Snow was gently falling as I boarded the train at Toronto’s Union Station for VIA Rail’s recently-introduced overnight sleeper car service to Montreal. Before long I was sipping a drink and engaged in conversation with a fellow passenger in the glass-roofed dome car. “What is it about Toronto? They’re such amateurs when it comes to…
Obit: nursing sister Dorothy Ann Macham (1910-2002)
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Dorothy Macham, a former army nurse who received an Associate Royal Red Cross medal from King George VI and headed Women’s College Hospital for three decades, died in Toronto in July, one week shy of her 92nd birthday. Ms. Macham had several years of operating room experience when she joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps…
Inside glimpse of Hassidic Crown Heights
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“One of the reasons we started doing this is because there’s so much misinformation out there about the Hassidic community,” says Rabbi Beryl Epstein, tour guide for a busload of visitors that leaves midtown Manhattan for 770 Eastern Parkway, headquarters of the Lubavitch Hassidic movement in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. During the 45-minute…
About the Mormon LDS Family History Library
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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…
Peter Lande on Holocaust records
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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…
Jack Klajman’s Out of the Ghetto
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Jack Klajman, a 69-year-old furrier in London, Ont., has written Out of the Ghetto, a book that describes how he survived the Holocaust. The book was published recently by Vallentine Mitchell, a British publishing house, and should soon be available at bookstores in Canada. Out of the Ghetto details Klajman’s experiences as a child in…
Profile: folk artist Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916–2009)
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For most of his adult life North York resident Mayer Kirshenblatt’s hobby was sailing and taking camping trips into the bush. But at his family’s repeated urging, the retired paint-and-wallpaper merchant took up the painter’s easel about 1990 to record on canvas the many colorful scenes he remembered from his boyhood in Poland. Kirshenblatt was…
Obit: Eddie Goodman, lawyer, political power broker (1918-2006)
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Eddie (Edwin) Goodman, a prominent lawyer, decorated war veteran, philanthropist and political power broker, died in Toronto from Alzheimer’s and heart disease on August 23, 2006. He was 87 years old. Head of a large law firm employing nearly 200 lawyers, Goodman was a lifelong Conservative who befriended Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and was a…
Obit: folksinger Wade Hemsworth (1916-2002)
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Wade Hemsworth, who was a career draftsman for the Canadian National Railway, once explained, “I build bridges with a slide rule and paper and pencil.” But after office hours, he crafted brilliant folk songs about life in the Canadian north that will likely prove as durable as any bridge he ever designed. Celebrated for the…
Travel: restoring endangered species to desert
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A recently opened camping compound on an Israeli wildlife preserve allows overnight guests to observe coyotes, jackals and other nocturnal animals in action. But you don’t have to sleep over at the Yotvata Hai-Bar Nature Reserve to see these nightly creatures. Daytime visitors may also view a menagerie of rodents, reptiles and arthropods in the…
