December 10, 2025 Librarians are a cautious bunch. How else to explain why those at the main branch of the Toronto Public Library have taken to hiding away the latest Toronto phone books from public view? They are all on the open shelf, they will tell you. But they are not. The phone books on…
“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…
Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities. Large format, five volume set. Researched by the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth. Through some diligent genealogical detective work about a dozen years ago, I located a distant cousin in Johannesburg, descended from my grandfather’s uncle who had gone to South Africa in the WWI era.…
◊ Note: The keynote speaker at the IAJGS conference on Jewish Genealogy in Fort Wayne, Indiana earlier this month was DNA forensic genealogist Ce Ce Moore, one of the world’s most talented investigators who uses DNA samples to solve serial murders and other crimes, some of which had been considered cold cases for decades. Conference…
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…
‘More Than Coincidence’ My first glimpse of it was from a distance, but there was something that drew me forward by an almost magnetic process. A large family portrait, perhaps a century old, with three rows of adults and children around a pair of grandparents, all dressed finely, nobody smiling. When I got closer the…
Sam Bernstein, a New England industrialist who acquired the franchise to the Frederics hair-styling machine in the mid-1920s, became a remarkable overnight success after America was seized by a permanent-wave craze at the height of the flapper era. “One day in 1927, I didn’t have a nickel to my name,” he used to say. “The…
Irving Howe (1920-1993), the New York intellectual who was a zealous socialist all of his life, received what he called his fifteen minutes of fame from a remarkable scholarly achievement that seemed a world apart from his leftist political convictions. His book, World Of Our Fathers, which was published in 1976, became a national bestseller…
About the Joint-Stock Russian-Canadian-American Passenger Company (RUSCAPA) The Joint-Stock Russian-Canadian-American Passenger Company, also known as RUSCAPA, was established in the early 1920s as a joint-stock company involving Russian, Canadian, and American passenger carriers. Its primary purpose was to facilitate the emigration of Soviet citizens—particularly Jews, but also Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, and Russians—from the USSR to…
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…
