Bill Gladstone

Peter Lande on Holocaust records

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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…

Profile: Rose Friedman at 100

Torontonian Rose Friedman, who arrived in Canada from the Russian province of “White Russia” (Belarus) in 1908, celebrated her 100th birthday at two parties in mid-July (2005), one at the home of a granddaughter and the other at the Apotex Centre where she is a resident. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Ontario Premier Dalton…

The Featherbed offers portrait of tenement life

With The Featherbed, Toronto writer John Miller gives us a credible depiction of tenement life on New York’s Lower East Side of a century ago, but with a number of jarring twists. Anna and Sadie, sisters who haven’t seen each other in more than 50 years, are reunited at the funeral of their mother, who…

Travel: Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt, Austria

Less than an hour’s drive east of Vienna, in the low-lying Austrian province of the Burgenland, are a series of towns of special interest to Jewish travellers. These are the once-famous “Siebengemeinden,” the seven noteworthy Jewish communities of Eisenstadt, Mattersdorf, Deutschkreutz, Lackenbach, Kobersdorf, Frauenkirchen and Kittsee. The largest and most significant is Eisenstadt, the provincial…

Travel: Edison Museum & the sleepy hamlet of Vienna

Six kilometers above the northeastern shore of Lake Erie, the sleepy hamlet of Vienna, Ont. boasts a strong but little-known connection with the family of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the legendary American inventor, who might have been born on Canadian soil but for a quirk of history and fate. Four generations of Edisons lived in…