by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, 2013 Morton Brown is sitting in the Beth Sholom board room beneath two long rows of photographic portraits of former presidents of the shul. Having first joined the board in 1970, Morton attended board meetings regularly and served on various committees, as treasurer, second vice president, board chairman and president…
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.…
Garth Drabinsky was appalled that day in 1987 when he heard that publishers were about to bid at auction for the rights to an unauthorized biography of himself. Realizing that “a book filled with misstatements and misrepresentations and ignorant reporting of the facts would do me a lot of harm,” he quickly took strong evasive…
By Brian Mulroney Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, was awarded the World Jewish Congress’s Theodor Herzl Award in New York on November 9, 2023. This is an edited transcript of his remarks (courtesy sapirjournal.org). In his book Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum tells of Hitler, just prior to his suicide, as the Third…
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…
Writing On The Wall: Review of Indian in the Cabinet (2021) 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,…
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…
26 May 2023 Census enumerators across Canada were busy on June 1, 1931, going door to door to gather 40 fields of personal information about 10,376,379 Canadians, including family names and relationships, age, gender, occupation, employment status, racial origin and whether the family had acquired a radio. Having sat in a vault for the past…
As reported in The Montreal Gazette (1938) This shocking photograph was taken at a fascist rally on Wellington Street, Montreal, on May 11, 1938. Inspired by Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party and Italy’s Fascists, Quebec’s National Socialist Christian Party was a strongly antisemitic and anticommunist group led by Adrien Arcand. Party enforcers were called blueshirts,…
