“The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is Anything But an Easy One” is the title of the first story; its subtitle is “The Foreigners There Have No Idea of the Months of the Year, and It Takes a Long Time to Convince Them That the Information Is Not for the Tax Collector.”…
◊ After the departure of Rabbi Benjamin Friedberg from Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Synagogue in the early 1990s, the congregation turned to Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl to lead it into the future. The following is an excerpt from The History of Beth Tzedec Congregation Toronto Canada (2016). It is being published as Rabbi Frydman-Kohl departs from Beth…
Appeared originally in Beth Sholom Bulletin, Toronto, 2013 Sylvia Banack and her husband Henry Banack joined Beth Sholom as founding members in 1946, and their eldest children, the twins Auby and Arlene, had a joint bar-mitzvah and bat-mitzvah in the shul in 1957. It was, Sylvia recalls, the congregation’s first bat-mitzvah ceremony. Next year [2014],…
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 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 the Canadian Jewish News, January 2016 Born in Radom, Poland in 1939, Adam Gabriel Fuerstenberg survived the war as a child by escaping with his mother to Galicia, then Soviet Asia, while most of their extended family were murdered by the Nazis. Residing after the war in a Displaced Persons Camp in Stuttgart, Germany,…
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…
