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…
“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
A new online source of genealogical information about immigrants to Canada from the 1930s to the 1950s From Remembering Our Yesterdays, a blog at Inside Toronto While working at Libraries and Archives Canada several years ago, Joanna Crandell discovered that hundreds of mysterious “order-in-council” lists related to immigrants appeared in the index under the subject…
From the Globe, October 27, 1902 A Centre of History: Frank Yeigh Conducts a Farewell Pilgrimage through old Parliament Buildings A farewell tour of inspection of the old Parliament buildings, now in process of dissolution, was paid by the Canadian Club on Saturday afternoon under the guidance of Mr. Frank Yeigh. Probably 400 persons, including many…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2001 Canadian Jews are calling on their government to tighten its borders with the United States following unconfirmed reports that some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have entered the United States from Canada. Jewish officials long have been…
Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir, Indian In The Cabinet, Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous Canadian who uses the…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2015 In late 1947 and early 1948, representatives of the Canadian garment industry organized what became known as the Tailor Project, a plan to select more than 2,200 skilled tailors from the Displaced Person camps of Europe and give them jobs and housing in Canada. The Tailor Project had…
Editor’s Introduction: Anyone who searches the phrase “Crystal beach racial disturbance” will come up with details of a brief race riot that occurred in the Ontario summer resort town in the summer of 1956. But news of an earlier “disturbance” — in the summer of 1942 — does not seem to come up at all.…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2002 One year after passing anti-terrorism legislation, Canada’s Liberal Government has responded to an intense barrage of criticism by adding the Lebanese-based Shi’ite group Hezbollah to its list of outlawed terrorist entities. After months of insisting that the so-called “social” wing of Hezbollah does not deserve the terrorist label because…
Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…
