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Toronto’s First Synagogue: 1885 Photo

“Of Things Past . . .”

Encyclopedia Judaica: Jews had long history in Rafah

by n-a • March 12, 2025

From the Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopedia Judaica) Rafah (Ar. Rafaḥ; Heb. Rafi’ah) is a town near the Mediterranean coast at the southern end of Gaza where it borders with Egypt. Rafah is first mentioned in an inscription of the pharoah Seti I (c. 1300 B.C.E.) as Rph; it also appears in other Egyptian sources, in…

by Bill Gladstone • January 21, 2025

Dr. SCHECHTER DEAD; NOTED AS A SCHOLAR (Obit from the New York Times, Nov. 20, 1915)

by Bill Gladstone • January 20, 2025

A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…

by Bill Gladstone • January 16, 2025

Book Review: We Who Wrestle With God (2024) Almost a decade ago, Jordan Peterson listened to his own “still, small voice” and decided to take a strong moral stand, come hell or high water. Peterson was then a relatively obscure professor at the University of Toronto, who also taught at Harvard. His fierce objection to…

by Bill Gladstone • December 25, 2024

Dan Behat, the former chief archaeologist of Jerusalem, served as a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and has also taught extensively in Canada. He has lectured to Christian groups around the world on Jerusalem in the time of Jesus and was once invited by Pope John Paul II to do so at the Vatican. He…

by Bill Gladstone • December 24, 2024

From the Globe and Mail, November 1999 Rabbi Sherwin Wine of Birmingham Temple, Detroit, asserts that all of the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel are only myths — and so is the God of the Jewish people. Heretical utterances for a rabbi? Certainly, in any previous age. But today Rabbi Wine is the founder…

by Bill Gladstone • July 5, 2014

From Canadian Jewish News, 2002 Below the southwestern corner of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, near the archaeological feature known as Robinson’s Arch, lies a random assortment of massive stone building blocks. Though you might not realize it at first, these blocks help bring history to life. They were once part of a parapet wall along the…

by n-a • November 8, 2012

From Toronto Star Weekly, February 12, 1916 The Jewish Free School at the corner of Cecil and Beverley streets is doing a unique work in Toronto. It was eight years ago that Mr. Edmund Scheuer took over this Sabbath School, under the auspices of the Zionists of Toronto. There were then twenty-one children on the…

by Bill Gladstone • December 6, 2011

We were driving southward through Israel’s Shephelah region when our guide pulled the van over to the shoulder and drew our attention to a ridge of hills to the right of us and a roughly parallel ridge to the left. We were south of Beit Shemesh on the road to Beit Guvrin, near the Ha-Ela…

by Bill Gladstone • November 21, 2011

Anyone attempting a serious book about the Bible’s status as history steps wilfully into a morass of difficulties. The first is what is meant by the word “Bible”? Is it the Tanach of the Jews (consisting of the 24 books of the Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim)? Does it include the later Christian testaments? The solution,…

by Bill Gladstone • November 9, 2011

“Futility of futilities! All is futile!” I heard someone mutter recently while glancing up with darkened brow from the pages of Kohelet, the Biblical book also known as Ecclesiastes. The utterance was understandable, since most commentators, if they agree on anything at all about Kohelet, seem in accordance that it is a most vexing and…

by Bill Gladstone • October 10, 2011

Unnamed characters, such as Lot’s wife, Jephthah’s daughter, Pharoah’s baker and the medium of Endor, abound in the Bible. Why dispense with a name? Adele Reinhartz, currently on sabbatical from her position as professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University, has studied the question in depth. Her book “Why Ask My Name?”:…

Kitty Wintrob, author of I’m Not Going Back

Genealogy

Best translation guide for 19th-century Polish docs (Frazin)

by Bill Gladstone • April 14, 2026

It has been about twenty years since I had my first “Eureka!” moment as a genealogist. Several smaller discoveries led up to this great moment. First, I discovered that my great-grandfather, Harris Glickstein, had been born in the town of Konin, Poland; second, that his father’s name had been Rafael; third, that our family name…

by n-a • January 6, 2026

Genealogists sometimes encounter a maddening problem when a relative seems to vanish under the name you know. Sometimes it’s because the surname has been legally changed, or an alias used for employment, business, military service or just convenience. In many cases the person who changes their name still keeps at least a few anchors: an…

by Bill Gladstone • December 4, 2025

“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…

by Bill Gladstone • August 23, 2025

◊ 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…

by Bill Gladstone • August 18, 2025

‘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…

Toronto Panorama 1910