Panorama of Toronto harbour, 1910 THE following book is a wonderful resource for genealogists who are researching particular families that were in Canada in the early 1930s, and anyone interested in the history of the Jewish community in Canada up to that era. Titled “Canadian Jewry: Prominent Jews of Canada,” it describes itself as “A History…
Dr. Gabriel Bar-Shaked, an expert on Hungarian Jewry for Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is convinced that a massive trove of documents on the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lies hidden in a state archives in Budapest, and he’s determined to gain access to it. So vast is the collection, Dr. Bar-Shaked asserts, that it would…
Between 1897 and 1914 — the period between the rise of Zionism and the start of the Great War — a quality English-language fortnightly newspaper captured the flavour of Jewish life in Canada. Published in Montreal, The Canadian Jewish Times functioned as a community bulletin board for the several thousand Jews then resident in Canada…
Sometime between 1905 and 1908, my mother’s grandparents said goodbye to their parents and their village of Zhlobin, Belarus, and brought their children with them to Canada. For decades, although they were divided by a wide gulf of geography and history, family members sent letters in Yiddish back and forth between the Old World and…
HERE are a series of articles written about the practice of some adherents of the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to perform baptism rituals on behalf of deceased Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The articles appeared in the New York Jewish Forward; the first piece prompted the New York Times to…
When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Russian Empire came out in 1993, it was hailed in genealogical circles as one of the most important books ever printed about Jewish surnames. His subsequent compilations of Jewish surnames from Poland, Galicia and other regions have only solidified his reputation as…
Sourcebook for Jewish Genealogies and Family Histories, by David. S. Zubatsky and Irwin M. Brent, is an updated edition, with substantial additions, of a two-volume bibliographic reference tool for genealogists that was published years ago. The revised work, published 1996, offers more than 22,000 entries pertaining to some 12,000 family names, culled from a variety of…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — better known as the Mormon Church — made internet history recently with the opening of its genealogy website. Planners were cautiously optimistic that the site might receive as many as one million hits per day. But when they were beta-testing the site, its URL address leaked…
An international expert on German Jewish genealogy told a Toronto audience recently that the vast horde of Nazi records that the Americans confiscated from Germany after WWII has finally been catalogued, making the material much more accessible to genealogists and historians. Peter Lande, who spoke to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) during Holocaust…
Davida Noyek Handler, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once owned a translation company, but gave it up in the early 1980s to concentrate on researching her family tree. Thanks largely to her research skills and perseverance, some 175 Noyek family members from six countries attended a first-ever family gathering at the Holiday Inn Yorkdale…
