Tag: history

Rabbinic ancestry? Prove it first

Arthur Kurzweil, the pioneering American Jewish genealogist, tells a remarkable story about how a passing remark from his mother’s cousin, Maurice, led him to a significant family discovery. Maurice recalled being told after playing a childhood prank, “That’s no way to behave, especially since you are an ‘ainicle’ of the Stropkover Rebbe.” Learning that the…

Kishinev, 100 years later

One hundred years ago this week (April 2003), reports reached the West from St. Petersburg of severe anti-Jewish riots that had occurred in Kishinev, capital of the Russian province of Bessarabia. The first news was sparse. Twenty-five Jews had been killed and 275 wounded in the attacks, newspapers reported, but eventually the death toll would…

Of Berliners, Oppenheimers and Rothschilds

From about 1840 to roughly 1900, one sort of Jewish immigrant was so familiar in North American cities that he was caricatured in novels, newspapers articles and comic strips. According to the stereotype, he was a prosperous merchant, garbed in bowler hat, business suit, and thick moustache. He manufactured or traded in pianos, fine watches,…

History of anti-semitism within the Social Credit

Norman Jaques, a former Social Credit MP from Alberta, earned a special place in the annals of Canadian antisemitism 60 years ago when he wrote a virulently anti-semitic letter on House of Commons letterhead, thus tarring two reputable institutions with a single brush. In the summer of 1943, as the Nazi Holocaust was raging in…

A search for six of the Six Million

Sometimes when author Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives would cry at the sight of him, so great was his resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel Jaeger. From some handwriting on the back of a photograph, Mendelsohn knew that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their daughters Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia had been “killed…

‘Devil in Babylon’ astute study of jazz age

Allan Levine, the hybrid Winnipeg novelist, historian and school teacher, says he is putting his Jewish detective hero Sam Klein on the shelf for a while, even though his trio of Sam Klein mystery novels “has done well in Canada and in Germany, where I did a five-city book tour last fall.” The Sam Klein…

Jewish genealogy in Pennsylvania

Anyone with the surname Eisen (which means ‘iron’) knows that Jews have had an historic involvement in the steel trade. From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galizianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 by Robert Perlman is a thorough local history that chronicles the rise of various Jewish communities in a sprinkling of towns in and…

A study of Toronto’s Orthodox Jews

Etan Diamond, an American academic, has written a full-length study of the Orthodox Jewish community of Toronto and its pioneering movement northward from the inner city into the suburbs in the postwar era. Published recently by the University of North Carolina Press, Diamond’s And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia devotes…

Russian Dance: true romance in Stalinist Moscow

One evening in 1928, a Russian-Jewish physician and his wife, Marc and Katya Cheftel, attended a large and fancy dinner party at the Manhattan home of the renowned concert-hall impresario Max Rabinoff and his petite wife Bluet, who was equally known for her beauty, wit and charm. Although Rabinoff had made a fortune as a…

Book tells story of Lithuanian Jewry

On the brink of the Second World War, Lithuanian Jews were “a poor tribe,” notes Israeli Professor Dov Levin in his book, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania. Numbering some 155,000 on the eve of the Holocaust, Lithuania’s Jews served as the country’s millers, bakers, tailors, plasterers, glaziers, blacksmiths, waggoners and…