Ben Weider, who with his brother Joe founded a billion-dollar bodybuilding empire and helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career in the United States, died October 17 (2008) of heart failure in his native city of Montreal at the age of 85. Weider was also a collector of rare Napoleonic artifacts, and donated some sixty valuable pieces…
Obit: Canadian arts patron Bluma Appel (1919-2007)
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Known for her patronage of the arts and her dedication to social causes, Bluma Appel died of cancer July 15 (2007) in a Toronto hospital. She was 86. Born in Montreal, Appel supported many arts and cultural organizations as well as individual artists. An officer of the Order of Canada, she was also the founder of…
Sigmund Freud House and other Viennese Jewish landmarks
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The November 29 (1993) issue of Time Magazine featured a likeness of the founder of psychoanalysis on its cover with the caption, “Is Freud dead?” in conscious parody of the magazine’s well-remembered “Is God Dead?” cover of April 1966. Inside, several articles asserted that recent chemical discoveries and psychoanalytic treatment modalities of dubious value have…
Vered Hagalil, popular ranch north of the Sea of Galilee
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Yehudi Avni has a dream — to mount one of the 20 horses at Vered Hagalil, his horse ranch and guest farm north of the Sea of Galilee, and ride around the lake and through the valley to Amman, the capital of Jordan. “When peace will come, and if it will be a real peace,…
Israeli infiltrated Germany’s neo-Nazi movement
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Having boldly infiltrated the top echelons of Germany’s neo-Nazi movement, former Israeli paratrooper Yaron Svoray felt more than mildly uncomfortable the day in 1992 that he sat with about 30 neo-Nazis in the woods and an elderly ex-SS guard put a gun to his ear, screaming, “Juden! Juden!” Quickly, Svoray leaned forward, out of range…
Horses on Yonge Street bridge below Davisville
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No, it isn’t an advertisement for Marlboro Cigarettes. Those dozen horses, seen in silhouette on an old railroad bridge that spans Yonge Street below Davisville, are the work of 34-year-old site-specific sculptor Robert Sprachman of Toronto. Entitled The Iron Horse, the sculpture consists of 12 life-sized silhouettes of horses arranged on the defunct Beltline Railroad…
Stamped Out: philatelic and postal items from Nazi era
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Henry Schwab, a German-born Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1936. enlisted in the U.S. Army and reached the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp just days after its liberation in April 1945. “It was a day never to be forgotten, coming face to face with some of the horrors,” he recalls in a…
Egyptian-born Jewish grandfather returns to Egypt
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For 21 years, Selim Sassoon, an Egyptian Jew, worked as an executive accountant for the Shell Oil company in Cairo. Then in 1956, with the Suez crisis looming, Sassoon became convinced that there was no future for Jews in Egypt and took his family to Canada, part of a modern exodus and expulsion that saw…
Rare 1910 Toronto panorama from Library of Congress
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A rare panoramic photograph of Toronto harbour, taken in 1910 from the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, has been transferred into video format and posted with some analysis and description onto YouTube. Toronto author and publisher Bill Gladstone, who maintains the website www.billgladstone.ca, came across the rare photograph in the US Library…
Bridging 90 years of Rubinoff-Naftolin history
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Sometime between 1905 and 1908, my mother’s grandparents said goodbye to their parents and their village of Zhlobin, Belarus, and brought their children with them to Canada. For decades, although they were divided by a wide gulf of geography and history, family members sent letters in Yiddish back and forth between the Old World and…
