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)
by •
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)
by •
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
by •
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’
by •
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
by •
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
by •
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…
His Girl Friday at Shaw Festival 2012
by •
From Canadian Jewish News, July 2012 The phrase “gallows humour” has a particular resonance in regard to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s famous 1928 play The Front Page, which is punctuated by the recurrent testing of a gallows in a courtyard of the Chicago courthouse in which death row prisoner Earl Williams is due to…
Glimpses of Jewish Baltimore
by •
It has been 50 years since a group of rabbis in Baltimore staged a protest against the racial segregation that was still a sad fact of life in many parts of America, including various restaurants in Baltimore. In February 1962, a time of heightened civil rights protests, the rabbis decided to target two local restaurants,…
Yiddishkeit, a graphic celebration of Yiddish culture
by •
In lieu of baseball cards, some American Orthodox boys have turned in recent decades to collecting Torah personality trading cards that feature images of revered “Gedolim” (Giants) from Moses Maimonides to Rabbi Moishe Feinstein, with lists of famous published works on the back in lieu of batting statistics. The happy invention of a Baltimore accountant,…
