Although his name may be little known even within the Canadian Jewish community, Meyer Joshua Nurenberger was an internationally-known Jewish…
Jewish Toronto
M.J. Nurenberger founded the CJN
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A ‘robust, new’ history of Jews in Canada
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Seeking the Fabled City: the Canadian Jewish Experience, by Allan Levine (McClelland & Stewart) Proficient, prolific, and preternaturally talented, Winnipeg-based…
Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut: An Appreciation
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From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther…
Obit: Simcha Simchovitch, eminent Yiddish writer (2017)
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From Canadian Jewish News, July 2017 Simcha Simchovitch, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and prominent poet and writer in both Yiddish…
A Matzah Factory on Ontario Street
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One good thing about matzah is that even after the passage of many months, it often tastes no more stale…
PUBLISH OR PERISH: How I Got The Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Saga into Print
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From AVOTAYNU, 2009 “Zhlobin — Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian…
Books gather dust in Toronto’s ghostly Jewish Public Library
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From Canadian Jewish News, November 2015 Ever since the great exodus of Montreal Jews to Toronto began some 40 years…
Chestnut Street fracas: the day the police came to shul
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By Henry Papernick From the Beth Tzedec Bulletin, 1976 The downtown area of Toronto bounded on the north and south…
Landsmanschaft societies stretched forth their helping hands
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From the Canadian Jewish News, Spring 2015 In a series of articles in the Canadian Jewish News about four decades…
Toronto
Detective Benny Cooperman turns 30 (2010)
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Some thirty years ago, writer Howard Engel gave the world Benny Cooperman, a new made-in-Canada literary detective whom the Globe…
All in a day’s work: Census takers in ‘the Ward’
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“The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is Anything But an Easy One” is the title of the…
A Toronto baseball team from 1880
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From the Toronto Evening Telegram, April 1919 Thirty-nine years ago up on the the old grounds in Queen’s Park, near…
Ing Quong, Chinese magnate, in his last procession (1912)
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As “John Bull” he celebrated the inauguration of the Chinese Republic Guards Band Played Him Home Funeral of Well-Known merchant…
Helen Keller at Massey Hall, 1914
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A WONDER WOMAN AT MASSEY HALL Helen Keller Spoke to Large Audience Who Were Spellbound. HER FAMOUS TEACHER Mrs. Macey…
Ups & downs of a department store elevator (1900)
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From the Toronto Star, 1900 Character Sketches Among the Throngs Who Travel Up and Down in the Big Departmental Stores…
Panic at Yonge Street crossing (1910)
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A Little Panic at Yonge St. Crossing — Crowd Burst Around Behind One Train and Ran in Front of Another…
Davisville hotel to disappear (1928)
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Photostory From the Toronto Evening Telegram, June 1928 Old North Toronto landmark at southeast corner of Yonge and Davisville has…
First Home of Heintzman Piano Factory
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From Toronto Evening Telegram, 1928 When King Street, from Yonge Street to the Market, was Toronto’s busiest shopping district, Heintzman’s…
The oldest family tree in the world
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 24, 2004 You may not find Dr. Neil Rosenstein’s new book listed on national best-seller lists, but the noted genealogist — with his tongue halfway in his cheek — compares it to the popular thriller “The Da Vinci Code.” Both books, the noted American genealogist and surgeon said, deal in…
Toronto’s Jewish ‘Unknown Soldier’ from WWI
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◊ An item in the Toronto Star from 1936 explains a certain inscription on a tombstone found at the Pape Avenue Cemetery, Toronto’s oldest Jewish cemetery. George Sorblum, Toronto’s “unknown soldier,” died in 1919 but his family only learned what happened to him in 2007. * * * From the Toronto Star, November 7, 1936 Some…
Review: Alison Pick’s Between Gods
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Seven years ago, as Toronto author Alison Pick began researching and writing what would become her prize-winning novel Far to Go, she realized that the seeds of two different projects — one a fictional manuscript, the other a closely allied memoir — were struggling for dominance within her mind. Giving priority to the novel, she…
Two views of Bristol house, 1911 & 2014
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Angell and Janey Lester (nee Alexander) were living in this house at 4 Radnor Rd., Bristol, in 1911 when this photo was taken. Janey is standing outside the house holding her infant son, Lionel Lester, with her four-year-old daughter, Ida, standing in front. Janey’s younger sister, twelve-year-old Dora Alexander, stands beside them in the dark…
A shocker: Mother & babe held at US-Canada border for two weeks
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From The London Jewish Chronicle, March 20, 1931 ◊ This shocking tale from the height of the depression focuses on a poor and desperate mother who, with a helpless infant, was caught in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land between the United States and Canada while authorities argued over which country would take her. Dorothy Cohen, a Jewish girl,…
