Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the Kids, by Burton Bernstein, was first published in 1982, and remains, 30 years later, one of the most interesting family histories this reviewer has read. The reason is not so much that Burton Bernstein was the brother of a celebrity, the great composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, but because he treated…
From The Jewish Times, 1912 (as reprinted in The Jewish Standard, 1934) by S. J. Birnbaum The Jewish Standard’s introduction: The following article is part of a thesis written by Mr. Birnbaum, now an attorney in Toronto, when he attended the University of Toronto. It is to our knowledge the most authoritative history of Toronto’s…
From the Star Weekly, February 3, 1912 Toronto boasts the largest Dickens society in the world Centenary of Famous Novelist Will Be Celebrated with Much Feeling Next Wednesday — Over 1,000 Members in Dickens Fellowship Next Wednesday (February 7, 1912), the centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, will be celebrated throughout the English-speaking world…
The Leventon family reunion, held recently in Dublin, Ireland, brought together 127 direct descendants — including 28 from Canada — of Rosa and Rabbi Israel Leventon, who lived in the 19th century. Rabbi Leventon served as the last spiritual leader of Dublin’s Mary’s Abbey Synagogue, which closed in 1892, and he was the first spiritual…
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…
Eighteen-year-old Frank Westwood had gone out with friends about 7.30 that Saturday evening, October 6, 1894. By the time he returned to his family’s Jameson Avenue mansion about 10:30, his father, sister and brother had already retired upstairs; his mother, seeing he was safely in, shortly went up, too, leaving him on the stairs. The…
Manuel Mordecai Noah, an American Jew born in Philadelphia in 1785, did much world travelling in his day — he visited Europe numerous times and was the US consul to Tunis — but it is perhaps the tale surrounding his travels from New York City to the upper reaches of New York State in 1825…
“Whoever did not see Jerusalem in all her glory never saw a beautiful city.” — Babylonian Talmud, Succah 51, B. Situated in the historic Citadel beside the monumental Jaffa Gate, the Museum of the City of Jerusalem tells the extraordinary story of the city’s long and checkered past. One of the most popular sites in…
Back about 1890, Anglo-Jewish historian Lucien Wolf noted a curious fact: several of the first Jews to resettle in London after the Jews were re-admitted into England in 1655 had “hailed from a little archipelago in the East Atlantic, which had never before figured in Jewish history, and which, so far as I know, has…
A historical puzzle: Why did Goldwin Smith, the foremost literary personality of 19th-century English Canada and a notorious anti-semite, attend the opening of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple on Bond Street in 1897? And why, despite his outspoken enmity towards the Jews, did he contribute to the Holy Blossom’s building fund, as congregational records show? If…
