From The Canadian Jewish News, November 19, 1987 If you trace the path of the Toronto Jewish community for the past fifty years you will be taking a snapshot of Goodbaum’s grocery stores as they marched north, eventually under the name of Sunnybrook Foods. “We were at 180 Baldwin Street, 188 Baldwin Street, 374 College…
Conversation with Alex Serota (2009)
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From Beth Sholom Bulletin, Spring 2009 Alex Serota was a founding member of the Shaarei Tefillah Congregation on north Bathurst Street in the late 1950s, but left to join Beth Sholom about 1963 because of the latter’s “magnificent USY movement” that was so important for his two sons. I met recently with Alex and his…
A visit with Moishe and Gert Kerbel (2009)
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From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, Chanukah 2009 Moishe (Maurice) and Gert Kerbel joined Beth Sholom 40 years ago, a couple of years before their son Jeffrey was to be bar-mitzvahed, and have remained active members to this day. Moishe Kerbel was for many years ritual chairman of the shul. He handed out the “aliyot” and…
Profile: Frank Cadesky of Beth Sholom (2009)
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From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, Summer 2009 Frank Cadesky, a former president of the congregation from 1969 to 1971, has been a member of Beth Sholom since moving from Owen Sound to Toronto in 1950. The second youngest of 12 children, Cadesky felt right at home here, even though he had previously been involved with…
The Burke family at Beth Sholom (2011)
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From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, Fall 2011 A memorable high point in the lives of Louis and Gloria Burke and family, as well as for Beth Sholom Congregation as a whole, was the testimonial dinner with Israeli government minister Menachem Begin that was held on April 29, 1974 to launch the annual Israel Bonds drive.…
Profile: David Beck, late shammus at Beth Sholom (died 2010)
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From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, Spring 2011 David Beck was a Holocaust survivor who had seen the worst of humanity, so “he wanted to focus on bringing out the good things in life,” said his son Mendy Beck about the long-time former shammus of Beth Sholom, who died October 2010 at the age of 89.…
Some Early Toronto Film Pioneers
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From the Canadian Jewish News, May 4, 2006 Born in the East End of London, leading British cameraman Joe Rosenthal came to Canada about 1900 at the behest of the Canadian Pacific Railway to make Living Canada, a series of documentary films intended to stimulate immigration. The series was a popular success in Britain, and…
Imposing Their Will an ‘original, illuminating study’
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In Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, 1933-1948 (McGill-Queens), Toronto writer Jack Lipinsky presents an original and illuminating study of Toronto’s Jewish community and convincingly demonstrates that the community underwent a crucial maturation in the 15-year period under discussion. Similarly, in The Defining Decade: Identity, Politics, and The Canadian Jewish Community in…
Book reviews: a police procedural and a medical procedural
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With the Eaton Centre and Scarborough block party shootings in Toronto, and the Dark Knight and Sikh Temple shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, gun crimes have been screaming from the headlines all summer. Seems a perfect time, then, to look at Robert Rotenberg’s third police procedural crime novel, Stray Bullets. As he demonstrated in his…
Samuel Koteliansky — A Russian Jew in Bloomsbury
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Samuel Koteliansky was never a major figure in the Bloomsbury circle. Author Leon Edel never even mentions him in Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, his masterful portrait of the loose affiliation of writers and artists associated with the London-based Bloomsbury circle. Neither is Koteliansky mentioned in the other books about Bloomsbury on my shelf. We…
