In this brief item, which appeared in the Toronto Star of October 28, 1910, a woman is brought into police court in connection with an episode in which she came to the defense of a Jewish mother and daughter who were being “stoned” on Victoria Street. Such incidents were certainly not unique in the Toronto…
The Toronto Lodge of B’nai Brith was founded 1919 and had as many as 2,400 members in its heyday in 1948, according to a Canadian Jewish News article on March 27, 1980, marking the Lodge’s 60th anniversary. Sixty-eight Jews banded together to form Toronto Lodge of B’nai Brith in 1919, and one of them was…
“Look at Judah’s claws, deeply penetrating my body! Look how my blood is running, look how the Jews are drinking it!” These are lyrics to a song. They were excerpted from a songbook found at Romanian Camp, a 50-acre compound in Flamborough, Ontario, outside Hamilton, where a group of sympathizers of the Iron Guard —…
Having boldly infiltrated the top echelons of Germany’s neo-Nazi movement, former Israeli paratrooper Yaron Svoray felt more than mildly uncomfortable the day in 1992 that he sat with about 30 neo-Nazis in the woods and an elderly ex-SS guard put a gun to his ear, screaming, “Juden! Juden!” Quickly, Svoray leaned forward, out of range…
Born about 1620 in Ostrog, Volynia, Rabbi Nathan Hanover and his family were among the countless Jews in Ukraine and eastern Poland whose lives were disrupted by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and the intermittent attacks that continued for years afterwards. Hanover travelled extensively over the region of devastation, speaking with many affected people and…
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…
Norman Jaques, a former Social Credit MP from Alberta, earned a special place in the annals of Canadian antisemitism 60 years ago when he wrote a virulently anti-semitic letter on House of Commons letterhead, thus tarring two reputable institutions with a single brush. In the summer of 1943, as the Nazi Holocaust was raging in…
Gwethalyn Graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven (1944) is said to bear the distinction of being the first book published in Canada by a non-Jewish author that deals centrally with Jewish themes and characters. Since the former bestseller has been out of print for two decades, its recent reissue by Cormorant Books of Toronto seems…
The morning after firefighters quenched a late-night arsonist’s blaze at Toronto’s Anshei Minsk Synagogue, congregants arrived to a chilling sight: thousands of prayer and holy books, charred by fire and soaked by firefighters’ hoses, were littered across the building’s front steps and the adjoining sidewalk. While the building sustained damage estimated at several thousand dollars,…
