Toronto lawyer and writer Robert Rotenberg has produced a credible “police procedural” murder mystery called Old City Hall that is set in Toronto and features the famous building of the title — now home to an array of criminal courtrooms — as an iconic centrepiece of the story. Rotenberg’s debut novel focuses on Kevin Brace,…
Former Vanek family resort to become a park
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Members of the Vanek family of Toronto are upset because the town of Richmond Hill has erected an “eyesore” on property that had been designated as a park in honor of their mother, the late Jessie Vanek. Three acres in size, the land sits along Bayview Avenue, on the eastern edge of the small, springfed…
My Life in the Mossad
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Nearly 30 years ago Michael Ross, a Canadian from Victoria, went on a backtracking tour to Europe and decided to spend the winter on an Israeli kibbutz, a decision that changed his life. In Israel, he fell in love with both the land and a local woman. He got married, converted to Judaism, became a…
Travel: Winter interlude in Montreal
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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…
