
From Canadian Jewish News, July 2017 Simcha Simchovitch, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and prominent poet and writer in both Yiddish…
A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, by Kirsten Fermaglich, New York University Press, 2018. Although Jewish name-changing was widespread throughout the United States and Canada throughout much of the 20th century, no one has studied this interesting phenomenon at book length until now. The author, Kirsten…
From AVOTAYNU, 2009 “Zhlobin — Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian shtetl where my great-grandparents lived before bringing their children to Canada about 1910. The postcard was part of an incredible collection of more than 100 old family-related photos from Russia and Toronto from the 1890s…
Curious about your Jewish ancestors from Romania? Read Jill Culiner’s ‘Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers’ Between about 1900 and 1914, multitudes of impoverished Jewish refugees sold their meagre possessions, joined into large groups for protection, and trekked hundreds of miles out of Romania on foot. The exodus of the Jewish “Fusgeyers” — Yiddish…
by Henry Wellisch In the early 1920s Dr. Arthur Czellitzer, a Berlin ophthalmologist, founded the Gesellschaft fur Judische Familien Forschung, the “Society for Jewish Family Research.” It is now recognized as the world’s first society dedicated to Jewish genealogy in the modern era. The society had regular meetings in Berlin and published a newsletter entitled, Mitteilunngen…
Wonder of wonder and miracle of miracles, the new production of Fiddler On The…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 1996 David Rome was born and spent his first ten…
From the Toronto Daily Star, May 7, 1907 At the next meeting of the annual…
From the Toronto Star, September 8, 1938 Charges of petty thieving by peddlers were today…
THE following feature profile of Jacob Cohen, a retired Toronto businessman who became Toronto’s first…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, March 1914 “When constabulary duty’s to be done, A policeman’s lot…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, February 21, 1914 Small Sums risked by Regulars in Public…