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…
Tag: history
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…
Mature writer Jacqueline Park scores with first novel
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After a distinguished career as a television scriptwriter and a professor of dramatic writing, Winnipeg-born Jacqueline Park, at 72, has achieved every writer’s dream: an acclaimed and commercially successful first novel. The book, a sweeping historical epic of the Italian Renaissance, is called The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi. Published by the prestigious American…
50th anniversary of Belleville’s Sons of Jacob Congregation
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Calling all Bellevillians and former Bellevillians to the 50th reunion of the “new” Sons of Jacob Congregation. The reunion takes place in the city of Belleville on the June 3 (2005) weekend, and includes a full program to celebrate the building’s 50th anniversary. In 1955, 65 Jewish families looked at their old-fashioned synagogue, which was…
On the Warsaw Ghetto
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In the decades before the Holocaust, the Jews of Warsaw believed that they were on the eve of a great positive transformation, according to an Israeli professor of Jewish history who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Jews of Warsaw were poor, often living in one-room flats where lively discussions of religion, politics…
Book Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes
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Edmund de Waal, London-based author of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, has described this memorable book as “a biography of a collection and the biography of my family.” The collection he refers to is an assortment of some 264 netsuke, tiny elegant figurines carved by Japanese craftsmen in…
Stamped Out: philatelic and postal items from Nazi era
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Henry Schwab, a German-born Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1936. enlisted in the U.S. Army and reached the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp just days after its liberation in April 1945. “It was a day never to be forgotten, coming face to face with some of the horrors,” he recalls in a…
Rare 1910 Toronto panorama from Library of Congress
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A rare panoramic photograph of Toronto harbour, taken in 1910 from the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, has been transferred into video format and posted with some analysis and description onto YouTube. Toronto author and publisher Bill Gladstone, who maintains the website www.billgladstone.ca, came across the rare photograph in the US Library…
