In 1839 an unfounded rumor spread among the Shi’ite Muslims of the town of Meshed in northeastern Iran that a Jewish woman had committed an act of disrespect towards Islam. According to a period account preserved in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, an angry mob “attacked the Jewish quarter, broke into the Jewish houses,…
Category: History
Markman’s Jewish Remnants in Spain
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In the town of Trujillo, Spain, home of Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, there is a row of shops off the main square of special interest to Jewish travelers. When I was there about ten years ago, a pharmacist pointed to a door in his shop and invited me downstairs; there, I found an archway…
Hundert’s study of 18th-century Opatow, Poland
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Professor Gershon Hundert, the distinguished historian and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, beguiled an audience of Jewish genealogists last summer in New York with midrash-like tales of early Jewish history in Poland. For centuries, the Jews felt very comfortable in Poland, Hundert said, referring to stories that even the name…
Lives Remembered: Photographs of a Small Town in Poland
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The collected photographs of Zalman Kaplan, who ran a studio in the town of Szczuczyn, Poland between 1898 and 1939, might never have been considered remarkable or been made the focus of a traveling museum exhibit, had it not been for the almost complete destruction of Szczuczyn’s Jewish community of 3,000 souls during the Nazi…
Two guidebooks from Ruth Ellen Gruber
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After several years stationed in Europe as a freelance political journalist, American writer Ruth Ellen Gruber was startled to discover that a magnificent old synagogue had been restored in the Hungarian town of Szeged. “I never had any inkling that such a synagogue could exist outside of a major city,” she recalled. Shortly afterwards, she…
Sephardic Jews in early Canada
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One of the most interesting and unusual items pertaining to the Jewish history of confederate and pre-confederate Canada is a two-centuries-old diary in the custody of the National Archives of Canada. The diary belonged to Samuel Jacobs, a European merchant whose ship, the Betsy, was known to have plied the St. Lawrence carrying trade goods…
Paris wins prize for ‘Long Shadows’
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A book by a well-known Toronto author won a $10,000 prize for non-fiction last month and is in the running for a second $10,000 prize to be awarded in May (2001). Erna Paris’s sixth book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, which was published last year by Knopf Canada, was awarded the Pearson Writers’ Trust…
Reconstructing Hungarian-Jewish world
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As Montreal-area author Elaine Kalman Naves was preparing to write the book that eventually became Journey To Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (McGill-Queen’s University Press), she considered carefully whether to present the story as a non-fiction chronicle or as a novel. The book tells the story of the Weinbergers, a farming family…
From a Ruined Garden: a marvelous distillation of memory
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Where might you expect to hear a tale of an enchanted Passover seder where all participants fall asleep at the table before even the first glass of wine is consumed? Or of a blind cantor who, during a brief visit to town, sings so sweetly in synagogue that the whole community is mesmerized for weeks?…
Journey to a 19th-century shtetl
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Back about a century and a half ago, the town of Kamenets was a typical Russian-Polish shtetl consisting “of 250 old houses, black and small with shingled roofs,” and with some 450 Jews listed in the Revizski Skazki, the official government registry. However, most of the town’s Jews did not appear in the registry. Fearful…
