Above: Current OJA executive director Dara Solomon stands beside image of early Passover seder, the sort of historic photo the OJA has become adept at collecting and preserving. First published in Archivia, 1990 ◊ Note: In this article Dr. Speisman, the founding director of the Ontario Jewish Archives, describes its holdings, policies and activities as…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 22, 1989 TORONTO – Rabbi Samuel Sachs died recently in Santa Monica, California at the age of 96. He was a spiritual leader of Goel Tzedec Synagogue from 1927 to 1946, when the congregation was housed on University Ave. (Goel Tzedec later merged with the McCaul St. Synagogue to become…
Dorothy Goldstick (later Dworkin) donned the modest white cap of a maternity nurse in 1909, but her accomplishments ranged into charitable work and philanthropy, business, newspaper publishing, and institution building on a scale that benefitted the entire city of Toronto. A driving force behind the establishment of Toronto’s world-famous Mount Sinai Hospital, Dworkin (1889-1976) was…
Although his name may be little known even within the Canadian Jewish community, Meyer Joshua Nurenberger was an internationally-known Jewish writer and publisher who founded the Canadian Jewish News. During a journalistic career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1990s, Nurenberger interviewed Albert Einstein, covered the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and was editor of…
From Canadian Jewish News, July 2017 Simcha Simchovitch, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and prominent poet and writer in both Yiddish and English, died in Toronto on July 12, 2017 at the age of 97. The winner of various literary prizes including several Canadian Jewish Book Awards and two I.J. Segal awards for Yiddish Literature, Simchovitch…
From AVOTAYNU, 2009 “Zhlobin — Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian shtetl where my great-grandparents lived before bringing their children to Canada about 1910. The postcard was part of an incredible collection of more than 100 old family-related photos from Russia and Toronto from the 1890s…
From Canadian Jewish News, November 2015 Ever since the great exodus of Montreal Jews to Toronto began some 40 years ago, the Toronto Jewish community has undergone continuous growth while Montreal’s has been in slow decline, so that today there may be approximately twice as many Jews in the Greater Toronto Area than in the…
By Henry Papernick From the Beth Tzedec Bulletin, 1976 The downtown area of Toronto bounded on the north and south by College and Queen Streets, and on the east and west by Yonge and University, comprises what is probably among the highest priced real estate in Canada. But at the turn of the century it…
From the Canadian Jewish News, Spring 2015 In a series of articles in the Canadian Jewish News about four decades ago, the late CJN columnist J. B. Salsberg reminisced with great affection about the “Apter Shteeble” in downtown Toronto that he had frequented in his youth during the First World War. The Apter Society —…
When Dr. Daniel Drucker of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital receives the US$150,000 Manpei-Suzuki prize for groundbreaking diabetes research this February (2015), he will be only the latest in a long parade of medical researchers at the world-famous institution to be recognized for their excellence. A researcher engaged in a different sort of quest — probing…
