From The Canadian Jewish News, Feb. 3, 1967 Former Toronto Mayor William Denison visited Greece, Italy and Israel in the 1960s and later described his travels on radio station CKFH. Here are his abbreviated comments about his visit to the Jewish state. Our five days in Israel was the high watermark of our tour. Here…
By Brian Mulroney Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, was awarded the World Jewish Congress’s Theodor Herzl Award in New York on November 9, 2023. This is an edited transcript of his remarks (courtesy sapirjournal.org). In his book Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum tells of Hitler, just prior to his suicide, as the Third…
Writing On The Wall: Review of Indian in the Cabinet (2021) Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir,…
26 May 2023 Census enumerators across Canada were busy on June 1, 1931, going door to door to gather 40 fields of personal information about 10,376,379 Canadians, including family names and relationships, age, gender, occupation, employment status, racial origin and whether the family had acquired a radio. Having sat in a vault for the past…
As reported in The Montreal Gazette (1938) This shocking photograph was taken at a fascist rally on Wellington Street, Montreal, on May 11, 1938. Inspired by Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party and Italy’s Fascists, Quebec’s National Socialist Christian Party was a strongly antisemitic and anticommunist group led by Adrien Arcand. Party enforcers were called blueshirts,…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 1992 After an eighteen-year battle with leukemia, Barbara Frum died March 26, 1992 at the age of 54. The well-known broadcaster was rushed to the hospital after an interview with Mordecai Richler on March 10, suffering a high fever. She died of complications from leukemia. Tributes to the polite…
From Inside Toronto, 2016 As if attaining genealogical records wasn’t already hard enough, genealogists now have to face a steep new barrier when it comes to getting Ontario birth records. Quietly, on the sly and when no one was looking, the Ontario Registrar General changed its longstanding rule about how long to wait before birth…
by Dr Stuart E Rosenberg From The Canadian Jewish News, 1972 Here’s an interesting footnote to Jewish Canadiana. A very unusual episode, full of portent and prophecy for the future of Jews everywhere, was played out in a remote corner of the country, at an army base in Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was there that…
From the Canadian Jewish News (editorial), 1987 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Founded half a century ago, the corporation has had, among its many mandates, the fostering of goodwill among Canadians all across our country. On Friday, January 30, the CBC violated that aspect of its mandate when it won the…
by Gaye Applebaum From the Canadian Jewish News, 1983 As the SS Hamilton Scandinavian docked at Quebec City on Aug. 21, 1921, a tremor of excitement surged through the rain-drenched crowd. On the ship’s deck huddled 108 frightened but excited Ukrainian Jewish children – all of them rescued war orphans from the devastated Polish Ukraine.…
