For a man who has lived in three centuries, Samuel Kernerman, who will be 101 years old on January 19, 2000, has a simple request. “I just want to see my great-grandchildren grow up,” he said. He has 28 great-grandchildren. Interviewed at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre veterans wing, Kernerman, a veteran of World War…
Tag: history
Orchestrating the American dream
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Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the Kids, by Burton Bernstein, was first published in 1982, and remains, 30 years later, one of the most interesting family histories this reviewer has read. The reason is not so much that Burton Bernstein was the brother of a celebrity, the great composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, but because he treated…
Stories from Jewish Portland
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If you have roots in Jewish Portland, you may be interested in a recent book — Stories From Jewish Portland, by Polina Olsen (The History Press, Charleston, S.C., 2011). Olsen has collected many stories of the Jews of Portland. Their roots go back to the gold rush and their heart is the “old neighbourhood” of…
The Road to Timbuktu: Adventures of a Jewish Traveller
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Seeking to extend their colonial holdings in the early 1800s, the major European powers considered the notion of dispatching expeditions through the forbidden Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, the legendary lost city of gold in the heart of Africa. Rumors of the vast wealth of Timbuktu had been circulating ever since 1324, when Mansa Musa (“Emperor…
Publisher has strong ideological mission
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Nearly a decade after he founded a publishing company with a strong ideological mission, Howard Rotberg may take his place among that small and proud group of Canadians who operate successful small publishing houses. Although Mantua Books started off slowly, it now publishes one new title each month. Some of the books sell tens of…
Titanic genealogy
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The 100th anniversary of the S.S. Titanic disaster is almost upon us. The legendary British ship sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage. More than 1,500 of the 2,200 people aboard perished in the tragedy, which has been memorialized in books, popular…
Historic photograph of 1812 veterans was taken in 1861
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No, it isn’t an actual photograph — just a sketch of a photograph of ten surviving veterans of the War of 1812 to 1814, who assembled at Rosedale some 50 years after the war, on October 23, 1861. The photo-sketch appeared in the Toronto Evening Telegram in 1910, just more than a century ago and…
Genealogist explores her family’s history in Stropkov
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Jews settled in Stropkov, in the Slovak Republic, around 1640. It was a little town in the backwoods of Slovakia with a Jewish atmosphere because it was between Galicia and Hungary and thus attracted Jews fleeing from those two areas. On May 24, 1942, the day before the Nazis began to deport Jews, the records…
Pre-1950 Jewish Toronto manuscript published
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A 60-year-old manuscript titled The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community has been found in the archives of Beth Tzedec Congregation. Ralph Berrin, a volunteer in the Beth Tzedec Museum, brought the manuscript to the attention of Bill Gladstone, the publisher of Now and Then Books. Gladstone identified the author as the late Shmuel Mayer…
Massey Hall rally for Jews in Europe, 1915
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IT’S clear from this article from the Globe and Mail of August 9, 1915, that the situation of Jews in Europe was desperate and that Jews in Toronto were keen to ease their affliction. The rally at Massey Hall reportedly attracted some 2,000 people and representatives of more than 50 Jewish organizations. The keynote speaker was…
