The number of Jews who fought in the First World War has always been difficult to tally because Jews fought on both sides and in multiple armies involved in the conflict. On the Allied side, at least 500,000 Jews served in the Russian Army, about 250,000 served in the United States Army, roughly 50,000 in…
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…
His name was Moses; he was a leader of his people; he spent much time in Egypt and the desert; he wandered incessantly; he is associated with a fiery mountain and the holiday of Passover; and his life lasted longer than a century. These traits describe the biblical Moses, of course, but they also refer…
A new online source of genealogical information about immigrants to Canada from the 1930s to the 1950s From Remembering Our Yesterdays, a blog at Inside Toronto While working at Libraries and Archives Canada several years ago, Joanna Crandell discovered that hundreds of mysterious “order-in-council” lists related to immigrants appeared in the index under the subject…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 13, 2005 Hy Burstein can’t quite explain his passion for riding horses, only that it first hit him as a teenager and that it’s still going strong six decades later. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Toronto in 1928, he recently published Ride ’em Jewish Cowboy, a book describing his…
From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978 Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie…
From The National Post, 2000 Dr. Reuven Yosef, one of Israel’s best-known ornithologists, has won a $25,000 (US) enterprise award from the Rolex Watch Company for transforming a garbage dump into a bird sanctuary outside the burgeoning tourist resort of Eilat on Israel’s 11-km-long strip of Red Sea coast. Born in India, Yosef came to…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2001 Canadian Jews are calling on their government to tighten its borders with the United States following unconfirmed reports that some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have entered the United States from Canada. Jewish officials long have been…
Review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, by Vanda Krefft Theda Bara (nicknamed ‘The Vamp’), one of Fox’s biggest stars, in a lavish 1917 production of Cleopatra. No known copy of the film survives. From the Canadian Jewish News, 2019 Although his surname appears in…
From Avotaynu, 2020 Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities, by Alexander Beider. Like a Napoleon of names, Alexander Beider has been sweeping methodically across the Jewish diaspora seeking to apply a rigid scientific methodology to the naturally-occurring phenomenon of Jewish surnames. Beider has devoted more than three decades…
