From Globe, September 24, 1901 SACRED SCROLL THREATENED Excited Jews Besiege a Burning Synagogue The sacred scroll in the Austrian Jewish Synagogue in Chestnut street, containing the laws as set down by Moses, was threatened with destruction at 1.30 o’clock this morning. Fire broke out in the rear of the edifice and when the Jews…
A major court decision rendered on November 20, 2025, promises to dramatically reshape how Canadian citizenship is passed down through generations. In December 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice released a landmark decision, Bjorkquist v. Canada (2023 ONSC 7152), striking down Canada’s ‘first-generation limit.’ Since 2009, this rule had blocked many Canadians born abroad…
From The London Jewish Chronicle, August 11, 1916 ◊ BG Intro: Rabbi Moses Avigdor Chaikin (1852–1928) was a distinguished rabbinic scholar, teacher, and communal leader whose life reflected the intellectual vitality and migratory experience of Eastern European Jewry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Shklow, in the Russian Empire, and raised…
Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities. Large format, five volume set. Researched by the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth. Through some diligent genealogical detective work about a dozen years ago, I located a distant cousin in Johannesburg, descended from my grandfather’s uncle who had gone to South Africa in the WWI era.…
Seeking the Fabled City: the Canadian Jewish Experience, by Allan Levine (McClelland & Stewart) Proficient, prolific, and preternaturally talented, Winnipeg-based historian Allan Levine has produced a robust new history of the Jewish experience in Canada that seems both compelling and fresh. Seeking the Fabled City — the title comes from a line by the late…
From the Toronto Sunday World, May 31, 1914 Saturday May 30, Decoration Day, has been looked upon as one of the most American of all American holiday, for it is on Decoration Day that the grand army of the republic past and present is honoured by the entire nation. Recently, however, attention has been called…
◊ Note: The keynote speaker at the IAJGS conference on Jewish Genealogy in Fort Wayne, Indiana earlier this month was DNA forensic genealogist Ce Ce Moore, one of the world’s most talented investigators who uses DNA samples to solve serial murders and other crimes, some of which had been considered cold cases for decades. Conference…
‘More Than Coincidence’ My first glimpse of it was from a distance, but there was something that drew me forward by an almost magnetic process. A large family portrait, perhaps a century old, with three rows of adults and children around a pair of grandparents, all dressed finely, nobody smiling. When I got closer the…
Irving Howe (1920-1993), the New York intellectual who was a zealous socialist all of his life, received what he called his fifteen minutes of fame from a remarkable scholarly achievement that seemed a world apart from his leftist political convictions. His book, World Of Our Fathers, which was published in 1976, became a national bestseller…
by Ben Lappin (from Commentary, 1955) Spadina Avenue, the main street of the needle trades in Toronto, looks very much the same as it did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. The same kind of old-fashioned haggling still goes on between the employers and the handful of tense harassed business agents – former pressers, operators, and…
