Photographs, blueprints and press clippings documenting the career of the late Toronto architect Harold Kaplan and his firm Kaplan and Sprachman are now in the Ontario Jewish Archives. Records of Kaplan and Sprachman’s work are also at the City of Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario and the National Archives of Canada. Kaplan’s two daughters,…
Many graduates of Harbord Collegiate Institute, once the centre of activities for Jewish teens in Toronto, have wonderful memories of their time at the school. The graduating class of 1953 recently held its 50th reunion dinner at Meron Banquet Hall, where 88 graduates, spouses and partners gathered, from places as far away as Kingston and…
Through a series of colourful panels, photographs, display cases, clothing racks, and stand-alone artifacts such as a 1917 Singer treadle industrial sewing machine, the exhibition, A Common Thread, which opened recently in the Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum of Beth Tzedec Synagogue, offers a lively and compelling look at the history of Toronto’s garment industry from the early…
THIS Golden Anniversary book was published in 1938 to mark the first 50 years of the Beth Hamidrash Hagadol Chevra Tehillim of Toronto, which was founded in 1887 and moved into the McCaul Street Synagogue about 1905. In the early 1950s it merged with the Goel Tzedec Congregation on University Avenue to become the present Beth…
THE following is the beginning of The House of the Living, a “long” short story by Bill Gladstone. It is a romance-mystery of Jewish genealogy. Genealogist David Lazarus assists a married lady named Sarah Blum to discover what happened to an uncle who disappeared from her family, and changes his life in the process. Originally…
THE following article, which appeared in the Toronto Star of January 8, 1912, summed up the various violent calamities that took the souls of 102 Torontonians during the past year of 1911. The article is reprinted in its entirety: 102 VIOLENT DEATHS IN TORONTO IN 1911 Suicides and Drownings Numbered 26 and 25 Respectively —…
This aerial photograph of Toronto was taken in 1910, when the science of flight was in its infancy. Note that the pilot is visible in the early biplane, which took off from the Aviation Park in Weston. The photo was obviously taken from a second plane, flying nearby. This poor reproduction doesn’t reveal much of…
Although most of the old Mount Sinai Hospital on Yorkville Avenue is gone, a prominent architectural firm has agreed to restore the only wing of the hospital still standing. The wing, built as an addition around 1928, was used as a nursing home after Mount Sinai moved to its present location on University Avenue in…
There were bull-frogs in the creek on the other side of Wilson Heights, Jackie told us: monstrous bull-frogs, the biggest he had ever seen. He had brought one home like a warrior returning from battle with a spoil. But he said the granddaddy of them all, the Moby Dick of bull-frogs, was still in the…
As the “people of the book,” wherever Jews live, they will always find a dealer who can provide them with sforim — Hebrew, Jewish and religious books. Before the turn of the century, rabbis and scholars brought with them numerous sacred books, and from time to time, a shipment of books would arrive here. Barenholtz…
