the Holocaust. The event raised $100,000. That evening, he described to the more than 750 people in attendance his family’s journey from Hungary – and talked about how JIAS and the Jewish community had helped his family when they arrived in Montreal.