Trying to put a yarmulke on the King of rock ‘n’ roll From the Forward, 2002 Evan Popoff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, says that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity —…
A look back at the CJN from more than 50 years ago: From the Canadian Jewish News, March 6, 1974 Spry Ben Sherman has no thought of retiring, and plans to work a full day in the hardware store he founded 55 years ago, the Canadian Jewish News reported in March 1974. Sherman’s family wasn’t…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978 Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie…
Review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, by Vanda Krefft Theda Bara (nicknamed ‘The Vamp’), one of Fox’s biggest stars, in a lavish 1917 production of Cleopatra. No known copy of the film survives. From the Canadian Jewish News, 2019 Although his surname appears in…
Dr. SCHECHTER DEAD; NOTED AS A SCHOLAR (Obit from the New York Times, Nov. 20, 1915)
Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…
by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, 2016 Harry Musicar and Selma Musicar attended High Holidays services as usual this year at Beth Sholom as they have annually for most of the last six decades. Harry and Selma have been members of Beth Sholom for nearly 60 years, but their association with the shul’s founding rabbi, David…
