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Before a respectful crowd on Thursday, on a small front lawn on Somerset Street, a plaque will be unveiled for Lillian Freiman, who died in 1940 at the age of 55 — long enough ago to be largely forgotten.

Bloodless bronzed words will stare toward the sidewalk, while her real imprint lives all around us in a city, a country, made better.

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Freiman led our first poppy campaign in 1921, and the red symbols of remembrance were made by hand — sometimes by blind war veterans — in this very house on Somerset, near Elgin Street, now an Army Officers’ Mess. Within a couple of years, poppies were being made in the hundreds of thousands and she continued to chair the city’s annual campaign until she died.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

That was the easy part. Freiman, the daughter of Ottawa’s foundational Jewish settler, Moses Bilsky (1829-1923), was a nationally prominent philanthropist at a time when anti-Semitism was rampant in the country. Before Canada had a “safety net,” she was called upon time and again by mayors and prime ministers in times of crisis.