“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…
A major court decision rendered on November 20, 2025, promises to dramatically reshape how Canadian citizenship is passed down through generations. In December 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice released a landmark decision, Bjorkquist v. Canada (2023 ONSC 7152), striking down Canada’s ‘first-generation limit.’ Since 2009, this rule had blocked many Canadians born abroad…
Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities. Large format, five volume set. Researched by the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth. Through some diligent genealogical detective work about a dozen years ago, I located a distant cousin in Johannesburg, descended from my grandfather’s uncle who had gone to South Africa in the WWI era.…
Tarnobrzeg, Poland, formerly known as Dzikow, cannot be accused of being a pretty town. With a population of 40,000, it is perched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, in a region known for the production of sulphur. One pictures a dreary, blighted place, surrounded by dark denuded hills. In 1757, a 15-year-old Christian boy…
Herman Kempinski was evidently a first cousin once removed to my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Glicenstein, and both came from the town of Konin, Poland. Herman, born about 1854, was one of the many thousands of Russian-Polish Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s: he left Konin at age 17 in 1872. He…
Seeking the Fabled City: the Canadian Jewish Experience, by Allan Levine (McClelland & Stewart) Proficient, prolific, and preternaturally talented, Winnipeg-based historian Allan Levine has produced a robust new history of the Jewish experience in Canada that seems both compelling and fresh. Seeking the Fabled City — the title comes from a line by the late…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
◊ Note: This article first appeared in the Globe and Mail in 1997. Now it has been more than 75 years since the scrolls first came to light. It is being presented again today in commemoration of the Jewish New Year 5786. ◊ Fifty years after the Dead Sea Scrolls first came to light, biblical…
◊ 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…
It is sometimes said that heredity is destiny — a phrase with some apparent truth in The Journeys of David Toback, an old (Yiddish) diary edited (in English) by Carole Malkin and published by Schocken Books. For David Toback, who became bar-mitvahed in a dirt-poor Ukrainian village in 1888, the pair of tefillin that his…
