Month: September 2012

Some Early Toronto Film Pioneers

From the Canadian Jewish News, May 4, 2006 Born in the East End of London, leading British cameraman Joe Rosenthal came to Canada about 1900 at the behest of the Canadian Pacific Railway to make Living Canada, a series of documentary films intended to stimulate immigration. The series was a popular success in Britain, and…

Imposing Their Will an ‘original, illuminating study’

In Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, 1933-1948 (McGill-Queens), Toronto writer Jack Lipinsky presents an original and illuminating study of Toronto’s Jewish community and convincingly demonstrates that the community underwent a crucial maturation in the 15-year period under discussion. Similarly, in The Defining Decade: Identity, Politics, and The Canadian Jewish Community in…

Toronto Jewry, Only Yesterday, by Ben Kayfetz (1967)

From the Canadian Jewish Review, November 24, 1967 Although Toronto Jewry is either 118 years old (if one estimates its age from the date of the Pape Avenue burial ground) or 111 years old (estimating from the first permanently organized congregation), its relative newness can be gauged by two facts: until only a few years…

Book reviews: a police procedural and a medical procedural

With the Eaton Centre and Scarborough block party shootings in Toronto, and the Dark Knight and Sikh Temple shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, gun crimes have been screaming from the headlines all summer. Seems a perfect time, then, to look at Robert Rotenberg’s third police procedural crime novel, Stray Bullets. As he demonstrated in his…

Excluded from YMCA, Jews built their own ‘Y’

A Narrow Policy From an undated newspaper clipping, Toronto, about 1913 When the YMCA authorities determined to segregate their 400 Hebrew members they made a false step. It is true that the action is consistent with the policy of excluding Unitarians from the institution, but the general public who have been subscribing freely to the…

Inside Toronto’s first synagogue on Yom Kippur, 1881

Note: This very early article may be the first significant piece written about the Jewish community of Toronto and any of its synagogues. It appeared only six years after the synagogue was built in 1875 on Richmond and Victoria streets. Like many stories of its kind from that era, it treated the Jews in a…