by Ellen Weiser If you’re a baby boomer, or more accurately, a Jewish Toronto baby boomer, undoubtedly you have fond…
Jewish Toronto
Memories of Good (Jewish) Eats on Eglinton & Downtown
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Friedland’s ‘There Was A Time For Everything’
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After the death of her mother when she turned ten, Judith Friedland learned to be resilient. She met the expectations…
Toronto’s Jews Think Big As Their Population Grows (2000)
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 24, 2000 (JTA) The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is trying to keep pace…
The CBC’s shame (1987)
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From the Canadian Jewish News (editorial), 1987 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Founded half a century…
Toronto’s May Day parades of yesteryear (1955)
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by Ben Lappin (from Commentary, 1955) Spadina Avenue, the main street of the needle trades in Toronto, looks very much…
Mutual Benefit: Toronto’s ‘Society’ doctors
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by Irving B Rosen, MD, FRCSC Society doctors, like Harley Street specialists, evoke the image of the sought after, affluent…
History of Beth Lida Forest Hill Congregation
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Note: In 2012, Beth Lida commissioned Bill Gladstone to write a detailed history of the congregation since its founding in…
Fond farewell to Frydman-Kohl after 25 years
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◊ After the departure of Rabbi Benjamin Friedberg from Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Synagogue in the early 1990s, the congregation turned…
The Keeping of Jewish Records in Ontario
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Above: Current OJA executive director Dara Solomon stands beside image of early Passover seder, the sort of historic photo the…
Samuel Sachs, long-time Goel Tzedec rabbi (1989)
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From the Canadian Jewish News, January 22, 1989 TORONTO – Rabbi Samuel Sachs died recently in Santa Monica, California at the…
Profile: Dorothy Dworkin, nurse & Mount Sinai founder
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Dorothy Goldstick (later Dworkin) donned the modest white cap of a maternity nurse in 1909, but her accomplishments ranged into…
Recent & Popular
Mulroney praises Israel, condemns Hamas
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By Brian Mulroney Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, was awarded the World Jewish Congress’s Theodor Herzl…
Gas lights and radiant stars in Toronto’s old Grand Opera House
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THIS story, highlighting Toronto’s fabled old Grand Opera House on Adelaide Street, has been reprinted from the Toronto Telegram of…
The Jews of Nagasaki
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The 60th anniversary of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month (August 2005) provides an occasion to recall…
Memories of Good (Jewish) Eats on Eglinton & Downtown
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by Ellen Weiser If you’re a baby boomer, or more accurately, a Jewish Toronto baby boomer, undoubtedly you have fond…
Indian In The Cabinet: A Look Back At SNC-Lavalin
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Writing On The Wall: Review of Indian in the Cabinet (2021) Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of…
Peter Sellers proud to be Jewish (1980)
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From the Canadian Jewish News, Aug. 7 1980 Peter Sellers, the famed actor who died recently, often spoke proudly of…
Silas Hardoon, richest man in Asia
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Silas Aaron Hardoon was born into a poor Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, but when he died in Shanghai…
Toronto’s Jews Think Big As Their Population Grows (2000)
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From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 24, 2000 (JTA) The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is trying to keep pace…
A Nazi Rally in Montreal, 1938
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As reported in The Montreal Gazette (1938) This shocking photograph was taken at a fascist rally on Wellington Street, Montreal,…
Elephantine Island: the Jews who returned to Egypt
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Eight centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel from Egypt, a Jewish community thrived on Elephantine Island, a small…
Book looks at Jewish taverns in Kingdom of Poland
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Book Review: Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. By Glenn Dynner. Oxford University Press, 2014. Despite…
Fine telling of the Reichmann saga
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◊ In light of the passing of Albert Reichmann in Toronto on December 17, 2022 at age 93, we bring your…
History
Book looks at Jewish taverns in Kingdom of Poland
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Book Review: Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. By Glenn Dynner. Oxford University Press, 2014. Despite various expulsions, evictions and repressive tax measures meant to force them out of business, Jewish-run taverns were a ubiquitous presence in Poland from roughly the 17th to the late 19th centuries. Polish historians have often underestimated the curious staying power…
Ben Gurion in Nova Scotia
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by Dr Stuart E Rosenberg From The Canadian Jewish News, 1972 Here’s an interesting footnote to Jewish Canadiana. A very unusual episode, full of portent and prophecy for the future of Jews everywhere, was played out in a remote corner of the country, at an army base in Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was there that a man who, thirty years…
The Baghdadi Jews of Bombay (Mumbai)
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Book Review: Bombay: Exploring the Jewish Heritage, by Dr. Shaul Sapir. Large format, hardcover, 290 pages; full-colour interior, lavishly illustrated with large four-panel foldout map. $50. Published by Bene Israel Heritage Museum and Genealogical Research Centre, India, 2013. There are four distinct historic Jewish communities in India — the Cochin or Malabar Jews, the Bene-Israel Jews, the Bene-Menashe Jews of northeast…
Baby born at sea amidst Ukrainian rescue
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by Gaye Applebaum From the Canadian Jewish News, 1983 As the SS Hamilton Scandinavian docked at Quebec City on Aug. 21, 1921, a tremor of excitement surged through the rain-drenched crowd. On the ship’s deck huddled 108 frightened but excited Ukrainian Jewish children – all of them rescued war orphans from the devastated Polish Ukraine. Also on deck was Lillian…
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey
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Book Review: Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, by Mikhal Dekel. Hardcover, 418 pages. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. In September 1939, as Nazi militias approached their town of Ostrow Mazowiecka in northeastern Poland, the author’s paternal grandparents, like many others, were faced with a momentous decision: stay or flee eastwards into Russian-occupied eastern Poland, then the vast…
Rediscovered
Ontario puts new restrictions on birth records (2016)
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From Inside Toronto, 2016 As if attaining genealogical records wasn’t already hard enough, genealogists now have to face a steep new barrier when it comes to getting Ontario birth records. Quietly, on the sly and when no one was looking, the Ontario Registrar General changed its longstanding rule about how…
Ben Gurion in Nova Scotia
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by Dr Stuart E Rosenberg From The Canadian Jewish News, 1972 Here’s an interesting footnote to Jewish Canadiana. A very unusual episode, full of portent and prophecy for the future of Jews everywhere, was played out in a remote corner of the country, at an army base in Windsor, Nova…
Rhea Clyman chronicled Soviet famine
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Rhea Clyman, an accomplished journalist born to a Jewish family in Toronto in 1904, wrote many front-page newspaper stories in the late 1920s and 1930s about political events and their tragic human consequences in Russia, Ukaine and Germany, but died in near-obscurity in New York in 1981. Clyman wrote rare…
A glimpse into the early days of the Queen’s Hotel
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Sixty Years’ Changes, As Hotelman Has Seen Them — The Queen’s Has Been “An Institution” of Toronto, Like the Parliament Buildings or St. James’ Cathedral — Glimpses of ‘60s & ‘70s — View of Bay Fetched Topnotch Price for Rooms — Nickel-plated Self-feeder Supplied Luxury of Heating — Tin Bath When Asked — First…
Canadianizing the foreigners with ‘Settlement Work’ (1914)
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From the Toronto Star Weekly, July 1914 By Julia K. Lamont “But is she a dainty cook?” “No-o; not especially, but an excellent worker.” “Won’t suit,” declared the settlement superintendent. “The children must have dainty dishes.” “Why, what children?” “Why, the neighbourhood children for our summer camp.” Elegance and simplicity…
