From the Canadian Jewish News, October 2012 As legions of Barbra Streisand fans pay exorbitant prices (reportedly up to $500) for tickets to see her during her latest (and perhaps last) world tour — which includes a concert at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on Oct. 23rd 2012 — it seems a fortuitous time for the…
Born as Tsvi Hirsh Glicenstein in Konin Poland about 1872, my great-grandfather came to London as a youth, married, then brought his family to New York in 1909, and to Toronto in 1913. His tombstone (1955) memorializes Harris Glickstein, the anglicized name he used most of his life. My late grandfather Ralph Gladstone further altered…
The photo shows the opening session of the 33rd international conference on Jewish Genealogy taking place August 4 to 9 at the Park Plaza Hotel in wonderful Boston. Some 1200 delegates have assembled in the Imperial Room of this historic hotel to hear Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Ma., deliver…
Five people who survived the Holocaust in a makeshift shelter in a Ukrainian forest were reunited recently in Toronto for the first time since their liberation by the Russians in April 1944. The five are the only remaining survivors of an original group of ten women and children from Rokitno, a town in the Volhynian…
BOOK REVIEW: Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment, by Gerald Tulchinsky (University of Toronto Press, June 2013) It was said that it would take Joe Salsberg three to five hours to stroll along Spadina Avenue from College to Queen because he couldn’t venture more than a few steps without meeting someone and having a conversation. The…
From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, April 2011 Mickey and Frimette Snow speak exuberantly about their long attachment to Beth Sholom, the Toronto synagogue that they joined in 1951, two years after they were married. Mickey, whose surname was shortened from Sosnowski, was born in Toronto in 1927 in a house on Euclid Avenue owned by…
From the Globe and Mail, 2003 As a great-grandson of American slaves, Dr. Daniel Hill carried the lessons of universal equality and civil rights in his blood. Founding director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and a former Ontario ombudsman, Dr. Hill is being remembered as a pioneer of the human rights movement in Canada…
Millions of Diaspora Jews owe a huge debt of gratitude to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Jewish magnate, banker and philanthropist who built the Orient Express railroad from Vienna to Constantinople, for assisting our Russian ancestors to reach the United States, Canada, Argentina and other hospitable shores. According to his biographer, Samuel J. Lee, Hirsch…
Review of Unbuilt Toronto 2: More of the City That Might Have Been, by Mark Osbaldeston (Dundurn) Five years ago Toronto urban researcher Mark Osbaldeston came out with Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been, offering us a view of building projects and schemes that — in many cases thankfully —…
For years the magazines sent him rejection letters, inferring that his short stories about a pair of Jewish cloak and suit makers in New York were about as unmarketable as last year’s suits and dresses. But in the early 1900s Montague Glass broke through to the big time as major American magazines like The Saturday…
