To mark its 25th anniversary, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) has published a book of 44 genealogy-related stories written by its members. The stories in Tracing Our Roots, Telling Our Stories are diverse and range freely over geography and time, encompassing both the Old World and the New from a couple of centuries…
Towards the end of the 19th century, as Jewish multitudes left the Old World for the promising shores of the New, the Toronto neighbourhood of St. John’s Ward became a densely populated Jewish ghetto. Toronto’s population was counted as 86,415 in the 1881 census, with an average of 19 persons per acre. On Elizabeth, Chestnut,…
Jewish passengers on Caribbean cruises often become excited after their ship docks at Curacao, the little stringbean-shaped isle 63 km off the coast of Venezuela, when they discover that the island is home to a Jewish community with roots that go back nearly 400 years. A rugged and hilly outcropping, Curacao is part of the…
Shortly after her mother Frances died in 1989, writer Helen Epstein began visiting the university library near her Boston-area home, browsing through books on death, on Jews and on Central Europe. “I was mourning my mother,” she explains in her latest book Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, “and if…
In the 19th century, as author-historian Ronald Sanders once observed, Jews in Tsarist Russia tended to perceive their cousins in Galicia as almost a breed apart, “with their strange Yiddish accent and irksome quality of seeming coarseness combined with Germanic airs of cultural superiority….” I can’t (or won’t) comment on the relative truth of this…
Back about 1890, Anglo-Jewish historian Lucien Wolf noted a curious fact: several of the first Jews to resettle in London after the Jews were re-admitted into England in 1655 had “hailed from a little archipelago in the East Atlantic, which had never before figured in Jewish history, and which, so far as I know, has…
A historical puzzle: Why did Goldwin Smith, the foremost literary personality of 19th-century English Canada and a notorious anti-semite, attend the opening of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple on Bond Street in 1897? And why, despite his outspoken enmity towards the Jews, did he contribute to the Holy Blossom’s building fund, as congregational records show? If…
By his own telling, Jerry Gray had one of the most thrilling experiences of his life in late June (2011). In front of a sold-out house at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, he stood at the conductor’s podium, raised a baton, and led the 385-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a full orchestra in a rousing rendition…
Ask any Jewish writer in Canada to name some of his or her most important influences, and before long the name of A.M. Klein is certain to arise. In an unofficial survey of contemporary Canadian writers whose works explore Jewish themes or feature Jewish characters, this writer found that almost all of them were quick…
Imagine for a moment that you’re in southern California, having a meal at a diner. Inside, the radio is tuned to a local shock-jock who is spouting a combustible mix of racial diatribes against blacks and immigrants. As these acrimonious attitudes defile the air, a heated argument breaks out between two strangers at separate tables.…
