This colourful portrait shows a group of Jewish men in the Old Yishuv or Jewish community in Palestine of the British Mandate. The glass slide, produced by a Toronto company (Screen and Sound Service Limited) on King Street, was part of a large collection of glass slides that were evidently used in talks to Christian…
Toronto’s mean streets of a century ago recalled in old police register — Documents found in former police headquarters on College Street Genealogist Bill Gladstone looked through a number of thick handwritten criminal registers that turned up some years ago in a forgotten alcove of the Stewart Building, the former police headquarters on College Street, and…
From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, 2016 Harry Musicar and Selma Musicar attended High Holidays services as usual this year at Beth Sholom as they have annually for most of the last six decades. Harry and Selma have been members of Beth Sholom for nearly 60 years, but their association with the shul’s founding rabbi, David…
From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, 2013 Morton Brown is sitting in the Beth Sholom board room beneath two long rows of photographic portraits of former presidents of the shul. Having first joined the board in 1970, Morton attended board meetings regularly and served on various committees, as treasurer, second vice president, board chairman and president…
I recently used the genealogy website MyHeritage to drastically improve the colour and clarity of an old Toronto postcard showing the historic Goel Tzedec Synagogue (at lower right in above image). This rare postcard provides an excellent view of the synagogue in situ on University Avenue in the 1920s. The synagogue was built about…
from Canadian Jewish News (2015) When Cantor Bernard Wladowsky was lured from Chicago to Toronto in March 1912 to begin singing in Goel Tzedec Congregation’s monumental new synagogue on University Avenue, he was 36 years old, in beautiful voice, and of striking appearance in his white clerical robes. As the Toronto Daily Star marveled at…
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,…
Born in 1887 to Jewish parents in Kalamazoo, Mich., American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber was a hardworking, overly modest, frequently self-effacing writer who read the critics too carefully and was too easily wounded by their sloppily-aimed slings and arrows. Convinced, for instance, that no one would want to read her novel So Big, she advised…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 2013 London-based writer Salman Rushdie was happy to sell his novel The Satanic Verses to Viking Penguin in February 1988. But six months after the novel appeared, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his blasphemous insult “against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an.” Instantly he became…
Garth Drabinsky was appalled that day in 1987 when he heard that publishers were about to bid at auction for the rights to an unauthorized biography of himself. Realizing that “a book filled with misstatements and misrepresentations and ignorant reporting of the facts would do me a lot of harm,” he quickly took strong evasive…
