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Toronto’s First Synagogue: 1885 Photo

“Of Things Past . . .”

At 103, Ben Sherman isn’t ready to retire (1974)

by n-a • December 12, 2025

A look back at the CJN from more than 50 years ago: From the Canadian Jewish News, March 6, 1974 Spry Ben Sherman has no thought of retiring, and plans to work a full day in the hardware store he founded 55 years ago, the Canadian Jewish News reported in March 1974. Sherman’s family wasn’t…

by Bill Gladstone • April 24, 2025

◊ Note: The film Hester Street came out in 1975 — so it is now 50 years old. The following article was posted 15 years ago, when Hester Street had turned 35. It has been 35 years since Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street first appeared on the silver screen. Although the slow-paced, 90-minute black-and-white drama…

by Bill Gladstone • April 5, 2025

In Devil in the White City, a riveting page-turner that reads like a murder mystery thriller, Erik Larson resurrects the legend of a forgotten American psychopathic mass murderer, the cold-blooded H. H. Holmes, and overlays it atop the equally dusty story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, one of the most impressive achievements of…

by Bill Gladstone • January 20, 2025

A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…

by n-a • December 23, 2024

Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…

by Bill Gladstone • May 15, 2024

From The Globe & Mail I am one of this city’s great silent army of working poor, and so my name is Legion. I am just one of the masses, evidently, poor and huddled, yearning to breath free; one of the anonymous faces that wash up in the courtrooms of Old City Hall each morning,…

by no-author • November 23, 2023

THIS story, highlighting Toronto’s fabled old Grand Opera House on Adelaide Street, has been reprinted from the Toronto Telegram of 1924. * * * Glamor and Magic of the Great Old Days in Toronto, when Footlights Flickered While Real Brilliance Held the Stage A THEATRICAL SERIES Reminiscences of Thos. H. Scott, Sr., Who Was for…

by n-a • July 7, 2019

“The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is Anything But an Easy One” is the title of the first story; its subtitle is “The Foreigners There Have No Idea of the Months of the Year, and It Takes a Long Time to Convince Them That the Information Is Not for the Tax Collector.”…

by Bill Gladstone • April 1, 2015

The following is an abridgement of a talk that Bill Gladstone gave to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) on March 28, 2012. Definition A landsmanshaft is a group consisting, at least initially, of Jewish immigrants who came from the same village, town, country or region in Eastern Europe or the Russian Empire. The…

by Bill Gladstone • February 22, 2015

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…

by n-a • September 17, 2014

Torontonians who have vanished to the four corners of the globe From the Toronto Star Weekly, November 29, 1913 By Arthur Barron In nearly every large city and town across the face of the earth are groups of men and women who, by all the laws of preference, should be spending their lives hundreds or…

by n-a • August 23, 2014

The following passages have been excerpted from The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community, by Shmuel Mayer Shapiro (1877-1958), the late editor and publisher of the Toronto Yiddish newspaper, the Hebrew Journal. After surfacing in a synagogue archives in 2009, his unpublished manuscript was illustrated with some 90 rare and historic photographs and illustrations and…

Kitty Wintrob, author of I’m Not Going Back

Genealogy

Like ‘winning the lottery’: Holocaust survivor sees photo of family for first time

by n-a • June 19, 2026

From the Canadian Jewish News Some 70 years after he last saw his father, mother, brothers and sisters alive, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen Belsen concentration camp was recently given a photograph of his family for the first time. “When I received this photo, I said, ‘This is better than winning the…

by Bill Gladstone • April 14, 2026

It has been about twenty years since I had my first “Eureka!” moment as a genealogist. Several smaller discoveries led up to this great moment. First, I discovered that my great-grandfather, Harris Glickstein, had been born in the town of Konin, Poland; second, that his father’s name had been Rafael; third, that our family name…

by n-a • January 6, 2026

Genealogists sometimes encounter a maddening problem when a relative seems to vanish under the name you know. Sometimes it’s because the surname has been legally changed, or an alias used for employment, business, military service or just convenience. In many cases the person who changes their name still keeps at least a few anchors: an…

by Bill Gladstone • December 4, 2025

“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…

by Bill Gladstone • August 23, 2025

◊ Note: The keynote speaker at the IAJGS conference on Jewish Genealogy in Fort Wayne, Indiana earlier this month was DNA forensic genealogist Ce Ce Moore, one of the world’s most talented investigators who uses DNA samples to solve serial murders and other crimes, some of which had been considered cold cases for decades. Conference…

Toronto Panorama 1910