By “A. I.” David Damascus, August 4, 1840 After a protracted international drama, the Ottoman authorities in Damascus have released their remaining Jewish prisoners, bringing an end to one of the most shocking hostage crises of the 19th century. The resolution follows an intensive diplomatic campaign led by British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and French…
Herman Kempinski was evidently a first cousin once removed to my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Glicenstein, and both came from the town of Konin, Poland. Herman, born about 1854, was one of the many thousands of Russian-Polish Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s: he left Konin at age 17 in 1872. He…
From the Toronto Sunday World, May 31, 1914 Saturday May 30, Decoration Day, has been looked upon as one of the most American of all American holiday, for it is on Decoration Day that the grand army of the republic past and present is honoured by the entire nation. Recently, however, attention has been called…
It is sometimes said that heredity is destiny — a phrase with some apparent truth in The Journeys of David Toback, an old (Yiddish) diary edited (in English) by Carole Malkin and published by Schocken Books. For David Toback, who became bar-mitvahed in a dirt-poor Ukrainian village in 1888, the pair of tefillin that his…
See map caption below by William D. Reid When Lord Durham, the Governor-General, refused to honor the contemplated autumn meet of the City of Toronto and York County Races of 1838 with his presence, the sponsors considered it advisable, for some unknown reason, to postpone the races altogether for the year. The author of the…
Castlefield was a grand residence north of Toronto built in 1835 by James Hervey Price (1797–1882), a prominent Canadian attorney and political figure. According to accounts, it was a handsome and imposing red-brick, neo-gothic mansion with four crenellated turrets on a long elm-lined drive which became Castlefield Avenue. The estate on which the mansion was…
◊ Note: The film Hester Street came out in 1975 — so it is now 50 years old. The following article was posted 15 years ago, when Hester Street had turned 35. It has been 35 years since Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street first appeared on the silver screen. Although the slow-paced, 90-minute black-and-white drama…
In Devil in the White City, a riveting page-turner that reads like a murder mystery thriller, Erik Larson resurrects the legend of a forgotten American psychopathic mass murderer, the cold-blooded H. H. Holmes, and overlays it atop the equally dusty story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, one of the most impressive achievements of…
His name was Moses; he was a leader of his people; he spent much time in Egypt and the desert; he wandered incessantly; he is associated with a fiery mountain and the holiday of Passover; and his life lasted longer than a century. These traits describe the biblical Moses, of course, but they also refer…
From the Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopedia Judaica) Rafah (Ar. Rafaḥ; Heb. Rafi’ah) is a town near the Mediterranean coast at the southern end of Gaza where it borders with Egypt. Rafah is first mentioned in an inscription of the pharoah Seti I (c. 1300 B.C.E.) as Rph; it also appears in other Egyptian sources, in…
