During a sightseeing visit to Los Angeles some years ago, I surprised myself by taking a cab to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t seen the Getty Museum, the Hollywood studios and so many other sights, so why was I going to some musty…
Thanks to the prodigious efforts of Toronto accountant Louis Devor, 180 members of a clan that variously spelled its surname as Devor, Devore, Dwor and D’wor, met in Toronto in the summer of 1983, reported Frank Rasky in a story in the Canadian Jewish News of August 4, 1983. Participants, who ranged in age from…
More than 250 members of the Bacher family met for a reunion at Grossinger’s, the Catskills resort, reported the Canadian Jewish News on July 21, 1983. The following is a summary of the original story. Ethel Bacher and Yossel Yussiper of Bukovina, Romania, who died in an 1860s cholera epidemic, were the ancestors to which…
Stanley Diamond, a semi-retired Montreal businessman who ran a company that manufactured decorated ceilings, has become a medical-genealogical detective in a bid to defuse what he calls a “ticking time bomb” and prevent potential suffering and death caused by thalassemia, a genetic disease. Common among Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, the gene…
More than 400 people representing five generations of Ruchel and Isaac Wagman’s descendants gathered earlier this month (2004) in Chicago for the latest in a series of reunions held every four years in a different city. “It has now been 20 years since the first international reunion of the family,” said Toronto’s Mel Katzman, who…
Dr. Gabriel Bar-Shaked, an expert on Hungarian Jewry for Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is convinced that a massive trove of documents on the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lies hidden in a state archives in Budapest, and he’s determined to gain access to it. So vast is the collection, Dr. Bar-Shaked asserts, that it would…
Between 1897 and 1914 — the period between the rise of Zionism and the start of the Great War — a quality English-language fortnightly newspaper captured the flavour of Jewish life in Canada. Published in Montreal, The Canadian Jewish Times functioned as a community bulletin board for the several thousand Jews then resident in Canada…
Samuel Hersh and Leah Devorah Glass of Kovel, Volhynia, Ukraine, were the revered ancestors of more than 150 relatives who gathered in Toronto in 1985 for a family reunion, reported the Canadian Jewish News on August 22, 1985. Samuel and Leah and their nine daughters settled in Toronto in 1905, and some scant details about…
One century after Sam Gryfe left his home in Botosani, Romania and came to Canada, more than 100 of his descendants gathered for a family reunion in Toronto, reported the Canadian Jewish News on June 3, 2010. Well-known descendants include Mark Gryfe, who is involved in the Baycrest Foundation, and Moishe Gryfe, who runs Gryfe’s…
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…
