by Ellen Weiser If you’re a baby boomer, or more accurately, a Jewish Toronto baby boomer, undoubtedly you have fond memories of a time and place that lives only in our dreams. Let me take you back to where I’m constantly accused of living … in the past. If anything, it was cheaper. For myself…
After the death of her mother when she turned ten, Judith Friedland learned to be resilient. She met the expectations for upper-middle-class women in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s, which included post-secondary education, marriage, and motherhood. While raising a family and supporting her husband’s academic career, she continued her formal education through part-time study…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 24, 2000 (JTA) The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is trying to keep pace with the city’s growing Jewish population through a massive building and revitalization project. The most recent is a $150-million Jewish campus in the York region, the area just north of the city that is home…
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 Ben Lappin (from Commentary, 1955) Spadina Avenue, the main street of the needle trades in Toronto, looks very much the same as it did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. The same kind of old-fashioned haggling still goes on between the employers and the handful of tense harassed business agents – former pressers, operators, and…
by Irving B Rosen, MD, FRCSC Society doctors, like Harley Street specialists, evoke the image of the sought after, affluent doyen of their calling, courted by the high and mighty, who never question their high fees. Toronto had its society doctors who held sway for about fifty years from about 1900 to 1950. I became…
Note: In 2012, Beth Lida commissioned Bill Gladstone to write a detailed history of the congregation since its founding in 1912. While the 44-page booklet is now out of print, it is still available in PDF format, and easily downloadable for free from the link below. From the Introduction: In Toronto, as in many cities…
◊ After the departure of Rabbi Benjamin Friedberg from Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Synagogue in the early 1990s, the congregation turned to Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl to lead it into the future. The following is an excerpt from The History of Beth Tzedec Congregation Toronto Canada (2016). It is being published as Rabbi Frydman-Kohl departs from Beth…
Above: Current OJA executive director Dara Solomon stands beside image of early Passover seder, the sort of historic photo the OJA has become adept at collecting and preserving. First published in Archivia, 1990 ◊ Note: In this article Dr. Speisman, the founding director of the Ontario Jewish Archives, describes its holdings, policies and activities as…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 22, 1989 TORONTO – Rabbi Samuel Sachs died recently in Santa Monica, California at the age of 96. He was a spiritual leader of Goel Tzedec Synagogue from 1927 to 1946, when the congregation was housed on University Ave. (Goel Tzedec later merged with the McCaul St. Synagogue to become…
