Etan Diamond, an American academic, has written a full-length study of the Orthodox Jewish community of Toronto and its pioneering movement northward from the inner city into the suburbs in the postwar era. Published recently (2001) by the University of North Carolina Press, Diamond’s And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia…
Only in Los Angeles: the Wilshire Boulevard Temple
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When your address is Hollywood and you’d like some murals in your synagogue, who are you going to call? L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple is a magnificent structure, both inside and out. Modeled roughly after the Great Synagogue of Florence, its features seem by turns pure Byzantium and pure Hollywood. Large as a cathedral, it boasts…
Lost in Hollywood: my cousin, the child actor
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During a sightseeing visit to Los Angeles some years ago, I surprised myself by taking a cab to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t seen the Getty Museum, the Hollywood studios and so many other sights, so why was I going to some musty…
Benevolence is latest novel from Cynthia Holz
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Bernard Wasserman and Renata Moon, the central characters in Benevolence, are a middle-aged, childless couple straining to regain their former closeness even as they struggle with barriers that separate them from their clients in their professional lives, he as a doctor who assesses patients involved in organ transplants, she as a psychotherapist who helps patients…
New story collection from Nathan Englander
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You remember Nathan Englander. He’s the former yeshiva bocher turned short story writer who dazzled the critics about a dozen years ago with For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a debut collection of stories that inspired raves and comparisons to Babel, Malamud and Singer. Not even his subsequent novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, could…
Dr. David Eisen was a dedicated historian
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Dr. David Eisen had a passionate interest in the history of Toronto Jewry From The Jewish Standard, November 1990 IT SHOULD NOT come as a surprise to those who knew him that, in his youth, Dr. David Eisen had wanted to become a professional historian. Eisen, who died in Toronto in 1988 at the age…
Tikkun Olam: Ve’ahavta intent on ‘repairing the world’
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Representatives of Ve’ahavta, a Canadian Jewish humanitarian and relief organization, are being credited with pioneering a method of treatment that drastically reduces HIV transmission from infected mothers to newborn babies in sub-Saharan Africa. Ve’ahavta medics in field clinics in Zimbabwe have devised a system for administering the anti-HIV drug AZT that costs about (US) $5…
Mature writer Jacqueline Park scores with first novel
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After a distinguished career as a television scriptwriter and a professor of dramatic writing, Winnipeg-born Jacqueline Park, at 72, has achieved every writer’s dream: an acclaimed and commercially successful first novel. The book, a sweeping historical epic of the Italian Renaissance, is called The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi. Published by the prestigious American…
Medical condition leads to genealogy breakthrough
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Stanley Diamond, a semi-retired Montreal businessman who ran a company that manufactured decorated ceilings, has become a medical-genealogical detective in a bid to defuse what he calls a “ticking time bomb” and prevent potential suffering and death caused by thalassemia, a genetic disease. Common among Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, the gene…
Jewish Toronto: miscellaneous photos from the olden days
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MEDICAL ARTS BUILDING ON BLOOR STREET (illustration, above) : New structure to be erected on the old Sweny property at northeast corner of Bloor and St. George stret by a group of Toronto physicians. The site was acquired from the Toronto General Trusts Co., executors of the Sweny estate, and has 140 feet frontage on…
